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Jul 28
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787: How to Consistently Perform at Your Peak with Dr. Haley Perlus

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Dr. Haley Perlus shares everyday tactics to help you achieve consistent peak performance.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How just three words can transform your day
  2. How to increase your attention span
  3. The simple secret to feeling more energized

About Haley

Dr. Haley Perlus knows what it takes to overcome barriers and achieve peak performance. As an elite alpine ski racer, she competed and trained with the best in the world, pushing herself to the limits time and time again. Now, with a PhD in sport psychology, Haley continues to push boundaries and drive peak performance, helping athletes and Fortune 100 executives reach their goals.

Dr. Perlus is a highly sought-after keynote speaker, professor, author and consultant to Division I athletes. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado lecturing on applied sport and exercise psychology at the graduate level. She has authored several books including The Ultimate Achievement Journal and The Inside Drive and her articles have been featured in publications such as Thrive Magazine, Fitness Magazine, IDEA Fitness Journal, EpicTimes, Telluride Inside, MyVega and BeachBody®.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Haley Perlus Interview Transcript

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

Haley Perlus
Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom. And I’m intrigued, you’ve got a number of impressive credentials: Ph.D. in Sports Psychology, Elite Alpine Ski racer, and also licensed bartender. What is the story? Do these all three fit together some way? Or, where does the bartending fit in?

Haley Perlus
Well, if the first two don’t succeed, then certainly it’s a shot, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Good mental health advice right off the bat.

Haley Perlus
If we’re doomed, there’s always tequila then we’ll get back at it tomorrow. I’m just joking. I’m just joking. But people find that interesting because it’s one thing that people don’t know about me. However, my mother, my proud mother, has my bartending certificate framed above the bar in her house. It’s an interesting conversation piece.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is sweet. Well, I’m curious, do you have any quick mixological tips for non-licensed bartenders? If we would just like our cocktails to be a little bit more impressive, what should we do?

Haley Perlus
The funny thing is I don’t even really drink, so I let everybody else go ahead and loosen up and I just observe. Clean. Everything can be clean. Remove all the sugar and just go for the good stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. We’ve got it. All right. Well, now let’s talk about peak performance stuff. Maybe, to kick it off, you could orient us. How do you think about peak performance, particularly in a professional context? Like, what does this phrase mean to you? Or, do you have like have a framework that you use to understand this stuff?

Haley Perlus
I do. And peak performance, sometimes, I think, actually veers us off track because when we’re looking for peak performance or peak experiences, we want to do it often. We don’t want to just peak and then come go back down. So, I really think about it as consistent, “How can I get the most consistent high performance?” which then is a peak performer. Often, we’re searching for that peak, our best performance but I want us to have our best performance as often as we possibly can, not just one time, consistent. Consistently being our best.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear because peak sort of implies it goes up and then it goes down, and then I have a little point at the top. It’s the peak. And so, consistent, I guess this chart might look like we have ever-rising peaks, if you will, and we’re getting better and better.

Haley Perlus
I love that. Let’s go with that, yes. We can’t always be perfect.  There will be ups and downs but we’re searching for more consistency.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so tell us, you’ve been studying this stuff for a long time, any particularly surprising or fascinating insights that you’ve discovered along the way?

Haley Perlus
Yeah, that’s interesting, Pete, when you did talk about to my bartending, when you asked me for one recipe, and I just said keep it clean, eliminate the sugar and just go for the good stuff. That’s really what I try to do in my practice. Remove all the fluff, all the extra thinking. We want to think less but more strategically.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like that.

Haley Perlus
We want to really go for the meat. When we have direction, when we have focus, we are more inclined to take action and follow through.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And so then, let’s talk about getting that focus, that clarity, that strategy going. Do you have any key questions or prompts you use to really zero in on that good stuff?

Haley Perlus
I do. And just this morning, I was training about five people, all managers and leaders in their various professions, and we started with narrowing it down to three words that would best describe them as their best self, so when they’re the most energized, most focused, feeling all the good things, they know who and what matters most to them. What three words would they use to best describe them because that then becomes their daily purpose, or at least a daily representation of their purpose, but three gives them direction, gives them focus, and then they’re more inclined to take action.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it’s three and not thirty, that’s certainly focusing. Well, can you give us some examples of three words, best self.

Haley Perlus
So, for me, I’ll tell you and then I can share with you why it’s the number three, and it’s not mine. It’s actually in The Psychology of Persuasion, where I learned it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Cialdini?

Haley Perlus
Yeah, absolutely. There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we had him as a guest. He’s awesome. He’s awesome.

Haley Perlus
And I love how he shares the number three. More is confusing, except with the tasting of gelato because then you want to have more experiences, the more flavors the better, and the color of our tennis shoes. But then he says everything else, we really want to narrow it down to three so that we can focus and have direction. Anything else, we get overwhelmed and confused.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got it.

Haley Perlus
But my three, for myself, I use the word bright, like I have this big sunshine of my mind, body, and spirit. What the sun gives the earth is what my brightness gives me. I’m curious as opposed to judgmental. So, I’m curious, I want to learn, I want to understand, I ask questions even though I may not like the answers, and I actively listen to you and to also what my body and my mind are telling me.

And so, each and every day that is my purpose, that’s my goal, that’s my intention. I also want to be kind. I also want to be generous. I also want to be empathetic. But if I try to be everything, I’ll be nothing. So, if I focus on those three, that will allow me to take action and I also will be so much more than just those three, but those three gives me purpose, gives me focus.

Pete Mockaitis
And is the idea that these three are pretty persistent as opposed to a shifting daily intention, like, “This is the best self and it’s what I’m going for day after day”?

Haley Perlus
I believe so. I’ve been playing around with it for myself for years, and it is rather consistent for me. For people who are just starting to figure out their best three words, sometimes you can play around, trial and error, you let it marinate for a little bit before you find it. But I do believe that when we do enough trial and error and self-awareness, we do land on three.

And then there’s a cool factor in this. It’s not just having your direction every day you wake up and you want to be these three things so that you can be your best self, it’s also catching yourself when you start to lose one of those words. So, when I’m not energized, when I’m not resilient to the first stressor of my day, for example, I immediately lose my curiosity. Hands down, it is the first word that goes.

So, as soon as I can catch myself no longer being curious, which usually means I’m judging someone or something, I can stop and reset instead of letting my entire best self get lost or sinking further and further into what I call my own quicksand of misery. I can stop and do something.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s a turn of a phrase. Quicksand of misery. Yeah, I hear what you’re saying in terms of like that spiral or that inertia. I guess folks might say, colloquially, “Whoa, I woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” or, “I just noticed something that maybe I’m being judgmental. I see something that’s not right as it should be,” and then my brain starts thinking, “What’s wrong with people? Why are we doing it this way? Like, this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. It’s so inconsiderate.”

And so then, it’s like I’m primed to notice other stuff that’s jacked up and messed up, and rail about that inside my head, so that’s no fun. So, when you do catch yourself, you notice, “Oh, I’m doing that thing,” but then what? What do you do about it?

Haley Perlus
There’s a couple of things but this is where we’re really talking now about a lot of recovery pauses. So, in life right now, and I say we, as in people in my field, we’re really trying to enforce the story of life is a sprint, no longer a marathon. What does that mean? Instead of just going, going, going, and if you start to not feel great, or start to be judgmental, “I don’t have time to reset. I just got to keep going.” No, it’s now a sprint. You stress and then you recover.

So, when I find myself losing my best self, I stop and I take a recovery pause. That might be one minute, it might be five minutes, ten minutes. And what do I do there? I reset, usually, my emotions because we are creatures of emotion. We’re emotional creatures. So, what does that mean? Maybe I listen to music, maybe I stick my head outside and get some fresh air, maybe I do some quick deep breathing, maybe I move my body, connect with a loved one, do gratitude. Anything that allows me just to reset my emotions, which then allows to come more into more of a neutral mindset, and then I can refocus and get back my curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that lineup there. And so, we’ve got a variety of options on the menu to choose from, and they’re on the quick side – one, five, ten minutes. It’s funny, I’ve been finding cold water effective for resetting emotions because it’s hard to think about much else when your head is in a bucket of ice water or a cold shower.

Haley Perlus
I was just about to say, “What does that mean?” Are you literally pouring a bucket of cold water over your head?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I literally have a lovely piece of, I guess it’s Tupperware that I have in my office refrigerator that I will pull out and put my head into at times. So, that’s weird but I find it effective because it’s like, “Ooh.” If you’re in a funky mood, it’s hard to fixate on that, and it really does feel like a reset, it’s like, “Okay. Well, now we’re back to a neutral, chilly, energized place. Let’s reset.” I guess I got on a Wim Hof kick, which is how this all started.

Haley Perlus
Oh, there you go. Yeah, so you can do Wim Hof breathing if you don’t want to pour cold water over your head, you can follow it. But, funny enough, that’s actually…I was a ski racer and a ski coach, and even obviously sports psychologist for winter sport athletes, just one of the many sports. But we put ice cubes down our backs, our necks, and, again, just a wakeup call, just to get refreshed and renew some energy which it will allow us to then stop for a moment, rethink, reset to be our best self.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And I want to go into some depth on some of these options. So, gratitude has come up a few times on the show. There’s a variety of ways to do it. How do you find is an effective means of gratitude that provides a reset?

Haley Perlus
Well, in moments where we need reset, in moments where we’ve lost our best self, usually we’re overwhelmed or frustrated, we’re feeling anxiety, and we don’t think we’re doing a good-enough job, or at least somebody else isn’t but we can only control ourselves. So, I like these two questions, “What have I already achieved today?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like it.

Haley Perlus
And, “What do I get to do next?” So, for example, “What have I already achieved today?” is very different than what I haven’t yet achieved, which is where I think most of us go, “I still have to do this. I haven’t done this. I wasn’t good enough at this. I didn’t have enough time for this.” But when you think about what you have achieved, it automatically puts you more in a pleasant emotional space, and patting yourself on your back increases some concentration, some focus and motivation.

“What do I get to do next?” is very different than the normal “What do I have to do next?” We’re always thinking about, “What email I have to respond to” “What call I have to get on” “What do I have to do?” “Who do I have to answer to?” That creates maybe some negativity, “Who do I get to support? How do I get to be challenged? What do I get to learn? What email do I get to be included on even though there’s 500 today?” Just the word “get,” a simple word choice changes our emotional experience, allows us to be a little bit more engaged in that next activity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that so much and I’m reminded of I was listening to Bryan Cranston’s autobiography, and he said something really stuck with him. He’s on a set of a TV show and people are kind of grumbling about the early days, early mornings, late hours. And this guy on the set, who was like a much bigger star than him at the time, said simply, “Well, beats digging ditches,” in terms of like, “Yeah, this is a job and it’s hard sometimes but, relative to the alternatives, that’s something we get to do, which is pretty cool.”

Haley Perlus
Always could be worse. I guess you could go there, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s a really great question that focuses your brain into a positive direction. And I’m thinking something I’ve been wrestling with here with regard to, “Oh, emotions provide information and they’re useful, and we should, ideally,” so I’m told and I think I’ve reaped some value here, “be curious and explore them and say, ‘Hey, what’s going on here?’” And, yet, at the same time, I find that when I do that, like if I’m in a funk, like, “Oh, what’s going on?” it’s like I’m very adept at coming up with a long list of things that are busted and I could be cranky about, and then I kind of feel worse.

And then one approach I’ve tried with some good results is I say, I ask myself, “Why might I feel amazing in five minutes?” because it’s not like I’m lying to myself, it’s like, “Why am I going to feel amazing in five minutes? You’re not. You’re still going to be tired and grumpy.” But it’s like, “Why might I?” Like, “Well, it’s quite possible that I could achieve this little thing and feel great that that’s no longer hanging over my head. It’s quite possible that, boy, I just needed a glass of water. It’s been a few hours. And that would hit the spot.”

So, I find that handy. Do you have any pro tips on engaging our emotions and/or positive refocusing questions that are super handy?

Haley Perlus
I do. I do agree that all emotions are okay. They all serve us. Being angry could drive us initially. Being angry or frustrated or fearful or worried or anxious or sad or depressed, all those unpleasant emotions, they do provide some self-awareness, they do provide polarity. I’m not a big believer in staying with them too long. I do like the non judgment. I do like the, “Hmm, okay, I’m angry.” But then I do need to get myself over to the pleasant side in order for me to do anything effectively with that anger.

If I need to communicate something to someone because that person created anger, I’m not going to be able to do that successfully staying angry, so I need to bring myself back over to one of more challenged, or something more positive, which will then allow me to be right, curious and listen. And then I can more effectively communicate why I was angry or the lesson learned. I feel like the lesson learned comes from the pleasant side.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that distinction in terms of the unpleasant emotion can highlight something that needs attention, and yet the attending to that something is often done more effectively in a more pleasant state of mind. That’s cool.

Haley Perlus
I agree. Yeah, that’s what I think. Now, when I think about, “Is okay that I bring back some sports?” I think people get really motivated by that anxiety. Sometimes, one popular athlete, that I’m sure we’ve all heard of, that used anger in the sense of rivalry even if there wasn’t a rival, he created one, was Michael Jordan.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Haley Perlus
However, when he stepped onto that court, it was strategy, it was tactics, it was the challenge of it. The anger definitely motivated him and got those chemicals and neurotransmitters and hormones running, and his enthusiasm. I don’t know personally but I’ve done enough research and I would like to say, and I hope he would agree with me, that when he got on the court, that anger turned much more into a challenge. And that is a pleasant emotion that allows us to focus.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, any other favorite refocusing questions that you pose to yourself?

Haley Perlus
Like, I said, I do like to think less but more strategically. But I actually find myself, when I’m trying to reset my emotions, is not necessarily always use my mind but to use tactics that immediately change my emotion, like music.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Haley Perlus
I have a theme song. It’s a cheesy one. I don’t care, I use it. But, for example, my favorite movie of all time as a kid and as an adult is Flashdance,” and there is a song in Flashdance called “What A Feeling.” I’m sure many of your listeners have heard of it or know it and they’re smiling right now or making fun, but that’s okay. But I will tell you that if I’m finding myself anxious or overwhelmed or exhausted or sad, if I turn “What A Feeling” on, if I need a little bit of an emotional reset to peace, I just remind myself of dancing around my parents’ house as innocent and free as I possibly can.

If I’m about to go climb a mountain, metaphorically, but I also do climb mountains, but whatever that mountain might be, the lyrics are, “Take your passion, make it happen, dance through life,” so my resetting is not necessarily asking myself a question. It’s directing myself to the words of another song, of a song, that allows me to direct my mind elsewhere.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And so, you’ve got your theme song. Do you have sort of a playlist or a lineup of different songs for different purposes or is it always this go-to?

Haley Perlus
This is usually my go-to, the theme song, but I do have a playlist, a Perlus playlist, and it’s quite long because in that moment, sometimes I want the genre, sometimes I want the harmony, sometimes I want the lyrics, the tempo, so it’s rather long but, yes, I do have a Perlus playlist that in that playlist, there’s always going to be some song that I can press play to navigate me to an emotion that I want to experience. It is my reset.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, this is bringing me back to a teenage Pete Mockaitis enchanted by Tony Robbins, sharing how to shift your emotional state immediately, talking about shifting physiology and imagery, what’s you’re imagining, and dialogue, what you’re saying to yourself. And then I guess the imagery or the music would fall into that. Do you dig that framework or do you have another way you think about it in terms of levers to pull for an emotional reset?

Haley Perlus
Do you mean the imagery piece? I love the imagery piece.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Or like holding your body in a certain way, or breathing, or your power moves or whatever.

Haley Perlus
Oh, absolutely. It’s so funny, I started teaching this and my brothers, I have two brothers and they make fun of me all the time because I always tell people to take their shoulders up, back and down, and smile. So, if you take your shoulders up, back and down, you’re opening up your chest, you’re letting room for air to come through, not just stop at your chest but go through your diaphragm, smiling even through all that anger and disappointment, releases certain chemicals, gets your body language set up.

In person, when I get people to stand up and take their shoulders up, back, down and smile, then they give me a standing ovation, so it’s always nice to set the room up. So, I do believe in definitely body to mind techniques, and that would be an example of one. Setting up your body to create a mental space, to create mental fitness, to create positive or pleasant emotions.

Movement, forget about standing still, moving your body is scientifically the best way to change your emotional state from an unpleasant to a pleasant, whether it’s small movements, like rolling your shoulders; whether it’s stretching, opening your front body after we’re all typing and hunched over at our computers all day; going for a walk, large movements, getting fresh air if you can, even adding to it. Blood circulates through your body, blood carries oxygen, glucose, energy. It energizes us and it makes us go from an unpleasant to pleasant.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. I dig it. And I’m also thinking about Dr. Andrew Huberman of the Huberman Lab’s podcast, which is fantastic, mentioned…and this is crazy. There’s good science to suggest, simply looking up can rally attention in terms of like what our eyeballs are doing and the signals that’s sending inside our brains. It is fascinating what is going on with the human body.

Haley Perlus
Straight up or to the right or to the left? Because I know we can read people depending on where they’re looking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as my understanding, and I might be mistaken, is you’re even tilting upward your chin and head, so it’s up. Like, you’re looking at a tall tree or a bird in the sky, and that can spark some attentiveness. And I think it’s true in my own experience. He’s got the scientific studies and papers and such underlying it. But I’ve even elevated my desk a bit more so that I’m not hunched over downward looking all day but rather there’s a little bit of a tilt up, and I think it’s made a difference, so at the very least, it’s given me a placebo benefit, which I appreciate.

Haley Perlus
Which we’ll take, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ll take that.

Haley Perlus
Yeah, that hunched over, orthopedic surgeons are now talking about the pandemic posture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Yeah.

Haley Perlus
Yeah, that hunched over. So, yes, so stand up tall, get your chest lifted, smile, raise that emotional space. But you just reminded me of one more tip, if I can share, about resetting.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please.

Haley Perlus
Getting outside, especially now as we’re recording this, it’s summer. Getting outside and earthing. What does that mean? It means barefoot in the grass, hug a tree, lie down. And also, if you don’t want to hug a tree, although I do, while you’re just outside, just focus for a minute only on what you see. Then focus for a minute, or maybe 30 seconds, only on what you hear, then only on what you can smell, then only on what you feel underneath you.

And if you do feel something else in your hands or in your ears, the wind passing by, just focus on one sense at a time. And that allows you to also tune out your own stressors and tune in to the energy of the world. Nature.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, so nice rundown there in terms of breaks. I wanted to also get your take on our attention spans, how do we improve them and beat distraction? I guess one thing is just, hey, make sure you’re taking good breaks, and so we’ve checked that box. What else do you recommend here?

Haley Perlus
Well, I know that it’s a hard one but I am with everyone else who believes that multitasking is one of the biggest energy drainers. So, though I live in this world too, so it’s not about I believe eliminating multitasking completely, but I do think that we can probably reduce multitasking in our lives to further increase our engagement and our attention span.

So, we need to ask ourselves and really be truthful, where can we reduce multitasking to increase our ability to focus on one thing at a time. And often, people will say, “Well, wait a second. I’ve got to do this email and that message and this call.” Well, then I propose us working on being a better juggler as opposed to a multitasker.

So, what does that mean? I don’t juggle balls physically but professional jugglers, no matter how many balls they have that they’re juggling with, there’s only one ball in their hand at one time. As soon as they have more than two balls, they make mistakes and they drop all of them. So, we need to just go back and forth, from one to the next, one to the next, one to the next. That allows us to maintain sharp attention span.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, that’s just sort of a mindset shift there in terms of, ideally, maybe we just to do one thing for a while, and then do the next thing for a while, but if not, juggling works but with the goal of, “I’m focused on you and I’m now focused on this thing. And now, I’m focused on you,” as opposed to, “I’m focused on you and this thing at the same time.”

Haley Perlus
Yeah. And one of those things, I know we brought it up before, but just to enforce it. One of those things is recovery, “I’m focused for these five minutes on recovery, and then I come back to this email, or this phone call, or this task.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then any tips when it comes to exercising our brains so that we are effectively able to engage and recover, and to engage and recover, and to keep on getting better and better?

Haley Perlus
Yeah, use it but be deliberate. So, right now, crossword puzzles or Wordle or Sudoku, those games, even video games, with my athletes, my sport athletes in my consulting practice, we actually train our brains using video games and games on the computer. In fact, some of us are so good that we tune out the rest of the world and we can go for hours. We don’t necessarily want that though. We need to have discipline and we don’t want to have the addiction but we need to use our brain and deliberately focus in, in order to increase our attention span.

Pete Mockaitis
So, then an exercise might mean like, “This is what I’m focused on for the next hour. Period.” Like, that kind of a thing, like, “This is what we’re doing here.”

Haley Perlus
Yeah, there’s something that you can just search it on the internet but I do it in my presentations. It’s called the concentration grid. And all it is, is 99 numbers scrambled up in a grid, it starts 00 and they’re all scrambled up to 99. And then you time yourself, not even an hour, I do a minute. And in a minute, you see, you start at 00, then 01, then 02, and you have to go and find these numbers in order as fast as you can and see how high you can get.

So, I’ll do this with the people that I’m consulting with, and then I will try to distract them. So, I will go and distract them with noise and with words, I tell them 30 seconds left, I tell them, and they have to literally focus on tuning me out. It’s the only time they can deem me irrelevant but if they hear me, I’m supposed to come into their presence and then leave, and they have to stay focused on their number.

So, that’s just an example of an exercise in concentration grit. You purposely engage in, again, Sudoku or Wordle or a crossword puzzle, or even a video game, or an app game, momentarily you tune in with the intention of deeming everything else irrelevant, and that’s going to increase your attention span. We just don’t want to become addicted because then we lose focus on everything else.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, when one is doing these exercises, you want to have some sort of distractor in the mix to practice the ignoring?

Haley Perlus
You can play around with it but I think that’s real life. Even though I’m trying to focus on this, on speaking with you, I have intentionally turned off everything so I will not get pinged, I will not get dinged. But in the real world, if we’re sending an email, we might get a text, we might get a message, someone might come into the room, so we have to practice real life. It’s simulation for real life, being able to focus in on this one exercise, knowing that you’re going to be distracted, but letting those distractions come and let them go. They’re irrelevant. What’s relevant is the exercise you’re focusing on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve got some perspective on the connection between hydration and performance. Let’s hear it.

Haley Perlus
I sure do. Well, we are two-thirds…our brains are two-thirds water, so we need water to, yeah, there you go, have a sip, and I have my water here too. But water is so many things. But when I think about attention span and our brain, I look at water as a cleansing tool. It flushes out all the toxins, flushes out all the negative stuff, flushes out all the things that we no longer need. It’s a cleansing tool. It also is an energizing tool. It lubricates, it hydrates, it gives us energy.

So, as we’re consistently drinking water throughout the day, we’re actually giving our brains energy as well as cleansing. Plus, when we’re dehydrated, that in and of itself is a distraction. Our bodies react to that. Our brains react to that. We become exhausted. So, that’s an unnecessary distraction. We can fix that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I guess how much is enough? I mean, I think some people will say, “You know, I drink water when I’m thirsty, and that’s fine, right?” What do you think?

Haley Perlus
Well, often the nutritionists and the experts will say if you’re thirsty, you’ve waited too long. And then, yes, the question is, “How much?” So, we’ve all heard eight glasses a day, or half your body weight in ounces. Just drink more. I don’t often come across anyone who is overhydrated. Most of us are dehydrated, so just drink more.

And here’s a thing. Get into the ritual of drinking first thing in the morning. There’s something that I used to do for myself before I became a regular water drinker. Every night before I go to bed, I pour myself a glass of water and lemon. To me, it was easier to drink water with lemon. And lemon is also very alkalizing so it does to provide energy. But I pour myself a glass of water and lemon, and I put it on my night table before I go to bed.

When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do before anything, especially before I brush my teeth, is drink that water and lemon. And it started off as just two ounces, then four ounces. And now I drink 32 ounces of water in the morning. Sometimes I have coffee, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I have green juice, like celery juice, but I’m always getting my water, and it’s now a habit because I’ve gotten used to that morning ritual.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious about bathroom trips. Sometimes I find myself reluctant to drink more water just because I don’t want to be hassled with more trips to the bathroom. How do you think about this?

Haley Perlus
Well, remember, I said pour the water and lemon the night before but don’t drink it.

Pete Mockaitis
Not the night before but the morning of.

Haley Perlus
Yeah, you drink it the morning of.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, daytime trips to the bathroom.

Haley Perlus
Yeah. Well, I would rather have that problem than the problems that will come if I’m dehydrated.

Pete Mockaitis
So, are we talking like ten plus visits a day then?

Haley Perlus
Yeah, that’d be a lot. I’m not going to lie. I do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s the quote of the show. We’ll put that on the graphic. That’s good. Thank you.

Haley Perlus
You’re welcome. I feel like you needed to get that out of me.

Pete Mockaitis
But it’s true, like there’s a genuine tradeoff. And it’s so funny, I think the same lazy brain, for me at least, that’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to get up and pour a glass of water,” is the same lazy brain who can rationalize or justify, it’s like, “Oh, I’ve already been to the bathroom like five times. I don’t want to go again.” And so, you’re going on record as saying that, yes, there is more time spent visiting the bathroom but you’re more than making up for that time with the improved benefits of hydration. Is that fair to say?

Haley Perlus
I believe that I am more efficient, I believe that I’m more focused, I believe that I’m a peak performer because I’m a peak peer. And I will tell you though, it also forces you to get up and move. It forces you to get out of your seat so there’s other benefits that come with it.

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

Haley Perlus
I think with this life, this Groundhog Day, the wash, rinse, repeat, the wash, rinse, repeat, it’s not necessarily that we need to increase our attention span. Many of us actually have good focusing skills, but because we’re stagnant all day and we’re inactive all day and we’re just doing the same thing over and over again, the boredom kicks in, the complacency kicks in. So, I think it’s important that we look for variety wherever we can. If you’ve been staring at this wall for half a day, maybe turn around and stare at a different wall. Add variety to your life wherever you can because that variety will also create energy which will allow us to focus and be able to be more engaged.

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

Haley Perlus
I don’t know that it’s a favorite quote but I will tell you what I use for myself when I get distracted or overwhelmed, and it’s more of a mantra, “Right, left, right, left, right left,” and also something that my significant other is now forcing upon me because I’m learning something new, and I get a little bit fearful, “Get your eyes wide open.”

When we are consumed with all of our fears, when we’re consumed with all of our anxieties, or our shyness, or our overwhelm, or our confusion, or anything that’s creating that negative energy, open your eyes, look around you, take something in. So, I really like to put myself…make myself small, if I will, and really look at the bigger picture, eyes wide open.

And then the “Right, left, right left,” is something that I do for myself as well, because when it looks impossible, when a mountain looks impossible to climb, whatever that mountain is for you, I know that I can get my right foot forward, and then I know that I can get my left foot, so really break it down. So, I don’t know if it’s a quote but it certainly words that I live by to allow me to refocus or stay focused and just plan and determined and have my most consistent performances.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Haley Perlus
Well, interestingly enough, I was just sharing this with my 13-year-old nephew a couple week ago who had to do a simulated TED Talk for his school, and he wanted to do it on sports psychology. And so, I shared with him the first study, the first documented study, for sure, in sports psychology which was by Norman Triplett. And he researched cyclists and he wanted to compare cyclists’ performance alone compared to where cyclists are in the presence of other athletes.

And when you’re in the presence of other people, at least in this study, you perform better. And it’s an interesting topic of discussion right now because of the hybrid environments and working from home versus in an office environment and the social facilitation. And so, this is a study that I’m really highlighting back and bringing back to my world and others because I do believe that we perform better when we are amongst others, not necessarily competition. I do believe that competition allows for that, too, but I do believe in being connected and being in the presence of others to help us perform better and be happier.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And a favorite book?

Haley Perlus
Well, yes, Robert Cialdini, that’s actually, to this day, my favorite book. I think it’s great The Psychology of Persuasion, but specifically, yes, and really looking to see how we can persuade ourselves to take action, what messages we need to tell ourselves to take action. So, it’s an oldie but, still, it’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And a favorite habit?

Haley Perlus
I’ll be honest, I’m really proud of myself for sticking with this water thing. It was not easy for me because I didn’t like the taste of water, and I just wasn’t a good water drinker, and, really, every morning I wake up, I drink water and lemon. I often now drink some green juice, and that starts my day. In addition, I make my bed every single morning, and I believe that that is super important to start my day off organized and structured, even though I’m pretty flexible and I wouldn’t consider myself a structured human being. But making my bed in the morning allows me to feel fresh and clean when I do start the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with audiences; they quote it back to you often?

Haley Perlus
People say it’s hard, people say change is hard. When we talk about changing these, replacing negative habits with good ritual, people say it’s hard. And I say, “I know. So what?” And I think that just kind of puts…and I do to it myself as well. I think that kind stops us in our tracks, and we’re like, “Okay. So what? That’s going to be hard.” And I say it with all the love in my heart, “So what?”

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

Haley Perlus
My website is the best place to find me. You can opt in for communications. You can actually connect with me directly through there. So, it’s DrHaleyPerlus.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?

Haley Perlus
Well, I don’t know what time everyone is listening to this, so depending on the time, the very next morning you have, what do you get to do? You get to drink water first thing in the morning and hydrate your brain, focus in.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Haley, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much fun and peak performance.

Haley Perlus
Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me.



Jul 25
0

786: How to (Really) Strengthen Your Relationships with Eric Barker

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Eric Barker shares science-based wisdom on how to make your relationships flourish.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The two critical elements of trust-building 
  2. The secret to dealing with difficult people
  3. How to navigate difficult conversation

About Eric

Eric Barker is the author of The Wall Street Journal bestseller Barking Up the Wrong Tree, which has sold over half a million copies and been translated into 19 languages. It was even the subject of a question on “Jeopardy!” Over 500,000 people have subscribed to his weekly newsletter. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Financial Times, and others. Eric is also a sought-after speaker, having given talks at MIT, Yale, Google, the United States Military Central Command (CENTCOM), and the Olympic Training Center. His new book, Plays Well with Others, will be released by HarperCollins in May of 2022. 

Resources Mentioned

Eric Barker Interview Transcript

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

Eric Barker
It’s great to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Plays Well with Others: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Relationships Is (Mostly) Wrong. And I got a kick out of your dedication page, it is “To the relationships that you’ve screwed up.” Can you tell us a key story there about a screwup and some principles learned?

Eric Barker
It’s never been my specialty at all. One of the five factors that psychologists use to determine someone’s personality, one of them is agreeableness, and out of a possible score of a hundred, I scored a four. So, disagreeable, probably not helping there. One of the things that led me to write the book was that I’m not a specialist with relationships but then, actually, two weeks after I closed the deal to write the book, California lockdown for the pandemic, and I realized, “Maybe I wasn’t the only one who was going to be needing a little relationship-defibrillator after all this was over.”

Pete Mockaitis
I see. Okay. So, low on agreeableness, and so can you tell us a tale of how that got you into some trouble once?

Eric Barker
Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a specific time, but, it’s funny, the same trait that has harmed me in my relationships actually helps me in my writing because I tend to always challenge things, debate things, to not easily go with the flow, I want to test things, play myth-busters, and that’s basically how my book is structured. Like, taking the maxims that we all kind of assume are true about relationships, and wanting to say, “Wait a second. Is that really true? Shall I look up the evidence here?” So, there is a silver lining.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, as I’m thinking about my relationships, I’ve got a friend, I’m thinking of my buddy Avon, in particular. He seems to love to take the other view every time, and I don’t even know if he really believes what he’s saying or if he’s just trying to rass me or he finds it fun. And it’s interesting, it’s like some people love that and some people hate that, like, “Oh, what an interesting thing we’re exploring. Hmm, we’ll do a little bit of banter, a little back and forth, volley, exploring.” And I was like, “Oh, my gosh, like, just can it, Eric.” Is that your experience as well, some love it, some hate it?

Eric Barker
Oh, no, absolutely. That’s the kind of thing where, like I said, after a day of working hard writing the book, I kind of have to tell myself, “Okay, turn it off, turn it off. Don’t need to test and question everything anymore. It works out really well with the writing, not so much as well with other people.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about relationships while you’re researching and writing this book?

Eric Barker
Yeah, one thing that really blew me away was the research on loneliness. Like, Faye Alberti is a historian at the University of York, and she basically found that before the 19th century, loneliness pretty much didn’t exist. It sounds crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Eric Barker
But basically, we were all embedded in religions, nations, tribes, groups. We always felt like we were connected to other people. And what’s really interesting is that aligns with some of the scientific psychological research on loneliness, which is that lonely people don’t spend any less time with others than non-lonely people do.

Again, it sounds crazy but we’ve all had that feeling of being lonely in a crowd. Just because you’re on the subway or in the middle of Times Square, you can be surrounded by people and that doesn’t mean you feel connected to them. What John Cacioppo, the leading researcher on loneliness, found is that loneliness is how you feel about your relationships.

If you have good relationships, strong connections, and you go on a business trip, you don’t feel desperately lonely. You know that there are people who care about you, they’re just not near you or by you. But if you don’t feel strong connections to people, you can be surrounded by others. You could be at a sporting event and you’re not going to feel that great. Loneliness is, again, how you feel about your relationships.

So, in the past, we had these deep kinds of near-tribal connections to others. We were always part of a group. And these days, we saw, basically post-19th century, the rise of individualism, and so we don’t feel those strong connections. Loneliness is an issue of perception. When we aren’t near others but we feel we have strong connections, that solitude, that’s a positive, that’s me time. It’s like, that feels good. You know that people are there but you get a little time to yourself.

Well, when we don’t feel those strong connections, neuroscience actually shows that our brain scans for threats twice as fast, which, from our ancestral environment, makes sense. If you don’t think help is coming, you need to be on the lookout for danger, but that’s not terribly conducive to happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess we’re getting into it. Tell us, Eric, what is to be done if we are feeling not so great about our relationships and we got some loneliness cooking?

Eric Barker
It’s really an issue of deepening our relationships. The first thing I did when I…in the section of the book on friendships, the first thing I did was look at Dale Carnegie because that’s the book everybody knows, How to Win Friends & Influence People, and that book was written before the advent of social science research, it’s all anecdotal.

But the crazy thing is that the primary pillars of Carnegie’s book all proved true. They’ve all been verified, except for one, and that is he says to put yourself in the other person’s shoes. And research shows we’re actually pretty bad at that. But everything else, finding similarity, paying people compliments, listening, these are all positives. The thing is Carnegie’s book is written mostly for developing business contacts, so it’s kind of at the more shallow end of the pool.

But for deepening relationships, what I found is that the research seems to point towards two things, and that is time and vulnerability. Time is really critical. It is the thing that research shows friends fight about the most. And time is a powerful costly signal. You spend time with people, we only got 24 hours in a day. You keep spending time with somebody, it shows you care.

And vulnerability is opening up. That’s telling people what’s on your mind, your stresses, your challenges. We’re usually afraid to do this but this is what really creates trust. By talking about the things we’re afraid of, we tell the other person that we trust them, otherwise we wouldn’t say it, and that leads people to reciprocate, and that’s how you build trust.

So, it’s really critical for us to go past the small talk, and very often we can feel stuck in the small talk, and it’s time and vulnerability that will deepen relationships, make us feel closer to others, and help us beat loneliness.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, I moved about a year ago from Chicago to the Nashville area, and I am more distant from many of my close friends than I used to be. And so, I’ve been thinking a bit about how one forms great friendships, particularly as it’s a little bit of a different ballgame being 38 with two kids and a wife than being 24 and “Woo,” just out and about for many nights in a given week. So, tell me, is there a…I guess it’d be hard to precisely quantify this with all the variability in humanity. But, like, what kind of time are we talking about here, Eric?

Eric Barker
What’s really interesting is Jeff Hall did some research on how much time it takes to go from just meeting someone to being like a good friend or a best friend, and it’s some pretty depressing research. It could take hundreds of hours to get to, like, closer best friend. But on the flipside, it is a matter of how we handle it and what we do.

Arthur Aron did research, and by giving people a series of questions to get them, like, opening up and talking, he managed to get people, in a laboratory setting, to feel like lifelong friends in only 45 minutes. In fact, two of his research assistants who were working on the project with him, actually fell in love and got married because of working on this.

So, it’s really that issue of vulnerability, of opening up. Usually, when we first meet somebody, we’re often tempted to try to impress them but the literature shows that signaling high status, while it might impress people and it might be good in maybe a sales or a business context, on a personal level, it tends to distance people. They don’t feel related to you. They feel like you’re above them or something.

Meanwhile, expressing yourself as a peer or actually showing human-relatable flaws, that’s the thing that makes us understand, relate, connect with people because we all have those insecurities. And when you express them, it’s like we get that, “Whew” feeling where we can relax, where we can relate. So, that’s the thing we really need to keep in mind.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, when it comes to vulnerability, that sounds like sharing the stresses, the problems, the worries. To what extent is there also connected value in sharing the joys?

Eric Barker
Sharing joys is really positive, there’s no doubt about that. The literature points to this, something called capitalization, and that is when your friends or your spouse talk about something positive that happened to them, it’s really important to ask questions, it’s really important to be happy for them. In fact, it was Shelly Gable that did research at UCSB, and she found that actually celebrating those positive moments, how you handle the positive moments was actually more predictive of romantic relationship success than how you handle the difficult moments.

It sounds crazy because we’re always so focused on fixing things, on trying to resolve the problems in a romantic relationship but John Gottman found that 69% of the ongoing problems in a romantic relationship never get resolved. It’s like you’re not going to fix all of these things. You’re not going to fix most of these things. It’s about the regulation of conflict, not the resolution of conflict.

But on the flipside, you want to be a supporter, you want to be a cheerleader, you want to share your positives, you want them to feel good for you, to be curious about it, and you want to do the same for them. This is a positive relationship tip you can use anywhere, especially in a romantic relationship, is to really look for those positive things, be supportive, be the cheerleader. This is a huge thing that we often forget about because we’re usually trying to bring the bottom up rather than trying to raise the roof. And it’s really important to celebrate those positive moments.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Any pro tips on how that’s done in practice? I just watched the show Devs, and somebody kept mentioning if they wanted a champagne bath. So, I guess that’s one tactic, is to bring a bottle of champagne with you to splatter people when they’re excited, though they might not receive that so well in real life, like, “I’m all wet now and sticky.” So, any other more practical recommendations for celebrations? I guess what we don’t want to do is say, “Okay, that’s nice,” and just, boom, brush aside. But, yeah, like what that sounds like in practice?

Eric Barker
What some of the advices that they give romantic couples is pretty straightforward. At the end of every day, you say the best thing that happened to you that day, and your spouse says the best thing that happened to them that day. And again, like you said, you don’t want to be dismissive, you don’t want to just nod your head and acknowledge it. It’s, like, you want to be happy for them. You want to ask questions. You want to be just listening and be supportive and be excited. It’s about that emotional back and forth, so it’s just consistently.

It almost sounds weird but even with your friends, it’s like, “Hey, what good things have happened lately?” It’s not something we usually do but it’s not too crazy a question, and I think most people are pretty happy to talk about the positives that are going on. You’re basically letting them brag. That feels good and if they’re somebody you care about, it’s going to feel good for you, too, and it can have very positive effects for the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember a motivational speaker once mentioned that he had someone, I think it was at work, and that was just sort of like their go-to line when they started talking, and say, “Tell me something good,” and everyone liked that person. It’s like, “Oh, that’s what Marty says, and I like Marty,” because, go figure, people are telling him something good all the time, and he’s getting the goods and celebrating with them.

Eric Barker
Well, it’s a funny thing because, like I said, very often, especially in romantic relationships, we’re usually focused on fixing the negative, but it’s like if you feel step back for a second and think about that, if all you’re doing is fixing the negative then, really, ceteris paribus, that means you’re going to get to neutral. Even if everything worked, if the 69% of long-term issues could be resolved, you just get to neutral, and, “I have a not negative relationship with every stranger on this planet.” It’s, like, that’s not love. It’s, like, you don’t want to get to neutral. You want to be beyond that. You want to be supportive.

That’s why one of the other things I talk about, at least specific for romantic relationships, is doing exciting stuff together because the thing is that there’s a psychological principle called emotional contagion. And basically, what that means is we tend to associate the feeling that we’re having in any context, we associate it with the people we’re with.

So, if you’re doing fun stuff, you associate that with your partner, and that keeps the relationship alive. It keeps things exciting. And so, we need to do more of that. Too much Netflix and pizza on the couch, we actually need to get out more and do more exciting fun things so we can keep those positive feelings flowing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, we went deep on loneliness and friendship and forming bonds. Maybe we can zoom out a bit. And could you share with us what’s sort of like the main big idea or thesis behind the book Plays Well with Others?

Eric Barker
Well, one theme that I found throughout all the aspects that I was looking at is that relationships really do come down to stories, stories in your head. The first section of the book, I talk about the issue, like, they say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and I kind of tested that. I went and looked at the research on body language and communication and reading people.

And what happens is, as soon as we meet somebody for the first time, or even if we’re seeing somebody we’ve known for a while, our brains are immediately telling us a story about who this person is, and we kind of can’t help it. We start making assumptions in milliseconds. And it’s an issue of revising that story but that story is going to be there.

And in a romantic relationship, John Gottman, I mentioned earlier, he’s the leading researcher on love and marriage, and his claim to fame is that he can predict whether a couple would be divorced in five years just by talking to them for a few minutes. And he can do this with about 90 plus percent accuracy. And how he does that is simply asking the couple, each member of the couple, “Tell me your story.”

And when he listens to that story, if it’s this story of overcoming challenges and that’s really something, celebrating those difficulties and getting past it, that’s a really positive sign but it’s not about the facts and details because we forget most of the facts and details. We kind of congeal them into this story, and if that story is positive, things are really good.

And past that, the final section, I talk about, I test “No man is an island. Is that true?” And it’s this issue of communities, have a story, a story they tell about who the members are, “’What is important to us? What do we value?” And that story is what draws us together. So, it’s this really critical element of understanding the stories of how we perceive others, how we’re connected to others, the community that we’re a part of. This is kind of the subtext, the element that undergirds everything that goes on between human relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that is you could just change your story about a relationship you have with somebody without interacting with them in any subsequent way. So, you could just choose to reinterpret and reformulate your story about your relationship with them in your head, could you not?

Eric Barker
Oh, absolutely. And that can be a positive thing and that can be a negative thing. We can reflect on it and we can look at different aspects, and we can say, “You know what, I’ve been judging them too harshly. Like, I forgot there were those few times where that person really went out of their way to help me, and I kind of dismissed that.” Or, on the flipside, something that’s common with long-term relationships and marriages is that people sometimes they don’t want to fight, they don’t want to argue, so they don’t raise issues. And when you don’t raise issues, they can’t get resolved.

And so, instead of people having a conversation about their spouse about an issue, they start having conversations with themselves, and that doesn’t always go so well because you start making assumptions about what they believe, where they stand, why they did what they did, and this can be really problematic because now we’re not actually getting insight from them; we’re making it up ourselves and that can quickly turn negative because what a lot of people don’t realize is that, yes, you don’t want to fight but the truth is, yelling and screaming, only 40% of the time does that result in divorce.

What is more likely to result in divorce is when a couple stops talking. You yell and scream because you care. When you stop caring, you stop interacting. And that’s what more often precedes divorce is when couples start living parallel lives where they’re not communicating, they’re not connecting, they’re not arguing, they’re not resolving problems. They’re just going, “It’s not worth it,” and kind of living their own life. That’s what usually precedes divorce.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And if we sort of shift the focus into the workplace and professionals and those looking to be awesome at their job, what are some of the best takeaways for folks looking to have strong relationships with their boss, their peers, their clients, their suppliers, etc.?

Eric Barker
Well, like I said, in terms of friendship, those are some of the really key things, is trying to deepen those relationships. Like I said, time, vulnerability, but another thing we deal with in the workplace is that, with our friendships, the interesting thing about friendships in our personal lives is that you can leave whenever you want.

In the workplace, you’re going to deal with some people that maybe you don’t like so much. That’s the tricky part about it because of the role. And what the research has shown is that the people who cause us the most stress aren’t actually our enemies, because enemies, like we know where we stand, we don’t like them, they don’t like us. The people that drive us most crazy are those ambivalent relationships. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. It’s that unpredictability. And Julianne Holt-Lunstad at BYU has found that that’s what drives our blood pressure up, it’s these people who we don’t know how they’re going to behave, whether they’re going to be nice or difficult this time.

So, in terms of dealing with difficult people, what we need to keep in mind is emphasizing three things: emphasizing similarity, emphasizing vulnerability, and emphasizing community, because these are the things that can sort of activate the empathy muscles in someone else. Maybe if they’re a little narcissistic, maybe if they’re difficult, when we express our similarity to them, when we talk about a vulnerability, weaknesses, when we express community, that we’re a part of something, that can trigger those empathy muscles that can help us deal with them a little bit better, help them understand us a little bit better. That’s truly key to dealing with those difficult people in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what does that sound like in practice to convey similarity, like, “Boy, Eric, you and I, we both love a good microphone, don’t we?”

Eric Barker
Again, we take those things for granted but that’s usually how many relationships start, is you’re both into a particular sport, a particular sports team, you’re both Star Wars fans, you’ve got something you relate to. And with those people that we haven’t taken the time to find something that we can both relate to and care about, that kind of acts like a medium for us to work through.

So, finding out a little bit more about somebody and finding that connection, research shows this is really powerful in terms of us feeling like we are connected, we’re part of the same group. In that way, community-wise, again, feeling like we’re a part of something, we’re both working toward similar goals. The research shows that a great way to get people who don’t like each other very much to cooperate and feel connected is to have them work on a project together, it’s when they have to rely on one another.

So, it’s really critical, it sounds a little silly in the abstract, but finding those similar things, asking them enough questions to realize, like, “Hey, we’re both into this,” it can make a surprising difference.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And I’m also thinking about some research. I read about it in Bob Cialdini’s books about moving and/or singing or dancing or marching in unison has a powerful effect there.

Eric Barker
Anything like that, again, builds that kind of similarity, like that’s in the physical realm is that we’re doing the same things, we’re coordinated, we’re working together. That means you’re a part of something. You’re connected. What’s really powerful, I think, from Cialdini’s, he has Influence which is like he’s masterwork, but his other books are excellent as well, Pre-Suasion where he talks about how so much of what helps negotiations and conflict resolution isn’t the tactics that you huse in the middle of it. It’s those things that you set up beforehand.

And that’s where similarity falls in. Once you feel, like, “Hey, we’re connected in this way. We both care about this same thing,” you’re more disposed to want to help someone. It’s like if a stranger asks you for a favor, that’s very different than when a friend asks you for a favor. You have something that connects you beforehand.

One of the researchers at Harvard Business School talked about salary negotiations, and, again, it wasn’t necessarily the specific tactics used during the negotiation. The number one thing that he said was they have to like you, was beforehand making sure that they like you, they appreciate you, they feel connected to you, because, again, it’s one thing dealing with a stranger, to another thing dealing with a friend. You’re much more disposed to give them the benefit of the doubt, to say, “Hey, sure, we don’t mind covering that expense. We don’t mind doing this.”

We think about these kinds of like really nuanced tactics in the middle, but if you can think about the beginning ahead of time, and say, “How can I really connect with this person emotionally so that they’re disposed to want to help me?” that’s much more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, with that connection now, those principles then of the similarity, vulnerability and community there?

Eric Barker
Yeah, first and foremost, like I said, that similarity, that’s something that we’ve all had that moment where we’re trying to connect with somebody, trying to go from acquaintance to friend, and similarity can really help. It gives you something to talk about. It gives you something that you connect on. And then that vulnerability aspect, where it’s like we all have our little jerk radar where we don’t want to be dealing with somebody who’s a pain.

And when somebody opens up and says, “Hey, you know what, I actually struggle with this. I’m not that great at it,” or, “Hey, this actually scares me,” that makes…humanizes somebody. They’re not trying to act like they’re above you or better than you. In community, it’s like we’re connected. It’s like, sometimes we don’t always love our in-laws but we still behave, we still do favors for them, we still do things because we recognize that we’re connected, we’re a part of something, and that shifts our perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
It sure does. And I also want to talk a bit about the digital side of things. Social media, how do we use that well such that we don’t create more bitterness, division, self-esteem problems, jealousy? Any pro tips there?

Eric Barker
Absolutely. You see research back and forth that social media is the devil, social media is not the devil, and there are some stuff back and forth, but the key thing we want to be thinking about when it comes to social media is time. And that is that you only have 24 hours in a day. Some of that is going to be sleep, some of that is going to be work. You only have so much of a budget for social time. And if too much of that is being used for social media, then it’s not being used for deeper richer connections, like face to face.

We just want to make sure that social media is not cannibalizing it. You don’t want to be replacing kind of the rich sumptuous meal of face-to-face contact for the junk food of social media. If you’re using social media to reach out to somebody who’s far away, hey, that could be really positive. If you’re using it to communicate with somebody who’s nearby and you’re using it to plan a face-to-face get-together, hey, it’s an alley of positive.

But if we end up, consciously or unconsciously, using it to replace real relationships, that’s when it gets problematic. And when it’s eating up too much of the buddy budget, the social time, just on Instagram, that’s really where it’s quite clear that we’re not treating our relationships as well as we could.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. And I’m also thinking about sort of the nature of what you choose to post on social media. And I found, for me, what makes me more favorably disposed to someone is they share something and it seems like it really is a means of spreading delight and goodness and positivity, as oppose to a post which says, “Look how awesome I am,” like, “Oh, just getting some sushi in Tokyo at the top sushi place ever.” It’s like, “Okay. Well, good for you, guy. That’s fun. I guess I’m supposed to think that your life is awesome.”

As opposed to, I’m thinking about my buddy Patrick, he once posted, “When my wife and I are cooking together and sharing instructions or collaborating, we respond to each other by saying, ‘Yes, chef,’ and it makes cooking so much more fun.” And I think of that because that is awesome and I do that now, too, and it really is fun and it spreads joy. And in both contexts, we’re talking about doing some food stuff and yet one post, I think, well, it makes me think more of Patrick, like, “This guy is awesome,” and not because he’s high status but that he’s just putting out joy into the world.

Eric Barker
Absolutely. I totally agree. This is something we’re kind of touching on earlier, where it’s like often when we first meet somebody, people often try to brag, they often try to signal high status, and it’s exactly what you said. When you see social media posts where clearly the person is bragging, and saying, “Look how awesome I am,” that doesn’t make us like them more, that doesn’t make us feel more warmly connected to them, so that’s probably not conducive to positive long-term relationships.

But when somebody posts a funny anecdote or if somebody is kind of like poking fun but it’s at themselves, then we do feel positively disposed to them. If somebody puts a warm positive moment, we react better to that. And these are the kind of things we definitely need to be thinking about because I think we’ve turned a lot of things. I think, by its very nature, social media often tends towards turning things into this kind of social competition because we’ve got quantification of likes.

You have a direct quantification of how much people like this post. That has this kind of almost competitive element to it. And I think, to your point, we need to resist the urge to kind of one-up people in that status competition, and another way is to rely on being a little bit more human.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Eric, tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts for us looking to improve our relationships?

Eric Barker
Yeah, one thing from the romantic relationship research, but I think it’s applicable in pretty much any relationship context, is John Gottman, that relationship researcher, he found that just by listening to the first three minutes of a conflict discussion between a couple, he could predict the ending 94% of the time.

And the takeaway from that is if it starts negative, it’s going to end negative. If you have to bring up a difficult topic with your spouse, or frankly with anybody, if we go in there firing both barrels, the research is pretty clear, if it starts negative, it’s going to end negative. So, if we present it in a more constructive way, we take a deep breath, we step back, we don’t launch into it in this very kind of antagonistic attacking mode, it can be a lot more productive.

Even though we feel like we deserve this, “I’ve been victimized. I need to…” that’s not going to get you the end result you want 94% percent of the time. That’s a very high number, so take a deep breath, think constructively, don’t point fingers, don’t personalize it. Anytime you have to have a conflict discussion, whether it’s at home or in the office, don’t discuss the other person’s character. Talk about the specific issue you had and stick to the facts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, Eric, I’d love to hear some of your favorite things. How about a favorite quote?

Eric Barker
Oh, yeah. Well, this is a quote that meant a lot to me when I was writing both my books because I was thinking about, like, testing these maxims and all these issues we have around both success and relationships. It’s from William Gibson, he said, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”

And that really resonated with me because I looked at the research and there’s a lot of answers to the questions we already have. It’s just tied up in all this ivory tower academic research. And so, my focus was trying to take that and make it accessible to people because the answers are already here, to many of our problems. It’s just not evenly distributed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s why I love doing interview podcasts, it’s like, “Hey, I don’t have to figure all this out. I’d just get Eric to share the goods.” Cool. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Eric Barker
This isn’t necessarily practical. It might make people feel a little bit better but one of my favorite pieces of research is there was one study done on ethics professors and ethicists, and it found that they weren’t any more moral than the average person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Eric Barker
So, if you feel like, maybe you haven’t been behaving that well, even experts in the field, hey, they’re not necessarily all that better, so don’t beat yourself up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Eric Barker
Favorite book, oh, God, there’s so, so, so many. I have to say one of my favorite books recently is my David Epstein wrote a book called Range, which is not only really useful, really smart. It also made me feel much better because it talks about how generalists can thrive, and how generalists often do very well because I’ve always been a generalist. And anything that helps me rationalize my decisions is amazing and wonderful.

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

Eric Barker
I have got to say that I remember many years ago, my friend Drew got these Bose noise-cancelling headphones. They were pretty pricey, and I was like, “Why?” And I’m not a big music guy. I listen to podcasts, but I got to tell you, noise-cancelling headphones literally changed my life. It’s like when you’re on planes, when you’re trying to block out noise, you got loud neighbors, it’s something silly, I didn’t think it was going to be that big a deal, but, man, I can’t live without them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love them and sometimes I will put in earplugs and then put on noise-cancelling headphones. I’m just really into that cone of silence.

Eric Barker
Okay, you’re playing on serious mode now.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. And it does send a message. It’s sort of like a ritual. It’s like, “All right. No messing around. We’re seriously dialing into this.”

Eric Barker
Oh, yeah. You’re putting on the Batman costume. Like, “This is it. We’re going to war.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I need a montage I need to play during this.

Eric Barker
Yeah, with some John Williams music. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. And a favorite habit?

Eric Barker
Favorite habit is reading. There’s no doubt, my first instinct when I have extra time is to fire up the old Kindle app. And, typically, you think, “That person is going to call me back in five minutes,” or, “Oh, this is only going to take this long,” or, “The internet will fix itself and work,” “My Wi-Fi will be working again.” You know what, sometimes it takes longer than you think. Often, it takes longer than you think. So, I get myself reading and the time flies by.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they highlight it in the Kindle book version of your works, or they re-tweet it a lot?

Eric Barker
I think the key thing was, in the new book as well as with others, there’s the Grant study which has been going on for nearly a century at Harvard. They’ve been following a group of men, basically, their entire lives. I think most of the men are in their 80s or 90s, and so it’s interesting, rather than some two-week study or six-week study to see what happens across a person’s entire life.

And, as you can imagine, multiple people have led this study because it’s taken nearly a century. And when they asked George Vaillant, who was probably the guy who led the study for the longest time, they said, “Look, what have you learned?” and, as you can imagine, the amount of information they’ve collected could fill a warehouse, but he replied with only one sentence. And he said that your relationships to other people are the only thing that matters.

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

Eric Barker
They can go to my blog at EricBarker.org, E-R-I-C-B-A-R-K-E-R.O-R-G. And the best thing to follow the insights and tips that I’m finding from the research is to sign up for my weekly newsletter.

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

Eric Barker
Yeah, the key thing I would say is, and I talked about this in my first book, was sit down with your boss and ask them what you can do to make their life easier. Ask them what you could be doing, point blank, to be better at your job and to be a better contributor. There are two benefits here. Number one, you are basically getting the answers to the test. They are going to tell you what you need to be doing.

And, number two, just in terms of signaling and relationship, how would you feel if you were boss if an employee came to you, and said, “How can I make your life easier? What do I need to be doing to be a better contributor?” That is a very, very positive signal, and it is going to tell you what you need to be focusing on. It’s a simple little thing and it can be a gamechanger.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that absolutely can be. And we had Mary Abbajay on the podcast talking about how to manage your manager, and that was one of her very top tips. And she said that she frequently will ask audiences, like, “Who’s done this?” and it’s generally less than 1% of professionals have done that. But, yeah, it’s powerful on both sides.

Eric Barker
And then for advanced mode, every week, sum up what you’ve been up, what you’ve accomplished, and send a quick bullet point email to your boss, and make sure to be focused on that thing that they told you, that you are making progress towards what they said was most important. This is extremely valuable. Your boss is busy. They’re not watching everything you’re doing.

So, to be telling them, “Hey, here’s what I’ve been up to,” makes them relaxed, makes them like and appreciate you. You’re basically doing a highlight reel. And if things don’t work out at that job, you can go back to every Friday email you’ve sent through all the weeks, and you know how to update your resume because you basically have a long list of all the things you’ve accomplished while you were there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Eric, thank you. It’s been a lot of fun. I wish you much luck with the book Plays Well with Others and all your adventures and relationships.

Eric Barker
Thank you so much. It was fantastic to be here.

Jul 21
0

785: How to Improve Focus and Productivity through Smarter Deadlines with Christopher Cox

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Christopher Cox discusses how to leverage deadlines to curb procrastination, improve productivity, and deliver better results.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The worst possible deadline you can give yourself 
  2. The trick restaurateurs and theater artists use to consistently deliver quality
  3. The trick to making self-imposed deadlines more motivating 

 

About Christopher

Christopher Cox has written about politics, business, books, and science for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Harper’s, Wired, and Slate. In 2020, he was named a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a visiting scholar at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He was formerly the chief editor of Harper’s Magazine and executive editor of GQ, where he worked on stories that won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN Literary Award for Journalism, and multiple National Magazine Awards. His book The Deadline Effect is out in paperback now.  

Resources Mentioned

Christopher Cox Interview Transcript

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

Christopher Cox
Hi, Pete. Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into some wisdom from your book The Deadline Effect: Inside Elite Organizations That Have Mastered the Ticking Clock, but, first, I want you to regale us with some tales from Everest base camp and/or summiting Kilimanjaro.

Christopher Cox
Oh, wow, yeah, that takes me back. That was one long trip that I took between college and grad school. I went all the way around the world, and all sorts of things happened on those trips. So, climbing Kilimanjaro is maybe the most dramatic story because it’s a multi-day journey, and on the last day, you have to climb up, at least on the route that I took, a very steep, I don’t want to call it a cliff, but it’s almost a cliff, and it’s covered in ice and snow, and it snowed that night that I was supposed to climb.

And you start off at about 2:00 in the morning. And part of the reason you start it at 2:00 in the morning is you want the ice to be frozen. During the day, it starts to melt and it gets slippery. And so, we’re climbing up the ice and I was with one other person, my guide, and after about 30 minutes or 45 minutes up this steep, steep expanse, his flashlight goes out and he asked me, “Do you have your flashlight?” And I said, “Yes, I do.” And then we had about 40 seconds of that flashlight before it went out, too.

And so, we did the final three hours of the climb in the cold and the snow and the steep in complete darkness, which was frightening at first, but then basically he said, “I want you to put your feet exactly where my feet are and we’ll just climb up that way.” And we made it and we reached the top exactly as the sun rose over the savannah, and it was a feeling of pure euphoria.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Cool. Well, so digging into the book a bit, can you share any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made when putting together The Deadline Effect?

Christopher Cox
Yes. So, the book, I sort of did two modes of research to write the book. One was reading as many studies as I could on procrastination and deadlines and productivity that I could. And the other was I went out and did a bunch of reporting, so I ended up embedding in nine different organizations and learning how they worked.

And so, each of those two paths of research led me to different insights. I would say that just from reading academic literature, the first thing that jumped out at me, which I saw replicated in study after study, was how powerful shortening a deadline can be. One of the very first papers I read was about the US Census and they were trying to figure out how to get more people to reply to the mail-in census. So, not when a person comes through a door but just the thing you get in the mail.

And it turned out that if you can increase the response rate for the mail-in census by one percentage point, it would save the US government $75 million per percentage point. So, there’s a big motivation to get more people to mail these things in. And so, they did some research and studies and experiments to see how they could increase that response rate.

And one of the things they discovered, which seemed counterintuitive to me at first, was if you actually give people less time to reply, they’re more likely to do so. And so, they did an experiment where they had two groups. They both had the same deadline to return the mail-in response to the census, but one group had a week less to do it.

And the group that had a week less to do it was more likely to turn it in. And there are all sorts of other positive benefits they saw, the data was higher quality, if the people had less time to turn it in, too. And so, I read that and that really got me intrigued, and that’s when I started to sort of delve in deeper into this subject.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is good. And so, you know, it’s funny, with these sorts of things, you can, after the fact, 20/20 hindsight, say, “Oh, yeah. Well, of course, if they don’t have to say, ‘Oh, I could do that. I need some time over the next few weeks,” is very different than, “Oh, shoot, I better get on this now,” while they have the piece of paper in hand. So, I guess I see the psychological effect at work, at least that’s my speculation. Is that the driving force there?
Christopher Cox
Yeah, I think that’s right. There is a tendency to sort of put things off into the last minute if you possibly can. And I often say, like, the very worst deadline that you can give to yourself is to say, “As soon as possible.” It’s better to have it be concrete, and even if it’s further off than you might want it to be. So, as soon as possible, and you feel like, “Okay, that means I need to get it done tomorrow.” But if you actually set a concrete date of, “No, it’s going to get done in a week,” that tends to be more effective in getting you to actually complete whatever project it is you’re trying to get done.

And so, one of the other things that came up in sort of looking at how adjusting the timing of the deadline can increase your ability to complete a project was I read all these papers on procrastination. And procrastination affects us all to greater or lesser extents. One economist I read called it sort of the universal human problem.

But I read this interesting paper called “Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences.” So, you think you procrastinate things you don’t want to do, but it turns out we all tend to procrastinate things that we do want to do. And there are two social scientists named Susanne Shu and Ayelet Gneezy, and they devised this pretty ingenious experiment.

They gave out coupons for a free slice of cake. So, again, this is not something that you would think people would want to avoid. And one of the coupons expired in three weeks, and a different version of the coupon expired in two months. And it turned out that the people who had three weeks, so more than a month less time to get their free cake, were five times more likely to use their coupon.

Pete Mockaitis
Five times.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, like a dramatic effect of shortening the deadline there. And I think it’s just what you say, with that urgency provided by the deadline, and not giving people time to be distracted from what they’re supposed to be doing, you’re going to increase your likelihood of getting things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, these are tantalizing insights right there. If we were to zoom out a bit, what would you say is the core message, thesis, big idea behind The Deadline Effect?

Christopher Cox
Well, in terms of what I saw in the organizations that I studied, there were two big conclusions that sort of tie everything together. The first was successful organizations take deadlines seriously, and that sounds very simple but that is step number one. You have to take them seriously. You have to set a deadline. You have to make it concrete.

And the second thing that united them was they set up their deadlines in the organization so that no individual employee ever faced a deadline alone, so they increased what social scientists called interdependence. And so, that meant that procrastination, more or less, gets taken out of the equation because there are so many different enforcement mechanisms on any individual person trying to get something done that they’re goaded into action. They’re kept to schedule because so many other people are relying on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. So, while an individual might have a deadline for himself or herself, there is a broader deadline that a team or a collection of contributors is all working towards, thus ensuring that the individual is able to get it done so that the team gets it over the line by the date. Is that accurate?

Christopher Cox
Yeah, that is accurate. And so, the first place that I saw this came from my own working life before I wrote this book, and even now I have a career as a magazine editor. And I began the book with a question sort of in the back of my mind, which is, I worked at a lot of different magazines over the past 20 years, and they are populated by people who can be weirdos and artists and writers and all sorts of people who you don’t expect to be the most disciplined human beings on earth.

And yet, somehow, month after month for a monthly magazine, or week after week for a weekly magazine, they publish something, they get a magazine out there consistently. For a while, I was the chief editor of Harper’s Magazine, which has been publishing since 1850. And so, what is that – 172 years? They haven’t missed an issue in 172 years. How could that be after all sorts of different people coming through there?

And so, I started to look at what made that possible, and I think they did those two things. They took deadlines seriously from the beginning. Deadline is a word that exists from the publishing industry. And they set up the process of publishing so that it was highly interdependent.

So, in my work as an editor, I would get writers to file an article to me, and that very relationship, the two of us working together, me reminding the writer to stick to the deadline, that was the first bit of interdependence that helped get things done on time but it wasn’t just that. I, in turn, was hearing from the art department, saying, “Where is that article? We need to start to think of the photographs for it or commissioning artwork for it.” And the fact checkers are saying the same thing to me, and to the art department, and the copy editors were saying the same thing.

And so, eventually, you have an organization that’s highly interdependent where everyone is working together to get this project done, even though it ultimately is going to appear as an article with one person’s name on it. And so, that is a machine built to get people to meet their deadlines. And that same writer, if left to their own devices, they’re writing an essay for themselves at their desk, they’re not going to show it to anyone, could end up procrastinating indefinitely, and often do.

I definitely know writers that I work with who say, “I cannot work unless I have the demands set up upon me by magazine deadlines, editors, and everyone else waiting for me to turn my copy in.”

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious, having worked with so many writers, how often do they hit the deadline that you originally established with them?

Christopher Cox
Well, I would say that the writers who will meet a deadline without me saying anything are definitely the exception rather than the rule. But that’s where I come in.

First, my mere presence there, saying, “Please give this to me,” reminding them helps a bit. And then I can also start using some of the strategies that might suggest themselves from the academic literature, which is if I have a writer and I know that I have to have a piece ready to print on Friday, I’m not going to tell them to send it to me on Thursday. I’m going to tell them to send it to me a week ahead of time.

And so, you start pushing their deadline up, which pushes them into action earlier, and that gives everyone else more time to refine the piece, make it better, and it sort of becomes a positive reinforcement loop as you sort of work to make the article as good as possible before publication.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so if we’re zooming in to professionals who want to do better about managing their time and meeting goals and objectives, are there some deadline magic, tactics, principles, guides that we can take on to achieve more better?

Christopher Cox
Yes. So, I think that, set a deadline, make it concrete, that’s step one. If you can set your own deadline, then give yourself maybe just a little bit less time to finish it than you feel comfortable with. That shorter deadline might serve as an inspiration. And then the bigger the project, the more you might start thinking about strategies, like self-imposing interim deadlines.

And this is something that I saw when I went out reporting. I spent some time with Jean-George Vongerichten, who’s a famous restaurateur. He has, oh, gosh, 45, maybe it’s more, restaurants around the world. And I went with Jean-George as he opened two restaurants back-to-back over two days in May of 2019, and watching him do that, I got to see his organization was a machine that was perfectly tailored to opening restaurants. They’ve done it often and they knew how to do it.

Meeting their deadline but having the final product, having the restaurant be as buttoned-up as possible. One of the reasons they want it to be as buttoned-up as possible on day one is they knew the reviewers are going to come that first week often, and they can’t afford to have something sloppy being put in front of a reviewer who might make or break the restaurant.

And so, Jean-George and his team were masters of using interim deadlines. And the way that they get that was something called mock services, which is basically what it sounds like. As soon as they could, and as often as they could, they served meals in these new restaurants, the restaurant before it had open, pretending that it was a regular service night at the restaurant.

So, I went to one of the two restaurants, it was called Fulton that’s in Lower Manhattan, and I first went to it about 30 days before it opened. And that first day that I was there, they’re not serving to real customers but they sat down some of the wait staff, they even brought in members of the construction company’s staff, and I think some interior decorators, and they sat them down and they served them some of the dishes they’re planning for that restaurant, and they worked on fine tuning the service part of it, they worked on fine tuning the taste, they asked them for their opinion on everything.

And they did that day after day after day, every single day until it opened. And that was, one, it had ensured that on actual opening day, that they were ready, and it also allowed them to improve consistently over that same period of all these mock services up until opening day, and, of course, beyond. But on opening day, you wouldn’t have known that it was the first day it was operating. Everything was pretty darn seamless. I was very impressed by what I saw there.

Pete Mockaitis
And that notion of opening day of not necessarily being what we assume when we think about an opening day, you also saw in theatrical releases. Can you talk about that?

Christopher Cox
Yes. So, I spent some time in the public theater, and I watched them develop a show for its world premiere. And what I saw there were a few different things happening at once. They had that same sort of daily check-in, daily revisions that Jean-George had in his restaurant.

But one of the things that really struck me about watching this come together was I had a fairly naïve notion of what a theatrical production looked like when you put it on. I sort of thought, “Okay, you write the play and you rehearse it, and then there’s dress rehearsal, and then it’s done.” But what I actually saw with this performance was dress rehearsal was sort of the midpoint in a longer process of improving the performance, improving the play that they’re putting on.

So, I went to dress rehearsal, and then after that, I went to the first of several preview performances where they had audiences there, and they actually changed the performance considerably based on the feedback from the audience, which makes all the sense in the world. Audiences sort of who you’re to perform for but I found it inspiring, really. And then when I talked to the director, he said, “Oh, yeah, like this is the way it’s always worked in theater.”

The social science name for it is sense-making and updating. So, you take a pause after each day and you figure out what’s going right and what’s going wrong, and then you update according to what you assess along those lines. And the theater producers have figured out how to formalize that process in a way that we don’t often do in our regular life.

And seeing that in the theater made me realize that that is the sort of maneuver that we all need to do in our everyday life, and not just for work projects; for everything. Like, take a pause every day or more often than that, depending on what you’re doing, and take time to assess what you’re doing, the effectiveness, and think about how you might update it.

And so, the interesting academic study I read about sense-making and updating, it was called “More and Less Effective Updating” and it studied 19 different ER teams during a training exercise. And the training exercise was they had a young boy come in as a patient – again, it’s just an exercise, it wasn’t real – who’s complaining of troubled breathing.

And the experiment had been set up so that a crucial piece of equipment, a sort of a mask they use to help the child to breathe, had failed, and they were testing to see who’s going to stop and just try to make sense of the situation, like, “Why are we not helping this child? This device, which is supposed to help the child breathe, why is it not working?” And if you do it well, you will see that this mask is broken, and you’ll update your behavior accordingly.

And the teams that were most effective were the ones who had that instinct, I guess, to stop what they’re doing, even though there’s a child on the table and everything is pushing you to sort of just heedlessly push forward. It doesn’t seem like there’s time to stop and assess the situation. But those teams that did were the ones that saved the child’s life in this exercise because they were able to say, “Okay, let’s figure out what’s wrong here.” And once they figured out the broken mask, it was easy to keep the child healthy and stable.

That was sort of a high-stakes version of the same process but from medicine, to theater, to restaurant opening, it’s a process that we would all do well to remember to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy, certainly. So, we have a deadline, and so some piece of completion must…I guess there’s all kinds of layers of final, and in some ways it’s never final. You’re constantly potentially iterating and tweaking on end but there are key milestones in terms of, “Someone is going to eat our food,” or, “The doors are going to open to people from the public,” and those are different dates and different milestones and different expectations.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, no, exactly. I think that, we talked earlier about interdependence, there’s a different sort of…it’s not really interdependence but it’s the same sort of mechanism where if you know that there’s going to be a real-paying audience out there watching you perform, or real-paying group of people coming in to eat dinner at your restaurant, that adds stakes to what you’re doing and it concentrates the mind, as they say.

And so, Jean-George, knowing that that first day that that restaurant opened, there are going to be real people there expecting high-quality service and cuisine, that motivated him to get that restaurant as good as possible for opening day. And yet he still continues to improve the restaurant after it had opened. Some deadlines, that’s the way they work. You want it to be as good as possible on opening day or whenever it’s due but you have a chance to improve beyond it.

And part of the wisdom of these organizations, and what I’m sort of trying to help readers discover in the book, is how to take that kind of move, that having what is basically a finished product ready before the actual real final deadline, and that gives you time to improve, revise, make it better. Again, in the magazine world, that’s what I dealt with all the time. Just getting that first draft out of the writer was maybe the most crucial step. And then we have, hopefully, enough time to go through revision after revision and make it better. Obviously, that’s going to be better than the thing that’s completed at the very last minute.

Like the term paper you did in college, that you did an all-nighter for, that was not your best term paper, was it? It was the one that you labored over and gave yourself extra time on because you knew it was super important. And so, recreating that dynamic is sort of what I saw the most effective of these organizations doing. And in the book, I sort of try to point the reader toward ways to build that time into your schedule so you can do the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, let’s talk about some of those approaches. I’m thinking about when there are self-imposed deadlines, often they…well, they just don’t have the pull that hundreds of people are showing up at a restaurant has. So, any way we can get some more of that motivational oomph when it’s just something that we made up for ourselves?

Christopher Cox
Yeah, that’s a great question, and I would say that, first, you set up these interim deadlines. Let’s say you’re trying to finish, let’s say, it’s a term paper, why not? A lot of us have had that experience. If you set up a deadline for yourself, say, “A month before it’s due, I want to have the first draft done,” or if it’s a longer work, “I want to have the first chapter done,” then do that. Impose that deadline on yourself.

And there’s good news about those kinds of deadlines. Even fake deadlines, even self-imposed deadlines are effective. They’re not as effective as a deadline where there’s a real penalty imposed upon you or a real audience out there, but they still have an effect. Actually, there’s an experiment that I write about in the book. Daniel Ariely conducted this with his students, he wrote the book Predictably Irrational.

Ariely set up an experiment with his class where he basically had three different experimental groups within it. One group got to choose the deadlines for three papers they would write during the semester; one group all had the same deadline, which is the last day of class; and one group, Ariely imposed evenly spaced deadlines for the three papers throughout the semester.

You probably can guess the outcome. The people who had their papers all due on the last day of class performed the worst. The people who had mandatory deadlines evenly spaced by the professor did the best. But there’s something interesting about the third where they got to choose their own deadlines. Some of that group chose the last day of class. They maybe thought that the more time, the better, they would perform better, they had the most flexibility but they actually did just as badly as the people who had it all on the last day of class by design.

But within the people who got to choose, those who self-imposed evenly spaced deadlines on themselves did just as well as the ones who had mandatory evenly spaced deadlines. So, those were fake deadlines, there was no penalty if they didn’t turn it in on the date that they said, but those deadlines had an effect. They were almost like real deadlines for that class.

So, that’s the good news for those of you out there who are thinking, “Well, I can self-impose deadlines but it won’t make any difference because they won’t be real.” Like, if you believe in them and you set them and you make them concrete, they will have an effect.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And to that point, it’s interesting that you can sort of deduce some stakes and some relevance to your deadlines as opposed to them being purely arbitrary. Like, I think these students, again I’m speculating, could say, “Okay, if I don’t complete these in an evenly spaced fashion, I’m going to have a brutally miserable few days of my life,” so there’s that. And so, I guess that’s one means of making them real for yourself is by having an understanding, an articulation of just what would happen if I didn’t hit my self-imposed deadline.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, no, exactly. It sort of goes back to the original lesson, which is set a concrete deadline, take deadline seriously is the most basic part of it. And if you’re thoughtful about it, if you’re just deliberate about these things, it’s going to have a big effect on your performance and how good you are at getting things done before the last minute.

So, these students were wise, those who chose evenly spaced deadlines on their own. They sort of planned through what they thought would be most effective and put it into place, and it worked out for them.

Pete Mockaitis
And you were about to say a second piece. Please, lay it on us.
Christopher Cox
So, first, self-imposed deadlines with nothing else going for them will have an effect. But if you can bring in some enforcement mechanisms, if you can bring in that audience, bring in some way to sort of give those self-imposed deadlines teeth, as I call in the book, then you should. And, well, I did it myself.

So, I wrote this book, and it had a deadline, the publisher wanted it on March 1st, and I knew that I needed to make that deadline. It would be completely embarrassing to write a book about deadlines and miss my own deadline. And so, I was very deliberate about it. I had a little bit over a year to write it and to report it, and so I set up a very fleshed out schedule sort of for that year. And I planned what I was going to write each chapter, what I was going to research each chapter, and I hit most of those interim deadlines pretty well, not perfectly, but those interim deadlines were there and they helped me, and I got things done. Some things came in early. Some things came in late but it all worked out in the wash.

But one of the things that I did to help make those interim deadlines more effective was to start promising a chapter to my editor, or promising a chapter to my agent or to my wife. It didn’t matter, it didn’t have to be someone who had actual authority over me or anything. It could be a best friend, and say, “I’m going to finish this chapter about Jean-George and I’m going to send it to you.”

And just that promise, bringing someone else into the process, increasing the interdependence of what is often a very solitary pursuit, writing a book, helped me, helped me get things done on time. And it meant that, by the time March 1st rolled around, and my editor was ready for my book, I was ready to send it to him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. So, anyone will do.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, anyone will do and I think that…well, how to put this best?

Pete Mockaitis
Not to diminish your wife in any way. She’s very special.

Christopher Cox
No, exactly. In fact, I would say promising to my wife, that was the most demanding one. I wanted it to impress her. But, yeah, I would say try to create multiple enforcement mechanisms for yourself. So, if you’re a writer, don’t make it only your wife who sees it too, but also find someone else, who’s an outside party, so you have…it’s sort of like, in a magazine world, like, me thinking, “Oh, I have to meet the demands of the art department and the fact-checking department and the copy editor.” It’s the sort of multiple connections of interdependence that is the most effective at keeping you on target.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ll tell you, with the podcasts, having tens and thousands of folks who just sort of expect there’s going to be an episode on Monday and Thursday does wonders for me.

Christopher Cox
Oh, for sure. Having that audience out there, whether you’re doing a podcast or putting a magazine out or putting on a theatrical production, it really concentrates you and keeps you on target.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Christopher, I want to get your take, is there a dark side to deadlines? Is it all benefit or are there some watchouts we should be concerned about?

Christopher Cox
Well, I’ve certainly come to embrace and respect and rely upon deadlines, and I do think that the notion that I find myself pushing back against over and over again, especially when people know that I’ve written this book about deadlines, is that deadlines and creativity are somehow at odds, that we associate it with the task master putting us to work and there’s no room for creativity, and it has to be done by a certain date.

Then what happens if I have a brilliant insight that would only arrive if I gave myself endless time to work on it? But I just don’t think that’s the case. Like, I’ve seen it with the writers, brilliant writers, poets, novelists, all of them, they thrive under a deadline. And I saw the same thing in organizations as different from that as like the Air Force.

Like, I went and embedded in this Air Force unit and they were so deadline-driven and yet they were so focused, but they also seem the most at ease of anyone that I saw because they knew they were dialed in, they knew that they were going to meet their deadlines, and so they didn’t feel any stress. And I compared it to a state of flow, this state of complete concentration that has elements of euphoria to it.

So, I guess I would say that there is a dark side to deadlines but only if you’re not using them effectively. The original deadline effect is a concept in the economic world the tendency to delay things until the last minute. So, if you are negotiating and you have a deadline to finish up your negotiation, the deadline effect is that draw that makes you not settle until the last minute. That’s why settlements are reached on the courthouse steps, it’s that deadline.

But that’s kind of miserable. Procrastinating until the last minute and then rushing something out. And so, that’s the dark side but if you embrace deadlines, and know how to effectively deploy them, you can get rid of all that last minute nonsense and eliminate the painful period of procrastination and just get right into that mode of creative productive work as early as possible, and that is deeply satisfying.

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

Christopher Cox
Well, it’s out on paperback. The book is out on paperback now, and I would love for people to pick it up. But, no, I think you’ve covered quite a lot in a short amount of time.

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

Christopher Cox
There is a quote attributed to Einstein, which is “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” And that, to me, spoke to me in my deadline work. And when I looked into that quote, he did say it but he said something much more long winded about it and it got boiled down into that more pithy version. And that sort of inspired me in a way because it’s sort of he had a brilliant idea, and even he needed an editor to improve it.

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

Christopher Cox
Well, I read a lot of different studies for this book but probably the most fun…well, one would be that “Procrastination of Enjoyable Experiences” because it just was so strange to think that people would put off getting themselves a free slice of cake. But there is another one called “Procrastination by Pigeons” and it was part of a whole universe of animal studies that show that animals, too, procrastinate.

There was a rat study where rats tended to prefer a larger shock if they could put it off into the future than a smaller one right now. So, it’s a wild and wonderful world out there when you start to think about deadlines and procrastination, and the way that not just humans have a relationship with time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, in a way, that’s a really good synopsis of what procrastination does, you’ll get a larger shock if later.

Christopher Cox
Yeah, and we impose that pain upon ourselves over and over again. We don’t learn. And just like rats, we don’t learn.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Christopher Cox
Well, one book that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently is an old favorite, but that’s Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. It’s a big weighty door stop but he is the master of research and going as deep as you can go on a subject. And I talk about him a little bit in my book as a negative example because he’s been working on his big LBJ project for, I guess, 50 years now, but I want to tell Robert Caro here now, I think what you’re doing is wonderful and I love your book, so forgive me for making fun of you a little bit in my own book.

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

Christopher Cox
Well, I think I probably will echo a lot of people who talk about sort of shutting off devices and finding time for yourself to be isolated. But here’s a much more mundane one. A while ago, I switched to waking up in the morning to make my coffee, and instead I pre-programmed my coffee every morning so it’s waiting for me when I wake up. And that has done wonders for my morning productivity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share, that folks tend to really quote back to you frequently?

Christopher Cox
Well, there is a part in the book that we didn’t talk about, but I ended up doing one part of the book undercover, and I got a job at Best Buy, and the deadline in question there was Black Friday. So, I ended up working in Best Buy on Black Friday, and I watched how they completely reformed the way that store works just for that one day to handle the huge increase in crowds.

And I don’t know if Best Buy is often thought of as a model organization, but what I saw there absolutely impressed me. So, whenever I meet someone who’s read the book, they often asked me if I really did work at Best Buy, and I can prove it by talking at length about different fight-screen televisions.

Pete Mockaitis
So, did you confess? When you say undercover, do they know what you’re up to, or you’re just a pure normal employee? “Christopher, I see you have quite the resume in the writing world. What makes you interested in electronics?”

Christopher Cox
Yeah. I had to disguise some of my resume and play up other parts of it. I made a promise to myself that I would not lie to anyone, but I did not tell them, for example, that I was, at that moment, employed by a magazine. So, yeah, I tried to go in through the front door, I went to their PR department and said I want to write about Best Buy, I want to write about Black Friday. They spoke to me for a while and then ended up ghosting me.

And after about a year of trying that, I said, “All right. Well, I’m going to find a different way to tell the story.” And applied for a job, and got one, and worked for a few months just to prepare for that Black Friday. And then, finally, when it was all over, I told everyone I worked with what I was up to, and I changed their names for the books because they weren’t expecting to be written about. It’s a very positive chapter, so I hope that they’re happy with it even though I had to get in through slightly less than direct means.

Pete Mockaitis
I was just thinking about you’ve got your own deadline for the book about deadlines, and you’re like, “Oh, man, I got to shift.”

Christopher Cox
Yeah, that was a problem. It’s time-consuming to hold down a day job at Best Buy while also writing a book but, somehow, I managed to squeeze it all in.

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

Christopher Cox
The easiest thing to do would be to go to Deadline-Effect.com, and it’s got a bit of everything about the book and about me there.

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

Christopher Cox
Well, I’ll repeat the first lesson, which is take deadlines seriously. I promise, you probably think you already do, but just be disciplined about it, be deliberate about it in everything you do, and, ultimately, it’s liberating. As your productivity goes up, you become happier, you spend less time feeling that painful procrastination, and you work life will get just that much better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Christopher, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck with all your deadlines.

Christopher Cox
Thank you, Pete. It’s been great to be with you.

Jul 18
0

784: How to Quadruple Your Reading Speed and Learn Faster with Abby Marks-Beale

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Speed reading expert Abby Marks-Beale shares the key strategies to speed up your reading–on screens and paper–without compromising comprehension.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to quadruple your reading speed with just one notecard 
  2. The best ways to retain more of what you read
  3. Awesome tools for optimal screen reading 

About Abby

Abby Marks Beale is a speed reading expert, consummate educator and professional speaker who enjoys teaching busy people how to read smarter, faster and just plain better. For the past 30+ years, she has taught thousands to build reading confidence and competence through the knowledge of simple yet powerful active reading strategies. She is the author of 10 Days to Faster Reading, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Speed Reading and Speed Reading: A Little-Known Time-Saving Superpower. 

Resources Mentioned

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Abby Marks-Beale Interview Transcript

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

Abby Marks-Beale
Thanks for having me, Pete. Much appreciated.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about speedreading with you. We’ve only covered this like once or twice before out of nearly 800 interviews. So, I know there’s much more goodness to share. But I want to start with hearing you say you used to hate reading. What’s the story?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I think a lot of people feel that way, that when you’re in elementary school, it’s like so great that you can read some fiction and stories are great. And then you get into middle school and high school, and they make you read these nasty textbooks that aren’t fun, there’s no pictures or not many pictures, and things that you have to learn.

So, I got turned off to reading at about that time. I used to love it until I was like in seventh grade, and then it just wasn’t fun anymore. And then I hated it until after college. And it was the kind of thing that was like I never understood why anyone in their right mind would read a newspaper on a regular basis. And I was just averse to reading. Period.

And so, I majored in Spanish in college, which helped because I could read word by word, and it was okay. And so, the comprehension part and such was just a very different animal at that time. So, yeah, I used to hate to read but I learned through a job that I got soon after college, having my degree helped to get this job, that this is not hard to do. This is something that can be learned, and it’s just a set of strategies, strategic things that people can do to become better, smarter, more effective readers.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued, when it comes to we can be better, stronger, more effective, faster, can you maybe lay out, like what’s possible in terms of just for normal professionals as opposed to, I don’t know, I’m thinking about memory champions or world record speed readers? Like, what could be possible for us in terms of, “Well, hey, I’ve been reading my whole life and I’m going fine”? What are we missing out on?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, you think it’s going fine but for some people it’s not. It’s like, “I know how to read but I don’t like to read.” There’s this thing that I talk about called your reading attitude. Everybody has one. It’s kind of like…and I say fill in the blank with this, “I am a blank reader.” And I start off all my programs that way, and it basically, if you can put in the word, like, “I am a good reader,” “I’m an avid reader,” “I’m a voracious reader,” those are all like really good positive terms, and that means that reading is something that you will do and you find it valuable, and it doesn’t waste your time, and it typically doesn’t make you fall asleep, and you don’t re-read a lot.

But others that put in the words like, “I’m a bad reader,” “I’m a slow reader,” “a distracted reader,” any of the words that are more negative means that they look at reading like the plague. It’s like, “It’s going to waste my time. It’s going to be boring. I’m going to fall asleep. I’m not going to understand it. I’m going to have to re-read.”

And so, what I aim to help people understand is that they can be much more confident about who they are as readers just by having some strategies. And even if they think they’re really good readers, which they probably are, they can still learn a few more because we haven’t had training since elementary school, pretty much. Most people haven’t taken classes or upgraded their skills. It’s like, “Here’s the words, folks. Go at it.” And that’s pretty much what they gave to us, and then we had to figure out how to manage the reading workload from there on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I guess I’m thinking about my own story. I think I’m a fine reader. I enjoy reading things. Sometimes I do need to re-read or I do seem slow, to my own judgment, I guess. I don’t know. I haven’t timed it recently. And so, tell us, just what is possible? What sort of benefits or magic is on the other side of mastering this skill?

Abby Marks-Beale
The Rich Habits Institute, did a study about reading habits of the wealthy. And it talks about, and I’m just going to read to you a couple of the percentages. Eighty-six percent of the wealthy loved to read, 85% of the wealthy read two or more educational books every month, 88% of the wealthy read 30 minutes or more each day, and 63% of the wealthy listen to audiobooks or podcasts during their commute to work.

So, for any of your audiences thinking, “Oh, how can I make more money at what I do?” the more that you read, and I encourage more nonfiction, things that are going to make you better at who you are and what you do, that those, when applied, are going to be incredibly helpful for your life and your career. So, I agree that the more that you read, I think, the tendency to make more money is definitely there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Thank you, Abby.

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s about feeling more confident about who you are as a reader, if you need that. It’s about having certain strategies to apply. So, some people think that when you learn how to read faster, everything has to be read fast but that’s not true. It’s about creating a gear shift. And I use this concept of five gears, and I show my hands.

So, imagine your hand, you look at your hand, on your hand you have five fingers, which are basically five gears, and gear one is your thumb, and gear two is your pointer finger, three, four, and five appropriately, keep going. So, that’s five gears. Most people are stuck in gears one and two because they don’t know how to get into gears three, four, and five. So, it’s about becoming more efficient, more effective, depending…

Like, if you’re reading something you’re very familiar with, you shouldn’t be in gear one or two. You should be able to get into, minimally, three, and definitely possibly four, depending on why you’re reading something and what you need it for. And so, it’s about… I call it active, mindful, and conscious. Those are the three things that I don’t think readers are when they read. They’re like, “Oh, here I am, my eyes are going to hit the page, and I’m going to hope that I understand what it says.” And it’s very much a conscious process, at least the way that I teach it, and the way that I do it, and the people that learned from me do it.

it’s not going so fast that you don’t understand or, as Woody Allen said, “It’s reading War and Peace in five minutes, and it’s a book about Russia.” That’s like the worst quote and I use it all the time because I hate it but it’s something that people can relate to.

But I want to give you my definition of speedreading because it’s different than other people that teach speedreading. So, it’s a set of active, mindful, and conscious strategies that allow you to get what you need quickly from any reading material in an efficient and an effective manner. So, it’s not about going so fast that you don’t understand. That’s called speed-looking not speedreading. And so, it’s being efficient and effective, active, mindful, and conscious.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you define what is your one, two, three, four, five?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, there’s different speeds. It’s basically gear one and two, they’re anywhere from about 100 to maybe 250-300 words a minute. That would be gears one and two. And then gears three, four, and five are anywhere from like 300-350 all the way up to 1250-1500 depending on what you can do. So, that’s not like wicked fast, although for some people it sounds that way. And the average reading speed of most people that haven’t had training is around 250.

So, if you think about, okay, if they’re in gear one and two, that’s around 250. Then if they could get into gear three, four, or five, they could easily go the other way, which could be 800 or 1000 words per minute when appropriate using certain strategies. So, it’s about using the gear shift, just like your car, like sometimes when there’s traffic, you got to slow down. And when it’s on the open highway, you can go into fifth gear. It’s about knowing what’s on your radar, what’s in front of you, what do you need to know, how much do you already know.

Like, okay, for example, I work with lawyers or doctors sometimes, and I teach them how to read better and faster, I say, “Look, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not a doctor, you guys know you have background knowledge that I don’t have. We could sit down with the same study,” they’re reading a study, or they’re reading a legal document, and they’re going to read it probably faster with much better comprehension than I will because I don’t have the background knowledge. You need to have the understanding of the vocabulary, of the concepts, the structure. They have that, which I don’t.

But put them into my world, reading educational material, reading speedreading material things, like I know how to get through that stuff a lot better and faster than they probably can. So, it’s about your background knowledge, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, well, quadrupling the reading speed sounds magically enticingly powerful in terms of what might be possible for just like slamming through an email inbox, or looking through reports, or doing research. Being able to pull that off four times as fast can mean going home early, or having time to do more fun, strategic work, or the people development stuff that is being neglected. So, are you saying that it is, in fact, possible via practice and strategy to read at four times the average speed, if we’re 250, to go to 1000 plus without losing comprehension?

Abby Marks-Beale
As long as you have, number one, the background knowledge, you know what it’s talking about, you’re familiar with it, and, number two, that you’re using the right strategy for the right reason. And so, two things I want to say. One is that in order to get into those gears of four and five, what you’ll find is that you have to use a tool.

And the tools that I talk about are using your hands or a card to read but you have to find something to put on, either your screen or your paper, that’s going to help you track your eye movements because your eye movements, they get tired just going across the lines and back to the beginning, and across the line and back to the beginning. But if you have something moving on your page or on your screen, you’re able to follow it much faster.

And, for me even, to get into those higher gears of four or five, I have to use my hands or a white card to read with. And so, that, for some people is just really uncomfortable because they’re not used to doing it, and I explain that, yeah, it is uncomfortable at first, but once you get the habit, you’re sold on it because that is how you get to those higher gears.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds easy.

Abby Marks-Beale
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
I just get a notecard and move it fast, and that’s all you got to do, Abby. Is that what we’re saying here?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, yes but, yes but, the white card, this is my favorite thing to share with people. It’s called the white card method. It’s taking a blank white card or the back side of a business card that’s blank, or a blank piece of white paper, like that, just as I’m seeing it, not everyone is seeing that, but, yes, a blank white card. And if you have like a magazine, newspaper, a book, whatever in front of you, most people would put that card underneath the line that they’re reading, and they would put it below.

And it’s just a natural thing because when we’re learning how to read, that’s where you would put it because you want to leave exposed what you’ve just read so that if you feel uncomfortable, you can go back and re-read it. But as the adult reader, the more skilled reader, you’re blocking where you’re going and leaving available what you’ve already read, which means you can go back. It’s something called regression. You don’t want to go back and re-read things.

So, to use the card effectively, it must go above the first line that you’re reading so it pushes you down and it blanks out or blacks out what you’ve already read so the tendency to go backwards is a whole lot less. You can still pick up the card if you lost your place but it’s really meant like, “Here, let’s keep it going, let’s go straight down,” and it’s very, very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Okay. So, I’m not cutting out a window pane but rather I’m blocking that which I have already read and bringing it down and…

Abby Marks-Beale
You’re covering what you’ve already read and leaving open what you haven’t read.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that means the notecard border edge margin is above my line, my active line.

Abby Marks-Beale
Correct. Yes. You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, tell me, all I gotta do is get my card, put it at the top, bring it down at a pace four times what I normally do, and, bam, I’m speedreading and that’s all it takes?

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s not necessarily just go four times. You build to that. You start wherever you start, you have a starting point, and then you try that strategy as well as there’s other strategies I teach called keywords and phrases. So, how do you pick up all those words that you’re going over pretty quickly with your hands or a card.

And so, being able to know that one word at a time is not the most efficient, but finding the bigger, more important words in the text is important, finding phrases, groups of words that form thoughts. Imagine throwing thoughts back to your brain at one time instead of one word at a time. The brain loves that. It’s just that it’s about active, mindful, conscious strategies. You stay awake when you read now because you’ve put yourself into a thinking place. I call it a quiet place.

You’ve set yourself up for learning or reading success. You could learn all this stuff in my program, put yourself in a really noisy place, it’s going to be really hard to focus. But if you can get your environment the way you like it to get the concentration you need, then you add all these different things. It’s magical. And it doesn’t mean laying in bed, I hate to say.

It’s like sitting up at a desk or a table, a place that we’ve been conditioned to work. It could be kitchen table. Your work desk may not be the best unless you’re reading webpages because there’s too much to do at your desk. There’s the phone, and there’s email, and there’s to-dos that pop up, and dingers and whatever. It’s like you want to move to a quieter place if you can.

For those that work in offices, go to a conference room or a cafeteria off hours. For those that are entrepreneurs and work from home, just get out of your office to a quieter cleaned-off desk, table, kitchen table, dining room table, but avoid the LA-Z-BOY chair unless you don’t really care if you get too comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then with these phrases, does that mean…I’ve heard the term subvocalize, which means I am reading each word inside my mind’s ear, like your bio, “She has taught thousands to build reading confidence and competence through the knowledge of simple yet powerful active reading strategies.” So, am I not doing that when I’m rocking at the 1000 plus words per minute level?

Abby Marks-Beale
Subvocalization, first of all, know that a lot of people have it because we’ve learned, at least here in the United States, that we’ve learned to sound it out, hear it in your head, called phonics, that’s how we’ve learned. And so, when you learned how to read, they didn’t tell you by the time you had a good sight vocabulary about seventh or eighth grade that you don’t need to do that anymore, and so you just kept doing it.

And so, we have this mental whispering that goes on in the head, and it’s hard to get rid of completely, so I tell people, “Don’t expect it to be gone but the faster you read, the less you can do it because you can only read about 150 to 200 words a minute out loud quickly.” And if you’re reading at 250 or 300 even as your base level, you’re not reading every single word. And so, you’ll read less, mentally whisper less the faster you go, and as long as you’re understanding what you’re reading, it doesn’t matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s just kind of mind-blowing in terms of…

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, it is, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
…that if I am reading but I’m not hearing each word in my head, although I talk kind of fast and I read words in my head fast when I talk, so I think I am probably around 250-ish. Average sounds about right. I’ve tested it back in the day, and I think it’s been about the same for a good long while. So, then I guess I’m a little, I don’t know, spooked.

My vision is like I’m on a treadmill and I’ve crank it faster than I can really handle, and I’m like, “Ahh.” And so then, I guess I’m wondering, would I, in fact, be able to comprehend, remember, retain stuff that I’m flying through if I’m not saying each word to myself?

Abby Marks-Beale
The short answer is yes, and this is where the active, mindful, conscious stuff comes into play. Like, if you’re going so fast that you’re not getting it, then you got to slow down. It’s about understanding you have gears that sometimes you need to slow down either because of the content or because of where you’re at in that moment of time.

If you’re really stressed, you had a hard commute to get to work, or you just had a fight with your spouse, or you’re dealing with something going on and you’re just really distracted, that can affect it too. So you have to have the most ideal mindset, which is…well, okay, I’m going to back up for a sec because this is something that, over the past 20 years, I’ve been teaching this stuff over 30 years.

But over the past 20 years since we’ve had computers and phones, that people have learned how to multitask but haven’t re-learned how to mono-focus. And so, it’s so hard for people who are so busy, and especially type A personalities, even people like me at times, to just stop and just read because they’re thinking about so many other things.

And so, by learning how to calm the mind, be it through mindfulness techniques like meditation, yoga, tai chi, breathing practices, something that can center you will greatly benefit your reading. So, I feel like that’s important to mention because we’re so twitchy with all the stuff that we have to look at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Got you. So, we’re just entering that tunnel of focus and it’s like all that is in my consciousness is this text and away we go. Okay. And I guess I’m curious, is there a place you might recommend? If I want to really take this for a spin, I’m going to get out the notecard and rock and roll, is there a place I can go to readily check my reading comprehension? I’m thinking about Standardized Test from my youth. Reading Comprehension was a section. So, how might I assess my comprehension and check that out to see if, yup, I am really blazing so fast I don’t even know what’s going on anymore?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I think the first thing to know is that it’s important just to know what your speed is to begin with. And, of course, people read ideally for comprehension. So, even if you don’t have ten questions after what you’ve read, you can still get your speed. I do have on my website a place where you can take a speed test just so that you can see what your reading speed is.

But if you’re looking for speed with comprehension, one of my books 10 Days to Faster Reading has ten readings in it with ten questions, so that’s a place that you could read and answer questions. Just don’t look back at the reading to get your answers. And there are a few other timed-reading exercises. I would bet if you Google them, you’d probably find them.

I know teachers can use them in high schools. Some do in college-level courses as well where you can get readings with questions. I had one from Jamestown Publishers. I used to teach when I did high school or college. So, you can get books like that if you wanted. You might even find it online as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. All right. Well, so we’re jumping around a little bit. So, we talked about the notecard, and you also talked about word clusters and…

Abby Marks-Beale
Keywords.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there something to do there with the keywords? Or what am I doing when I’m using the keyword method?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, in some ways, it’s hard to just describe. You really have to see it. However, what a keyword is, is basically any word that’s about three letters in length or longer, and it usually gives you the most meaning of a sentence. And so, it’s almost like picking out from a like a 12-word sentence, maybe seven or eight of those words that make sense. But by doing that, what you’re doing is actively consciously looking for the more important words, which keeps you more awake and alive and on task more than daydreaming.

So, daydreaming, regression, and subvocalization are the three evils, if there were such a thing, to reading. And so, mind-wandering is one of the things that happens when you go too slow. And so, by having a strategy, you will tend to daydream less, first of all, which is helpful. And then by learning how to find keywords, you’re going to be able to read almost…it’s just like newspaper headings. It’s just like a headline, that’s what I’m looking for, a newspaper headline. And it’s just like, “I get it. I don’t need all those other words because I got it through these bigger words that are more important.” And you see the other words. You’re just not stopping your eyes on all those words.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you and I know what you mean about needing to see it. As I’m looking at my note draft starter outline questions, which I flexibly refer to and suppose to march through. I’ve got, “What are your best practices for people trying to get into speedreading?” And I’m seeing in many of these words, “What are your” don’t need them; “best practices” that’s big; “for people trying” we’ll take the trying; “to get into” okay, “speedreading.” “Best practices” “trying” “speedreading” like those keywords are maybe a little under half of the total words, and I get the gist of what this question is about.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay. Very cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I just pulled out, I was looking for some reading material next to me. So, I have a copy of my book that came out Speed Reading: A Little-known Timesaving Superpower. Just opened up to squeeze the margin section, just opened it up. I’m just going to read like two, three lines and keywords.

Abby Marks-Beale
And just see if this makes sense to you even though you’re not seeing the other words. “Reading newspaper column quite different reading email. Not just content different, also column width. Average newspaper column, six words across. Average email anywhere 18 to 25 words across. I jump from end one line to beginning next. Much longer email than newspaper makes it hard eyes read. Find the next line accurately.”

Does that make sense at all to you?

Pete Mockaitis
It does. Well, it’s funny, like I’m already jumping the implications, like, “Oh, maybe if the email is wide, I should like shrink the window so that it’s more manageable and it squeezes that in a bit.”

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah. And not saying it out loud, obviously, by doing it internally, you’ll go a lot faster than if you do it out loud. But it’s about getting good at just finding those bigger words, and that takes a little bit of play and experimentation, but once you get good at it, it’s very helpful for some people, especially people that subvocalize every word because then…and even English as a second language learners find that this is a very helpful tool for them so they don’t have to read every it, that, to, the, to, and, for, if because they look at those words as if they have to all be processed the same way and they don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. Thank you.

Okay. So, we talked about getting in the right mindset and maybe it’s some breathing practice or mindfulness or a distraction-free space where it’s just the text. We talked about looking at the clusters of words and then the notecard, starting at the top, and then scooting on down to cover what we have already read and put it at the top of each line, and not needing to subvocalize, and we can rock out at four times the speed without losing comprehension with practice. That’s exciting.

Abby, tell us, what are some of your top do’s and don’ts that we haven’t covered here? It sounds like there are some more tools with regard to margin use. What’s the story here?

Abby Marks-Beale
So, there’s a lot. There are so many different pieces of this whole concept. I think, probably, one of them is about the purpose that a lot of people when they sit down to read, they don’t really know why they are reading what they’re reading, and, even more importantly, what do they need to get from it. And the reason I say that is because there are times when you’re going through something where it’s like, “Why am I reading this? It’s not going to meet my objective,” but it’s there so you feel like you have to read it.

And so, when you know that you’re not going to need it, you can skim over it. I teach people how to effectively skim. You can skip it without guilt and just say, “I read this because I read the rest of it because that was what I needed, and I didn’t need that piece.” And I give an example of, let’s say, you wanted to read about, I don’t know, like chocolate. Like, you’re reading a book on chocolate. That’s a good one. You want to know about different kinds of chocolate and where they’re made, and blah, blah. But then there’s a chapter that just talks about one maker of chocolate, Belgian chocolate, and you’re like, “Nah, I don’t really like Belgian chocolate. It doesn’t really matter.”

And so, there’s like a whole chapter, 12 pages on this one person, and you’re like, “You know, I’ll do a quick skim and find if there’s anything really interesting here but I’m not going to spend a lot of time because it doesn’t interest me, it doesn’t float me in some spiritual way, personally or professionally.” So, you become very selfish, I think, when you read active, mindfully, and consciously because you don’t want to spend time on things that aren’t worth your time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. And I heard it said somewhere that if you can determine in one minute that a 30,000-word book will be of no value to you whatsoever, then it’s as effective as you having read all 30,000 words in that one minute.

Abby Marks-Beale
That’s a great one. I like that. I agree. I agree 100%.

Pete Mockaitis
Fair enough.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, I agree.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, what else are the top do’s and don’ts you’d put forward?

Abby Marks-Beale
So some of my other favorite things, that reading on screen, which is the bane of so many of our existence, there are some really cool apps. I demonstrate them when I do webinars and I like to share them whenever I can. One is called BeelineReader.com. B-E-E-L-I-N-E Reader.com. And so, you go into, like you’re looking at, I don’t know, Fortune magazine or Vanity Fair, whatever, online, and you’re reading an article. There’s all these videos and pop-ups and things that are just like distracting you, and it’s so frustrating.

And when you put BeelineReader onto your computer, it can do really two things. Number one is it color-codes the lines so that it’s easier to read. So, it goes from black to red, red to black, black to blue, blue to blue, black to black, so it’s easier to find the next line. But then when you do this thing called activate in clean mode, it takes out all the ads, all the pop-ups, and it puts the article in basically standard-length lines all the way down the page in the colored texts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
It is like the coolest app, and I use it all the time when I’m reading longer articles, like, “I don’t want to read with all that stuff flashing at me.” And so, I think it’s like $9, $10 a year to have that on my browser.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, it’s a really cool thing. I like that a lot. And then another one that I like and I tell people about for learning how to process words faster, is to get the free app of something called Spreeder, S-P-R-E-E-D-E-R. The free app of Spreeder, you can copy the words that you have on that article, just copy them, and paste them into Spreeder and you can force-feed it to you at different speeds. And so, one word at a time, you can set it up. You play with it. It’s fun and it’s free. And it’s another way to get the eyes and brain used to communicating faster. It’s just one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, a lot of cool things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take when you’re focused in and reading fast, are you more or less tired afterwards? Because, on the one hand, I can see, “Oh, man, I’m draining mental resources because I’m just going bananas in terms of fully dialed in and focused and slamming through so quick.” Or, is it like, “Hey, by being completely absorbed in that which I was doing, it is actually sort of like a flow state rejuvenator”? Or maybe it just varies person by person. What’s your take on this?

Abby Marks-Beale
I think it’s both. I do think it’s a flow state rejuvenator. Definitely, when I’m reading something that is very interesting or something I really want to learn, and I sit down at a desk and I have it in front of me, and I’m using my hands or a card to read with, and I’m really dialed in with it, then when I’m done, I’m like, “Wow, that was so good.”

Like, I read a book on an airplane. I went down to Florida last week and I just read half the book on the way there, and half the book on the way back, and I’m like, “Wow, that was awesome. It was so good.” I didn’t feel tired from that at all. But if you read too slowly and you don’t have a purpose, it’s very draining because you’re sitting there trying to learn it, you’re trying to understand it, and it doesn’t really work.

And you can get so much more done when you have that purpose in mind. And, obviously, you don’t want to read it unless you’re a night person. I don’t know how people read at 10:00 or 11:00 at night unless they’re really night owls because that’s like the last thing I want to do. I read like a couple pages and it’s my nightcap to go to sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that’s a great illustration of the gear system. It’s like, “I’m chilled out, I’m lying down. I’m not looking for max speed, max wisdom. It’s just like here’s a soothing thing that’s a bit interesting.”

Abby Marks-Beale
Or, “I’m at the beach. I’m on vacation. I don’t really want to read so fast,” or, “Maybe I do because I love the book and I want to read fast.” It’s always a choice once you have those five gears in place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, we talked about screen reading, there’s a few tools right there for us. Anything else you recommend, like maybe just shrinking the windows to get the width or margin in a certain spot? How many words or inches should I be going for? Because I got a big old screen here and I can resize this window anyway I want. So, what would be optimal for my speed if I am not going to leap over to BeelineReader or Spreeder? How do I think about my windows and my line width?
Abby Marks-Beale
So, some people like the six words per line that are a part of like a newspaper column, and if you like that and you find satisfaction reading quickly across those lines, then get your screen to six to eight words per line. Otherwise, if you look at like emails, it could be anywhere from 18 to 25 words per line, and if that’s comfortable for you, you could do that. But if it gets to be a lot more than that, the eyes have a really hard time tracking all the way across those lines, and then back accurately to the beginning of the line.

And so, you can use, I’m sharing this really special with you, Pete, just so you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Abby Marks-Beale
Is that you can use your screen like the white card. So, you take the text that you have in front of you, line it up to the top of your screen, like if there was a ruler there or just the top of your webpage, and you use your scrollbar, hopefully your mouse can do it one click or two lines at a time. And so, as you click it on your scrollbar, the lines go up into the “black” just like covering it up with the white card, so you’ve adapted the white card to the screen. Does that make sense in how I described that?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very easy, yeah.

Abby Marks-Beale
Okay. And so, it’s another way to use the white card but on a computer screen or a Kindle or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s clever, yeah.

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s just easier to use that way.

Pete Mockaitis
And my mouse likes to make giant leaps when I click it but I could just use the down arrow and bo-boom, bo-boom.

Abby Marks-Beale
You can use the down arrow. You could also change the settings of your mouse just for reading purposes. It can be one line at a time when you go in your settings, so that’s another way to do it.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
Oh, there are so many other things but I think one of them is about creating a manageable or a quality reading workload instead of a quantity. I think a lot of people have stuff stacked up be it on their computer, or on paper, on their desk, on their nightstand, in their bathroom, in their backpack, whatever. There are so many different things, places that they have stuff. And after a while, it’s just like, “What am I going to get to next? I don’t even know.”

And so, by really evaluating what you have in your pile, and so I’m going to give this to you, too, because you’re a nice guy and I know the people, they would like it. And so, it’s a quick four-step process, so if you have a lot of stuff to read and you’re like, “I know there are stuff there that I don’t want,” and you put it in there six months ago, six years ago, and you just never got to it.

The first thing you do is kind of put it all together and then put a number on it on a scale of zero to ten. Zero is, “Totally worthless, totally not worth my time. Yuck, I hate it,” to a ten, “This is like the best thing ever. I love this. I can’t wait to get to it. It’s so good.” And so, you rank it on a scale of zero to ten, and anything over six, you put in one pile, anything under six, you put in another pile. The stuff under six, you recycle, get rid of, don’t need it, don’t want it, it leaves right now, it’s not worthwhile to use, so get rid of it.

And then what’s left, you think you’re done but you’re not. Now you have to say, “Well, how much time do I have to read on a regular basis?” If you only read five minutes a day, get rid of a lot of your stuff because you’re just not going to get to it if you’re just thinking you will. So, making more time to read is really important but then managing, “How much time do I read with what I have in my pile?”

So, you want to read things that are of value to you, things that float you spiritually, personally, professionally, and then make sure that you make the time to do it because that’s how you get a pile that’s under control. You don’t want to have boxes and boxes or bookcases and bookcases of things you’ve never read. That doesn’t help. So, it’s about being attracted to your reading workload instead of repelled.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
I think, actually, I have two. One of them is, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” That’s by Henry Ford because sometimes I have stinking thinking, so it does help quite a bit. And the other one is “There has to be a better way.” That’s another quote. I don’t know. I say that. I don’t know who says it but I always think just when I think things aren’t working, like, “There’s got to be a better way. There’s got to be a better way.”

Pete Mockaitis
That makes me think of, I think, there are some infomercial pitch man, at least that’s how…my wife and I say that to each other. We do it in a British accent, in a slow informercial-ly voice, “There’s got to be a better way. Well, there is, Abby. Buy my product.”

Abby Marks-Beale
I like that. That’s good.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
So, I quote this study, it’s called the Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting. It’s E-B-B-I-N-G-H-A-U-S in case anybody wants to look it up. And, basically, when you read something today without any active, mindful, conscious strategies, you’re not going to remember more than 10% of it three days from now unless you talk about it, re-read it several times, or experience it in some other way.

And so, by becoming more active, mindful, and conscious to begin with, you remember 50%, you don’t remember just 10. You remember 50% or more because of the intention. And so, I love this Ebbinghaus Curve of Forgetting, and so you need to repeat and re-read and experience with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Abby Marks-Beale
Yeah, you’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Abby Marks-Beale
I’m going to say that one of my favorite books is called Yoga and the Quest for the True Self by Stephen Cope. He’s a person that I followed at Kripalu Center for Yoga & Meditation. It’s a really good book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Abby Marks-Beale
BeelineReader. I think BeelineReader is my favorite tool for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Abby Marks-Beale
Favorite habit for me is probably doing exercise that feels good and doesn’t cause pain, which is like I’m a swimmer so I swim laps and walking and yoga, but I don’t like things like lifting weights because they cause problems for me. Yeah, just things that don’t cause pain.

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

Abby Marks-Beale
It’s more what I quote to them. It’s kind of my tagline, that, “The road to knowledge begins with a turn of a page.” It was a fortune that I found in a fortune cookie when I decided to start my business in 1988, and so I keep that. It’s just to me very powerful. “The road to knowledge begins with a turn of a page.”

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

Abby Marks-Beale
Yes, thank you, to my website at RevItUpReading.com, R-E-V-I-T-U-P Reading.com. And there’s the free test that you can take, the speedreading test. There’s also a free sneak peek which will allow you one module, which actually introduces the phrasing concept in my favorite exercise called discipline your eyes. You can get all that for free. So, I encourage people to go check that out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Abby, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun reading.

Abby Marks-Beale
Thank you. You, too. I read a lot. It’s your turn.

Jul 14
0

783: How to Restore Energy and Clarity by Tuning in to Silence with Leigh Marz and Justin Zorn

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Leigh Marz and Justin Zorn share compelling research on the surprising benefits of silence—and how to find it amidst the noise and busyness of today’s world.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The small but powerful ways we can get more rest every day 
  2. How taking a hike can shorten your to-do list 
  3. How to resist the pull of your smartphone

About Leigh & Justin

Justin Talbot Zorn is an author and policymaker, who has served as both a strategist and a meditation teacher in the US Congress. A Harvard-and-Oxford-trained specialist in the economics and psychology of human thriving, Justin’s writing on mindfulness and politics has been published in 12 languages and his work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, and other publications.  

Leigh Marz is a leadership coach and collaboration consultant specializing in work with scientists, engineers, and creatives. She spent years working with the climate team at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and over a decade facilitating and advising a cross-sector team of chemists, advocates, government regulators, manufacturers, and retailers aiming to reduce toxic chemicals in our homes and environment. 

Resources Mentioned

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Leigh Marz & Justin Zorn Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Leigh and Justin, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Leigh Marz
Hey, thanks, Pete.

Justin Zorn
Thanks for having us, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig in. And, first, I’d love to hear, as you were putting together Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise, were there any particularly surprising and fascinating discoveries that grabbed you?

Leigh Marz
Well, I guess what we found is that when we started unpacking silence, that there was really a lot to it, much further than auditory decibel-level silence, that when we’re looking at silence today, we’re looking at freedom from distraction from our screens, or on the mass proliferation of information available, and also, we’re looking at silence internally in our minds. Just what does it mean to be quiet inside? So, for us, the exploration of silence became much bigger than just that auditory starting point. And that’s where things got rich.

Justin Zorn
We really did start thinking about the importance of auditory silence in the literal sense. We wrote this article for Harvard Business Review on this topic, and it resonated with people. So, we went out and started just following the cookie crumbs and interviewing people, neuroscientists, poets, activists, politicians, businesspeople, we ran the gamut.

And as we asked people this question, “What’s the deepest silence you’ve ever known?” as a starting point, they gave us answers that often weren’t auditorily quiet. So, we started exploring this silence in the informational sense and even in the internal sense, like Leigh mentioned.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so funny because the first thing I thought of is, “Oh, I stepped inside of an anechoic chamber,” which they say can drive you insane, which I find intriguing. I plan to visit one in the future. But that’s intriguing, people’s most silent moment didn’t have much to do with the decibel levels, eh, at times?

Leigh Marz
That was the big surprise. Yeah, that was the big surprise.

Justin Zorn
And the funny thing is, even an anechoic chamber isn’t really totally silent. We write in the book about a 20th century famous modernist composer named John Cage, who had a real love affair with silence. He wrote a piece of music that was famously just four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

And John Cage, actually, went into an anechoic chamber on the Harvard campus through World War II, and when he got there, he noticed there were two sounds, and he told the engineer running the anechoic chamber, this supposedly soundless booth, “Hey, this thing isn’t silent as it’s advertised.” He said, “I hear two sounds. One high pitch, and one low pitch.” And the engineer said, “Oh, no, it’s working.” He said, “The high-pitch sound is your nervous system in operation, and the low-pitch sound is your blood in circulation.”

So, for us, we’re actually through this, like, “Hey, maybe there isn’t such a thing as total perfect silence in the universe.” But then, as we explore the meaning of silence with all these diverse kinds of people, outstanding professionals in various fields, as well as the scientists, we find that silence does exist. It’s just that it’s a subjective experience in human consciousness. It’s what we think of as the space where no one is making claims on your attention. It’s pristine attention.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just as you describe that, it feels so refreshing.

Leigh Marz
Oh, good.

Pete Mockaitis
Wouldn’t that be nice?

Leigh Marz
Wouldn’t it though?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s very interesting in terms of, “Hmm,” as an exploration of a concept and how it affects humans. Can you speak to the benefits of silence, like some of the science behind it and, particularly, as applicable to folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Leigh Marz
Well, first, we need to maybe take you to a tour through the damage of noise a little bit, maybe some definitions because that toll of noise is real and true, so first, it’s about, of course, mitigating noise. So, we looked at the auditory effects on our bodies, on our ears, of course there’s hearing loss, but there’s far more than that. Hearing loss being a serious issue, leading to some isolation and all kinds of problems, doing all kinds of jobs, of course.

But, also, we looked at the impact, the toll on our ability to focus, how it impacts our nervous system, even how it’s connected to all kinds of diseases, like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, how it impacts our lack sleep, our ability to sleep. And that lack of sleep, as you know, has a lot of downstream consequences to it.

So, there are vast physical psychological mood and impacts to all this noise. And then we turned to silence and we looked at, actually, this fascinating study out of Duke University that puts little mice in that anechoic chamber that we were just talking about, and pipes in pop sounds of little mice, Mozart Sonata in D, I believe it is, ambient noises and silence.

And what they found was that silence had an incredibly beneficial impact on the mice. It led to growth in their neurons in their brain that were sustained growth, they didn’t die off. Those neurons didn’t die off right away. So, the hypothesis was that this was a positive type of stress called eustress that the mice were under, something unusual that led them to grow into the direction of that silence, to listen into the silence and actually build some capacity in their brain that they didn’t have before.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing.

Leigh Marz
Yeah, yeah. Those areas of the brain are also associated with…in the hippocampus are also associated with memory and things like that. So, we became very interested in those effects.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, if we don’t have access to an anechoic chamber handy, how do you recommend we go about pursuing and acquiring some of the silence?

Justin Zorn
You know, for us, we didn’t want to write about the kind of silence that’s all about running away to an anechoic chamber or a sensory deprivation chamber or a monastery, for that matter. We’re interested in the kinds of silence, Pete, that we could find in this noisy, buzzing, singing, dancing world, and we think it’s a good thing to be immersed in the noise of the modern world.

And so, we explore in this book how silence is always available. It’s in the breath, it’s in the moments in between words and conversations with friends, and it’s in that three minutes of stepping outside of the cubicle and feeling the rays of the sun.

And we can even tune into silence just internally even when the noise of our lives seems out of control. So, this is a book abut how we tune into silence in our own ways. Some really simple ways to do that are, for example, to just step outside and just listen to nothing in particular. Leigh mentioned this Duke University Medical School study about how the act of trying to hear in silence is actually physically edifying to the brain. It grows new neurons.

So, if we could take a moment, even in a busy day, you don’t need to have a meditation practice or some kind of fancy knowledge of some kind of contemplative work, to just step outside and just listen to the breeze, just listen to the branches, listen to the rain, even just listening to the birds. It doesn’t need to be necessarily literal audio, auditory silence. This act of simply tuning into our hearing is healing and it’s edifying and it’s clarifying.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you say listen to the silence, now I guess I’m thinking about the noise. I do hear some birds. I’m hearing some air-conditioning and that’s not nature. Is that still beneficial?

Justin Zorn
The way we think of it is as long as it’s not making claims on your attention. We’re living in a world where we’re constantly needing to have these mental reflexes go when we’re protecting our reputation or promoting a point of view. And in this book, we talk about taking a temporary break from one of life’s most basic responsibilities, which is having to think of what to say.

So, these kinds of listening, it’s better, of course, to listen to nature, we found through the science research, and we can get into that more. But this act of listening in a way that isn’t thinking of what to say, isn’t thinking about, “How do I compute this information?” giving your mind a break to simply rest in the silence.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And when it comes to these breaks, is there a dosage that is optimal? Is it more is better? Or, is there like, “Ooh, three minutes every 60 minutes,” that you can prescribe to be excellent?

Leigh Marz
Yeah, that’s a great question and you did ask, “Is it beneficial?” So, I think what we’re doing is really pointing the reader back towards their experience because silence and noise, both are subjective actually. Those are subjective experiences. It was within the interview, an interview with biobehavioral professor, biobehavioral health and medicine at Penn State, Joshua Smyth. And were haranguing him for a good definition for internal silence. When, in absolute exasperation, he said to us, “Quiet is what people think quiet is.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Leigh Marz
Yeah, and we would add quiet is what people feel and experience quiet to be. It could be quite surprising. So, listening into the air-conditioning, like you were saying, or listening to sounds of nature, simply turning away from your screen for a little bit, or stepping outside in the rays of the sun, the trick here is, as each of us, to tune in to what is actually bringing us a sense of quiet, a sense of clarity, a sense of relaxation perhaps in the nervous system.

Whatever those signals are that we are relaxing, as well as really learning about the signals that we are agitated, we have had too much noise, we are saturated, we’re unable to focus, to get clear on what those signals are in each of us. So, there is no great perfect prescription for all people. There’s no one size fits all here, which is one of the reasons why we think of this as a non-meditator’s guide to getting beyond the noise because meditation often is proposed to something that will work for all.

But as many of your listeners have probably experienced, even if we’ve had a short stint of being great with meditation, and Justin and I have had some good stints with meditation, even teaching it in the US Congress, in Justin’s case, but that’s not always the best way to quiet. So, the real key here is what is your way to quiet? And what is the type of noise that’s polluting your soundscape? What is the quiet that gets you out of that, and really getting tuned into that?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, in the book, you outlined 33 different ways to find silence. You shared a few. Can you share a couple more that really seem to be powerful for folks?

Justin Zorn
Sure. And one way we describe the beginning of these 33 ways to silence, which span individual practices as well as families, workplaces, communities, and broader society, one way we start to frame them, which will be, I think, particularly relevant to listeners thinking about how to be awesome at your job, is as the healthy successor to the smoke break. Leigh makes a confession that she used to smoke in the book.

And the confession isn’t so much that she used to smoke, it’s that she loved it. She loved the experience of having nothing to do for this period of time in a day. she would step outside of the office, particularly when she was doing really difficult work, crisis work around domestic violence and other difficult issues. She would step outside and have this time of total respite when she didn’t have to think of anything, didn’t have to do anything.

And, of course, it’s a wonderful thing that she quit and wasn’t going to have it any other way. It’s a wonderful thing that anyone quits smoking tobacco. But the question is, “What’s going to replace those little pockets of silence in our days?” So, we examined that question because there’s some researchers in Scotland found that often workers, particularly in high-stress industries, often have to at least pretend they smoke because that’s the only way they could get a break.

So, how can we shift our cultural norms in workplaces so that it’s possible to take these breaks in silence that we’re describing? So, some of the ways we describe this is, as I mentioned, this practice of simply stopping and listening, which is an ancient practice from India called nada yoga, the yoga of sound. And as we mentioned, there’s this research that indicates it’s edifying for the brain.

But one way to do this is to simply listen to the ringing in your own ears. We’ve interviewed folks in the book who talk about the science of how this works. Simply tuning in and listening can actually diminish that ringing in your ears, if you’re actually paying attention to it.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I don’t know if I’ve ever…

Pete Mockaitis
It’s quite rare that I’ve ever noticed the ringing in my own ears. I don’t know what that says about me.

Leigh Marz
Maybe you don’t have any.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess there’s a follow up. It’s like do we all have that and how much?

Leigh Marz
Yeah, it’s pretty common, especially in that total silence or that near total silence. As we said, there may not be such a thing as total silence, which is why some people don’t find auditory quiet that relaxing if they’re not able to…or if that’s too aggravating. So, again, we’re finding what brings us quiet. For example, finding quiet might be I’ve been strapped to my desk for several hours on Zoom meetings and whatever.

I’m going to put on a song and I’m going to dance like a mad woman for three minutes, which is not quiet but will empty my brain of all those unhelpful thoughts, all the chatter, all the worry, just the lack of focus that I’m about to get into, if I haven’t already gotten into that, because we know about attention. We don’t have unlimited attention, rather. We can’t go on and drive and work and work without some cost to the quality of our attention.

Justin Zorn
So, one big idea is really how we find beyond just these little successors, healthy successors to the smoke breaks, which we’ll get into some more of those, but one big idea is how we come into moments of truly pristine attention, what we call these moments of rapturous silence, where the kind of silence that can actually change the way we perceive the world.

So, we looked for an example in the book and a practice called take your to-do list for a hike, which was inspired by a legendary acoustic ecologist named Gordon Hempton, who, every once in a while, will take a look at his to-do list and, say, when it gets too long, he’ll drive out somewhere remote off into the rainforest, the whole rainforest in Olympic National Park near Seattle, and he’ll hike for a day once he gets there.

And once he finds that he’s really tuned into the silence of nature, he’s gotten beyond all that noise and distraction that’s present for him at his desk, he takes his to-do list, which he’s printed out, out of his pocket, and he crosses out everything that’s not really necessary. And once he gets to that vantage point, that’s a day’s travel away from the hustle and bustle, he notices how the things that he thought were important, weren’t really so important. And he says the answers are in the silence.

Leigh Marz
He adds that when he does do something like that, take a day or half a day off of work to take his to-do list for a hike, that he often comes back to his office again with about five months less work on his plate because there’s a whole lot that feels important when he’s sitting there strapped to the desk. But out in nature with more expansive views and more expansive mind, he has a different perspective on that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I’m thinking about the healthy successor to the smoke break and how many of us, when we have such an opportunity in which there’s nothing external claiming our attention, we just short-circuit it in terms of like the phone can be the ubiquitous device. I’ve heard it called a digital pacifier in terms of, “I’m a little bit bored or uncomfortable,” and it’s almost like reflex or so habituated. It’s just out it goes and there I am on social media or news or whatever.

And it could even feel, for some, uncomfortable that it’s like, “Aargh, I need to do something, and here it is, and this will be entertaining or, in some way, pacifying.” So, how do we deal with our own selves in the midst of this?

Leigh Marz
Yeah. We spend a lot of time looking at what is within our sphere of control, and that’s one that we argue is within our sphere of control. We can certainly get into feedback loops where it feels like maybe we’re hustling and bustling, we’re mistaking busyness for productivity, we’re mistaking stress for aliveness. We can kind of get into these feedback loops of activity. But if we can actually take those moments as little gifts of silence.

So, let’s just say you’re stuck in traffic or you’re stuck in a long line, and rather than grab for your phone immediately to feel any of those things, a podcast, or checking the news, checking on your email, etc., that you actually take that, even if it was unplanned, or especially if it was unplanned, as a moment to tune in to silence.

Justin Zorn
We talked with a neuroscientist named Judson Brewer, who’s been a pioneer in the use of fMRI studies of meditators and studying the brains of meditators. And he looks at how people’s experience of noise in the consciousness often corresponds to a feeling of contractedness: contractedness in the body, contractedness in the mind. It’s a subjective state. It’s a feeling. But it often corresponds to a kind of feeling of being hunched over your phone, reading the news, feeling the stress of that.

And Dr. Brewer tells us that there’s an experience in the consciousness people described that corresponds to what he calls silence in the mind, this internal experience of silence in his studies with fMRIs and other imaging machinery. And he tells us that that experience of silence corresponds to the state that he calls expansion. That’s the kind of common denominator to what people are feeling.

And this is often also the kind of common denominator to where good creative ideas emerge. When we’re out of that state of contractedness, that hunched over the phone, doom-scrolling, or whatever you might be doing, versus being outside, being receptive, kind of like how many of the good ideas we often have happen in the shower, again when there’s nothing making claims on our consciousness, nothing making claims on our attention.

So, Leigh mentioned this challenge that in our society these days, we often mistake stress for aliveness. In our workplaces, we often mistake this feeling of constant doing, constant exertion for the feeling of being productive and effective, but it’s often not in those spaces of contraction but in these spaces of expansion where the best ideas, the profoundly generative ideas emerge.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool and that totally resonates. And that I hear that Aaron Sorkin put a shower in his office in order to take more showers and have more good ideas, which is funny. And I guess that’s one approach in terms of forcing it, like, “Oh, can’t do much else. You’re naked with water on you.”

Leigh Marz
Yup, that’s a healthy successor to a smoke break if there ever was one.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Certainly. So, let’s just zoom right in. Okay, I like what you’re saying, Leigh and Justin. That’s really cool. And so, I go ahead and I retreat, whatever that means, you take a step outside or whatever, and then I feel the urge, the tug to pull out the phone. What is the optimal, if we’re seeking silence, response to ourselves? Because I imagine you could give in, you could harshly say, “No!” How do you think about those moments and sort of re-asserting what you’re going for?

Because in some ways, expansiveness, like as I think about that sensation, that vibe, is kind of like the opposite of constricted-ness. And in some ways, it feels constricting to engage in self-denial, like, “I want to do this.” “No!” And then, in so doing, there’s a bit of a constricting feeling. So, I’m all tied up in knots here. What do we do?

Justin Zorn
That’s a really good question. We have a chapter in the book called “Why Silence is Scary,” and at one level, we’re looking in the big picture what it’s like for people to go on extremely long silent retreats or someone to go on just away from the civilization for a while. And what that brings up in the consciousness, because that’s extremely scary, it’s almost like taking it to its…the farthest extent of that persistent nag of picking up the phone that you’re talking about, so we explore that dynamic.

But we found a study from the University of Virginia from 2014, where a social psychologist left mostly undergraduate students in a sparse room with no cellphones or no entertainment for 15 minutes, and Wilson is this professor, gave the participants a choice. They could either sit in silence without their phones alone or they could push a button that would administer a painful electric shock. And, initially, the participants had all said that they would pay money to avoid this painful electric shock. But in the end, 67% of the men and 25% of the women actually chose to shock themselves rather than sit alone without their phones in silence. And that was 15 minutes.

So, to answer your question about what do we actually do when confronting this, one big theme we explore in the book is the perennial wisdom of know thyself. Understand that we, in this day and age, are hardwired to seek stimulation, to seek sound and stimulus, and it is a skill to cultivate to get comfortable with silence.

Leigh Marz
We also talk about a convenience addiction that we have. And Cal Newport brings this to our attention in some of his work Deep Work and Digital Minimalism, where we tend to think about the gains of whatever it is, let’s say, a group email where infinite numbers of people are listed and included but we don’t think of the cost, so we’re consistently minimizing the cost of this constant grabbing for more input, more attention, more outreach, constant connectivity without looking at those costs there to our work, to the quality of our work, to the quality of our consciousness.

Pete Mockaitis
So, then one is there’s a little bit of just sort of patience and gentleness with yourself, like, “Yup, this is normal. You’re not messed up. This is a natural response to those who are not yet practiced and skilled with doing this.” And so, if the thought emerges, “I want to see what’s on Instagram right now,” how do you recommend responding to that thought?

Leigh Marz
Even just to pause a beat before jumping right in and to do a little bit of a cost-benefit analysis. in that moment, a little bit of an assessment in terms of where that’s coming from. If it’s coming from that grabby, needy, constricted place, or if it’s because you really want to check in with your network, there can be…we allot ourselves that time all the time to really figure out, “Where is it coming from? Where is that urge coming from?”

And then we can do that as teams as partners, as work partners, like Justin and I do all the time as well, too, to really just look at, “What’s our default here?” to examine the default that’s happening on our teams and in our organizations. Should we always be meeting? Should we meet back-to-back all the time? Should we assume constant connectivity? Those kinds of things. Like, what are the costs of that? And how can we support each other to create a culture that honors silence?

Justin Zorn
One thing that comes up for me with that question, too, Pete, and what Leigh is saying about questioning our defaults and building these cultures, this is where appreciation, through the stories in this book, we explore why silence is something worth valuing in a world of constant sound and stimulation and entertainment.

And if we can appreciate this basis of silence in our lives, we start to not just question our defaults, and say, “Well, I need to put my phone away more and I need to just deal with that kind of impulse.” It’s something more than that. It’s flipping the script so we’re able to see opportunities for rest and healing and renewal within the silence, which is what the science shows and what we also explore in the book through stories.

One big theme in the book that we explore is a traditional Japanese aesthetic concept, an idea called Ma. And the idea of Ma, this word Ma means the space in between. Some people call it the open space, the negative space but we think of Ma as pure potentiality. So, Ma is the space in between the words we’re saying to each other right now. It’s the space between notes in music. It’s the space, the empty space in artwork or, in Japanese traditional, ikebana, flower arranging. This word Ma actually means sunlight pouring forth through the gate of a temple.

So, it’s this pure potentiality that exist in the in-between spaces, in what’s not spoken. So, we look in the book, “What would it mean to appreciate Ma in our lives?” We have a section of one chapter called “Ma On the Job,” which is we explore how we could bring more silence, for example, into organizational brainstorming, or how we can bring more Ma into our workday, for example, in between meetings, or in between any kind of task or activity. Stopping and taking some breaths. Stopping to savor a glass of water. Or, within a group, having some moment of quiet time to integrate what it is that you’ve been talking about.

At the end of the book, we even explore Ma goes to Washington, what it would look like to bring all these reverence for the open space, to society as a whole, but the basic idea is something that we can bring into our work lives to find more rest and renewal and more inspiration in the moment-to-moment conduct.

Pete Mockaitis
You know what’s fascinating, Justin, is just as you’re speaking, you’re talking about Ma and I was pointing my attention toward the gaps or pauses between your words and sentences, and just in doing so, my brain felt less fatigued, and yet, I still heard and understood and internalized what you said. What’s that about?

Leigh Marz
That’s a great question. I think when we’re not sitting with…it’s about better listening. For starters, I think it’s just a better quality of listening instead of being poised perhaps with the internal on-the-ready of how we’re going to respond, and then, therefore, not really listening. So, I feel like the quality you’re talking about in part, the quality of listening as well as just your attention relaxing. I think that’s about just finding that silence and what it does to your consciousness. In that case, it’s a thing that supported you and relaxing, which is what it’s all about.

It’s about experimenting. This whole book is about experimenting and finding our way to quiet. So, I don’t know the exact answer why you, Pete, doing that practice, what was happening in your brain. We could put you up to all kinds of circuitry, but what matters is that it did, and what matters is that you might be onto a new way to listening that brings you some quiet. And that’s what this book is all about.

Justin Zorn
Florence Nightingale, about 150 years ago, intuited that noise in the consciousness, too much sound and stimulus, just at the auditory level drives the fight-or-flight response. It is a driver of stress. And this is why she said that unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that could be inflicted on a person sick or well.

And a lot of the recent research in neuroscience and various different disciplines of physical sciences of physiology are discovering that Florence Nightingale was right about this that she perceived 150 years ago or so. So, even if the auditory decibels are the same level, there’s something to be said of where we put our attention. If we can put our attention on the empty spaces, as you’re talking about, Pete, and we’re tuning into the silence, then there’s this opportunity we find, through our interviews with people in this book, to help reset the nervous system, to get beyond that fight or flight.

And one thing we explore in the book is it’s not just about the auditory decibels or it’s not even just about the amount of information and sound and stimulus you have in your life. It’s about how deeply you can go into the silence, when it appears, even if it’s just for two seconds, even if it’s for less than a second, like those moments of silence between words. How deeply can you go into the silence in this noisy world?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Well, Leigh, you mentioned hooking me up to circuitry, which I’m game for if anyone happens to have the equipment.

Leigh Marz
That’s fascinating, yeah, to do that. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m looking over at my Muse brain-sensing headband in the corner there, and I’m curious, are there any particular tools or things that can be handy here? We’ve talked about it’s not just about the decibel levels, so earplugs and noise-canceling headphones have something to offer but it’s certainly not the whole story that we’re unpacking here. Anything else that is useful for folks to pick up as we’re pursuing this journey?

Leigh Marz
Well, actually, I’ll say this, there’s actually another aspect of surprise, perhaps, is we expected to reach out to neuroscientists and for them to have all sorts of concrete, like, “Here’s what’s happening in the brain. And we know this, and we’ll see this.” But, actually, neuroscientists, like Adam Gazzaley at the University of San Francisco, where, really, every neuroscientist we spoke with were very humble about what they were able to claim, that they were actually…they said, “We use all this equipment, fMRIs, just an example of one, but there are times when someone’s sitting there and they’ll say, ‘Well, what just happened? Did something major register on the machinery?’”

And they’ll say, “Well, nothing. Nothing happened at all.” Or, the participant will have some great brilliant insight and it won’t register on the machinery. So, there’s still a lot we don’t know but there’s a lot we’re learning about some commonalities between mental states. And we haven’t mentioned things like states of flow, which can, of course, happen when we’re really getting involved and enjoying work states, maybe we’re really getting into a project.

So, really observing your own way with what is bringing you into that place of focus, where you’re challenged at an appropriate point but not so much that it’s stressful, and it’s also challenging enough that you’re not bored, so that sweet spot where you lose a sense of reflective self-consciousness, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi puts it. So, there’s something in there about really getting attuned to when are you losing that sense of self, of not so helpful part, a sense of self, where you’re talking to yourself about yourself, whether you’re feeling distracted or there’s a lot of unhelpful chatter, notice you had anything crossed on before.

He has a great work, great research on those unhelpful and truths of thought and ruminating. So, part of what we’re looking at is really it’s kind of back to us. We wanted to avoid pointing towards gadgetry and pointing towards apps and things, but those can be helpful. Again, it’s up to us to really find out what is really working, what’s helping us find our flow, keep our focus, or clear the slate, or invite in novel thinking and creative thinking, versus what is just cluttering our brains.

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

Justin Zorn
You mentioned gadgetry, like noise-canceling headphones, Pete, and we have explored that a little bit. But one thing that’s come up for us in this book is that we’ve avoided wanting to add more technology, more complicated kinds of solutions, especially expensive kinds of solutions. We want to make this as accessible as possible, as simple as possible.

So, we look at the simplicity of these practices that we’ve talked about, that healthy successor to the smoke break, accepting these little gifts of silence when they arise in our lives. Maybe, if it’s possible, taking a little bit of time not talking. Gandhi, every week, spent his Monday not speaking. He would sometimes attend meetings, he would sometimes see visitors, but he wouldn’t speak a word. And it was about resting his mental reflex of constantly needing to think of what to say, constantly needing to add to the conversation. And he found that this was an important way to discern the truth.

So, these ways to finding silence are often, even in this world of so much noise, they’re really simple. Oftentimes, we find they’re about simple conversations with other people. We wrote, recently, a new piece for Harvard Business Review on this, and we talk about how, during the drafting of the US Constitution, the delegates there in Philadelphia had a giant mound of dirt erected outside Constitution Hall, and that was because they wanted to have pristine silent attention to be able to do their work, even if they were debating and even yelling at each other sometimes. They wanted a container where there wasn’t outside noise and distraction coming in.

So, we explore how that was the result of, obviously, not a fancy technology, but just a simple conversation that could lead to a shared norm around the value of quiet attention. And this book is really about “How do we make these shifts in our own lives, like Gandhi, or as a group in a workplace, like those delegates writing the US Constitution all those years ago?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now, can we hear some favorite quotes?

Leigh Marz
Well, we turn to Viktor Frankl. He has, at least, this is a quote often attributed to him, psychologist and Holocaust survivor, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

Justin Zorn
And for us, this quote really gets to the essence of what we mean by silence, not just the auditory silence; the informational and the internal. When we find this space that Frankl is talking about, this is the deep pristine attention that we’re talking about. It’s this golden silence. And there’s choice here. It’s where we find our agency.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Leigh Marz
So many but just maybe in relation to this conversation, Chatter: The Voices in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross because that really put…what happened actually, that book came out while we were working on this, and he really took the conversation of that internal soundscape to a new level into the mainstream, and we’re so appreciative of that, and that one little piece that he pulled out with the fact that we have 320-some state of union addresses going through our minds every day, that’s compressed speech, really, really helped us with understanding how this internal chatter is noise in many cases.

Justin Zorn
Relevant to this conversation, one book that was coming up for us that we didn’t mention in our book but mentioned in a recent article, is a work of Hal Gregersen, a long-time MIT scholar. His book Questions Are the Answer is really about the notion that in group decision-making, the answers come through cultivating open space, not by trying to perform or not always by even presenting the best data but by cultivating the space where we could be together in a question, contemplating inside the inquiry. And this book is very much about how we curate and cultivate these kinds of spaces.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Leigh Marz
Well, we’ll highlight the take your to-do list for a hike. I also like to take clients on the early side of brainstorming for a hike so that that’s the space that we’re thinking about this project from, not strapped to a desk.

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

Justin Zorn
I would say this that I mentioned earlier about an invitation to take a temporary break from one of life’s most basic responsibilities, which is having to think of what to say.

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

Leigh Marz
So, as you might imagine, we’re not really big on social media with a platform like silence being our thing. But you can find us at our website AstreaStrategies.com, and that’s A-S-T-E-Astrategies.com. You can contact us through the website.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Leigh, when you said that, that reminds me of my favorite tweet of all time, which is, I read it and it just tickled me so much, it said, the tweet read, “Holding my child and just so present in this moment.”

Leigh Marz
That is the best. We’ll put that as our new favorite quote.

Justin Zorn
That is a really high-level way of throwing some shade on Twitter.

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

Leigh Marz
Yeah. I would say…well, I’ll say the first half is really to notice noise. Notice the auditory informational and internal noise that is getting in the way of you being awesome at your job, to really take note of it, and notice how to mitigate those things. And the second part, I’ll let Justin take on.

Justin Zorn
The second part, the flipside of that is tuning into silence. As we mentioned, noticing even these small pockets of silence exist in our life. Maybe it’s like we talked about in between the words, maybe it’s just taking that moment to step outside of the office and connect to the silence that surround us, and to feel the abundance that’s available in the silence, to feel the abundance of calm and peace that we could tune into, even when the world seems crazy, even when our lives seem crazy. Tuning into the silence, finding more energy, clarity, and focus within it.

Leigh Marz
Especially when we go off as teams to retreat, to refuel, or to generate some ideas and strategies in the future, to just try not to stuff all that time with content or data or activities, to really build in some silence and some quiet to enjoy together, as well as some recreation and fun.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leigh, Justin, this has been a treat. I wish you much great silence.

Leigh Marz
Thank you. You, too, Pete.

Justin Zorn
Thank you, Pete.