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Aug 24
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893: How to Help Your Team Beat Distraction and Unleash Their Productivity with Maura Thomas

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Maura Thomas shows you how to create a distraction-free work environment to make time for the tasks that matter most.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The underlying cause of derailed productivity
  2. How multitasking hurts your productivity and attention
  3. The two questions that will help you eliminate distractions

About Maura

Maura Nevel Thomas is an award-winning international speaker and trainer on individual and corporate productivity and work-life balance, and the most widely-cited authority on attention management. Her proprietary Empowered Productivity™ System has been embraced by the likes of NASA, Dyson, and Google. She is a TEDx Speaker, founder of Regain Your Time, author of six bestselling books, and was named a Top Leadership Speaker in Inc. Magazine. 

Maura is frequently featured in major business outlets including Business Insider, Fast Company, and Washington Post, and she’s also a regular contributor to both Forbes and the Harvard Business Review, with articles there viewed over a million times.

Resources Mentioned

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Maura Thomas Interview Transcript

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

Maura Thomas
Pete, I’m so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the wisdom of your latest book, Everyone Wants to Work Here: Attract the Best Talent, Energize Your Team, and Be the Leader in Your Market.That sounds like cool stuff, we all want that. But first, I need to understand, between the last time we spoke and now, you’ve adopted a pickleball habit. Is this accurate?

Maura Thomas
It is accurate. I’m so addicted. I play every chance I get. It’s so fun and I’m getting to the point where I’m just north of horrible, so it’s a little more fun. It’s not embarrassing anymore. It’s only slightly uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. One of the very first speakers I remember was named Fran Kick. Shoutout to Fran Kick. We’ll link to him. I think he’s still kickin’. He made a lot of kick jokes, and he talked about this concept of when you get good at something, it becomes more fun, and then you want to work at it some more. And then you become better at that thing, and so it’s a nice little virtuous cycle between work, fun, good. And I was like, “Fran, this makes a whole lot of sense.” I remembered it from high school. So, a powerful message.

Maura Thomas
It is. And one of the most important things I learned, I trained in martial arts years ago, and I keep finding this theme happening in my life. My sensei told me that once you hit black belt level, that’s when your training begins. And what I’m learning about, any time I try to tackle something new, it’s like once you have…like you can’t be a good writer until you know the alphabet.

And you think that knowing the alphabet is your goal but that’s not your goal. The goal is really to write and to write well. But you can’t write well until you know the alphabet. It’s like you can’t do a thing until you are at least competent at the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Absolutely. And that could be really a period of entry. I’ve never really gotten into golf because I had so many painful embarrassing moments when starting. Maybe in the future I’ll go to it. But pickleball, it’s trendy right now, right? Like, I remember playing pickleball in high school PE class over the summer, and I never heard of it before then, and very rarely after it. But then the last couple of years, I guess there’s pickleball courts sprouting up everywhere.

Maura Thomas
They are sprouting up everywhere. They are, because I think it’s more accessible. It’s a little less impact than tennis. It’s a little easier. Yeah, it’s very accessible. You see people, I mean, today, I was in a game with, like, a 12-year-old and a guy. It was easier, easily early ‘70s. And we all had a game and it was great. It was super fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now let’s hear a little about some other team insights from your book Everyone Wants to Work Here. Any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries when putting together this work here?

Maura Thomas
A lot. A lot. So, in the book, I talk a lot about unconscious calculations. And I call unconscious calculations things that we behave in a way that suggests that we believe a thing but we’ve never actually examined that thing to know if that’s really true or if we even really believe that that is true. So, one of those unconscious calculations is that, “I am not being good at my job,” or, “I’m not providing good service to my customers,” or, “I’m not being a good team player unless I’m responding to all communication immediately.”

And people behave as if that is true but I think we all kind of know that isn’t really true. You can service your clients really, really well even if you don’t respond to them every minute. And you can help your team members even if you take time for yourself. We put this weight on, “Being available to other people is part of my job, so I have to do that.”

But what we forget is that your colleagues depend on you to get all the millions of things that are on your to-do list done, and you can’t do both. You can’t be constantly responding to incoming communication and also be making progress on your to-do list at the same time. We try but that’s not super effective. So, one of many, many sort of counterintuitive things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Maura, this is, I think, we can talk for hours about this alone. Unconscious calculations. I love the way you’ve articulated that, and this reminds me of some other concepts. We’ve heard maybe Ramit Sethi talk about invisible scripts a lot or Vishen Lakhiani talks about “brules,” which stands for bull crap rules.

Maura Thomas
Ooh, I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
We keep a clean rating here. But, yes, this unconscious calculation, I like the vibe because it does connotate analytical numerical judgment evaluation side of the brain, which I think is a very real nuanced part of that. I know I’ve experienced it, and it can be sometimes damaging to mental health, like, “I’m not a good parent unless I…” A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And those things, they are unconscious, and until you bring those to the surface, which practices like self-reflection, and therapy, etc., can help do, it can really drain folks’ energy and capabilities.

Maura Thomas
Yeah, it really can. As those other people have articulated as well, we really need to look at what we believe. And a lot of times, I see my job as just shining a light on how people are operating so that they can just ask. Sometimes somebody says something to you, and you’re like, “Ahh.” They say, “Why are you doing that?” and you’re like, “You’re right. That’s totally stupid. What? What was I thinking?”

The story that comes to mind, for me, is when I redid my kitchen, and my aunt came over, and she’s in the new kitchen, she’s standing at the stove, and she opens the drawer beside the stove. And in the drawer beside the stove, there’s silverware. And she looks at me, and she said, “Where are your potholders?”

And I point across the kitchen, and I’m like, “My potholders are over there.” And she looked at me, waiting for me to catch up, like, “Potholders should be beside the stove, right?” I was like, “Oh, you’re totally right. You’re totally right. I never thought about that before.” “Move the potholders so that they are near the stove.”

But once she said that to me, I was like, “Oh, and the spices should be near the olive oil. And, oh, the spatula should be near the frying pans.” And I had a whole new outlook on everything as soon as she just sort of shone that light on, “Does this make sense the way you’re doing this?” But I never even thought of it until she said that.

And I think a lot of the things that I sort of do with my clients is really just shining a light, “Does this make sense the way you’re doing this? And wouldn’t you like to do it a little easier?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s already a fantastic tidbit. Can we maybe zoom out a little bit and hear what’s sort of the big idea or main theme of the book here?

Maura Thomas
I outline a lot of problems that are happening inside companies that are making people go home at the end of the day, and say, “Oh, my gosh, I was busy all day, and somehow I got nothing done.” Instead of going home at the end of the day, and saying, “Oh, my gosh, that was such a good day. I got so much done.”

There are many, many sorts of culture, corporate culture, and leadership behavior problems that are contributing to this, but underlying all of them is distraction. Distraction is what prevents us from going home at the end of the day, and saying, “Oh, my gosh, that was such a good day. I got so much done.” Distraction in the way that we communicate, distraction in all of those unconscious calculations.

Another unconscious calculation that people make is, “Well, people are interrupting me all day but I have to do that. I have to deal with that. That’s part of my job. So, the only way I can get stuff done is when people aren’t bothering me.” Well, the only time people aren’t bothering you is when you’re not supposed to be working – nights, weekends, early mornings.

So, we behave as if we have just accepted that we will work all day at work, and then we will go home and do our most important work, “I’ll just deal with everybody bothering me all day long, but then I’ll do the really important stuff tonight, or Saturday, or Christmas eve, or whenever people aren’t bothering me.” And that’s just, I don’t think anybody wakes up on Monday mornings, and says, “Ooh, I can’t wait to work 60 hours this week.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah. And then I heard recently, it said almost universally CEOs and executives do work before they get to work just almost out of necessity, it’s like, “I’m going to do half an hour, or one hour, or two hours of super important stuff early in the morning before I am even on the premises and can be accessed.”

Maura Thomas
“Yeah, because that’s the only way that I can get it done.” And I believe that leaders and people, anybody, whether you’re a leader or an individual contributor, you need to own the fact that you need to get your important work done at work, and you do need to be available to other people but you can’t do that to the exclusion of getting the important work done. So, you have to carve out the opportunity in your work day to both be available to people but also be unavailable so that you can get important work done.

And I talk a lot about that in Attention Management, which is the book that I was on with you before about, and in Everyone Wants to Work Here, I talk about how leaders can really make it easier for the team to do that because people think that they can’t do that because their boss is going to get mad at them if they do.

And another unconscious calculation, usually, because usually it’s not true, I can’t imagine a rational boss saying to someone, “No you can’t have any time while you’re undistracted. I need you to be distracted all day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And I have led workshops where lightbulb moments go on, and this is a wildly held unconscious calculation that they need to respond right away, and it is wild. I might have a team of a dozen folks, and we discuss some norms associated with email response times, and maybe half of them are like, “Oh, wow, really? It’d be okay if I didn’t reply for 24 hours, and if you needed it faster, you’d drop by or call me or text me or something? Oh, wow.” And so, it’s just beautiful. I feel like, “Oh, my work here is done. That’s all we had to do was have this one conversation and we got a great ROI on this training here.”

Maura Thomas
Well, yeah, and it does start people thinking but then when I talk about, and I’m sure you do as well, you need a bat signal. Like, “I have a million things to tell you all day, and I’m going to shoot you some emails, but if I really need something,” bat signal. What’s your bat signal at your company? Because if every email might be an emergency, then you have to treat every email as if it is an emergency until you know that it isn’t. So, you can’t use the same communication device for emergencies that you use also for non-emergencies, so there needs to be a bat signal.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, I’m enjoying we’re already getting on some of the tactical goodness, which I love. But first, I want to maybe address what’s the prevalence of this distraction? Or, do you have some stats on the widespread-ness, the cost in terms of dollars or hours per week? Like, I have a sense it’s a big one, a big problem. Can you make it a little bit more precise just how big we’re talking here?

Maura Thomas
Yeah, there’s a ton of research. So, Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, I read a lot about her research. And her research, her older research said that we switch what we’re doing at work, on average, about every three minutes. And her latest research shows that that three minutes have gone down to about 47 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Maura Thomas
I think a lot of the people listening here are people who use a computer to do their work, primarily folks who need to solve problems, and communicate, and generate ideas, and write things. Some people call them knowledge workers. If you work primarily at computer for your job, then, really, your job is to think, and you can’t think clearly, you can’t make any good decisions, you can’t have your best ideas in 47-second increments. And yet that’s pretty much all we give ourselves throughout the day.

And so, how are we supposed to be good at our jobs? Because if you’ve ever been in a meeting, and at the end of the meeting, you’re like, “Hmm, I shouldn’t have said that,” or if you’ve ever said, “Oh, my gosh, I should’ve said that,” after you’ve had a chance to think about it, you have a much better answer than you did that you just blurted out when somebody asked you a question.

And so, we’re not our best selves in these tiny little increments. I talk about brain power momentum. We need time to really muster the full range of not only our talents, and our wisdom, and our skills, and our abilities, but also our diplomacy, and our tact, and our kindness, and our humor, and our empathy so that we can be the best version of ourselves, and we’re not the best version of ourselves in 47-second increments.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that absolutely rings true. And so, is it your sense that the majority of knowledge workers have the majority of their work day gobbled up by distractable environment time? Or, just how big are we talking here?

Maura Thomas
I do think that. There is some research, it really depends on what’s the average salary and how many people are in the organization.But for an organization that has about 50 employees, making about $50 an hour on average, the average distraction, and this is with the old research, that the distraction is costing somewhere around $1.2 million a year for that organization. So, again, the numbers depend on a whole bunch of different things, but it’s a lot. We all know it’s a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, understood. That is a meaningful fraction of everybody’s week. So, then tell us, what are the primary culprits of this distraction environment?

Maura Thomas
Yeah, so part of the problem is that we are habituated to distraction. Most people who use technology today have a habit of distraction, and that is on purpose. Our technology has created in us a habit of distraction. So, we’ve gotten to the point where, most people are at the point where doing only one thing at time is really hard and really boring.

And I even find it in myself when I’m watching a TV show or something, or when I’m cooking dinner. Watching TV, I have the itch to scroll my phone, and when I’m cooking dinner, I have an itch to listen to a podcast, or put a book on. I try, and my husband and I have come to this place where we have a commitment we fail a lot, but we have a commitment to being a single-tasking household because the more distracted you are, the more distracted you will be, the more you do multiple things at a time, the harder it will be for you to do only one thing at a time.

But the reverse is also true. So, the more you practice doing one thing at a time, the better you get at doing one thing at a time, and the less itchy you feel about, “Oh, I need to do something else.” And when we’re doing one thing at a time, that’s when we can put our best out into the world.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. So, this makes me think of analogs of any sorts of training. Like, you do a thing, you get better at a thing, the muscle gets stronger, the legs get faster, the heart and lungs are able to process more oxygen, and endure longer. It’s sort of like a training effect or adaptation is unfolding. So, I’m curious, do you have a suggested protocol or routine or workout that we might engage in, in order to strengthen that capability of doing one thing at a time and being less itchy?

Maura Thomas
Well, because for most of us it’s a habit, we have a habit of distraction, and so the first step in changing any habit is really the awareness. So, recognizing when you get that itch to do something else, then sort of making the conscious calculation. Probably doing both isn’t a good thing, “So, do I want to just do this thing? Or, do I want to just do that thing?”

And bringing more awareness of when we have the urge to be distracted is the first step in changing any habits. But I would say the practice is start out doing only one thing. If you’re going to watch TV, put your phone in a different room. Try to make it easy for yourself to do only one thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And then, likewise, I’m thinking I guess there’s all sorts of layers or levels or variations of this. Like, with your eating, don’t be eating and watching TV or listening to a podcast.

Maura Thomas
Yeah, there are different ways to multitask, and some are better than others. So, one physical thing and one cognitive thing is better than two cognitive things. So, scrolling your phone while watching TV is probably worse for your multitasking than heating up something in the microwave while you listen to a podcast, because one physical thing and one cognitive thing.

Now, if you are a chef, then you might not want to listen to a podcast while you are creating your meal because that is kind of an artform to you. But if you are not a chef, like me, and you’re just making something that doesn’t require a lot of thought, practicing single-tasking is good but there are also some kinds of multitasking that are worse than other kinds of multitasking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good for our download numbers. Thank you, Maura. Understood, there is a distinction there. Okay. So, that’s first, like within us, individually, that’s something we can all do, and that really does sound swell in terms of the impact that can make and the muscle you build.

One of my favorites, I actually have a sheet right here, one my favorite approaches is I make a list of what I did do and what I wanted to do during a phase of work, because I’ll have all these ideas, like, “I want to check the news. I want to check social media. I’m curious about this thing, hmm. I wonder if you can buy a thing that does that. Let’s put it on Amazon.”

And so, all these things pop up, and so I just write them down. And it feels fun because then, after the work session, I get to behold it, and say, “Ooh, look at all these victories I racked up. Each of these was a distraction I did not engage in,” and so I feel a sense of accomplishment there. And when it’s time to indulge these distractions, “Ooh, I’ve got a bunch of things I was curious about and want to play with already cued up for me to go binge and tour.”

Maura Thomas
I love that idea. I love that. I think that’s a great idea. The thing that I try to keep in mind, so there’s a quote I’m told. I went looking for it and I couldn’t find it. Somebody, one of my keynotes told me that it comes from the movie “Hitch.” But the line is “It’s not the moments in your life that matter. It’s the life in your moments that matter.”

And my belief about that is that if you are not present when you’re doing a thing, then you miss both the moments in your life and the life in your moments. And we only get a finite number of moments in our life, and I really would like to be present for every single one of them, cognitively present, not just physical present.

And so, to me, we all need to find the motivation that works because somebody tells you something is good for you, that might not be sufficient motivation, “Yeah, a lot of things are good for me that I don’t do.” But I think each individual has to find the thing that is this the sufficient motivation for them. So, you like your victories, and I like thinking about…I like yours though, I might try that too. But I like thinking about, “How many moments today was I really present for? How much of my life was I just not cognitively there for?” And when the answer is too many, it makes my heart hurt, so.

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s powerful. And I love the way you’ve described that in terms of these are different flavors of motivation or why that resonate differently. And a heart hurting versus a victory has very different vibes to them, and there could very well be many others that are custom and unique, and for each individual that are really powerfully resonant.

Maura Thomas
And a different day could mean a different thing. On one day, looking at your list might feel amazing, and another day it might be more about the moments. It really depends on the day, too, right? So, we can employ all of them. All of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Well, so we talked about some approaches that the individual can use. Tell us, if we are in a position of management or leadership and have some influence with the team and the culture, what are some best and worst practices that we should be considering?

Maura Thomas
Yes. There’s a whole chapter in the book about how much leaders underestimate the influence they have. So, I think it’s really important if you do have people who are on your team for whom you are the leader, at least at work, or really anywhere else, if you are the leader, then you need to realize that you have a lot of influence.

I think that it’s clear that a leader has influence during the work day on somebody who works for them. But I think what they forget, for example, is that how that person feels about their work day, they’re going to carry that home with them and interact with their family in a way that reflects how they felt about their work day.

So, if they had a work day where they said, “Oh, my gosh, that was a great day. I got so much done,” they’re going to go home and be with their family, and they’re going to show up very differently than if they go home, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, another day where I’m exhausted, I was busy all day, and still I got nothing done,” they’re going to interact with their family in a very different way.

Also, if you are, for example, sending emails to your team after hours, that’s going to impact the family because I think we’ve all been in a situation, either as the grownup in this situation, or maybe as the child in this situation, where it was like, “Yeah, we’re all going to sit down to dinner, oh, but mom just got the phone call or the email from work, and now mom says, ‘Start dinner without me. I’ll catch up as soon as I can,’” or, “Go to the park. I’ll be there later. Go ahead, do that without me,” or they show up, they’re at the park but they’re really just sitting on the bench on the phone, and not really present in the park.

So, leaders just underestimate so much how much influence they have not only on their team members but on their families. And if you influence families, then you influence communities. And if you influence communities, you influence the whole world. And so, modeling behaviors is really, really important in thinking about people as whole people who have lives outside of work. And when you send that email at night, it doesn’t matter if you say, “Oh, this isn’t important. Don’t worry about it,” your team is going to check it. They’re going to check it, and there’s all kinds of research about that, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. So, yeah, just wait, put in drafts, we can schedule it, software will do that for you. Certainly, you’re setting the model.

Maura Thomas
All of that, yes, but also act in a way that is good for your team. Downtime is as important for leaders as it is for everybody who works on their team. And I know a lot of leaders who think it’s such a good example by being the first one in, the last one to leave. I think that’s such a horrible example. It just makes your team want to work more and more and more and more and more.

So, take time off, don’t check in, be away, go on vacation and be on vacation. There are so many different ways that you can model healthy ways to engage at work. And when people, leaders and individual contributors, when people take better care of themselves and they disconnect from work, then they’re actually better at work the next day.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Can you share with us some other behaviors you recommend modeling and some new thinking? I really love your example there associated with, “Oh, I got to set an example by being there early and staying late.” And I guess, maybe, if your problem is you have a bunch of loafers who are slacking, that might be the example that you need to set for them.

But it seems like, often, these days, we have the opposite problem in terms of working nonstop and being distracted and not getting awesome things accomplished with the time that we do spend. So, having some more leisure does the trick, so model that instead. Any other reframes or paradigm shifts you want to put forward here?

Maura Thomas
Yes. What you just said reminded me, having a team of loafers, I’m sure that there are lazy people but I work with thousands of people in a year, not tens of thousands, not to mention everybody I know and people in my professional network at, I don’t really know a lot of slackers. So, I just want to put out there this idea that, I really want to put this idea of quiet quitting to bed. It was never a thing. It was never a thing.

Some guy on TikTok thought he would get some attention by saying, “I’m going to do the bare minimum at work and see what I can get away with,” and then that turned into this business propaganda that would have leaders, trying to scare leaders into thinking that they have a team full of lazy people, and they need to be careful about their employees are slacking off all the time, and that’s why hybrid and remote work doesn’t work because if you can’t see them, they won’t be working. It’s not a thing.

Everybody wants to show up at work and do the best job that they can. Everybody wants to feel productive and satisfied and accomplished at the end of the day. It’s not a thing. I wrote an article for Forbes called “Why you should want your employees to quiet-quit?” I covered it in the book as well. quiet quitting is just about, “There’s more to life than work.” Maybe.

And maybe I’ll have some better boundaries now than I did before. And maybe I won’t always be checking my email on the weekends. And maybe when I go away on vacation, I’ll actually be on vacation and be present with my family so that I can show up better at the end of my vacation. That’s all that is, it’s boundaries. It’s not lazy people trying to get away with stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well said.

Maura Thomas
Sorry, I feel a little passionate about that.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I think it’s good. And in my experience about the folks I know, when they engage in something that resembles quiet quitting, it’s usually because they keep asking for good meaningful work to be done, and they keep not getting it, and they’re like, “All right, fine. If I’m just going to get minimum amount of stuff that doesn’t actually matter, then I’m going to enjoy myself.” And so, it’s not a matter of, like, “I’m sticking it to you. I’m going lazy mode,” but rather it’s like, “I guess it’s sort of like a consolation price. If I can’t do meaningful work, I guess I’ll just chill a little bit.”

Maura Thomas
Yeah. Well, then address the culture. Address the culture and help people do the meaningful work so that they can enjoy those days. Here’s another sort of contrarian thing or another unconscious calculation. People talk a lot about open-door policy, “We have an open-door policy here.” Well, that word maybe doesn’t mean what you think it means. What do you mean when you say open-door policy?

What I think most people think when they hear open-door policy, they think anyone can drop in on anyone else for any reason at any time. And I don’t think that’s really what we ever intended open-door policy to mean. And some people even think it means, “We are not allowed to close doors here.” And if you’re going to use the phrase open-door policy, you really need to explicitly define it for your team. Otherwise, you’re setting up the company to have a culture of distraction where everybody does drop in on everyone at any moment at any time for any reason, and that’s not a place that is conducive to high-quality knowledge work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s well said. I always thought, because I do, I love my quiet time, and to be able to just go deep work, focus mode, and make things happen. And so, I always thought that that was an odd phrasing, “My door is always open,” and I thought, “Always? Really?” “My door is always open between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. and when you schedule an appointment,” is sort of like how I think that sentence ought to be finished because that’s sort of silly.

Maura Thomas
My metaphorical door, meaning, “I will be here to help you if you need some help,” but open-door policy is not a good way to say that. “My door is always open” is not a good way to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fun, Maura. How about you just keep giving us hot takes? What else do you got for us?

Maura Thomas
Yeah, I think, again, it comes back to distraction is the problem. And if you start looking for distraction in the way that you operate, and in the way that your company operates, all of these, it’s the shining light, and you just start to see, “Oh, my gosh, if I just…that is so distracting. And the way we do this is so distracting, and it’s taking away from our ability to really do meaningful work.”

Now, not to say that collaboration isn’t important. It absolutely is but it needs to be intentional, and it needs to have a purpose, not just, “Hey, I just thought of a random thing, so I’m going to drop this half-formed thought on your lap just because it just popped into my head.” That’s not the best way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could maybe wrap us up by sharing a cool story of an organization, a team, an environment, a culture, where distraction was just causing all sorts of consternation, and then a couple key things folks did, some changes made, and the nifty results that came out on the other side?

Maura Thomas
Yeah. So, what my clients tell me a lot is that they get the unconscious calculations really were interfering so much more than they thought. They really thought that their required 60 hours. And when they managed their distractions, and when they had a conversation with their boss about, “I’m going to be offline occasionally not for hours at a time, but maybe 60 minutes, 90 minutes, maybe even just 20 minutes throughout the day,” it turns out I can get a lot more done in less time, and the quality of my work is higher.

And so, I could name client names, but that’s like the common refrain that I hear. Unconscious calculation, job requires 60 hours. When you really shine a light, when you realize all of the areas of distraction, when you really look at how your work is getting done during the day, you realize you could do so much more.

And if you can get your work done in fewer hours, then how much room does that open up for you to do other things, to learn about other things, to think about other parts of your life, to take up a new hobby, to spend more time with the people that you care about? It just opens the door because people feel like they have space, and they have breathing room, and they can think about other things. And it’s game-changing.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful. And so, the action step there, it sounds like the big one is simply to have that conversation. And maybe it sounds something, like, “Hey, boss,” “Hey, colleague,” “Hey, teammates, I’ve noticed that my whole day is inundated with distraction, and I think I could do much better work more effectively and efficiently if I want to give you a heads up that there’ll be zones of the day, maybe 20 minutes, maybe 90 minutes at a time, in which I am entering a tunnel of focus, deep work mode, whatever you want to call it, and you won’t be hearing from me because I’m doing important stuff, but I’ll reach back out to you soon.”

I’m trying to use my best words. Do you have any suggested verbiage?

Maura Thomas
Yeah. So, here are two specific examples that the words come out of, “In order for this to work, we need to look at two important things. One, how does work flow through our department and get done.” Most people, I find, show up at work and do whatever happens to them. There are just communication coming in, it could be from colleagues, it could be from vendors, it could be from customers, and I’m just dealing with all of that.

And so, work isn’t flowing through me, through the department, through the company, in a systematic logical way. This happens first, and then this happens, and then we do this, and then we do this. And in between that, yeah, we communicate with each other. But you focus on the way the work moves through the organization. That’s the first thing.

Shining a light on that, if you’re not a leader, then just look at the way work comes to you, and look at the things that you are truly getting evaluated on, and really what’s in your…ultimately, in your job description, the thing that you are hired for, and how much of your day do you actually get to spend doing that. So, that piece is the really important thing.

And the second thing to think about is, “How do we communicate as a team?” We have lots of ways to communicate, and, usually, as a team, we don’t create any guidelines. I have a whole chapter in the book about communication guidelines. So, we have 17 different ways to communicate but we use this one in this situation, in general. There are exceptions, right? But this one in this situation, and this one in this situation, and this one in this situation.

Because without that, it really just defaults to personal preference, “Well, you seem to like chat, and Joe seems to like email, and Lisa likes to have meetings, and Marty always likes to call me. And I don’t know, I can’t remember how you all like to do this. So, I’m just going to send everything I need to send in all the ways. I’m going to leave you a voicemail, I’m going to put it on the chat, I’m going to send you an email, and we’ll talk about it in the meeting just for good measure.”

And so, the volume of communication in organizations is way too high, and the efficiency of communication is way too low.

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

Maura Thomas
Yes, just the last thought I will leave you with is I teach people two primary things. Number one, how to manage their attention, and, number two, how to manage their work, bigger picture. Nobody can do that except you. Nobody can manage your attention except you. No one can manage how your work gets done except you. You get to decide, so it is entirely up to you.

Now, if you’re a leader, yes, you have to help. But bottom line is no one is going to do this for you. If you would like to have days that feel more accomplished, more productive, more satisfying, if you would like to feel less frazzled and flustered, if you would like to have more space in your life to do other things, that is 100% up to you. And I know that many people feel like it isn’t but I’m here to tell you, it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. I guess even in, like, the worst-case scenario, it’s like, ain’t nobody in your whole organization budging whatsoever when you raise these things to them. You still have the agency and the ability to make a change, like, “Hey, this is not the organization for me at this time of my life. All right.”

Maura Thomas
Either that or maybe it’s just like, “You know what, I’m going to work differently, and I’m going to see how everybody else around me reacts to that.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Maura Thomas
“But I’m going to work in the way that makes the biggest difference for me, that helps me get the most done, that I can put the best of myself out into the organization and into the world, and let’s just see what happens with that because, I bet, the results are going to be better than you think.”

Pete Mockaitis
That really does ring true. I remember I was at a wedding, and I was chatting with a friend, Kelsey, catching up, and she was working in a consulting firm, which could be notorious in terms of demanding clients, and managers and partners, and all that stuff. And I said, “Oh, man, so you just must be working really…” and she said, “Oh, it’s not too bad.”

And it blew my mind. She basically just established boundaries for herself, and I was like almost…my mouth was agape, I was like, “I don’t think I even knew you could do that in that environment.” She said, “Well, I just told them that, ‘Hey, it’s really important to me that I train for this Ironman, I’m bonding with my brother doing that thing, and so I’m probably not going to be working during these times but I’ll give you my best focus and attention during these times, and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.’”

And I said, “And they went for that?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, and I got promoted.” It is what you say is true. It may feel impossible or scary, and yet if you give it a shot, it just might work out way better than you think.

Maura Thomas
Yes. Yes. And I’m a control freak so that means a lot to me.

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

Maura Thomas
Yeah, so a couple. One I already gave you, “It’s not the moments in your life that matter. It’s the life in your moments.” Another one that has always kind of resonated with me is kind of two ways to say the same thing, I guess, “Don’t wait for your ship to come in. Swim out to it.” Another way to say that, I have it hanging on my…a little quote I cut it out of a magazine. It’s hanging right on my desk, it says, “Ask for what you want 100% of the time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Maura Thomas
It can’t hurt to ask. You might not get what you want but it can’t hurt to ask. It never hurts to ask.

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

Maura Thomas
Yes, I think that I’m really fascinated by Gloria Mark’s research, and how technology is affecting us, and how much it’s costing us not just financially but in all parts of our life because, I think, again, when we’re not present in our moments, then we rob some of the richness from our lives. And when I read Dr. Mark’s research, it just feels…I don’t know why, I should call her Dr. Mark, but I feel like I know her because I am so steeped in her work. But it just smacks me in the face, and just it’s such a good reminder for me about what it’s costing us.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Maura Thomas
I have two. One, I think, Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich because that’s where I learned the idea of mastermind groups, and mastermind groups have changed my life. And then, personally, it’s by Gavin de Becker, it’s called The Gift of Fear. And it’s about listening to that. It’s about really how to keep yourself safe. But the reason that the book is so great is because it reads like a thriller, it reads like a mystery thriller, but it’s really about practical life advice. And I’ve given it as a gift to a million people.

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

Maura Thomas
I don’t know how I would get my life done without Todoist, task manager. I’m a big fan of the folks over at Todoist. We also use their other tool called Twist, which is an alternative to chat tools, it’s a different kind of chat tool, but it is based on asynchronous communication, and I’m a big fan of the folks over at Doist.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Maura Thomas
So, we talked earlier about finding that motivation, and I guess this goes along with the book idea. But I read a book that I guess has been out for a long time, but I just stumbled upon it, and it’s called Younger Next Year. And that book really gave me…everybody knows you’re supposed to exercise and how to take care of yourself, and it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m supposed to exercise. I know.” It wasn’t enough to get me to exercise. The information in this book made me go, “Oh, oh, oh, now I get it. Now, I understand why I really…why it matters every single day,” and it really has had an impact. So, favorite habit is exercise.

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

Maura Thomas
Yes. The thing I hear that resonates most is the way that I reframe. I don’t think I said it specifically this way today but how you manage your time really doesn’t matter unless you also manage your attention. So, what matters more than time management is attention management.

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

Maura Thomas
MauraThomas.com is the best place to learn all the things.

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

Maura Thomas
Yes, try to be more present more often. Manage your attention and make the most of your moments.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maura, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and well-managed attention.

Maura Thomas
Thanks for having me, Pete. It’s been a pleasure.

Aug 21
0

892: Tools for Thriving amid Change with Curtis Bateman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Curtis Bateman shares simple tools that make uncertainty less frustrating and more rewarding.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The simple model that makes change predictable and actionable
  2. The critical first step to introducing any change initiative
  3. How to keep poor results from discouraging you

About Curtis

Curtis Bateman is one of FranklinCovey’s lead change experts and the author of Who Rocked the Boat: A Story about Navigating the Inevitability of Change and co-author of Change: How to Turn Uncertainty into Opportunity.  He is also the Vice President of International and a Senior Change Consultant.

Resources Mentioned

Curtis Bateman Interview Transcript

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

Curtis Bateman
Hey, thanks, Pete. It’s nice to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting about your book, Change: How to Turn Uncertainty Into Opportunity. And I’d like to kick off by hearing about one of the biggest changes you’ve made in your own life.

Curtis Bateman
Well, one that I love to talk about was a few years ago when I was deciding to either leave a business or stay, and the change that I ended up making was I offered to buy the business. So, the journey was pretty interesting because I was realizing I wanted to be doing more, and the whole fear notion got in the way for me and I was stuck for quite a while, thinking, “I want to do more. I think I could do more with this company. Should I leave? Should I stay?”

And then my wife, one day, quoted a line from Who Moved My Cheese, and she said, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” And, suddenly, the realization of answering that question meant, “I’m going to make a change. I’m going to buy this business versus staying in the employee situation,” so it was a massive change for me.

And, frankly, the reason I like to mention is because it transformed my career and my life, that one significant change and decision that I made.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Okay. Well, tell us, what’s the big idea with the book Change?

Curtis Bateman
Well, there’s two big ideas in the book. The one is that there’s a predictable pattern, and that this pattern applies to personal change, work change, teams going through change, even organizations taking their whole organization through change. So, it’s this idea, there’s a predictable pattern, and if we can learn it, then we can start to drive some opportunity or some advantage from it. The second big idea is that individuals have more choice even though they don’t really feel like they do when the change is being imposed on them. And so, pattern and choice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, tell us, what sorts of benefits or goodness is on the other side of understanding and mastering this stuff?

Curtis Bateman
In some research I’ve done, we found that as many as 88% of people think that a change is going to lead to something worse for them.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah. Now, you might be thinking, “Wait a minute.” But the data, over time, with thousands of respondents says a lot of people really think change is going to lead to something bad for them. Now, I’ve asked that question mostly in an organization context where change is a decision made somewhere else and I’m living with the consequences of it.

But what happens is most people start from the paradigm of, “Oh, this is going to lead to something worse for me and I don’t like it because I’ve had experience after experience where that’s the case.” And so, we’re trying to help people recognize that that doesn’t have to be the case. So often, it ends up being a lot better than they think, and so we’re trying to help people frame it differently, see it differently, and use some tools to get better success from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really is interesting, and I don’t think it’s even occurred to me personally until you cited this, is that that is sort of my default reaction, like, “Uh-oh, here it is.”

Curtis Bateman
“It’s happening again.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Okay. All right.” And it’s like, in terms of, “This is going to be a big hassle. It’s going to be difficult. This is going to upset…” whatever. And, boy, maybe that just speaks to that human nature in our very, I don’t know, biochemistry or nervous system.

Curtis Bateman
It does. It does because we’re programmed as humans to protect ourselves. And so, often what happens is because we have experienced bias that says, “Change is cruddy for us,” and it feels threatening, it activates this, “I’m going to protect myself.” So, we immediately revert to, “How do I fight or flight on this?” rather than “How do I get something better from this?” So, it’s part of what we’re trying to point out and help people realize there is a choice in there and we can do some things to help you have a better experience with it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. So, 88% percent of folks think going into it, “Okay, this change is going to be bad for me,” and yet it’s true, if I objectively assess, “Changes imposed upon me historically,” it’s probably more like 50/50 in terms of, “Yes, that was more of a pain,” or, “Actually, I’m so glad we made that change. It’s way easier now.”

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, and if it’s a change that, as an individual I’ve initiated, like, let’s say I buy a new house and I have to move, that’s a massive change, and you dread it, and you hate it, but there’s a reason you did it. You want something better. And when you finally settle into the new circumstance, you think, “I love this,” yet you take all that stuff in the middle, and you think, “This is going to be lousy.” And it may be difficult, to your point, but maybe there’s a little more joy in the journey if you realize it’s going to lead to something better for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us about this journey of the change model.

Curtis Bateman
Yeah. So, there’s two variables, two axes. One is results, up and down or vertical, and horizontal is time. And we have this space where we’re achieving outcomes that we’re really comfortable with. We call that the zone of status quo. And then a change is introduced. Either we introduce it or it’s introduced to us. And when that happens, we start to see this decrease in outcome. It might be our engagement. It might be a financial outcome. It might be a relationship outcome. But whatever it is, there’s this negative impact that starts to create this downward path.

And what’s happening is we’re looking to understand “What’s changing? Why is it changing? And what’s the real impact on me?” And so, we stay in that space, this space of disruption until we really feel like we’ve got some answers. At which point, we pass through a decision point where we choose to opt in. And then we start working on, “How do we make this change come to life? How do we implement it?” It’s called the zone of adoption.

It’s a messy space. That’s where most changes really fall apart. They fall apart organizationally. They fall apart individually because it requires some determination, some acceptance if things didn’t work right the first time. And as we move through that, then we start to get back to a level of outcome that we’re happy with, then there’s last zone, which often gets overlooked, and, hopefully, we’ll get a chance to talk about that.

But it’s the zone of innovation where we take everything we’ve learned, and if we can really get curious about it, we actually can create higher, stronger, better extended outcomes from the change that really create even more value from the change rather than just making it through the zone of adoption.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is it fair to say that this is the pathway of all or nearly all or the vast majority of changes of all flavors?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, I’ve been asked that question for years and years and years, and I keep looking for exceptions. Leaders often want exceptions. They want to jump to that third zone and skip the other two zones. It doesn’t happen as much as they want to try, push, cajole, encourage, whatever the right adjective is. So, all change follows this pattern. All change personal, professional, nonprofit, kids, teenagers, it goes through this pattern. And if you can learn that and appreciate it, it instantly starts to create awareness that you can do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so just to make this all the more real, I’d love it if you could walk us through three examples. One would be a personal initiative, maybe it’s fitness, maybe it’s a hobby, or something, “I’m going to get organized,” or something, a personal initiative, a relationship, maybe a friendship or close romantic relationship but kind of one on one. And then an organizational team situation.

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, good. Let’s get practical. So, on an individual basis, we experience this pattern with so many things that happen, and we give them other labels. So, to your point, let’s say we’re going to start a fitness program. Status quo is where we are, what we’re doing, how we’re eating, our weight, our health, all of those things just kind of maintained at this level. And then what comes along, the New Year’s resolution, “I am going to eat healthier and be fit, or more fit.”

And we start to change our behaviors, and so it pushes us from the status quo into a different set of behaviors: eating patterns, exercise patterns, even thought processes, and that creates disruption. It takes us in this downward slope, which we’re just trying to figure out, “Is it worthwhile?”

Now, if we start a little differently, if we start with a vision of, “What is it that I want as the outcome?” and we stay focused on the benefits of that, it actually helps us move through this process. But if we don’t, if we just say, “I have to be more fit,” and we don’t really have a connection to the outcome that motivates us, what we find is we start to exercise a little bit, we start to eat differently, and we’re attempting to move through this dip part of the curve.

And this is where, in the zone of adoption, it gets messy, it gets squishy because we miss exercising one day, or we go out with friends and we eat differently, and we think, “Oh, I’ve lost it. I failed.” And what happens is we can get stuck in the bottom of that change process because we’re not pushing through the difficult part.

So, if we do, if we start to move through that, and we develop a new set of habits, those can take us either back to a new status quo where we’re eating a little differently, exercise a little differently, or they can take us continuing up the curve to a point where we get better and better outcomes.

And what happens often with individual New Year’s resolutions where we lose that momentum, is we get stuck in the bottom of the curve and we drift back to our old status quo. So, the vision, the focus on the value, to me, is what will help you move through the dip part of that curve towards the top, at a better pace and with some success. So, that’s an individual example.

I love that you asked about a relationship example. Take a parent and a teenager relationships are interesting, and if we think there is our normal reactions to each other, for example, I have a teenage son, he loves to challenge everything.

And so, if I’m thinking I want to improve my relationship with him, my status quo is he challenges everything, so it’s easy to say, “I told you so. I’m the parent. You’ll do it this way,” and we maintain the status quo, which is perhaps a lower level of relationship result than we would hope for.

And if you think, “What’s the result I want in this relationship with my teenager? I want to have a friendship. I want to be able to influence. I want them to trust me.” But if my status quo behavior is, “Gosh, this kid really pushes my buttons. I’m going to tell him what to do,” I’m stuck in that space between, “This is my result, and the result I’d like is up here. I’d like this better relationship.”

So, I say, “I’m going to change.” The person with the most responsibility in the relationship has to initiate the change. So, I initiate the change, and say, “I’m going to behave differently.” Well, I have to figure out, “What does that mean to me? What is it that I need to do differently?” And that’s that zone of disruption, “Why am I doing this? What does it mean to me? And do I really want to do this? Yes, I do.”

So, then I jump into the zone of adoption that says, “I’m going to behave differently. I’m going to choose different behaviors that will increase the nature of the relationship result.” And it’s going to be hard because I’m going to have a moment where he pushes my buttons, and we start to really feel some friction, and I think, “Okay, what’s the new behavior I want? I didn’t do that right last time. How am I going to do it better?”

And I have to work through that. I have to have some failures. I have to recommit to the change I want. I have to recommit to the relationship I want. And as I do that, and persist with it, I find myself moving up the change curve towards a different style of relationship. In my example, I’m saying, “I want higher trust. I want better friendship. I want higher levels of influence, and I don’t want to be activated by that behavior.”

And so, that’s where you commit and you recommit, and you start to see even better ways that you can improve your relationship. And so, that change journey is real, and I love that we can see the application that the result is the nature of the relationship. It’s not economic or anything else. It’s a relationship result. So, that’s a second one, Pete.

And the third one is an organizational change. Let me approach this from a different angle, and this is the angle where the change feels like it’s happening to me. In the other two examples, I might’ve been the one driving the change. But in a professional context, I might show up to work, or at a charity where I volunteer, whatever the organizational situation is, and they say, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” And I think, “Wait a minute. Why are you doing this to me? I like it the way it is.”

So, they’re saying something about my status quo is going to change. They introduced that change. Maybe it’s an organizational restructuring. Maybe I’m reporting to a new leader. Maybe it’s I’m being asked just to take on different things in my role. All of those represent changes, and it’s happening to me. Somebody else is telling me, “This is the change.”

So, that launches me over the edge of the change, and this is a little bit trickier because we have to figure out, “Okay, what is it that they’re saying that’s changing, and why?” And understanding the why in this context will really help. It will in the others, “I want a better relationship, etc.” “So, why is this happening? What does the organization need?”

Well, as I come to grips with what and why, I start to piece together a storyline that says, “What does it mean to me? And am I okay with that?” So, I reach the point where I say, “Yes, I am. I get it. I like being here. I like this job. I like the work.” So, I start to engage in implementing the change. Well, I have to learn new skills. There may be some new skills I have to learn. There may be some new relationships I have to develop.

And so, the process of doing that leads to starts and stops, successes and failures, and so that’s why this third zone, the zone of adoption, causes us to really feel like, “Argh, I’m not going to get the full outcome we want.” But as we work through that and we accept moments that don’t work, and moments that do, and we trial and error, and as a boss or a leader helps clear some of the obstacles out of the way, we find ourselves moving through that zone of adoption. And then we might even start to realize, “Hey, this can lead to something great for me in the zone of innovation.”

Here’s what’s interesting in all three scenarios that I think is really important for listeners to pay attention to. The middle two zones, the zone of disruption and the zone of adoption, represent a cost to the change. There’s an emotional cost, a relationship cost, a productivity cost, perhaps an economic cost. And the more we can do to shrink those two zones, move through them at a better pace, and move through them with less severity, we decrease the costs that we experience with change, and we get to the point where we’re starting to experience the benefit of the change.

And the better that we can become at that, that’s where the book title comes into play, “How do we turn that uncertainty into opportunity? How do we shrink the costs and increase the benefits?” So, tell me what you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I think it’s handy and, one, I’d recommend folks, in the show notes, you’ll find a link to the Amazon page for the book, which I think is so useful, because as we talk about these zones and these axes, you want to look at the picture. So, that’s the audio medium. Hope that you could visualize that. We see a straight line, and then a dip downward, like a U, and then a nice big high level, so like a ladle, if you will. A ladle with a handle facing to the right is kind of what we’re visualizing, so check that out if you want the visual reinforcement.

But I think, one, it’s just so handy to know upfront, “Hey, just expect there will be a phase unavoidably in which your results dip down. This is worse, it is less than what we had before, and the way it will look, sound, and feel will vary based upon the nature of the change you’re making.” So, in terms of fitness, it’s like, “Actually, I’m exercising. This hurts, I hate it,” “I’m eating healthier. This doesn’t taste good. I don’t like it,” “I am eating less to lose weight. I am hungry and sleepy and cranky often. This sucks.”

And so, just to know straight up that is the nature of change and how it goes down. There will be a trough in which you think, “This sucks,” and you actually seem to be worse off than you were before. And now, boy, I’m thinking, biblically, just like the book of Exodus, it’s like, “Hey, I know we were enslaved before but, actually, we prefer that. We’re hungry out here and it sucks worse than being slaves back there.” And I think you can find this in sort of many bits of literature or great story. This is what‘s going on.

Curtis Bateman
When we wrote the book, we actually talked about that, that there are so many examples in literature where this model plays out. And once you recognize the model and know it, you start to see it in places in your life and in what you’re reading. Even what you’re reading in the news “Oh, there’s a change going on here. Here’s what it means.” It’s fascinating and, hopefully, really helpful to people as they learn to recognize the pattern. It does not make the change like a magic wand but it makes it 20, 30, 50% better, and it makes you more capable of approaching it because you know what to expect.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And in those relationship areas in which you’re making a change, it won’t look like or sound like, “My body hurts,” but it might sound like, “Why is dad being weird? This is really kind of odd. Like, okay,” and then it feels like, “Oh, it feels like we’re more distant because he’s giving me weird looks, and says I should stop being weird. But what’s weird is just the fact that I’m doing something different than what I have done before, by definition, weird.”

Curtis Bateman
That’s right. And I think, as an observer of somebody going through change, we need to give people permission to try it because we usually change to get a better outcome, to be better, to become better, to have a better circumstance. And so, one of the things we can do if we’re watching change from the outside is to recognize where they are in the process, and give people support, to say, “Hey, it’s going to be worth it if this is a change you want,” because there is a funny space in the middle,” just like you’re saying, Pete, in that we have to recognize.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, how do we make that space in the middle less brutally unpleasant?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, that’s a good question. And we had spent a lot of time exploring this, so let me give you a few ideas here that highlight what you can do. So, in each zone, we have a really clear one-word idea that we need to be looking at. In the zone of status quo, before a change starts, we should be thinking about preparing. What can we be doing to be ready for the change? And that actually helps with the middle two zones, this idea of preparing, developing our capability, whatever that might be.

In the zone of disruption, what we’re looking to do is clarify because mostly what we’re feeling there is uncertainty. And the more we can disambiguate, the more we can clarify what’s going on and what kind of impact it’s going to have. That clarity, that information starts to help us get traction and feel like we can make some decisions. So, prepare, clarify.

In the third zone, most of what we talk about in the book are ways that we can persist. How do we keep at it? How do we take something that didn’t work and do something better with it? And there are a lot of different tools that we provide to help with that, but if you’re going to remember one thing, “Hey, I’m in the zone of disruption. I know the thing I need to do is persist. It might look different in each circumstance, but if I persist, it’s going to make a difference.”

And then, as we get into that fourth zone, there’s a lot going on there but I would say curiosity is one of the best things we can do in that last zone. So, in the middle two zones, clarify and persist, and we’ll provide…if you take a look on Amazon, we’ll provide lots of specific tools on how you do that. But from a radio, from a podcast point of view, if we just listen and think, “Okay, I’m in the zone, I need to clarify. What are the questions I want to have?” You’re going to find it will help you a long way down the path.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us some examples of tools or key clarifying questions that make a world of difference there?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, I’ve mentioned a few in one of the zones, so I’ll just restate those, and then I’ll mention a tool that can help in the zone of adoption. So, in the zone of disruption, this is largely a personal space even in organizational change. So, we’re trying to clarify what’s changing, and we’re actually looking to understand, “What are we moving from?” so this is a tool, just to list, “What are we moving from – behaviors, actions, and results? And what new behaviors, actions, and results are we moving to?”

And if we can clarify that with our leader, with our peers, our colleagues, or in an individual circumstance, like my teenage son, “What is it that I want to change from? What are my old behaviors when I interact with him, and to?” So, from and to statements is a great tool there. And the other thing that I should mention in that zone, I can’t say it enough, is we need to really declare what we believe is happening for me, “What’s the impact on me?” so we’re clear about that.

In the zone of adoption, what often ends up happening is we discover there’s this list of 30 new things we think we need to do to make the change work. And, as a result, two things are happening. One, we’re feeling overwhelmed, and, two, we’re struggling to know what to do with all the ideas. So, there’s two sorting tools that I’ll tell you about, easily just write these down on a piece of paper. They’re really easy.

The first sorting tool is, “What’s my stop-doing list? There are all these new things I want to try with the change. What should I stop doing so I create space to work on it?” And that’s really difficult, particularly in an organizational change because we have this accumulated list of stuff we just believe we need to do. So, we need a stop-doing list.

The next thing we need to do is we need to sort through all of the new ideas, and we need to say, “Which ones are hurdles, meaning I can jump over these? They’re in my path. And what kind of obstacle is this?” The next one we need to look at, “What are the quicksands? Where am I going to get stuck on these new ideas? And where do I need help?”

And then the last one, the last bucket to put things in is, “What are the brick walls? Where is it that I can’t solve this but somebody else can – a leader, a change sponsor?” And so, as we look to sort, “What can we stop doing?” and then we look to sort through obstacles and opportunities and hurdles, quicksand, and brick walls, it lets us know, “Here are the ones I can focus on. I’m in complete control of these, and here are the ones where I need other people to help.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s great clarification. And then for persisting, any pro tips there?

Curtis Bateman
Well, on the persist part, in an organizational context, if I’m an employee and I’ve got a leader, one of the things I need from my leader is for them to stay engaged in the change. Why do I say that? A lot of leaders think that once they announce the change, people will just go make it happen. So, I need a leader to stay engaged. If I am a leader, I need to stay engaged so that I can help clear the path, and I can help acknowledge successes. That’s one of the things.

The other thing that I need is the leader, like I said, to clear the path to understand where they can take obstacles out of the way. And if I’m an individual contributor, and I’m thinking, “Wow, I’m really stuck here,” what’s happening is I’m giving you a language that doesn’t threaten anybody, “Hey, team or leader, we’re stuck in the zone of adoption. We’re working hard, putting a lot of energy into it, but this seems like an obstacle that we don’t know how to get out of our way. Who can we go to? Or, boss person, can you get this out of the way?”

And so, the language pattern I’m giving is a non-threatening way to talk about it, that’s one way to persist. A leader clearing the path is another way to persist. And then the third thing I would say is if we really feel stuck and that we’re sliding backwards, one of the things we can do to persist is reconnect with, “Why are we doing this? Why are we even going through this change?” And the why can create energy and motivation to recommit and keep pushing ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I’m curious, any super favorite examples of how you’ve seen this play out beautifully that really illustrates it and inspires?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah. Let me tell you from an organizational perspective first, and then I’ll hit a personal one. Here’s what normally happens with a change. We have leaders working together for months on a change they want to introduce. They’re going through the data, they’re understanding what’s going on in the market, and they have all of this run-up to when the change is going to be introduced.

And a normal pattern is they’ve been working on it performance, they stand up in a town hall, and they say, “We’re making this change,” and then they think their work is done. And the problem is they’ve been on a journey of understanding why we need to make a change, and what we’re asking the organization to do.

And if you just stand up and make this proclamation, what happens is you don’t give the people the space to come on the journey with you. So, from a leadership perspective, and this can be a team leader, this can be a senior leader, it’s any level of leadership, what happens is if you’ll just capture some of your thoughts and some of what you’ve been learning into a story, and say, “In our organization, we’re seeing this and this and this happen in the marketplace, and so we need to make these changes to stay competitive.”

Maybe that’s, “We need to upgrade our technology.” Maybe that’s, “We need to modify how we go to market with our commercial model.” Whatever the case may be, we need to explain how we came to that conclusion, and then that’s the ‘why’ behind it. It becomes a storyline so the people can say, “Oh, I get it. I understand why you’re asking us to go through a change.”

And so, it’s not a super complex thing. What makes it complex is we usually skip it. That’s where the complexity comes in, Pete. And so, we’re telling leaders, “Don’t skip it. Bring your people on the journey,” and so it’s really the art of storytelling. And then let’s take a personal example about a change and why we would need to have that case for change. So, I’ll go back to the relationship example with my teenager.

If I say I want a different level of relationship, why is that? Well, somewhere in there, I see value in having a better relationship. Now, talking personally, I would say, personally, for me, Curtis, “Why does that matter?” Well, there’s going to come a point, because I’ve seen it with older kids, where my ability to say, “You will do this” goes away, and my ability to influence and help him is based on my relationship. So, the more that I can do to move from, “I will tell you…” to we build a trusted relationship, the more likely it is that I’ll have influence with that child long term, that relationship long term.

So, that’s the why, that’s the compelling why, that matters to me. Now, that may not matter to everybody. I’m just telling you; you need a compelling why. You need a compelling why.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I don’t know if it matters to him, not to dig too deeply into your personal family dynamics, it may not be of interest to him.

Curtis Bateman
And it may not right now. That’s right. But for me, it has value, and so it’s a compelling why, and that compelling why is what gives me the motivation to go through the cost of change. Now, that same thing could be true on just an individual level. Let’s say…I was talking to a friend who is mid-career, and he’s really stuck right now, and he needs to make a fairly significant change.

And so, the reason he’s not making a change right now is he doesn’t have a compelling why. Every time he starts to make the change, he’s told me about two different times he’s really started to make this professional change, and he gets stuck because his compelling why isn’t there. And I think that’s really one of the obstacles, because once we have that, it helps us have the courage and the tenacity to move through the cost part of the change model.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I guess I’m curious in terms of the case or the story, so you’ve got a great why for you, but how about a great why for the other stakeholders who were up in it?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah. So, when we do organizational change, hopefully, whoever is sponsoring the change has a compelling why and what’s changing, and examples of what we’re moving from and to at the top of that change. What’s special then is if the next group, let’s say there’s four teams that are underneath that, if each of those teams go through that compelling case for change, and they say, “How do we take this case for change and create a version of it that’s aligned but it’s our story, making it our story, our compelling why, aligned with what’s being put forward, helps us engage and connect with it?”

And I’m not naïve. That doesn’t always become possible. Some changes are really just they struggle to create that alignment, but a lot are, and a lot do. And so, as we can create our own case for change, and sometimes there’s two or three tiers of organization, if at each level we can create our own aligned case for change, it connects us to what’s going on, and it allows our people to connect to our substory.

And I’ve seen that work at large scale. I did some work with a call center in India, offices in Mumbai and Pune, about 5,000 people, and we started with leadership, and we took it all the way down to the front-level team supervisor, and we wrote this case for change. They’re short, they’re brief, they’re one page. But as we did that, and as we’ve reviewed them, what we found is it created the engagement top to bottom. Even the frontline workers were aware of what their case for change was.

And we were looking to move them from a kind of a mid-tier ranking in the JD Power for ranking for customer service, and they wanted to get to number one. And over a period of 18 months, they moved all the way to the top of the charts because we were able to take that story, that case for change, and help everybody be aligned. Then they started to align their behavior and their work in that zone of adoption and persisted through it to get the kind of outcomes they wanted.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m also curious to hear, when it comes to, we talked about persisting, and the disruption, and the adoption, and there’s a dip, and we’re in the middle of it, I think it’s also quite possible that you learn once you’re in the midst of it, it’s like, “Oh, shoot, this was the wrong change.”

Curtis Bateman
“Wrong change.”

Pete Mockaitis
“And it’s not a matter of us being resistant to change, or having a messy middle, but, like, for real, we probably should have never embarked on this, or new stuff has come to light, and probably the best course of action is to abort or change in a very different strategic direction than the one we did do.” How do you distinguish that in terms of noting, “Oh, no, seriously, that was the wrong change, and we need to switch it up,” versus, “Hey, we’re just in the midst of disruption and that’s how it goes”?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, what a great question. The model supports that. Now, there has to be some courage, as a leader or an individual, to say, “Oh, this isn’t it.” How do you know? So, if you’re looking at the costs in the dip part of the model, if you start to realize that no matter what you do, you’re not going to be able to offset the costs of that change, and it’s just back-on-the-envelope math, whiteboard math, saying, “What is it costing us to work and we’re getting this kind of outcome?” or, “What is the impact on our employee attrition because we’ve got low engagement from this?”

You just have to look and ask a couple questions like that, and you think, “Oh, I can start to just do some back-of-the-envelope math, and realize I don’t think we’re ever going to create an outcome that offsets that.” And that’s where having the framework says, “Okay, that means we’re stuck with a lower outcome. That’s not okay. What do we do? Do we go back to where we were? Or, do we just initiate a modified version of the change based on what we’ve learned?” And once you know that framework, you can realize where you are, and analyze what the cost impact or the implication is of the dip. You can make those choices.

The other thing you can do is, knowing the model, I really encourage people to think through while they’re in the zone of status quo and they’re considering a change, “What is the cost here? How significant is it? Is that cost worth it for the outcome we think we’ll get?” And I think if there’s more intentionality before we initiate changes, you can head off some of those mistakes. You can get to them before you ever get to the scenario you described. If you do get to that scenario, use the model, the framework to analyze cost and make a different decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any quick do’s and don’ts associated with conversations and word choice when announcing and sharing a change with folks?

Curtis Bateman
Yeah. So often what we find when we’re announcing a change is we initiate a monologue, “I’ll do all the talking. I’ll tell you what to do.” And if the change gets announced, and that’s the end of it, and it’s all monologue, you have set yourself up for failure. You have to create a mechanism or a forum for dialogue because it’s very unlikely that I will understand all the consequences of a change for an entire team or organization. So, you need to give people a place to have that heard.

So, the second key to that, which is a tool, leaders don’t like that sometimes. They get a little nervous, because they think, “Well, what if I don’t have the answers?” I usually encourage people to make a list of all the questions I don’t have answers to so that you just acknowledge it upfront and work together on it rather than avoid the dialogue. And when that’s the case, it makes it a lot easier to engage in a dialogue. So, that’s a massive, “Don’t do this. Don’t just monologue.”

The second thing I would say is a big no-no, we talk about common reactions to change in the book. There’s a parable and we talk about some common reactions. Sometimes people use those common reactions as a label of “You’re this kind of person,” and labeling is not the intent of those reactions. Those reactions are to say, “These commonly appear. They’re not right or wrong. Recognize it in yourself and in a colleague, and then if it’s not the best reaction, use the non-threatening language to talk about what is the right reaction and how do we help people get to that space.”

So, don’t label people so they’re stuck there. It takes away their permission or ability to go through the change, and make sure you engage in a dialogue so people have input.

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

Curtis Bateman
Final thoughts are it’s a really easy to understand model. If you can learn, share it, draw it, talk to people about it, you’ll find that it’s stuck with you forever, and it’s really easy then to reference it. So, rather than have it be an idea that you hear about and goes away, the minute you just draw it on a napkin and share it with two or three people, you’ll find that it becomes part of your thinking, and it’ll be a great tool for you to use the rest of your career and your life.

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

Curtis Bateman
Actually, I have this thought I put on a wallet. It’s from an Indian philosopher, and it talks about the need for silence because silence gives you space to consider, reflect, and get better. And, for me, I don’t know if you read Susan Cain’s Quiet, I’m a lot like some of what she describes there. And so, for me, the idea that comes from that thinker, that thought leader, is this notion of giving yourself space to reflect, and think, and to discover. So, that’s kind of what comes to mind.

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

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just recently read Dan Pink’s book, When, and it’s a research-based book. And what I love about it is he’s explored what’s going on with startings, middles, and endings, and our energy. And I love all of the research that’s gone in there to understand how to be and put forward your best self, your best effort, your best energy.

So, I use that a lot when I’m coaching people or working with employees, is energy management and timing management. So, that’s an area of research that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately, is Dan Pink’s When.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And any other favorite books?

Curtis Bateman
Well, I mentioned a couple business ones. I’ll give you a non-business one. I love books. So, Great Expectations, I’m a big Dickens fan. And maybe the reason is because there’s so much change that goes on in some of the characters, but, yeah, Great Expectations is one that I absolutely love.

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

Curtis Bateman
Yeah, I’m a productivity junkie, so I use Evernote. I use it to organize, to plan, to think, to create, so productivity tools. You could probably list 20 of them and I would love them all but Evernote is a good one that I use.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I’m curious. So, Evernote. What’s maybe also on the top five for you?

Curtis Bateman
I use a journaling tool called Day One that I love. I use it for reflection, for when I’m doing mindfulness, or when I’m reading, I’ll capture learnings, and I do it in Day One. Also, what I love about that is it pulls from my Instagram and my LinkedIn, and so it creates this comprehensive journal of everything I’m thinking about on days and weeks, and I love to go back and reflect on it, so another one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Curtis Bateman
Planning. Weekly planning. This is a very Franklin Covey, in which is where I work, a Franklin Covey answer but it’s been part of my whole life. I love to reflect each week at the start of the week on my mission, my vision, my personal values, the people that I want to impact, and then incorporate that into my daily and weekly planning. That’s one of my favorite habits. I really look forward to that time every Sunday evening.

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

Curtis Bateman
I was looking through on Amazon where people make quotes or in my LinkedIn and other places, and I was looking to see what that’s like. And I had somebody recently say from the book how much they valued understanding the human reaction and the human part of change, and I get that a lot. One of the things we’ve endeavored to do is acknowledge there’s all that change process stuff which is important but that there’s a human component to it, and how much the work we’ve done really helps people as an individual and a human move through change, not just having a checklist or a process.

And I’ve had several people, just recently on social media and other places, make that comment to me. So, I love that, I love that that’s the case that really gets a lot of value for people.

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

Curtis Bateman
So, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I continue to write blogs. I do keynotes and other speeches. And as I learn more and I think about more, I write blogs to update that and to the books, and that’s at Curtis A. Bateman on LinkedIn, you’ll find me there. And then FranklinCovey.com, there’s a Speaker’s Bureau link, and I’m listed there with bio and information and videos and things. So, FranklinCovey.com, Speaker’s Bureau, or Curtis A. Bateman on LinkedIn.

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

Curtis Bateman
Yeah. I’m going to say it again, and this for everybody – individual contributor, teenager. If you’ll learn the little change model that we’ve talked about, just how to draw that ladle-shaped curve, you just said, Pete, and you just explain it to somebody, I guarantee, 100% money-back guarantee, if you’ll learn it and teach it to people, it will start to make a difference in your work and in your life. You’ll find connections and it will help you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Curtis, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with all the changes in your world.

Curtis Bateman
Thank you, Pete. Nice to talk to you today.

Aug 17
0

891: Finding Calm, Balance, and a Cure for Workaholism with Dr. Bryan Robinson

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Dr. Bryan Robinson shares the dangers of work addiction–and how you can recover from it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What workaholism is–and how you can tell if you have it
  2. The 10 C’s to help you find your calm
  3. How to befriend your negative emotions

About Bryan

Bryan E. Robinson is Founder and Chief Architect Officer of Comfort Zones Digital, Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and a psychotherapist in private practice. He writes for Forbes.com and Thrive Global and is the author of over forty books, including three editions of Chained to the Desk: A Guidebook for Workaholics, Their Partners and Children, and the Clinicians Who Treat Them and #Chill: Turn Off Your Job and Turn on Your Life.

Resources Mentioned

Bryan Robinson Interview Transcript

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Thank you, Pete. It’s great to be here again.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World: A Guide to Work-Life Balance. But I think one thing we didn’t touch on last time you were here is your fun tagline that you heal by day and kill by night.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
That you’re a psychotherapist and a murder mystery writer. Tell us about this.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
That’s right. That’s balanced, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I got to wonder if I’m one of your clients, am I inspiring content to your novels?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
I would do this to my clients but just don’t cross me because people that cross me end up as one of the victims in my books, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
I’m teasing, of course. My focus really is on healing, but the murder mysteries are just fun, the play part.

Pete Mockaitis
And how many have you written?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Two so far. And, in fact, one of them, the first one is being made into a television series. I can’t talk too much about it yet because it’s still under negotiation but we’ve already done the pilot, and it’s going to be happening sometime, probably next year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s exciting. Congratulations.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Yeah, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any principles by which you write by that make for a great murder mystery?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Principles? Yeah, well, some life experiences that you take and exaggerate. Like, I was at the supermarket here about a year ago and the woman behind me didn’t put the stick between my groceries and hers, so they charged me, like, $300 or $400, and I thought, “What?” And it took us 20 or 30 minutes to undo all that mess. But what I thought, “Wow, this is a great way for two people to meet before they die.” So, I used it in a novel.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That is good. And then maybe there’d be some lingering information on the receipt.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Yeah, all right. Yeah, all kinds of things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Can you tell us more about the book Chained to the Desk in a Hybrid World? What’s new and interesting? You’ve got a lot of experience in the universe of workaholism and exploring that. What’s new in the hybrid stuff?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, the book is really about work-life balance. That’s the subtitle, “A Guide to Work-Life Balance.” And things have been changing, as probably everybody listening knows, all over the world, in the workplace specifically. People are not working as much in the office. They’re working more either in hybrid ways or at home, which has brought up another whole problem. And that is, “Where do you set the boundaries?”

And one of the things that research has shown since we’ve started working more from home is we’re living and working under the same roof, and that means there are no boundaries. So, it’s caused a huge problem in overworking and burnout. For example, let’s say I have a project and I work till 5:00 or 6:00, and then I think, “Hmm, I can just keep working and burn the midnight oil and get this done.” And there’s more of that happening, and, therefore, more people are having mental health problems as a result of it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fascinating. Could you give us some statistics associated with the frequency, the prevalence of this overworking at home and the mental health challenges?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Yeah, the last statistic I saw was 40% of the people who were working remotely were saying, because they didn’t think about boundaries, and so they would just go in and out of their office, or they’d go throw on some laundry, and so it’s 40%. And that’s pretty high for an increase in burnout. So, obviously, what needs to happen is if we’re living and working in the same environment, we need to have some kind of mental understanding of where that line is.

For example, right now, I’m in my home office, and I work from here a good bit. I also have an office downtown but I imagine that my office at home, after 5:00 or 6:00, is five miles across town. I have a rule, I don’t go into that place, unless it’s an emergency, after a certain amount of time. I also have an understanding with my family, “You can’t just come barging in any time you want to.” Like, if your spouse works in a doctor’s office, you’re not going to bounding into that office with the doctors with a client, or if it’s an attorney with someone.

So, we have to also honor the boundaries of the people we live with. And what a lot of people have done is to spread out their work on the kitchen table or in front of the TV, which, really, you have other family members who want to watch TV or have dinner. It’s not respectful for them. So, it’s really raising or a heightened awareness of boundaries so that you can function in these two different worlds that have collided, have come together.

Another thing is some days, when I’m working in my office at home, I realize there’s laundry that needs doing, the dog needs to be walked, there’s chocolate cake in the fridge, but I also know, when I think that, that, yes, that’s true but I’m in my office right now, so those things are not available to me. So, that’s just like a mental way of reminding myself to stay on track.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that, that mental habit there, “Yes, but I’m in my office and so those things are not available to me.” There you have it. And then to review that statistic, you said those who are working from home have a 40% increased probability of experiencing burnout? That’s the stat?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
That’s right, yeah. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That is big.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Burnout is cumulative stress. It’s not something that just happens. There’s a difference in stress and burnout. Stress, we can recall from. Burnout is more difficult. It’s when you get to the point that you’re exhausted, you lose your sense of meaning and purpose, and you’re not as motivated as you were, you’re exhausted. And it takes a while to get over. You can’t just say, “Okay, I’ll take a week off.” It takes some good time to get through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, then could you perhaps share with us a cool story of someone who figured this out, they made some good adjustments to boundaries, and saw some nice results?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, I can name a lot of people that I know, that I’ve worked with. One is Arianna Huffington, who started The Huffington Post, and in the throes of trying to get that off the ground, she’s written about this in her book so I’m not sharing anything that’s personal or private. She collapsed and hit her head against the desk, her face against the desk, broke her cheekbone and woke up in a pool of blood.

Alanis Morissette, who’s a friend of mine, also suffered what she calls nervous breakdowns because of overworking. It was a real problem that she’s had over the years. Overworking, by the way, or work addiction and hard work are not the same things. We often get those confused because people will often say to me, “What’s wrong with hard work?” That’s not what we’re talking about. Work addiction is when you can’t turn it off.

And to a lot of people, they don’t get it because they think, “Who wants to work all the time?” But, believe me, many people do, and there was a time in my life when I did. It wasn’t just the work. I was running away from something within me. I didn’t realize it. When I was a professor at the university, I had a weekend ahead of me with nothing planned, and it was terrifying.

So, really, it’s about knowing what’s going to happen, and it’s about control. So, what did I do? Well, if I were an alcoholic, I would go and I would get drunk, maybe. But I was not or am not an alcoholic but, as a workaholic, or someone who’s really addicted, it became my sense of medication. And so, I found the campus newsletter and saw that there was a call for grant. And when I wrapped that computer printout under my arm, now in retrospect, it was like an alcoholic putting a bottle under his arm and feeling calm because it gave me a sense of certainty, a sense of control.

Now, where does that come from? I’ve been studying cases, and I’ve done empirical research, and I’ve worked clinically with workaholics, and every workaholic I know of has a history that relates to of living in an environment where things are out of control, often alcoholism or drug abuse or just an unstable family. And one of the things they intuitively learned to do as a child is to take control by caring for a younger sibling, for doing homework and excelling, or just doing things.

As a kid, I remember writing the church Christmas play one Christmas. Now, not only did I write it. I directed it, I acted in it, I built the sets, everybody thought I was great but I didn’t know what I was doing except, now I know that it was my way to control an unwieldy home life that was out of control, that I couldn’t control.

So, these were the kinds of things that form or the foundation for a true workaholic. People tease about it but it’s a serious addiction. And in the research that I’ve done, it accounts for 40% of divorce. If you compare a workaholic marriage to a non-workaholic marriage, there’s a 40% higher divorce rate. And we know that children who grow up in a workaholic home not only have a serious depression and anxiety issues, but they also, compared to children of alcoholics, have a harder time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s heavy stuff. Thank you for sharing. And I’m curious, when you say you are a workaholic, if you can’t turn it off, and you are uncomfortable with the idea of, “I don’t know what I’m going to be doing. Ah, work, what a release,” I’m also curious, there are times I think when I am thinking about it a lot, it’s almost like that there’s an unsolved problem or case that I’m in the middle of, and it just keeps representing itself.

And I don’t know, it’s almost like, is there a distinction here? Is that sort of the same thing or a different thing? It sort of happens intermittently when there’s, like, a puzzle that is quite not solved, and the incompleteness of it keeps grabbing my attention over and over again.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
It depends on where you’re coming from. If you’re coming from a place of having to or striving or requiring yourself to fix it, that’s one of the forms of workaholism, that if you have this compulsive need to get it finished versus being curious. Curiosity, if I’m curious about something, that’s not work addiction.

But if I have this thought in my head, “You have to do this. You’ve got to get this done,” when, in fact, there are a few things that I have ever had to do, that’s more the pressure. That triggers what we call the sympathetic nervous system, the fight or flight. But if curiosity is coming more from what I call is what is known as the parasympathetic nervous system, or the rest and digest response, so it’s coming from a different place inside of us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Bryan, I’m just going to take a little curiosity break right now and ask how do you know all these famous people? What’s that? What went on there?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, they contacted me because they had read some of my work. So, Alanis Morrisette tells everybody that she worked with me. As a therapist, I don’t go out and broadcast who I work with, but she’s written about it and she talks about it, and people call me and say they want to work with me because they hear that I worked with her.

And Arianna and I worked together. I write for Thrive Global, which is her big thing now since she left Huffington Post. And I’ve written about a lot of different people. I write for Forbes, and so I’ve interviewed them, and so I’ve just heard. One of the things that I’ve learned as a therapist and having the privilege of being able to hear the internal system of people, and also interviewing people for Forbes, is we’re all struggling with something.

Everybody on this planet is struggling with something inside of us, some more serious than others. We don’t often talk about that because people are afraid that if they let other people know, they’ll be judged or they’ll be humiliated, but what’s happening more, especially well-known people, like Prince Harry or Alanis, Jewel, I’ve interviewed Jewel, talk about the hardships and how they got over them.

Then the more people realize they’re human, and what they’re going through is the human experience, and they don’t have to judge themselves because judgment throws you into a cycle of feeling worse. It’s like if you’re already suffering from something, and you judge yourself for it, that’s like fighting the fire department when your house is on fire, which adds insult to injuries.

So, one of my goals is to let people know some of my struggles, which I’m not ashamed of, but I’ve been able to get through them and land in a place that I really feel good about, which I’ll call my central command center, or the C mode. And there are 10 C words that will tell you you’re there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lay it on us.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Okay. Curiosity instead of judgment. This goes back to what I was saying. Most of us, if we fail or make a mistake, we have that little voice in our head that judges us, and that’s the worst thing that can happen. As you become more aware of that, and you go into curiosity, and say, “Why did I yell at her?” or, “Why did I throw that soup across the room at my husband?” or, “Why did I snap at my child?” then you can get to some understanding of who you are and why that happened instead of judging, so it doesn’t add insult to injury.

Calm versus anxiety. Well, we all want to be calmer, but yet we find that difficult because many of us are living such busy lives. But we know that cumulative anxiety creates health problems and early death, that’s a fact, a scientific fact. But if I can be calmer, I can be happier, I can be more productive, and I can live longer and have fewer health issues.

Clarity instead of confusion. If I have a mind that’s cluttered, it’s going to be more difficult for me to perform and to succeed. But if I have clarity and I understand what’s happening inside of me and why I do what I do, and if I have some understanding of why someone else maybe does what they do, then I can live more from a central command center, from that C mode.

Connection instead of isolation. We know that loneliness and isolation is a huge public health problem in this country. And the surgeon general, under both Obama and Biden, has pointed that out and written a book about it. So, connection is really healing for all of us. And people who are able to connect, especially in their older years, have fewer health problems, and, again, they live longer. These are all tied to longevity and happiness.

Compassion instead of cold-heartedness. Now, when I say compassion, I’m talking about caring about other people. And as I said before, all of us are struggling with something but we don’t really recognize that, we don’t see it, so we don’t know it, but it’s something we have to just…an awareness we need to carry with us so we can be kinder to people because we don’t know what they’re going through. But it’s also important that we’re kinder to ourselves.

One of the recent studies that has just come out that I find fascinating but I’m not surprised is that people who practice self-compassion have better cardiovascular systems. In other words, people who don’t practice self-compassion have higher cardiovascular risks. And they’ve actually studied the linings of the arteries to show this. This is not just somebody’s opinion. It’s a very rigid, highly scientific article. I’ve read the actual research itself. And I could talk about each one of these probably for an hour.

Then there’s, of course, confidence versus intimidation. You see so many books about confidence, but if I can really feel confident, that’s strength and that allows me to overcome just about anything. But if I’m intimidated, which is just another form of fear, or if I shrink in a situation, I’m going to be less successful and, of course, less happy.

And then there’s courage. Courage is really versus fear. Stick your neck out a little bit. If you stick your neck out, that’s how you grow, but a lot of us are afraid to stick their neck out, and it feels like we want to stay in a secure place, which is understandable. That’s the way the brain works. But if you stay in too comfortable a place, you don’t grow and you don’t succeed. And people do that and they never understand, “Why am I not happy? And why have I not been more successful?” Well, it’s because their minds have kept them stuck so they can be safe.

Then there’s creativity versus stagnation. Creativity comes from the central command center, which is the opposite of the inner critic. The critic, if anybody who’s creative knows about the inner critic, it tells you, “You can’t,” “You must,” “You should,” “You don’t know what you’re doing,” “You’re going to fail.” And so, then we recoil and we stay in our safe place. But if we stick our neck out, that’s where creativity comes from. We’ve learned we can do something different and reap the benefits.

And then there’s comedy versus drama. This whole thing of lightheartedness and laughter, we know the science. It makes us feel better and it lightens our load no matter what we’re dealing with. It makes us feel better. And then there’s celebration versus exhaustion. Celebration is when we’re grateful for what we have instead of focusing on what we don’t have.

So, celebrating our birthday, and rituals, and being with other people, that builds our life and makes us happier, and makes life worth living. So, those are the 10 Cs, if we want to live from a place of chill or a place of calm.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, those 10 Cs are associated with the chill and calm. And I do see how these things tend to hang together in terms of, “Okay, when I’m in the confident group, I’ve also more courage, I’m more brave, have more courage, and I’m more creative.”

Dr. Bryan Robinson
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
“And I’m more likely to laugh at stuff,” comedy. So, they hang together.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
They do.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we are on the opposite side of those 10 Cs, we are un-chill, we are uncalm. Because I’m wondering it sounds like maybe I have 10 gateways I might enter through to try to get over to the chill side of things. Or, what do you recommend?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
You’re absolutely right. They’re all connected, it’s like a big puzzle. Now, those C words, some people call it a higher state of mind, a higher form of living, but the ones you’re pointing out – cold heartedness, isolation, confusion – we call those parts in psychology. And they’re often protectors. They’re parts of us that take over and eclipse the C mode, and they’re trying to protect us from…they’re based on survival.

Fear, anxiety, worry, confusion, those are all actions that they want to keep us, I don’t want to say trapped, that’s not their goal. They’re survival parts that automatically come out that keep us safe. They respond to threats. So, we’re hardwired for those more negative parts. It takes a little bit of…you could call that a lower state of mind.

But it takes a little bit of awareness and understanding to live from those C words. So, it’s a higher state of living, and it takes practice and awareness. It’s not something that’s just going to happen. We have to pay attention and want to live from that place. Can I give you an example of what…?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
This is what got me out of the work addiction. This is what led me from the pit into more of an awareness. And I haven’t arrived anywhere. Believe me, I have my issues that I have to deal with like everybody else. I was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and the creative arts center invited Tibetan monks to come and perform on our campus.

So, what they do is they have these instruments and these beautiful costumes. It’s incredible entertainment. Well, we found that outside, right before the performance, there were a group of religious fundamentalists who were circling and with signs that said that Buddhists worship the devil and they’re evil and demonistic. And, of course, I was furious with these people because it was such a horrible way to welcome strangers to our campus.

But when the monks found out, they all went outside, and, at that point, the group was singing “Jesus loves me” with their hands in a circle. They joined hands and sang “Jesus loves me” with a smile on their face, a compassionate smile. And I remember thinking, “I want that. That’s what I would like to have,” because I was fuming and seeing that, and thinking, “How can they do that? I don’t get it.”

And it’s something I’ve aspired to, and I haven’t arrived anywhere but that set me out on a journey to live more from a better state of mind, and a healthier state of mind, and a longer state of mind, and it changed my life.

And I can tell you what I have discovered. I’ve kind of boiled it all down and have harnessed the three As that I practice every day.

So, if I have fear, or if I have anxiety, or if I have worry, or if there’s drama, or if I’m confused, first of all, I have to be aware because most of us don’t even realize we’re in one of those states because they’re so quick and we’re so used to swimming in the water we’re swimming in. So, awareness is the first A. And when I’m aware that I have worry, then I acknowledge it on the inside. And this is so different from what most of us do. Acknowledgement is the second A.

And the way I do that, and this is based on research, I focus on that, let’s say, the worry, and I talk to it like it’s a person, and I use third-party language. Now, this is all based on research. It used to be we’d say people who talk to themselves are crazy. Now, it’s one of the best therapeutic tools we have. And so, I’ll say, “Worry, oh, so you’re here. Okay, pull up a chair, let’s have a cup of tea or…” I prefer coffee.

Now, what I’m doing is I’m talking to it just like it’s a person who just walked in the door, “And so, tell me what’s going on.” And I’ll get a message, I’ll get an image, I’ll get words, or I may just get a sense of what that is, “Oh, I see. So, you’re worried about the MRI. Yeah, right. Well, that makes perfect sense to me.” Now, notice I’m not fighting it, I’m not debating it, I’m not steamrolling over it, I’m not ignoring it. That’s the worst thing you can do. I’m befriending it. I’m inviting it in.

As I do that, I start to feel calm. I’m curious. I’m compassionate with it. Now, that’s the own ramp. And the third A is allowing it to be there, allowing it because it’s protecting me. It’s saying, “Bryan, you need…something is going to happen, and you better get worried, you better get ready for this. This could be bad news,” so it’s not my enemy. Why would I want to fight it or ignore it? I want to appreciate it and welcome it in, and say, “Thank you for letting me know this but I got this.”

So, you feel a separation from it and you’re able to move forward with more of those C words. So, that’s the triple A that is the own ramp to some of these C words.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re aware, we acknowledge, and the third A is?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Allow. Allow it to be there. Don’t fight it. And there are actually two more that I don’t often tell people because it can be overwhelming. You can’t just get this overnight. You got to practice it. Like, if you go to the gym, your muscles are not going to build up unless you lift the weights. You got to do the work. If you practice this, you develop the muscle memory though.

So, the two more As is appreciation. If you practice this, after a while you’ll start to appreciate, “Wow, thank you for being there for me because I used to hate you or I used to fight you or resist you. But now I see how you’re trying to protect me, just like my ribcage protects my vital organs, and my cranium protects my brain.”

And then the final A is acceptance. And acceptance is when it goes really deeper into, yes, and it can be worry, it can be fear, it can be whatever, and you’re able to go then out once you worked inside. It’s an inside job, as we say. You’re able to go forward into an uncertain situation, a scary situation, public speaking or results of an MRI, or fear of a divorce, or somebody’s going to leave you that you love. It can be a myriad of different experiences, but it’s these Cs strengthen you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s cool. And so, when you say that’s the pathway, when you’re un-chill, work through the three or five As and return to chill.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Exactly. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
That’s my ticket.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s your ticket. That’s the one. All right. It’s funny, I was going to say, I was thinking at first when I heard the 10 Cs, so I could do any of them, it’s like I’ll just watch something funny and then I’ll return to chill. Is that also accurate?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Yeah. I was talking to someone today and we’re going to be doing a podcast, actually, and so she and I are going to do it together, and she said, “Oh, I got this great guy, and he wrote this great book, and, oh, it’s fabulous. You’ve got to read it and we got to have him on.” And then you could go on the dark side, but then she said, “But then I found out that he was dead.”

And we laughed but not because he was dead but just because of the absurdity of it. So, you can bring comedy to a situation, or you can go on down the dark path. We have a choice of what we want to focus on. And that’s true of any of these C words. You have a choice on, “Do you want to focus on cold heartedness or compassion?” Cold-heartedness is a protector. If I’m coldhearted, that’s a part of me, it’s not even me. It’s like my skeletal system. I have a cranium and I have a sternum. Well, cold-heartedness is protecting me from being hurt because I’ve been hurt before.

So, if you look at each one of these that’s on the opposite side, they’re all protecting us. We just don’t stop to think about it that way. But in protecting us, they keep us stuck. They trap us and we don’t realize it but we can get ourselves unstuck if we look at those Cs, and each person listening just says, “Which one of those would I like to build up?” And you can make that a goal for this coming week.

One of the things I did, only because I wanted to practice some of these, at the beginning of 2023, well, my only resolution was I’m going to do one kind deed a day, especially for somebody I don’t know, a stranger. And, boy, has that helped me. It’s helped me, first of all, become more compassionate with people I don’t know instead of making snap judgments.

And some of the things I’ve done is bought groceries for people. I do that a lot. When I can tell they don’t have much money or they forgot their credit card one day, and I said, “Forget it, I’ll pay for that.” And it makes me feel good. Or, I’ll hold a door for somebody. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. It doesn’t have to be money.

But if you want to be more compassionate, think of little things you can do for somebody, or just compliment somebody. Our mind tends to go into the negative because we are born with what’s called a negativity bias for survival but we can offset that by starting to look at, “Wow, gosh, you look beautiful today.” I found myself saying things I would never have said to people 10 years ago, and it feels good to me, and it feels light, and you get smiles and people look at you, and you feel connected to the world.

So, you’re right, you do one and then you feel these other Cs coming in along with that one C that you started with. We often say curiosity is the gateway because it’s easier to get to. If I can just be curious about, let’s say somebody snaps at me. My automatic reaction is going to be to snap back or to maybe call them a name.

But if I pay attention to that space, there’s always a little space in there before I react, I might say, “Now, how do I really want to be?” And I might think, “Well, she’s having a hard day,” or, “She’s misunderstood what I meant.” So, if I can just take a second before I react to that, I feel like I’ve just hit a homerun. It’s a great feeling to be able to stay in your central command center and respond from that place instead of from that protector.

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, I will say that, I’d said earlier, I didn’t know how to get to where the monks were, and I still am not where they are. I can’t promise that I’m always going to be in the C spot, or the C mode, I call it. And I always tell people, “If you see me pounding the steering wheel and I’m stuck in traffic, I’m human. I’m just like everybody else, but I don’t judge myself if I get angry. I don’t judge myself if I’m scared. I don’t judge myself if I feel stagnated.” I’ll allow that to be and acknowledge it, which paradoxically shifts me over into the C mode.

So, the thing to watch out for is judgement is such a quick thing that our parts do to protect us that it can be there before you realize it. So, just know that curiosity is the gateway, and practice that for a little bit, and be curious before you react, and watch what happens. It’s amazing. It will change your life.

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, my favorite quote is by Viktor Frankl, that everything we’ve been saying relates to. Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning. He was in Dachau and Auschwitz, and his wife and he were separated. She was sent to the chamber, she was burned. He didn’t know that but with people dropping dead around him, and him starving and literally no clothes, knowing he could die any minute, he made a vow to himself, “One thing they can never take from me is my will.”

And so, the quote that I think about all the time, and that I love to share with people, because none of us are in the Holocaust, hopefully. We’re trapped in other ways inside because of the way we think or because of what’s happened to us. The quote is, “Between the stimulus and the response,” the stimulus meaning the event that happens, and how I react to it, “there’s a space.” Most of us run real shadow with that space. But if we start to be aware that there’s a space, and we take that pause, then we have a choice. We realize we have a choice.

And in that space, when I make the choice, I’m free. I can never be trapped by anybody or anything. So, the quote is, “Between the stimulus and the response, there is a space. And in that space, we have a choice. And when we choose, we are free.”

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share a favorite study or bit of research?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, there are two. One is about Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan, who did the study on self-regulation that shows people who speak to themselves in the third person versus people who speak using “I” pronoun, perform better.

And it’s incredibly scientific experiment that he did showing how when I say, “Bryan,” or “You,” instead of “I,” I separate out from the me, and I have more, like, a bird’s eye view of what I’m doing. It’s almost like somebody else is talking to me. And I have less anxiety and I have more confidence. That’s one. And the other is the study I mentioned earlier about self-compassion and how that leads to better self-care and lower cardiovascular disease.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dr. Bryan Robinson
I guess my favorite book, there’s so many, but Huckleberry Finn, I read it as a kid. I could read it tomorrow and just love it. I love Mark Twain.

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, I’m going to go back to self-talk. It’s something that has really helped me separate out from those negatives that I mentioned earlier. Because when I talk to myself, it gives me an objective, I zoom out and I’m able to see the whole picture instead of just the myopic view that I had.

So, self-talk, in a way, it’s a certain way of self-talk though. It’s like I use my name, “Bryan, you know you can do this,” or, I say, “You know what, have you thought about this?” It’s almost like there’s someone else talking to me, and it widens my perspective, and it helps me see potential instead of just the problem.

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Yeah, it’s something I borrowed from John F. Kennedy. Some people listening may not remember this, but he had a famous quote that said, “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” And so, I borrowed that and changed it a little bit, and it’s, “Ask not how life is treating you. Ask how are you treating life.”

And what that means is we all have curve balls coming at us. That’s what life is. It’s joyful, there are wonderful things but we’re all going to have things happen to us that we don’t want. But what do we do that? Instead of focusing on, “Ain’t it awful? And ain’t it terrible? And, oh, my God, you won’t believe what happened to me,” which is what we tend to do, and that’s okay.

But if you can add to that, or flip it, and say, “So, what am I going to do with this? How can I turn this into something that will make my life better or benefit me? And how can I live from a higher state of mind as a result of this?”

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, my website is BryanRobinsonBooks.com. And so, they can, from that, find out how to get in touch with me. And they can also read more about some of the work I’ve done, the articles I’ve written for Forbes, and some of the books I’ve written, and even there are some films on there, and even see the pilot, the novel that’s called Limestone Gumption is on there, so.

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

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Well, what I’d ask everybody to do is, based on that last quote, because right now, people listening to this are struggling with certain things – fear, grief, anger – and that’s okay. That’s our humanity. But how can you flip that? For example, I can focus on my shortcomings but what are my tall comings? Pete, I don’t know if I ask you to list your tall comings, you might immediately think, “Well, I can do my shortcomings in a flash,” but you have to think a little bit about those tall comings sometimes.

Tall comings are just the opposite. It’s like what are you creative at? What are you good at? What are you talented at? What are your qualities that people are drawn to you for? That’s one. And have more green time with your screen time. So, I call it flipping, have a to-be list with your to-do list. If you’d focus on the negative and flip it, there’s always a positive side. You can’t have an up without a down. You can’t have a right without a left.

So, if we just teach ourselves to look more on the positive, and that’s not ignoring the negative, it’s adding to it. It’s seeing the whole picture. It can make a huge difference in our lives, in our health, and our longevity. We know that for a fact.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Bryan, this has been a treat. Thank you for this. I wish you much luck with all your chilling.

Dr. Bryan Robinson
Thank you. Appreciate it. It’s been great being with you, Pete.

Aug 14
0

890: The Five Laws to Asking for What You Want with Laura Fredricks

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Laura Fredricks shares battle-tested tips to confidently ask for what you want.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to respond to “I’ll think about it.”
  2. Why you want to talk only 25% of the time
  3. Persuasion pitfalls to avoid

About Laura

Laura Fredricks is an author, speaker, and consultant who trains and coaches individuals, businesses, and nonprofits. Her latest book is Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want. Through her previous six books, Fredricks has helped hundreds of global executives, industry trailblazers, marketing and communication leaders, boards, fundraisers, entrepreneurs, teenagers, artists, philanthropists, and everyday people achieve their best professional and personal lives possible.

Since 2005, Fredricks also has taught at New York University School of Professional Studies.

Resources Mentioned

Laura Fredricks Interview Transcript

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

Laura Fredricks
Welcome, welcome, to you, too, Pete. Glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat about your book, Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want. It sounds super useful. But, first, I want to hear, as the ask expert, what are some of the wildest asks that you’ve come across in your days?

Laura Fredricks
It was two kids that wanted a dog and parents weren’t having it. They weren’t having it. So, I came across them and they came to me, and, of course, they’re doing all the stuff. So, I said, “What are you doing?” “Oh, we’re making the bed where the dog could go, and then we’re baking cakes for them, have the dog get them.” And they were doing all these extraneous stuff. It was hysterical.

So, I said, “Well, one thing you could do is wake up early every morning as if you’re going to walk the dog, because you know what’s on your parents’ mind. We’re going to get the dog and we’re going to be taking care of it.” I said, “Sure, you’re responsible so wake up early. Get that powder and go. And then you got to ask for the dog. You can’t just keep saying, ‘I want a dog. I want a dog.’ That’s not an ask.”

“Say, ‘Look, mom and dad, we wake up early every morning. We’ll take care of the dog. This is really important to us. We think it’s going to be great for the family. Can we go out this Saturday and look for a dog? Please, it’s important.’” And they did, they got the dog, and away we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Laura Fredricks
I did something sneaky in there, Pete. It’s all what we’re going to talk about. Every ask, two sentences, and a question.

Pete Mockaitis
That is absolutely something I’m going to ask you about. It’s funny because I can imagine this is in my future. Our kids have made reference to wanting a dog.

Laura Fredricks
It’s coming.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans when it comes to asking during the course of your research and career and writing on this stuff?

Laura Fredricks
A lot. And this is the number one thing. Confidence wins the day. The more confident you are, the more likely you are to get what you ask for. I get this ask all the time, Pete, “Do women make better askers? Do men make better askers? If you’re at the top of your field, does that make you a better asker?” It’s all about confidence. And so, one of the things I try to do is create confidence in preparation first, and then actually asking. But you will get more of what you want by just a confident delivery.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I was going to ask specifically how you define confidence. So, you say a delivery that comes across as confident.

Laura Fredricks
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, whether you believe you deserve it or whatever is not so much relevant?

Laura Fredricks
No, it is. Because when you believe it, you deserve it, you look confident, there’s no way you can look any other way. So, that is the stepping stone to being confident. You have to be 100% sure that this is what you want, what you need, and what you deserve.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There we go. Now, let’s dig into the book, Hard Asks Made Easy: How to Get Exactly What You Want. What’s sort of the big idea or main thesis here?

Laura Fredricks
There are five laws of asking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Laura Fredricks
I can walk you through them if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, let’s do it.

Laura Fredricks
Good. So, I always like to do it this way. Pete, tell me one thing that you need this week or this month.

Pete Mockaitis
I need my team to chug ahead on, frankly, a pretty boring, repetitive project.

Laura Fredricks
Okay. Okay. Good. So, here we go. And that’s a good one because I just did an interview with someone, actually, which is really exciting, and she needed more sponsors for her show, so we walked through that one, which was great. But this is asking a team to keep going even though it’s not exactly exciting work. Did I get that right?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm.

Laura Fredricks
Okay. So, here we go, Pete. Law number one, know exactly what you want with numbers and dates. So, knowing that, how would you ask your team? Numbers and dates.

Pete Mockaitis
I need all 890 of these episodes converted over for dynamic ad insertion by September 25th.

Laura Fredricks
There we go. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Okay. Notice you didn’t say, “By fall,” “By the end of the summer,” by whatever. That, really, “Now, I’m crystal clear of what we need to do. I’m your team member. I’ve got a good idea.” Good. Now, law number two, stay with me, write the old-fashioned way, or type it on your phone but it has to be brain to physical here, 15 things your team is going to say to you.

So, I’ll help you out. “Don’t have that kind of time,” “Can’t make that deadline,” “Why do you need it by that date?” “What’s in it for me?” “Do I get extra pay?” “I’ve got these other tasks to do,” “Where is this on my priority list?” Okay, I just gave you seven. Now you fill in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, my team is so fantastic that I think they’ll probably say, “Oh, hey, well, we’ll try. I mean, yeah, we’re going to do our best but I don’t know. I mean, that’s kind of a short deadline.”

Laura Fredricks
“Well, what happens if we don’t make the deadline?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Laura Fredricks
Okay. “Can we get extra help if we don’t make the deadline?” “Once that’s done, what else am I getting?” You get the point, 15 things. And we do this because of this reason. The number one reason people don’t ask, it’s not to hear, everyone here knows it’s not fear of rejection. It’s they’re afraid they’re going to hear a response they’re not prepared for.

And so, law number two, get you prepared. First step is 15 things you think they’re going to say, and then you go back, and what will you respond to each of them. That gets you right into the beginning of the show we talked about, law number three – deliver with confidence. Now, your listeners can’t see but every time I do an important interview, like the one we’re doing now, I stand. You’re standing, too. Why? It’s confident. No one exists in my universe right now other than you, Pete. Nobody.

Pete Mockaitis
Why thank you. Felt good.

Laura Fredricks
My voice is up, my energy is great, this is it, but people just step over this, like, “Oh, I got this. I’m good. I know my boss.” Just like you said, “My team is great. They love me. We love them. It’s all fine.” But we’re not delivering with confidence.

Law number four. Clarify what you think you heard. So, let’s say, one of the responses, which is very common, not that your team would give it to you, but let’s say they do, “Oh, Pete, you know, I got to think about it.” What would you say?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I suppose when I’m thinking about something, usually, there’s something pretty specific under the surface that I need to think about in terms of, like, “Well, I’m wondering if I have that capacity given that there is a vacation scheduled.” And so, often “think about” really means gather some more information and do some research to bring a little bit more certainty to an unknown.

Laura Fredricks
Right. So, the thing about that, which is a very common response which we’ll have to prepare for, is your only job is to find out the “it.” What is the it? Now, you went down and said, “There’s research. There’s something to contemplate on,” there’s always something. But you need to find out in that moment what it is.

So, anyone hears I have to think about it, this is what you say to your team member, “Thanks so much for sharing. This is great.” This is my words, use whatever, “To the extent you feel comfortable, can you share with me what you’re thinking about?” And here’s the most important part, “I’m here to help you,” and you bring it back in. It’s not I threw something at you, you threw a response back, time is going to take care of it. There we go.

“To the extent you feel comfortable, can you share with me what you’re thinking about? I’m here to help you.” And you know what? They tell you. And exactly the reason might be that you just said, “Well, you know, here we are. It’s August 3rd, I have the last two weeks of August off. I don’t think I can make the September deadline.” And now we know what it is. It’s the timing.

It could be, “Well, I’ve done 90% of this project. I don’t think I should do any more. I think this other teammate should do it because I did 90% of it.” You don’t know what the “it” is, so figure out the “it.” And then law number five, and this is very important, right there and then, plan your next move while you’re talking about it.

Because if it’s, “That’s great. Go back. Think about it. We’ll circle back. August 3rd will be closed.” August 15th becomes August 30th, and too much time goes by. So, you could say, “Great. Work it out with your teammate. Friday 10:00 o’clock, let’s meet again and finalize this.” And now you’ve taken a big topic and you’ve condensed it, and you’re going to get an answer in a short amount of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. There we have it. The big idea is those five laws, and you just laid out what are those five laws. And I think the part that’s vibing for me the most is the idea of we fear more getting a surprise question that we can’t answer than we do getting a no. And I think that resonates, well, for me. I guess maybe you’re suggesting it’s universal.

Because if I get a question I don’t know the answer to, I feel, I don’t know what the word is. I feel kind of like a loser in terms of, “Okay, guys. So, you’re coming in here asking for a special favor, and then in reply, I have a very basic clarifying question to ask of you, and you have no idea. That feels kind of disrespectful to me who’s being asked that you don’t have your act together. And so, that’s what I’m feeling.”

Laura Fredricks
It does. It does. And, also, like you said the word, surprise is correct. I always say, “You don’t want to have that deer-in-the-headlights look, like whatever.” That’s why I did law number two of writing down the 15 things because you’re pretty much going to hit the parameter of where it is. And many people in leadership positions, this is the reason why they don’t ask.

Think about it. You don’t get to be CEO, you don’t get to be in the C-suite, you don’t get to be the VP out of the sky. You’re prepared, you’re good, you’re knowledgeable. You’re the one to have that role, and a lot of times they don’t step up and ask for that same reason.

Pete Mockaitis
Because if you’re the vice president of whatever, and you ask the CEO, and the CEO asks you a sensible question, and you’re like, “Ugh, I have no idea,” then you’re sort of worried, like, “Uh-oh, maybe I’m not going to be the next CEO because the CEO now thinks I’m dumb and unprepared.”

Laura Fredricks
You’re supposed to know it. You feel judged.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And I suppose when you do these 15 things, you can have the polished version of “I don’t know” at your disposal.

Laura Fredricks
Well, what you can do, and I recommend to everyone, like use this as a positive moment. We’re kind of on audio here but the visual matters. When you hear something you don’t like, normally, your body language tanks and you just give it away. Just say, “You know what, that’s a great question. Let me circle back. How about Friday 2:00 o’clock? I’ll have the answer. We’ll go from there.” Use it to your advantage. Use it as a leverage point. Don’t let that take you away. If response number 16 came and you weren’t ready, keep that list. That becomes number 16.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I like the clear formulations here. So, we got our five laws. You’ve also got three rules and a formula. So, let’s hear these, too.

Laura Fredricks
Yes, I do. Well, these all came from… asking has always been left from luck, chance, and time. If I ask enough people, one person is going to say yes. If I spend so much time with Pete, he’s going to naturally know what I want. And that’s how asks had gone, and I said, “I have to put organization, structure, and focus because when people have a path, they’ll follow it, and they’ll do it. Without steps, they’re not going to do it.”

So, my three rules, which are pretty easy but you’ve got to follow them, is be prepared, be personable, be present. And the preparation is what we did in the second law, but it’s also beyond doing your research. Really get to know a person. This comes to play when people want another job and they want to network, and they want to find a reference, and they want to find someone who might be in the company that they’re about to go in, where they’re a candidate for.

So, first of all, if someone is going to say, “Hey, I know this person, and it might be good for you. I kind of know them, kind of don’t,” there’s a lot of questions you need to ask, “Do you know anything about them? Do you know their interests, how they like to be communicated with? Are they kind of a person who is relaxed, likes jokes, very formal?”

All that stuff you can gather, makes you prepared for when you want to use that person as a reference should you ever become one of the top candidates. Just be prepared. I think people step over, it’s like, “I know Pete. He’s a good guy. The conversation will go well.” It won’t. Be prepared.

Second is be personable. And what I mean by this is, it’s one of my mantras that I love, your tone is as important as your words. Everyone who comes to me, it’s like, “What’s the right words? What’s the magical formula to ask?” And I can do that, but I always practice with them, “How do you sound? Take your phone, record your voice. Do you like it? Are you using one or two words way too much?” Your tone is as important as your words.

And then the last is be present. And I say listening with presence matters so much. Now, it’s gotten a little bit easier since a lot of us still do a lot of communication on Zoom, so we can look at our computer screen and focus. And you’ve prepared all your guests like me, to have no distractions, cellphone off, landline off, windows closed, the whole bit. The same applies when you’re going to ask. You have to be present. Nobody exists but the person you’re asking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And can you also share with us the 75% to 25% rule?

Laura Fredricks
Yes. That gets to listening with presence. How many times, think back, that you had a conversation or even someone asked you where they’re overtalking it, they’re selling it, they’re pitching it, they’re selling it again? And by the end of the conversation, you don’t know if you’re supposed to think about something, you don’t know if you’re supposed to respond to something, and it was a great conversation but you’re kind of clueless.

So, I say, especially when you’re in the ask, it has to be they talk 75, you talk 25, which gets us to the ask formula of two sentences and a question. You end on a question so that the person you ask speaks next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, two sentences and a question, and the goal there is that you’re not overtalking, and they do the next speaking, as opposed to dead silence, “Okay, now what?” So, can you give us a few examples of sentence, sentence, question, sentence, sentence, question?

Laura Fredricks
Sure. Sure. There’s a person I knew who wanted, she was the vice president and the CEO position came up. She’s in Colorado and she contacted me. And, again, people can go too heavy on what they accomplished so that they should naturally rise to the next position. And I said, “Listen, let’s do this in preparation. Let’s frame your interview. Let’s frame your ask. Go in there, and here we go.”

First always, “Thank you for your time. This is great. It’s a wonderful opportunity and I’m really looking forward to it” sentence number one.” Number two, “I’m here today to share with you my three points of taking this company to the next level in the next year,” sentence number two. Question, “Is this a good time to talk about it? I’m really excited about it.”

So, this is a job interview. Now, what did I do? Two sentences and a question. We’re going to get to asking for the job in a minute but I like this prep first. I like saying, “I have three things to share with you,” because what does that do, Pete? That means I’m waiting for number one, I’m waiting for number two, I’m waiting for number three. It focuses the conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Laura Fredricks
Now, we’ve advanced why I am going to be the best CEO because I’ve already thought of how we’re going to advance the company. Listen to the back and forth, they’re going to talk about the stuff. And so, at the very end, saying, “I hope I’ve answered all your questions. This is so important to me in my career,” and here we go, “I’m asking you now to consider me as the next CEO. Can you do that?”

Nobody asks for the job. They talk around it. But when you ask for it, there’s laser focus that you are the person who really wants this. You’ve put a lot of time and energy into it. You’re going to advance us and you actually asked for the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. “Can you do that?” and they’re like, “Sure. I can think about that.” Or, I guess they’ll say, “Well, no, actually, someone else is going to get it. So, sorry about that.”

Laura Fredricks
And that’s fine but at least you planted a major seed that this is something they really, really want, especially if you’re moving up in the company. There can be way too many assumptions that, “They know me. They’ve seen my work. We’ve gone out. They know my plan,” and when it comes to this moment, you have to treat it as if they kind of know you, kind of don’t, but you have to be the person who asks for the job because you want the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you give us another demonstration of the two sentences then question?

Laura Fredricks
Sure. Sure. Let’s go back to the interview I just did. The woman said, “I need more sponsors,” which we know from law number one is not an ask. I said, “Give me an example.” She wanted Coca-Cola to be a sponsor for 25,000 by September 1st. Okay, that’s what we wanted. Okay, it was kind of a framed ask. It could be any sponsor. It could be a local bank. It could be whatever but we used Coca-Cola because everyone knows it.

So, anyway, we go in and say, “You know what, first of all, what’s in it in for them?” “I’ve studied your company, and a lot of people tune into my podcast, and I think this can be a tremendous partnership. What I’d like to talk to you today is about Coca-Cola being a $25,000 sponsor by September 1st. Can we talk about it now? What else do you need to know before you make this important decision?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, they’re clear on, “Well, here’s what I need. I need to know your demographics, your dah, dah, dah.”

Laura Fredricks
Precisely. You’re right down the runway, “It’s 25,000 by September 1st.” And then you get into everything else. Here we go, “I’m not the decision-maker. The budget is over. We don’t support podcasts.” Then you get into the 15 things, and you’re going to respond.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And let’s do one more example.

Laura Fredricks
So, there’s a lot of people that need more personal time now or through the end of the year, or they want a promotion, or they want a raise, but I’m going to go with personal time because more people are coming to me, that’s as important as raises and promotions.

So, here we go. And when you speak to your boss, you’ve got to remember, they don’t remember how much vacation personal time you have. I think they think it’s emblazoned in there, like, an Excel spreadsheet but they don’t know. So, go in there and say, “You may be aware or not that I have 10 personal days in calendar year 2023. I’d like to ask for three more personal days that I can use in September. And if we have to count them against my 24 time, that’s okay. Is this something that you’re ready to decide now? How can I help you make this decision?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there we have it. Well, so I like that we got right into a lot of the pro tips on the formulation of the ask. Can we maybe back up a little bit and talk a bit about that asking reluctance. We talked about the fear of not knowing what to say. You’ve also formulated what you call two devils and three temptations when it comes to asking. What are these?

Laura Fredricks
Well, the two devils are assumptions and expectations, and that can just sabotage, even your thinking, about asking. So, there’s a lot of assumptions. Let’s go back to the person who wants to be CEO. They can do a lot of assumptions of, “I’ve been here X amounts of years. I’ve taken this company here. Everybody knows me.” And, like, in what we ever say, “It’s going to be a slam dunk,” but that’s way too much assumptions.

Or, “The more time I spend with someone, the more likely they are to know that I want their business.” This happens a lot in sales, a lot in real estate, “Take the person out for a thousand times, and they know that that person is going to buy the house from them.” Assumptions. Wipe it away.

Expectations. This comes a lot in personal relationships, especially, when we expect someone to know, “You need to clean the house more.” We expect someone to know, “It’s your turn to do food shopping.” We expect someone to know, “We have been on vacation. We’re going to take the biggest one we ever have.” Wipe away expectations and assumptions. You do need to ask and you can’t rely on those two.

And then my three devils, I mentioned them before, and they surface all the time: luck, chance, time. “If I ask,” and I hate this, “ten people, one person will give me investment.” Chance, “Well, my chances are pretty good because I just went out with them last time, and they’re going to know, and they’ll just do it, but I’m going to take my chances. I’ll sit back and wait.” And time, fall back on the other one, “The more time I spend with people, the more naturally they’re going to know what happens, and I don’t have to ask. It’s just going to happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, tell me, Laura, any final things you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Laura Fredricks
Yes, there’s a couple things that I like. Just keep in mind, anytime you ask, it’s a conversation, and anytime you ask, it’s an opportunity. A lot of times, people can ask because they feel like they’re taking something away, the person is going to have less than they had before, but always think it’s an opportunity. They’re going to say yes, no, maybe, move on, but I’m guaranteeing you, if you don’t, there’s someone right behind you who’s going to ask that person. So, remember, it’s an opportunity.

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

Laura Fredricks
“The quality of your life depends on the quality of questions you ask yourself and others.” I made that up and I like it. It’s my guiding principle.

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

Laura Fredricks
I look a lot towards two things – The Chronicle of Philanthropy, Advancing Philanthropy, just because I know the mindset of people with a lot of money, what they’re doing with it, why they’re giving it, why they’re not because that comes up in a lot of asks. Most asks have a monetary element to it, so I monitor those two. And, also, I’m an avid reader, I read The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post every day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Laura Fredricks
To Kill a Mockingbird hands down. It’s my favorite book then. It’s my favorite book now. and, Pete, one of the wonderful things is I got a chance to see Jeff Daniels be featured as Atticus here in New York City. And what’s so wonderful and sometimes terrifying is that the lines, the original lines from the book, in the play made people gasp because they’re timeless. We’re still dealing with these issues. And so, to write that kind of book and still have it so relevant so many decades later is just amazing.

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

Laura Fredricks
A couple because I’m on the road a lot, I use Egnyte because then I can access any of the documents I have, any of the press releases, on and on, and I like that a lot. Oh, my MailChimp, I could not live without that because that gets out my newsletter. And if anyone wants to be on my newsletter, it’s laura@expertontheask. Send me your email and I will put you on. I do a newsletter once a month, and it’s called 2S 1Q, two sentences and a question.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Laura Fredricks
So, those are my best. And then I invest in a lot of good lighting because it’s sometimes very difficult in a New York condo to get the right lighting, so I always invest in good lighting.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Laura Fredricks
Read The New York Times religiously every morning, and my other two, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post because external forces govern internal decisions. You have to know what’s going on locally, regionally, nationally, internationally because they affect every ask you can do, won’t do, or need to do. And I also want to know what’s on people’s minds when people are asking. People don’t think about your ask in an incubator. They know what’s going on in the world and it’s on their mind so you have to be prepared for that.

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

Laura Fredricks
I gave one before, “The ask is a conversation,” “Your tone is as important as your words,” and, “Listen with presence.”

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

Laura Fredricks
Two ways ExpertOnTheAsk.com or simply my name LauraFredricks.com.

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

Laura Fredricks
Make more asks. Don’t hold back. Use the five laws. Honestly, they really, really work. Be prepared. Be personable. Be present.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with all your asks.

Laura Fredricks
Thank you. Likewise, my friend.

Aug 10
0

889: Deploying Your Unique Problem-Solving Strengths with Cheryl Strauss Einhorn

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Cheryl Einhorn provides tools to improve your decision-making skills.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key to countering bias in decision-making
  2. The five Problem Solver Profiles–and which one you are
  3. How to work with different types of decision-makers

About Cheryl

Cheryl Strauss Einhorn founded Decisive, a decision sciences company that trains people and teams in complex problem solving and decision-making skills using the AREA Method. AREA is an evidence-based decision-making system that uniquely controls for and counters cognitive bias to expand knowledge while improving judgment. Cheryl developed AREA during her two decades as an award-winning investigative journalist writing for publications ranging from The New York Times and Foreign Policy Magazine to Barron’s and The Stanford Social Innovation Review. Cheryl teaches at Cornell University and has authored three books Problem Solved, A Powerful System for Making Complex Decisions with Confidence and Conviction, about personal and professional decision-making, and Investing In Financial Research, A Decision-Making System for Better Results about financial and investment decisions. Her new book about Problem Solver Profiles, Problem Solver, Maximizing Your Strengths To Make Better Decisions, was published in March 2023 by Cornell University. Learn more by watching her Ted talk and visiting areamethod.com.

Resources Mentioned

Cheryl Einhorn Interview Transcript

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

Cheryl Einhorn
Thank you. So good to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to talk about your book, Problem Solver, and get some more insights into problem-solving goodies. But one problem I understand you’ve been working to solve for years is the perfect spice cookie. What’s the story here?

Cheryl Einhorn
Oh, I’m always experimenting. They say that cooking is an art and baking is a science, so that means that you can keep experimenting until you find what you think is just right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say spice cookie, what spices are we talking about here?

Cheryl Einhorn
Oh, I really throw in the kitchen sink. I like a lot of ginger. I think ginger is, like, this secret ingredient. And then a little bit of cayenne and all sorts of nuts thrown in so you get really good texture.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you go with the spice ginger or the powder ginger? Sorry, not spice, the fresh ginger or the…yeah.

Cheryl Einhorn
No, no, I like the fresh ginger. I like the fresh ginger, and I think something that people don’t appreciate enough is that you actually don’t have to peel it. The peel is actually good for you.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, I do recommend cleaning that first, but make sure that you leave that on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve already blown my mind about one minute into the interview, so this bodes well for the future. You don’t have to peel your ginger. Who knew? Okay. Well, talking about your book, Problem Solver, any particularly extra-surprising or fascinating or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about problem-solving while putting this together?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, absolutely, because what the research talks about is that there are five dominant ways that people approach their decisions, and that each of these different decision-making archetypes, I call them problem-solver profiles, and that’s why my book is called Problem Solver, each of them has some beautiful strengths but each of them also is correlated to a couple specific cognitive biases.

Those mental mistakes that can impede clear thinking and, therefore, each of them is actually optimizing for different things in their decisions. And if we can learn about which problem-solver is ours, we can better understand why we engage with our decisions in the way that we do, what kind of information do we think is important for making a decision, and we can also learn how to make better decisions with others based on understanding the other problem-solver profiles that are not our own.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Cheryl, this is exciting stuff and I’m eager to almost just dive in, table format, what’s the archetype, what are they optimizing for, what’s their strengths, what’s their bias. But maybe before we get to that level of meat, could you first share what’s at stake in terms of if we are great at problem-solving versus just okay at problem-solving, if we really know our archetype and we’re dialed into it versus we are just blissfully unaware of that knowledge?

Cheryl Einhorn
I think it’s a great question. The only thing that we truly have agency over in our lives are our decisions. And so, our decisions are the data of our lives. If we feel confident as decision-makers, if we have conviction that our decisions can move us forward into our good future, we can have a greater sense of wellness and of resilience. We can take on bigger challenges, and we feel like we can move through our day more easily.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Do you have any cool stories of someone who learned some of your stuff and was able to upgrade their decision-making, problem-solving to see some cool results?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, absolutely. My company, Decisive, we work with decision-makers around the world. And what we’ve found is that, as we begin to work with almost anybody, whether it is somebody who would like to help their aging parents find the right house or housing accommodation as they age, or whether it is somebody who’s thinking about starting their own business, as people learn their problem-solving skills and feel better about what actually is a quality decision-making process, they feel better about themselves, and they feel like they can reach their goals and their dreams.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Any particular goals and dreams reached that was super inspirational?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, we recently worked with a team that had been together, a senior leadership team, at an organization, a big international company, and what they had found is they had been working together for so long that they had sort of fallen into certain habits and patterns where they had some preconceived notions about who they can work well with, and who they kind of wanted to go around.

And by working together to uncover these problem-solver profiles, they now really felt like they could reduce their friction and work better together because they understood why each person was approaching a decision a certain way, why they were asking the questions they were. They weren’t being sluggish, or slow, or confrontational, but they needed to understand certain parts of the process in order for them to feel confident in the decision that they were making, and it really amplified and reignited what this team could do together and for the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Cheryl, I’m curious, in terms of our direction here, do you think it would be worthwhile to provide a refresher on the AREA Method for those who missed our first interview or do you think we can jump right into the archetypes?

Cheryl Einhorn
I’d be happy to give a refresher. So, AREA is an acronym for my system of complex decision-making that uniquely controls or counters cognitive bias so that we can expand our knowledge while improving our judgment. And, basically, it’s an order of operations where the A, absolute, gets up close on the target of your decision, the R, relative, then puts that decision into the broader context and collects information from related sources.

E, exploration upgrades your research beyond documents to identify good people and ask them great questions, it’s interviewing. Then AREA exploitation is a series of creative exercises to test your evidence against your assumptions. This is a new piece of decision-making which really helps you to strength-test your decisions.

And then the final A, analysis, helps you think about failure, which is so important because if you can identify how and where your decision could fail, you can shore up and prevent that weakness and also have a signpost to tell you when something is going awry in the execution phase, and when you might need to make a new decision.

So, that is just a brief summary of the AREA Method as an end-to-end system for complex problem-solving that includes all of the different perspectives, and really helps you to end up with a decision that has a good chance of succeeding.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cheryl, that’s lovely. Thank you. So, we’re all situated there. And now, okay, so we talked about cognitive biases a couple times. Now, I am familiar with this term and I find them so fascinating. I, one time, in my prior home in Chicago, had this beautiful poster, the Cognitive Bias Codex. Maybe you’ve seen it. It’s got a brain in the middle, and then it’s just nicely sorted, like all these cognitive biases.

I think they’re, like, over 150 into segments. It was lovely but it didn’t successfully make it through the move but we’ll link to that in the show notes for anybody who wants to buy this beautiful piece of art. But what is a cognitive bias?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, basically, it’s a heuristic. It is a mental pathway, a way of thinking that actually can help us to make the many small decisions that we have during the day but that don’t go away when we’re solving for complex problems. Let me give you a couple examples of things I think we all do. One is the liking bias. We tend to overweight information that comes from somebody that we like. Or the planning fallacy, which is even if we’ve done a task before, we may believe that it can be done faster than actually the number of steps and the time that it takes.

Or, another one is the confirmation bias where we look to confirm a favored hypothesis instead of thinking about disconfirming data which has far more diagnosticity. So, those are just a couple of examples of how we sort of move through the world to help us go a little faster but they don’t necessarily help us to really be present in the moment to think about the decision that we’re actually facing on its own.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. That’s good. And I pulled up the image of the Cognitive Bias Codex in terms of it has categories, like, “Why do we have these shortcuts? Well, it’s sort of unclear. What should we remember? We’ve got too much information. We can’t make enough meaning out of something and we crave meaning. Or, we got to act fast and we can’t analyze every tidbit.”

Cheryl Einhorn
Our brain likes to conserve energy and it likes to take these shortcuts, and it definitely allows us to multitask. If you’re in the supermarket and you know exactly where the box is in the cereal aisle that you want to get, you can also be on the phone and maybe thinking about something from earlier in the day. So, you can be doing many things, but by reducing that cognitive load, it’s also not actively thinking through whatever it is you’re facing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. All right. So, lay it on us, these archetypes. We’ve got the adventurer, the detective, the listener, the thinker, the visionary. I guess that’s alphabetical. Is that how you like to, the sequence you like to move in or should we go at it? What’s your order of preference?

Cheryl Einhorn
That’s perfectly fine. One is not better than the other. As I said, they each have beautiful strengths but each of the problem-solver profiles are optimizing for different things in their decisions. So, the adventurer is a confident decision-maker, and he or she really favors making a lot of decisions. And there’s an underlying optimism bias to this because if they make a decision and it doesn’t work out the way they want, guess what? They always can make a new decision. And so, this is really a great person to have in your friend circle, in your colleague circle. They really help to make sure that you continually have momentum.

The detective, that’s what I am, this is a slower and more evidence-based decision-maker. For me to make a decision, if you don’t come to me with data, I really have trouble hearing you. I want you to substantiate it. And that has an underlying confirmation bias to it, which is that I can find the facts that I need to be able to share with you why my hypothesis is the correct one. And so, this is somebody, when you really want to be able to prove it, the adventurer can help you find the data that you need.

The listener is a relational, collaborative, inclusive decision-maker. And for this kind of a problem-solver profile, they have an underlying liking bias. They tend to have a trusted group of advisors, and they tend to overweight information that comes from those people, and they are people-centered. The thinker is your slowest decision-maker. This is somebody who really likes to explore their options. This can have a kind of frame blindness to it because they tend to look at the options against each other, which can circumscribe how they see and understand the problem.

And then the visionary is a creative open-ended decision-maker. This is somebody who has an underlying scarcity bias. They overvalue things that are original and things that maybe have not actually been on the table in the discussion, and that can also make them seem off-topic. And so, what I think you can see is that each of these different problem-solver profiles value different parts of decision-making.

And in order to make better decisions, alone and with others, you can really rapidly build trust and increase the speed of your decision-making by knowing the problem-solver profiles of the people who you’re making decisions with so you can come to them with what it is that they need to be able to discuss their decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s do a rapid recap there. So, the adventurer is optimizing for what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Forward momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
Forward momentum. And their cognitive bias is?

Cheryl Einhorn
Optimism bias.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then the detective, they’re optimizing for?

Cheryl Einhorn
Data.

Pete Mockaitis
And their bias is the confirmation bias.

Cheryl Einhorn
That’s correct.

Pete Mockaitis
And the listener is optimizing for what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Collaboration, cooperation.

Pete Mockaitis
And their bias is what?

Cheryl Einhorn
Liking bias.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-huh. And the thinker, likewise?

Cheryl Einhorn
The thinker is somebody who wants to understand their options, and a bias that would be associated might be the relativity bias.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do we define the relativity bias?

Cheryl Einhorn
Relativity bias is like the frame blindness. They see the world in a relative, “This versus that,” over a…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right. Option A versus option B.

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And, finally, the visionary?

Cheryl Einhorn
The visionary is creative and really optimizing for originality. And one of the biases associated for them would be the scarcity bias. And in my book, I go through this in much more detail and I give you lots of what I call cheetah sheets. Can I describe why I call them cheetah sheets?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Cheryl Einhorn
So, the cheetah, while she’s the most fearsome hunter and can accelerate up to 60 miles per hour, her hunting prowess is actually from her deceleration, and she decelerates up to 9 miles an hour in a single stride. That gives her agility, flexibility, and maneuverability. And that’s what you need in quality decision-making.

And so, throughout all of my books, Problem Solved, on personal and professional decision-making, which introduces the AREA Method, Investing in Financial Research, about business, financial, and investment decisions, and this newest book, Problem Solver, I have cheetah sheets throughout which are worksheets that help you be a more agile and flexible decision-maker.

And each of these worksheets allows you to take the skill that you’re building and, basically, plug it right into your day. It gives you a series of questions that I ask that, as you answer them, help you to really be able to use the tools and the skills of each of these problem-solver profiles.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. All right. And I’m curious, do you have a sense of what proportion of people are adventurers versus detectives versus listeners?

Cheryl Einhorn
So, so far, I’ve collected information from well over 5,000 people. And for the people that take the problem-solver profile, we do have the largest group as thinkers. And I have been thinking about why that might be, and one of the things that occurs to me is the thinker is going to be very open to taking a quiz to help them to self-identify how they make decisions. They want to understand. The option for them is between the ears. They want to know the why.

An adventurer might hear about the problem-solver profiles on a podcast like this, and say, “I don’t need to take the quiz. I know I’m an adventurer.” Again, that forward momentum and the different ways that people are thinking about how they make their decisions, and the time to the decision.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And perhaps, to make it all the more real and concrete, could you walk us through a problem to be solved, or a decision to be made, and how each of the five archetypes would approach it?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, one thing that I think is, in all of our common experience, might be going out to dinner with the five problem-solver profiles. When you get the menu and the adventurer looks at the menu, sees something on the menu that speaks to her, and she can put the menu down. She doesn’t have to read the whole menu because it’s not about all options. It’s about picking the first one that seems good to her.

The detective looks at the menu, notices that one of them has olives, loves olives, and thinks about, “Okay, based on that specific ingredient, that’s a dish that I’m probably going to like.” The thinker looks at the menu, and thinks about, “Well, what else have I had today? How do I want to balance out my diet for the day?” and maybe thinking about all of the eating that he or she has done as she looks at the menu to pick the dish.

The listener may be waiting to hear what all her friends order because she wants to hear what they think sounds good as well. And the visionary looks at the menu, likes the dish that has the olives, but looks at another dish and sees that the sauce might be better on that particular dish, and create something of her own. So, just from that example, I think you can see, again, that these different problem solvers are either skipping to decision-making or staying in problem-solving from very different vantage points.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, I have my own guess, but I’d love for you to diagnose me. When I’m looking at a menu, I find what I most often after is I want to be full and satisfied in a very efficient way per calorie while also experiencing deliciousness and novelty. So, I am looking at every option, and I’m sort of crossing them. I look at every option, and I eliminate every one until I’m left with perhaps two or three finalists.

And sometimes one just pops off because, hey, someone else is eating the other one so we’ve got the variety. And other times, I will, I’ve asked this question many times to wait staffs, like, “Which one is heartier? Or, which one is the most delicious and unique in your opinion?” And so, yeah, I guess I really am kind with everything. I’m all about optimizing experience relative to the criteria and values that matter most to me.

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, first, just the sheer amounts of things that you’re thinking about, and that you’re weighing against each other – hearty, savory, new, what does the waiter think – oh, my goodness, this sounds like a thinker to me. You’ve really got a lot going on. And while you can certainly have elements of listening, and elements of novelty, you’re not optimizing for forward momentum.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Cheryl Einhorn
The pace of the decision doesn’t matter to you as much as making the right decision according to the criteria that you’ve identified.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And when I do want it to go fast, I use the Chipotle app because I’ve already done all the thinking, and this is the exact bull that I want.

Cheryl Einhorn
And that’s very exciting to the thinker. The thinker, having it be like the three bears just so, that’s important. And that is in part why the thinker is such a slow decision-maker because the thinker has huge loss aversion. They are not optimizing for the best possible outcome. They are optimizing to mitigate the downside risks.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true. I have had moments in a restaurant where I have intense regret, like, “I absolutely should’ve ordered what you had ordered.” And I regret having made the choice that I did.

Cheryl Einhorn
And that is something that really plagues the thinker. And regret is an emotion uniquely about our decisions, and it’s a very difficult decision. It’s a very difficult emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we are resonating with a particular archetype, or we take the assessment. Well, first of all, let us know, what is the quick and easiest way we can learn what our archetype is?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, you can go to App.AreaMethod.com and you sign up for it, and you can take the problem-solver profile. And then you can learn more about it and how to use it by reading Problem Solver, my new book which goes through how to really put it into practice, or, obviously, by getting in touch with me, and working with me to help you and your team, or your family, or your friends, in making decisions using this new knowledge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s say we’ve got a sense for, “Okay, I’m a thinker and I’m working with an adventurer,” just for example, what do you think are the key implications in terms of, “So, now how do I live my work life differently with this knowledge?”

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, you have a really asymmetric risk-reward between these two because the adventurer wants the forward momentum, and the thinker wants to understand the why and to explore the options. And so, in a way, this can be just a wonderful group together because they’re really thinking about the problem differently.

And if you understand that, the adventurer then doesn’t have to feel frustrated that the thinker really needs to know that he or she has understood the why and the options, and the thinker doesn’t have to look at the adventurer, and say, “Why is this person in such a rush?” And together, you can really use each other’s strengths to make a decision that you both can feel good about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell us, any other top tips or implications that we should bear in mind as we explore this stuff?

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, I think this is transformative. First, I don’t think that we really think that much about intellectual diversity, and the fact that the different problem-solver profiles are optimizing for different things means if you can bring in questions from all five of the vantage points, you can have a much more fulsome understanding of the problem that you’re solving.

And you also no longer, as I was mentioning, need to denigrate how other people approach their decisions. Somebody is no longer hasty. They are optimizing for forward momentum. And somebody is no longer sluggish or too slow, for instance, like the thinker. This is somebody who really wants to make sure that they’re mitigating the downside risks.

And so, I think it can give you a really beautiful appreciation for these different ways that people problem-solve and reminds you that your way is not better. It’s just different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’d like to delve into that a little bit in terms of I can understand the style and process can be neither better nor worse, just different. I suppose I’m wondering about if someone has a capacity as an officer, executive, director, agent of an organization, whether it’s government, or nonprofit, or corporation, like, “To maximize shareholder wealth” is the sacred, I guess, oath of executives of publicly-traded corporations, according to my finance curriculum from the University of Illinois.

So, in that world, in some ways it seems like what is to be optimized for is kind of the part of the job description, if you will. And so, from like a results perspective, I guess not so much from a process perspective, so just wrestling with that, how do you think about these matters?

Cheryl Einhorn
All of these problem-solver profiles are excellent leaders and bring very different kinds of energy to their leadership. So, all of them can be very successful no matter where they are in the for-profit or the nonprofit world.

But just like when we all were going to school and we needed to figure out how to succeed for a particular teacher, when you’re working with different problem-solver profiles, you will have an easier time building trust, strengthening the relationship, and making more successful decisions together if you have a window into which of the problem-solver profiles they are.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Cheryl, any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Cheryl Einhorn
No, I just think that this is absolutely transformative. In my own life, as I have applied this, I never would’ve imagined how this was able to help me with relationships, both new and ones that I’ve had for my entire life. So, I think it’s an incredible piece of research, and I really hope that it can help other people in feeling better about their own decisions, but also very much in making decisions and having good relationships with others.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah. So, one of my favorite quotes is, “If you think you can, or if you think you can’t, you’re absolutely right,” which I think was said by Henry Ford. And this is really about you putting in some of your own motivation and your own effort, and it’s this idea that the agency that you bring to something is what really can help you to succeed.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I’ve got a favorite study or piece of research, which is this research study about teachers, that the most success that the students have is, in part, by having a teacher who really believes in them. And I would think that this would be true outside of the world of education, that having somebody who really believes in you helps to give you incredible motivation and resiliency.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Cheryl Einhorn
One of my favorites is The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin. He is a former chess champion and also a champion in the world of martial arts in what’s called push hands.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I would say that one of the things that I use is this idea of not leaving before you leave. When I finish something, or get up from the day, or finish a meeting, I stay with whatever that topic is for a few minutes after to sum up my thoughts and make sure that I can re-enter well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Cheryl Einhorn
Well, I think it’s the same idea of not leaving before you leave.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. 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?

Cheryl Einhorn
I think it’s this idea that there’s two kinds of learning – there’s knowledge and skill. And, for me, decision-making is a skill, which means I can teach you those skills and they can be yours.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
I would point them to my website, which is AreaMethod.com. And there, you can learn about my books, and my research, and my articles, and get in touch to work together.

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

Cheryl Einhorn
Yeah, if you can invest in your decision-making, it can unlock everything that you’re doing, personally and professionally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cheryl, thanks for chatting, and good luck with all your decisions.

Cheryl Einhorn
Thank you so much for having me today and for this conversation.