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Feb 21
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744: Mastering the Skill of Confidence with Nate Zinsser

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Nate Zinsser reveals practices that athletes and military cadets use to overcome pressure and build the confidence to perform anytime and anywhere.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why confidence is a skill–not a quality
  2. How to make affirmations work for you
  3. What to do when you feel unmotivated

About Nate

Dr. Nate Zinsser is the Director of the Performance Psychology Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the most comprehensive mental training program in the country, where, since 1992, he has helped prepare cadets for leadership in the U.S. Army. He also has been the sport-psychology mentor for numerous elite athletes, including two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning and the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, as well as many Olympians and NCAA champions.

He has been a consultant for the FBI Academy, U.S. Army Recruiting Command, and the Fire Department of New York. He earned his Ph.D. in sport psychology from the University of Virginia and his senior black belt rank from Shotokan Karate of America.

Resources Mentioned

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Nate Zinsser Interview Transcript

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

Nate Zinsser
Pete, thanks for the invite. Wonderful to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat with you. One of my best friends went to West Point, and you’re the director of Performance Psychology, and I love performance psychology, and you’ve got a really cool background and resume with being a wrestling champion, a mountaineer, a karate black belt, working with elite athletes like Eli Manning. Could you share with us maybe one fun story that cues this up in terms of a transformation and what’s possible when we get a handle on some of this mental stuff?

Nate Zinsser
Okay. Well, here’s one fun little story about how I actually ended up at West Point.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
I had been prepared for a fairly traditional academic career in the field of sports psychology, although I was very interested in doing applied work, and I had gone to a graduate program, a PhD program at the University of Virginia that was very much emphasized on applied work, actually dealing with athletes and helping them rather than just being in an Ivy intellectual tower.

And I found out that there was a job opening at West Point, and I found out that on Thursday but I also found out that I had to get the credentials in and the application materials done by Monday. So, I had to believe in myself enough that I could assemble everything, and this was not your standard application. This was a very complicated federal employee application process, so I had to believe in myself to get all that stuff done rather quickly, get it in the mail, and then be patient while the system works through.

As the system worked through, I was not originally selected as one of the finalists for the job. And when I found out about that, I took the bull by the horns, I called up the United States Military Academy, I eventually got through to the gentleman who I would eventually be working for, and I said, “Colonel, you have got to look at my resume because I am the guy for this job.” And the rest, ladies and gentlemen, as they say, is history.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, I love it. It’s so bold and, in some way, I’m just putting myself in the colonel’s shoes there in terms of it’s sort of like you’re taken aback, like, “Well, this doesn’t really ever happen. I’m intrigued and curious. Okay, Nate, why? I’m all ears. You have my attention.”

Nate Zinsser
Yeah. Well, I explained to him that I was the guy for the job and I had everything that he was looking for, and he was open enough and relaxed enough about the process, not being able to go by the rules, play by the rules, but interpret them a little bit here and there, and the rest is history. I’ve been there for almost 30 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. You know, it’s funny, I think I did that technique way back in college when I wasn’t interviewed. I did not get an interview. I think it might’ve been for Walgreens for an internship, and I thought, “Well, I can see some of the people who did get interviews, and not to be totally arrogant, but I’m smarter than them, just like from grades or extracurricular achievements or whatever.”

And I thought, “If you’re interviewing them, you’d be interviewing me.” And so, I said that. I think I found a more diplomatic way to say that so they don’t say, “Who is this arrogant jerk?” And they said, “Oh, okay. Sure. We got a slot open here.” I was like, “Oh, cool.” And so, it worked. It worked for you, it worked for me. I guess I didn’t get it after the interview but it’s fine. Things worked out just fine in the summer.

Okay, cool. So, that’s some confidence and your book is called The Confident Mind, so it seems like you’re walking the talk here.

Nate Zinsser
I do, indeed, try to practice what I preach, and it was indeed a process of believing, having a sense of certainty about myself that I was indeed the right guy for the job, so I was not hesitant or nervous or afraid to put myself forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, so then tell us, what is the big idea behind your book, The Confident Mind, the thesis, if you will?

Nate Zinsser
The big idea is that confidence is a skill that you build and you apply the same way you would build and apply any other skill. You work on your backhand or your second serve if you’re a tennis player. You work on your understanding of organic chemistry and gross anatomy if you’re a medical student. You work on understanding your product and your audience if you’re in the sales business. You work on that stuff. It takes practice. Confidence is the same thing. It’s not a mysterious quality that magically descends upon you. It is a quality that you develop through the practice of specific thinking skills.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say I want that confidence, what’s my practice look like? What is my gym exercise equivalent for building the confidence muscle?

Nate Zinsser
Okay. In broad strokes, the exercise regime consists of being very careful in the management of your memories, both long term, short term, and immediate memories that accumulate over the course of a day. That’s one component. Another component is being careful about how you think about yourself, the stories you tell yourself, the way you think of yourself and your various capabilities in the present. How do you think about yourself? There are guidelines and techniques to manage that.

And then there are also guidelines to help you think about your future. What are the pictures? What are the short video clips that your imagination produces when you think about things that have not yet happened? By combining all of those effective thinking skills about your past, about your present, about your future, you can build the psychological equivalent of a bank account – a whole lot of constructive useful thoughts.

And when you have that, it contributes to a sense of certainty which allows you to step into an arena, a game, a contest, a negotiation, a presentation, and be rather automatic, rather instinctive, rather natural in your execution.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really good. I’d like all of that. And so, that’s an interesting word you’re using, management of memories and managing the way you think about yourself and the way you think about the future. So, management implies proactive, assertive, the will, as opposed to just, “Hey, man, thoughts come up and that just happens, man. Thoughts are thoughts.” So, you say it’s a little bit different than that.

Nate Zinsser
Well, thoughts are indeed thoughts. They do come up, but you have to manage them. You have to manage the weeds that grow in your garden. You have to get rid of things that aren’t helpful and you’ve got to nurture the plants that are helpful. That’s management but you have to manage your own cognitions. And a lot of people, unfortunately, are the victim of their cognitive habits rather than the master of their cognitive habits.

And those cognitive habits either create or contribute to that sense of certainty or they erode it. And it’s a simple matter of exercising your free will to use your mind effectively. I say it’s simple. I didn’t say it was easy all the time. There’s a difference, but it is the matter of taking control, intentional control, of how you think about yourself in the past, in the present, and in the future. When you do that, the certainty builds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is this certainty or confidence more like a universal, like I can do anything, or is it more of a specific, like, “I excel at tennis”?

Nate Zinsser
Well, it is entirely situation-specific.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, entirely.

Nate Zinsser
One of the misconceptions is that confidence is this all-encompassing quality and once you have it, it applies everywhere in your life, and if you don’t have it, it applies nowhere. That’s not really accurate. Confidence is highly situation-specific. You can be very confident about your tennis game, and you can be very worried and insecure about your knowledge in your mandatory statistics scores for your business major.

Interestingly, even within your tennis game, you can have varying degrees of confidence about forehand, backhand, volleying, serving, etc. But the good news is that you can develop confidence in any area of your life that you choose to by following the guidelines, by managing your thoughts, by creating a mental bank account that is specific to a particular skill or particular set of skills that you wish to have.

Pete Mockaitis
Particular set of skills always makes me think of Liam Neeson in “Taken” so thank you for that. Let’s develop some of those in a different context for a different purpose. So, I want to dig into some details of the management of thoughts in the past, present, and future, and how precisely that is done. But, first, if there’s any skeptics thinking, “Oh, that sounds kind of woo-woo and I don’t know,” could you give us a story of a client or a cadet or someone who really saw a pretty cool transformation from not so confident and not performing well to super confident and super performing well, and/or, for stacking the evidence, some excellent research or studies underscoring this?

Nate Zinsser
Well, to give you an idea of a case study, just this very afternoon, I was contacted by a West Point graduate who was the captain of our women’s tennis team back in the early 2000s, and she is now a very successful entrepreneur. She has served with distinction in her combat deployments before she retired from the Army. And she recounted to me how clearly her experience working with me changed her ability to believe in herself, and that belief led to greater execution.

She came in as a relatively low-level recruit to our women’s tennis team, but she graduated playing number one in her junior and senior year, and graduating as captain. And it was not a matter so much of her having to redefine herself physically and technically, although, let’s face it, she did a heck of a lot of work on that stuff too, but she was very clear that so much of her development had to do with her ability to manage her thoughts, to get through those tough matches, to handle criticism, to handle setbacks, and that is all just an internal process of being in control of your own mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, let’s do it. So, how do I go about managing my memories, in the past side of things?

Nate Zinsser
Well, let’s first take a long look back. When you consider your experience in your profession of choice, or in your sport of choice, let’s go back and let’s take a look at the memory, the moment where you’ve discovered that, “Hey, this is pretty cool. I kind of like this, and maybe I’m pretty good at it.” What’s the feeling that that moment creates for you as you think back upon it? And then, as we move forward in our memory from that moment, let’s notate, record, write out the memories of a few other powerful moments that create a similar kind of feeling.

I refer to this as the top ten exercise. What are your top ten moments as a tennis player, as a medical student, as a sales manager, as a white-collar athlete, as I like to put it in any other sport? What are the major contributions you’ve made to your organization? What are the projects that you’ve completed? What are the recognitions or awards that you have accumulated in the course of your professional development?

In a way, it’s like writing a resume but you’re writing your accomplishments, you’re writing your top ten fulfilling memorable moments. That list of top ten things, those are your original deposits into your mental bank account. That’s taking ten checks down to the local savings and loan, and say, “I’m opening an account. Here’s my money.” And so, that’s how we take a look at our long-term memories.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I like that notion of it’s like a resume but it’s a bit different in that the audience is just you, and you pick what’s meaningful as opposed to what you’re thinking someone else might find impressive, and you’re prioritizing based upon the emotional juice, as oppose to someone else’s perceived valuation of that thing.

Nate Zinsser
Exactly. This is a very personal exercise. And so, once we’ve established our bank account with those top ten moments, then it becomes a matter of managing our memories day by day by day. What did you accomplish today as you look back on the day? What did you accomplish in terms of effort? Where did you give quality effort? What moments in your day were characterized by maybe pushing through something that you knew you had to do but really didn’t want to do? Where did you overcome a little procrastination, which plagues us all, let’s face it?

So, record an episode of effort, and then look at the day, and ask yourself, “What did I get right? What little successes did I have?” Record some episodes of success, be they ever so small and ever so humble. And, third, think about your day, think about maybe some of the previous days, and record an episode of progress, “What am I getting better at? What do I seem to be improving?” And so, you have a daily ESP reflection. E for effort, S for success, P for progress. And that is an exercise that you conduct at the end of every day some time before retiring. And those are some deposits that you make daily into your mental bank account.

And we can take it one step further. Looking at how you manage your memories in the course of a day, “I finished a meeting. I have five minutes before the next one. I can take 30 seconds of that minute, of that five minutes, and say, ‘Hmm, what was the best moment for me in that meeting? Where did I hear properly? Where did I respond properly? What did I understand?’” And just that little tiny memory, of a little very small highlight, with a very small H, that’s a deposit.

And so, you can make many small deposits throughout the day, some bigger ones at the end of the day, and they are complemented by your top ten, and so you’re in this process of daily and, indeed, hourly building up a sense of certainty about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And, again, all these are within a particular context.

Nate Zinsser
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, what’s your advice on this one, Nate? How many domains can we tackle concurrently? Because I love the notion of focus, but if it’s sort of like, “Oh, boy, I need more confidence in my professional life, and as a parent, and as a spouse, etc.”

Nate Zinsser
You can do it for as many different performance arenas or performance situations as you care to. I would start out with the one that’s most important to you in the long term to get that started. But you could, indeed, conduct a daily ESP for your physical training if you’re working on your fitness training for a 5K or a 10K or a marathon. You can do a daily ESP for your professional work. You could do a daily ESP for your relationships that are key. And, again, this daily ESP is about a three-minute exercise, ladies and gentlemen. And we all got that kind of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So we covered the past nicely, and it seems we did the present as well in terms of the super recent past. Or is there more that you’d like to add about the present in terms of the way you think about yourself right now?

Nate Zinsser
Yes, the way you think about yourself right now revolves around the stories that you keep in yourself about yourself. We all have opinions about how smart we are, how good we are at this, how bad we are at that. So, telling yourself stories that contribute to a sense of optimism and energy is really important.

The key skill here is to think about a particular skill you’d like to have, a particular quality you’d like to have, a particular accomplishment that you would care to achieve, and phrase your desire for those things in the present tense, “My crosscourt backhand goes deep and scores points.”

That’s a skill I want to have so I am affirming it, I am saying yes to it, and I’m very specific about what I want, the story I want to tell myself about myself, “My backhand is…” “I listen carefully to each of my subordinates,” “I easily stay in the moment to solve problems as they come up.” Telling yourself these stories are further deposits into your bank account, and they kickstart effort and action that is consistent with what you are affirming.

If we continue, if you tell yourself, “I’m really not good at that particular technological application. I really struggle with some of the remote platforms,” if you tell yourself that, if that’s a story you tell yourself, you will be less likely to work at that enthusiastically and with an open mind so it’ll be really hard for you to get that technology down.

If, on the other hand, you change the way you think about yourself in the present, “I easily learn new skills,” “I easily learn new applications.” If you’re a student taking a graduate course, “I easily retain the origin, insertion, function, and intervention of each skeletal muscle.” If you’re talking to yourself that way about yourself in the present, first person, present tense, very detailed, you initiate a very functional constructive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious then, and there’s been some really cool studies on affirmations. I’ve dug into them in terms of, sure enough, like salespeople getting superior results and so very quantifiable and such. I’m thinking about how we had a great conversation with Hal Elrod about the six morning habits of high performers. And he said, when it comes to affirmations, we got to be careful that they’re truthful enough such that you don’t respond internally with, “No, I don’t, and that’s bull crap.”

Nate Zinsser
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I don’t easily remember these bones, or new software programs, what’s my gameplan here? But I want to.

Nate Zinsser
I want to remember so I would phrase your affirmations, at first, for things that are just a little bit out of your reach or just a little bit different from the way you’ve been thinking about yourself in terms of something that you do. One of the stories that I cite in the book comes out of Harvard where hotel workers, the folks who make the beds, vacuum the floors, scrub out the bathrooms every day, hour after hour after hour, they were taught to think of their daily work as good exercise, so the thought, “I’m getting good exercise every day.”

A group of workers were given that instruction and taught how to talk to themselves and think about their work, their daily work, as good exercise, and the control group received a placebo treatment. Well, the group that changed the way they thought about their daily exercise lost a significant amount of weight, lowered their blood pressure over a period of time while not doing any more work, while not doing their work any faster or harder, but simply as a function of changing the way they thought about themselves. That actually changed their physiology.

And there are plenty of other studies along that line, really looking at the effect of just this element of mindset on not just our mood but our actual cardiovascular, endocrine, and neurobiological systems. It’s interesting stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely, it is. That is a really cool study. And so then, I’m curious, in terms of like the specific phrasing of the affirmation. So, if I am having trouble with a software but I want to be learning it easily, if I say to myself, “I learn the software easily,” my mind will say, “No, you don’t. That’s bull crap. You’ve been struggling mightily with this while your colleagues seem to be getting it just fine.”

Nate Zinsser
Ramp it back a little bit and think, “I’m getting one piece of this down every day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s true. I love it. That is not a lie and you can look back, and say, “Sure enough, that happened yesterday and the day before.” Boom! Cool. All right. So, then that’s the present. How about the future?

Nate Zinsser
How about the future? The question is, “What kind of future do you want? And what kind of future are you allowing your wonderful imagination to create?” We have this fantastic audio and video production studio in our imagination. We can dream up all kinds of things. And the things that we dream up have direct, again, physiological effects.

Every one of your listeners could deeply imagine holding a nice ripe juicy lemon in their hand, and smelling the lemony smell, and feeling the waxy texture, and they could imagine cutting open, cutting that lemon in half, and bringing it up and really smelling the fresh juice, and then taking a small careful lick of it, then maybe a bigger lick, and then maybe even biting into it.

And everybody will experience their mouths watering while they do that because just the thought, when you combine the picture of it with the sensation of smell, with the sensation of taste, with the sensation of texture, that literally fools the taste buds which sends messages back to your brain, and the messages come from your brain back to your salivary glands, you’re actually fooling your nervous system into creating the experience that you want.

And this is why athletes and other performers will very carefully mentally rehearse in as much real time as possible, with as much realistic detail as possible, the game-winning field goal, or the closing argument in a legal case, or that great homerun point of the sales pitch, and they’ll feel themselves in the room giving that pitch, they’ll hear the tone of their voice, they’ll see the respective faces of the audience and create a multisensory representation of that experience that they wish to have.

And when they do so, they’re actually manipulating, working their nervous system so that when they get to that moment, they’ll have a sense of familiarity about it, “I’ve been here. It’s an important moment but I have seen it happen, I felt it happen, I’ve envisioned it carefully, and my nervous system believes that I’ve already done it.” So, the experience, when you get there, while still having some excitement and some emotion, for sure, but there’ll be an element of comfort in that experience that you might not have had you not done this kind of mental preparation.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. All right. So, past, present, future, the mental management we do in order to have that confidence going. I’m curious, when we hit rough patches in terms of maybe it’s a number of failures or just, “Hey, I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed, I’m de-motivated, I don’t give a hoot anymore right now,” is there any sort of acute or emergency stuff you recommend we do in our brains in those moments?

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, welcome to the real world that we all live in. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to experience setbacks. This is one of the important points about confidence, in general, is that it’s not a one-time thing that you do. Confidence is fragile. You have to rebuild it. There is no decisive victory that one can win over fear, doubt, worry, insecurity, etc. It is a relatively ongoing war of attrition, as one of my cadet advisees understood it as. There’s no decisive victory. I can’t just get it and expect to have it all the time because the world is going to kick back.

We have a saying in the military, “The enemy gets a vote,” and we all got to be aware of setbacks, difficult things that happen around us that can negatively affect our confidence, and then there are the things that we say to ourselves internally that also negatively affect our confidence. So, a few safeguards in this context, Pete, is how you look at those inevitable failures and how you respond to your own inevitable simple human imperfection.

You have to look at those moments and acknowledge that they happen, but one way to think about them is that they’re temporary, “It happened that one time. It happened that one time. It happened. It happened that one time.” As opposed to having something go wrong and you sort of unconsciously assume that it’ll continue, and you fall into the, “Oh, here I go again. Same stuff all over again.”

You’ve got to protect yourself from that trap by keeping it in the time that it occurred, “It happened that one time. It’s temporary.” And you may have to do that four or five times, “It happened this time. It happened that time, but it’s just those times.” You keep it in that context.

The second rule about this is to look at those imperfections, those mistakes, those setbacks as limited in where they occurred, “It happened in that situation,” “It happened in that game,” “It happened in that moment of my day, and that moment is just a moment by itself, that situation. And I don’t know why something that happened in one situation, in one setting, to sort of ooze out and affect my feeling about what’s going to happen in other situations.

I don’t allow a mistake in one part of my game to make me think, “Uh-oh, my whole game is in trouble today.” No, no, that one part of my game. “Okay, my second serve isn’t getting in very well. That’s just my second serve. My first serve can still be a bomber. My forehand, my backhand, the rest of my game can be fine. I got to keep my mistakes and my thoughts about my mistakes limited in where they occur.”

And then, finally, and this might be the biggest one for most of us, when the setback occurs, when I experienced some of my own imperfection, I got to be able to say to myself, “Look, that moment, that mistake is not representative of who I am as a player, as a performer, as a professional, as a person. It doesn’t tell the truth about me,” even to the point where you can say, “Okay, yeah, that happened. I did blow that but that’s sort of a fluke. That’s really not me.” So, to keep your mistakes temporary, limited, and non-representative are ways of protecting this bank account that you’ve built up through the other methods that we’ve been describing.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. And now, as I think about just before the moment of performance, the big game, the big speech, or even just an afternoon in which you’ve got to be productive and you’re not feeling it, what are your top perspectives on how to get into the right state, mood, emotion, the mindset place to rock and roll and perform well the thing you want to perform well at even if you’re not feeling it in the moment?

Nate Zinsser
This is the million-dollar question that we all face many times in the day. The answer is, as you’re about to enter that performance, if you’re about to get down to the workload at 3:00 o’clock or 4:00 o’clock, and you got to get it done before you can leave, that’s when you have to look at yourself, and say, “Okay, I’m an athlete, I’m contending for this prize of winning this moment right now, and I have to be willing to think back, maybe access my mental bank account, look how far I’ve come. I did this. I’ve done this. I’ve done this. I’ve done that.”

And then you take a few breaths, and I give some advice on breathing in the book. I’m not an expert but I’m pretty knowledgeable about it. And then it’s getting out of your mind and just getting into your senses, “What’s the one thing I have to pay attention to now? I have to pay attention to that column in these spreadsheets to get through this task. I have to pay attention to this comment from these people in my work team in order to get through this day.”

I kind of have to limit my mind to something that is important so I cue up some confidence, I breathe, and I attach my attention, attach my awareness to what’s important. And I may have to do that several times over the course of the task but I will continue with that, I will continue with that, I will continue with that. In many ways, it comes down to a matter of willpower but willpower, in and of itself, doesn’t work great unless you have some tools. And these mental-focusing tools, combined with your will, can make a big difference in your day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, since you mentioned breathing, I’m intrigued. Is there a particular formula, timing, counting, approach that makes a difference?

Nate Zinsser
Well, breathing, in general, is another rather misunderstood process for most of us. When we take a deep breath, we tend to lift our chests up and sort of breathe up, up, up high, when a really effective breath is a breath that expands your midsection, it goes down and out using the downward action of the very important diaphragm muscle.

So, I encourage people, if you want to take control of your breath, first, exhale, and have the feeling that there might be a python squeezing you around your waist, and that’s squeezing you in and it’s squeezing air out, squeezing you in, and that air is escaping upward and out your mouth, and then that python relaxes, and now have the feeling of breathing down and out, almost like you’re inflating an inner tube around your waist.

And then you can squeeze it to put it out, and then you can open it up, down and out to get maximum oxygen into your lungs because you really want to get the lower part of your lungs where the most effective oxygen-carbon dioxide transfer takes place. You really want to activate that lower part of your lungs. Do that a couple of times, you will feel a change in your mood.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
And that’s when you open your eyes, and say, “Okay, this is what’s important. I’m just going to focus there and I almost allow myself to get into that highly focused zone-like state. I can make myself very friendly to the zone when I do that.”

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

Nate Zinsser
I would just reinforce for people, it’s a skill, it takes work, but the work is well within your capabilities, and it is a constant thing. And, very importantly, if you develop the quiet internal sense of certainty I’m describing, you can remain, indeed, a very polite, modest, respectful, pleasant person to be around. One of the misconceptions is that confidence equals outspoken, chest-beating arrogance. No, no, no, no, no.

We occasionally see, and unfortunately the media likes to highlight these loud, brash, outspoken individuals, but what the media doesn’t often help us understand is how many quiet, introverted, yet very confident people there are out there. And so, for all you quiet introverts, plenty of hope for you, folks. It’s about how you think. It’s not necessarily about how you open your mouth and portray yourself.

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

Nate Zinsser
A favorite quote that I find inspiring is from the great folk rock poet of the ‘60s, Bob Dylan, and the phrase reads, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s from a song “It’s Alright, Ma.” And I’ve always liked that quote because you are either in a process of developing, expanding in one way or another, or you’re in a process of shrinking and stagnating.

If we look at developmental psychology, this is, indeed, a theme that takes place throughout each stage of development right through our most senior years. Are you generating things even in your 70s and 80s? Or are you stagnating? “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

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

Nate Zinsser
Okay, here’s one. And I included this in the book because I think it’s really important. We’ve been talking about the way you talk to yourself, the stories you tell yourself, and we’ve been talking about how you get rid of the internally generated negativity. A study that took place in the University of South Africa took trained cyclists, highly trained athletes, and they were all tested on a time-to-exhaustion test, meaning, “You’re going to go as fast as you freaking can until you just can’t.” So, we get a baseline of what they’re absolute maximum output is.

Half of those trained cyclists were taken through a course in what you would call motivational self-talk, learning to talk to yourself in the moment while you are working very hard, “Keep this going. You can handle this.” Essentially, talking back to that voice of worry and doubt and fatigue that every middle-distance athlete knows it’s that fear of not being able to maintain the pace, “I can’t hold this during my mile run, or my two-mile run.” “I can’t maintain this for the duration of my swim workout.”

But these athletes were trained to start and continue and finish with a very powerful group of affirmational statements, “Get this down. You’re fine. Keep the hammer going,” etc. And then the other group were given a placebo treatment. Three weeks later, everybody was retested. On the average, the group who had learned to talk back to their voice of negativity lasted 18% longer than the non-trained subjects. They showed an 18% improvement over their previous baseline and they had a lower sense of perceived exertion while doing so.

Eighteen percent improvement? Who wouldn’t want that in their batting average, shooting percentage, sales figure growth? Who wouldn’t want an 18% improvement? That’s a pretty powerful study. And it all had everything to do with how you talk to yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, that’s really compelling study, Nate. Do you happen to know the principal investigators or have a citation?

Nate Zinsser
Yes, I’ve got that. Samuele Marcora, University of Kent.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, you want to look at the book Alex Hutchinson’s Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. That’s a William Morrow 2018 reference, page 260.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you.

Nate Zinsser
Yeah.

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

Nate Zinsser
I make sure that I practice 15 minutes of very careful but very energizing breathing every morning. I make sure that I am working that diaphragm muscle, I’m working those abdominal muscles, I am massaging the liver, which is what happens when you breathe properly, and it’s a very relaxing experience but, at the same time, it’s somewhat exhilarating.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have like music or an app or a track that guides you?

Nate Zinsser
Nope, I do this simply seated on a small cushion. I don’t need any guidance. I have been practicing meditation since 1971 where I learned the technique that involved the repetition of a sound, the repetition of a mantra that you do over and over again with sub-vocally. But these days, it’s all breath training.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Nate Zinsser
And, by the way, I keep my own ESP daily journal as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Nate Zinsser
I’m still practicing Japanese karate, and so every day, I’m looking at my physical practice and making notes about this movement, this feeling, this interpretation. It’s an ongoing iterative process.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you’re known for or people quote you on often?

Nate Zinsser
Doc Z says, “A little bit of delusion is the origin of every major important change in your life.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
A little bit of delusion, yeah.

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

Nate Zinsser
I have a website, DrNateZinsser.com. You can reach me there. And the book The Confident Mind has a lot of good nuggets in it.

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

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, here’s the call to action. Is the quality of your thinking consistent with the quality of life that you want to lead and the quality of the performances that you want to experience?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Nate, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck with your book The Confident Mind and all you’re up to.

Nate Zinsser
Well, thank you, Pete. This has been a wonderful interview. My best wishes and best luck for all your listeners. Let’s have a great 2022.

Feb 17
0

743: How to Achieve and Flourish in the New World of Work with Keith Ferrazzi

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Keith Ferrazzi reveals fresh best practices for working and leading in the post-COVID world of work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four critical shifts teams need to make
  2. Two tiny tweaks that vastly improve team morale
  3. Time-saving alternatives to time-wasting meetings

About Keith

Keith Ferrazzi is a bestselling author, speaker, investor, philanthropist, and executive team coach who helps teams transform enterprises. As Founder and Chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, its applied research institute, he coaches executive teams in top organizations to achieve extraordinary outcomes. He formerly served as CMO of Deloitte and Starwood Hotels. He is the author of the new book, COMPETING IN THE NEW WORLD OF WORK: How Radical Adaptability Separates the Best from the Rest.

Resources Mentioned

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Keith Ferrazzi Interview Transcript

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Pete, this is an extraordinary time because your name reminds me of my father, and time together always reminds me of best practices and clear action. You’re one of those individuals that I really enjoy these conversations with.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you, Keith. I enjoy chatting with you, and it’s fun to be speaking to you live after I’ve read your books before I had a podcast. And you got some more coming and a big research project. What’s the scoop here?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, so the peak of the pandemic, I saw this not only as a horrible disruption of the world, but I saw it as an inflection point; an opportunity. And what I want anybody listening to think about is “Have you really captured this pandemic and this disruption as an opportunity for your career and for your team and for your organization?”

We benchmarked 2,000 executives and entrepreneurs, and asked the question, “How do we leverage this pandemic to leap forward to work, not go back to work? How do we change the ways we’re leading? How do we change our business models? How do we really think about workforce redesign during this incredible disruption time?” And we’ve been chosen as the number one pick of Harvard coming out of the pandemic in terms of books, and this has been a massive research project that I’m excited to share with your listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, we’re excited to hear it. So, you interviewed all these folks, and you asked them specifically, “Which work innovations from the pandemic had the highest return and ought to be kept, held on to?” So, can you share what are the top one, two, three themes that folks are relatively unanimous about?

Keith Ferrazzi
I’ll give you three themes, which you’ve asked for. The first one that I’ll give you is how much collaboration transformed during the pandemic, and I’ll give you a number of very distinct practices. Because we were in crisis, org charts and positional authority, they went out the window. Anybody who could lead change was given the opportunity to lead change. If you had an idea, if you had a way of working around a crisis situation, you could step into the void and you could fix it.

Now, that was extraordinary. We saw people emerge without titled leadership into significant leaders. And I want to make sure that we keep that going. I’ve never been a particular advocate for managing org charts or thinking about your team as who reports to you. When I was a kid at Deloitte, I had a vision that Deloitte could be a great marketing organization, and I started leading toward that end, and I became the chief marketing officer at Deloitte before I was 30. Before they even made me partner, I was the chief marketing officer of the company.

So, the opportunity for all of us to step into the void and see a vision for improvement or opportunity, that was afforded to us. Now, the second piece that we saw was, because of hybrid work, we could think of our teams as an unbounded way. We didn’t have to think about geolocation. We didn’t have to think about anything. We could think of “Who do we want to collaborate with to really achieve this vision?” And that’s one of the big tips I want to leave everybody here with.

Your team is whoever you need to get your job done. Now, if you imagine that, who do you need to get your job done is your team. Then the next question is, “How do I let them know that they’re on my team if they don’t report to me? And how do I invite them in to really co-create extraordinary new advances?” And the answer is just that. You reach out to individuals that you want to collaborate with, and you say, “Here’s a vision I have for how things could be better.”

And then with that, you say to them, “But I could never get there myself,” humbly speaking, “Maybe we could work together and achieve that together. We could co-create a solution. We could take that hill together.” The next thing you know, you’re now a leader of another individual who, working together, is going to achieve something that you couldn’t have achieved on your own.

We saw that happening all over the pandemic. And in the chapter that we have in the book around collaboration, we saw that hybrid work put all of that on steroids. We could really be unbounded in our collaboration and there’s a ton of things in there also on best practices on how to start rebooting the way we think about work in a hybrid work environment, which most of us aren’t thinking of today.

So, for instance, we think of the way to collaborate is through meetings. Well, the best organizations were collaborating asynchronously. They were collaborating in Google Docs and other things so that we didn’t have all of these droning meetings one after another. So, we started using the tools in a more effective way to reboot the way we were collaborating, and that was very powerful as well.

So, all of that, I would say comes under the theme that you were asking for, one of the themes, which is, “How do we really fundamentally re-imagine the way we collaborate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And I’d love it if you could share a fun favorite story or two that shows that in action.

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, sure. It’s a big company one, it’s the first one that I think of. So, Unilever has always done business planning in very traditional ways. They cascaded business planning down from the CFO and the CEO, figure out the budgets, then they work with the executive teams, then they give everybody their budgets and they’d trickle it down.

Well, what happened was one individual, an HR person in North America, so here’s an HR person in North America had an idea, which is “Why aren’t we crowdsourcing innovations and growth opportunities for next year 2021 that I guarantee we wouldn’t have seen at the executive team, at the central headquarters in London?”

So, Mike Clementi came up with the idea that we should be crowdsourcing among the top 300 leaders in the world, not the executive team only where the growth opportunities were. And he ushered that process into being, and they literally ground-up the business-planning process instead of top-down. Another example is a learning executive inside of Federal Express was asked to host these townhalls on behalf of their chief operating officer and chairman.

Well, typically, these townhalls were one-way broadcast conversations, but this person said, humbly speaking, “Why are we, when we’ve got the technology, we’ve got breakout rooms, why aren’t we asking people questions of what risks they’re seeing in the Federal Express platform, what opportunities they’re seeing to serve customers differently?”

So, instead of a one-way townhall, they started inventing two-way dialogues, once again, breakout rooms, opening Google Docs, having people give their ideas, and they created a very two-way collaborative engagement with thousands and thousands and thousands of people. So, those are two very small examples of massive companies that fundamentally rebooted real important processes in their business because a single individual saw hybrid and collaboration and crowdsourcing and innovation as something that didn’t have to be limited to a small group of people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Another theme in your book I want to dig into is you say that there are six decision dials that can impact the way we work. What are we achieving with this framework? And what are the dials?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah. So the book was divided into two sections. The first half of the book focuses on how all of us need to change the way we work and lead, and there are four components to that. One of them is agility, the other one is foresight and, really, how do we look around corners and run an agile operation. And then the one we just talked about, collaboration. And then the next one, which is really a hot issue today, which is the subject of resilience and mental wellbeing.

And then what we did is we said, “Once you begin to lead in these four fundamentally different ways, where do you apply this philosophy to?” You apply it to reinventing your business model, reinventing the way your workforce works, and to, whether or not, we, as organizations, are led by the north star purpose, which became a very important aspect of a lot of businesses.

So, what you’re referring to in terms of these dials is inside of a chapter called “Workforce Redesign.” One of the things that really happened was we started to realize that the old ways we thought about work needed to be rebooted. So, of course, we’re all now thinking about “Are we physically proximate or are we remote?” So, that’s a dial going one way or the other.

Now, when we really dug into it, we realized it was a spectrum. It wasn’t just an and or or. The hybrid spectrum of how we work together actually includes a dimension that isn’t even on that dial which is called asynchronous. How do we work asynchronously? How do we work in a way that doesn’t even require meetings? How do we work in a way that collaborates in the cloud where I don’t give a damn if you’re physical or if you’re remote? It doesn’t really matter.

The other thing is whether or not you’re domestic or global. Now, on my personal organization, and this, Pete, could be something you’d be interested in, I designed an entire marketing function at Ferrazzi Greenlight. Now, we coach executive teams. I designed an entire marketing function out of the Philippines. I used to have marketing executives in my company that were about 85,000 in their base salary and their job was what I called high-touch marketing, curating relationships with executives that could ultimately buy our services. High-touch marketing, very high touch.

But there was a lot that I wanted to do around search engine optimization, there’s a lot that I wanted to do around content marketing, email marketing, etc. that I never really put as a primary because I didn’t see the return on investment for it from the kind of money that I’d dispend in the United States on marketing executives.

I ended up hiring folks out of the Philippines, an entire marketing team at, on average, $25,000 a head, who are every bit as good as the professionals I was hiring at $85,000. They work on my time zone, they’re incredibly English literate, and driven, and ambitious, and thoughtful. And so, I really, this outsourcing conversation, many organizations are now totally rethinking the boundaries of where they’re hiring. And I’m sure you’ve read a lot about that in the marketplace, but we can live anywhere and work anywhere.

And so, why doesn’t an individual like yourself, Pete, even, anybody who’s a solopreneur, whatever, you can be thinking about building a team that you were never able to think about before, both from a global perspective, gig workers. Now, we’re dealing with a choice. Do we even want to hire a full-time employee or do we want to hire an individual who’s an expert on an hourly basis that can really change the game in our strategy?

So, all of those are workforce dials that we look at in the chapter of re-engineering the workforce. I guess the one tip I would say is if you can start thinking about hiring globally, you can get incredible value for some of the employees that you hire. Anybody listening should consider that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, yeah. I have had great results myself by pursuing that approach. Okay. And we got some extra dials here, huh?

Keith Ferrazzi
Well, look, what I really want to make sure we have time for is to get to some that which really starts in the book. There were many organizations that were fundamentally caught on their heels during the pandemic. On March 13th, I sat on a March 11th in a room with an executive team that had major presence in China, and this topic of the pandemic was only a mention at one point during the discussion, and that was just a few days before the shutdown.

Yet, the question that we looked for is, “What organizations foresaw the pandemic and were able to react to that risk whereas others did not?” We found an organization called Lockheed Space. Now, Lockheed, interestingly enough, didn’t even have operations in China, yet they had a simple process I highly recommend for all of your listeners whether, again, you’re a team leader, a company leader, or a solopreneur. They brought together, on a monthly basis, a group of individuals that would look at the marketplace from different vantage points.

“So, Pete, you’re going to handle the customer vantage point. What’s changing from the perspective of the customer? Dave, you’re going to look at competition. Jane, you’ve got technology innovations. Sue, you’ve got the focus on macroeconomic policies and finance.” And then, once a month, as a part of a natural meeting, they would spend five minutes, and everybody on the call reported if they had a major risk that they saw from their vantage point, or if they saw a major opportunity that should be pursued from their vantage point.

Now, sometimes, they would go beyond that five-minute meeting and nobody would have anything to say. Fine. Or, somebody would say, “Hey, I just read this blog about some virus in China. Maybe it’s worth us taking a look at in terms of a disruptive force.” At that point, they wouldn’t even gut-dive into it to disrupt the meeting. They would say, “Let’s have an assessment meeting to determine whether or not we move into some form of planning or watch and observe.”

Well, Lockheed Space saw this in December of 2019, they had their assessment meeting in January, and went into planning and went fully virtual in February. Fully virtual in February. And how many of us, if we had had that insight and wisdom, we would’ve shorted so many stocks, we would have invested in other stocks. As individuals, we’ve got to leave some space and time in our lives as individuals, as leaders, to assess risk and opportunity that are from different vantage points that we may not be seeing every day.

That was one of the biggest takeaways that I saw which is us realizing and, interestingly enough, it moves interestingly into the agile question. We practiced crisis agility during the pandemic. Now, I was working with Delta Airlines, coaching that executive team moving into the pandemic, and we were going to reinvent the travel industry and we’re doing a great job of it, and, all of a sudden, they lost 90% of their revenue in a day.

Now, they went into daily agile sprints. They assessed the situation from all different vantage points, “Where are the risks? Where are the opportunities?” They planned for a day. They went and did it. At the end of the day, they did a standup, and said, “Okay, what did we achieve? Where did we stumble? What are we going to do the next day?” Every single day, they went on an agile sprint willing to assess what was going on from the external marketplace.

Now, the power of that is that model of agility is well-practiced in technology companies while they’re programming and designing software. It’s well-practiced among any organization doing strong project management, but it’s not practiced in many executive teams. It’s not practiced by most of us leading our work, running our work in small agile sprints.

I believe what we saw in the pandemic was this crisis agile that is going to become the new operating system for any organization. We are living in volatility. We’ve got to lead in agile where we’re constantly assessing and re-assessing pivots and movement and readjustments, and we can’t just be planning on a quarterly basis anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful that the five minutes assignment was all it took to be like, “Oh, okay.” And then to have it on the radar and then go deep. And so, I’m curious, for folks looking to implement something along those lines, do you have any favorite ways that you think about breaking up the world of stuff to be on the lookout for?

Keith Ferrazzi
Of vantage points, yeah. In the chapter called “Foresight,” we actually have a list of the vantage points. But the reality is every company is going to be a little different. The ones I gave you make the most sense, which is by functional area, you know, sales is dealing with competition, marketing is dealing with customers, your IT folks are dealing with technology advancements, your CFO, your accountants are dealing with… etc. Those are natural.

But in any given business, you’re going to have your own nuances. And I would say one of the things you should do as you start this process is ask your team, what vantage points they think we should be looking at on a constant basis. Now, I’d mentioned this to you, Pete, that we created an entire video series around the book that helps any team move through each chapter, and anybody who buys the book gets that free video series.

So, if you go to RadicallyAdapt.com, and you purchase the book wherever you want to purchase it, just let us know that you bought the book and we’ll send you the video series. It’s all on trust. But the power of that is that in the section of “Foresight” we actually walk you through all the details of how you can set that up for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. All right. Well, so we talked a bit about agility, foresight, and collaboration. How about resilience and wellbeing?

Keith Ferrazzi
So, that was one of the more exciting ones to me personally for a number of reasons. I have felt for a very long time that teams needed to build a greater relational competency inside of their teams because you know me, the guy who wrote Never Eat Alone cares a lot about relationships. And as I came along with subsequent books, we have double-clicked on how important those relationships are to functional teams and organizations.

And what I saw happened during the pandemic was what I know brings greater relationships among people and brings greater empathy among people is the willingness to be authentic and vulnerable. This got dialed up during the pandemic significantly. I saw grizzled white shoe-type old leaders being vulnerable, crying in fact, on townhalls where they were talking about the fear that they had for their parents’ health who were in a nursing home, or a spouse that was diagnosed with COVID early on in the process before we knew what that meant.

And I saw that vulnerability and that shared sense of openness, and I was proud of that, and I knew that that was something that I think we had opened a door that we’d never be able to shut again, thank goodness. Now, the question then is, “What do we do with that vulnerability? How do we resolve it? And how do we help people have greater resilience?”

Of the teams that I saw be most successful, they were the ones that had a different social contract. They owned each other’s energy. They lifted each other up. They asked how people were doing openly, and then when people were hurting, the team rallied around that person. Now, I feel like there was an old myth associated with work of the past, which is your resilience, your mental wellbeing, that’s your responsibility. And it’s not even your responsibility; it’s your private affair, and we’ll leave you to it.

Whereas, what happened in the pandemic was there was much more transparency around all of this. And some teams did a very simple practice, they called an energy check, which I love and I advocate, which is in your meetings, just every once in a while, ask, “What is everyone’s energy level?” And I’m not just talking about in the afternoon. I mean, going into a meeting, you say, “What is your energy level these days? Put in the chatroom from zero to five what your energy level is.”

Now, anytime somebody puts a two or below, then you pause, and you say, “Pete, tell me, you put a two. Are you okay?” Now, Pete might respond, “Well, my kids had a restless night, and I was just up all late last night with my kids.” “Great. Sorry to hear that and hope they’re okay.” But they might say, “Jane, why did you put a two or why did you put a one?” “Well, my spouse has just been diagnosed with needing a kidney transplant.” Now, I heard that in teams, and the person who particularly said that had been sitting on that information without sharing it with the team for two weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, because nobody asked, like it doesn’t live anywhere. It’s nothing like, “Hey, anyone’s family need an organ transplant?” Like, that just doesn’t pop up.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s not part of the vernacular. But where it used to happen organically, and this is what we found across the board, where it used to happen was in the casual walk down the hallway, or the lunchroom conversation, or the coffee-break conversation. Now, that’s where these kinds of conversations happen, but in the remote or hybrid world, they don’t happen organically. And if you make it a purposeful process, it actually happens.

What was most interesting is that we found that…we’d been coaching teams for 20 years. We had a diagnostic tool that we used in coaching teams, and what we found was that teams that made a…one of the areas is relationships. Teams that didn’t pay attention to relationships purposefully eroded their relationship score on this test.

So, one of the tests is “I am deeply committed and connected to my team.” That’s a scale of zero to five. Well, those that didn’t have purposeful processes around it went down on the score. But, interestingly enough, those that decided to have these kinds of energy check-ins, or they hosted a meeting…one of the things we recommend is a personal/professional check-in meeting where the whole meeting’s intention is “What’s going on in your life personally and professionally?” so people just share what’s going on with them.

And those teams that had these purposeful processes, actually, their scores rose above what they were when they were in physical meetings together. So, people claim that remote work eroded things like innovation and relationships. It only eroded work if you didn’t do the things you needed to do more purposefully. If you did them, it actually improved the qualities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful in terms of it’s like, “Well, yeah, if you’re just kind of going with flow, yup, that’s what’s going to happen. It’s not going to be so rosy.”

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it’s lazy. It’s lazy and you’re going to suffer lazy results. Now, we spend a lot more time on this, “When is a wellbeing and resilience question?” We had major partners like Headspace and Weight Watchers all working with us to create innovations, and we found a number of things. Number one, as I sort of mentioned, just the awareness and the collectivism gained around “We own each other’s energy. We’re going to serve each other. We’re going to take care of each other,” that was the highest lift in scores and mental wellbeing.

But there was no question that we needed to make sure that people were aware that they had to take a more proactive responsibility for their own wellbeing, their own mental and physical wellbeing. There were people who just sat down in the morning and they didn’t leave all day. They didn’t get their workouts, they didn’t take a break, they didn’t take a moment for themselves. And, by the way, because they didn’t leave any time for email or anything else, that time got squeezed into their evenings and weekends. They were just one meeting after another.

So, what we learned is that there are a set of personal routines that you need to adopt, and the most important thing is, if you’re a leader, you adopt those personally. Like, block your workout time, block your walk with the kid time, make sure that small breaks that you’re taking, you actually put them on your calendar so you’re signaling to the organization that they need to have those routines for themselves as well. Very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so you mentioned a few personal routines, and we love that sort of thing here. Anything that came up again and again as being super powerful and restorative or good bang for the buck in terms of rejuvenation per minute?

Keith Ferrazzi
One that was really funny that nobody did until, all of a sudden, somebody cracked the code, one of them was end meetings five to ten minutes early.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that does feel great for everybody. No rushing.

Keith Ferrazzi
Right, it does, but guess what? Nobody ever does it because you’re in the flow of the conversation then we don’t end the meetings five or ten minutes early. So, what one group, I remember who this was, I think it might’ve been FedEx, they did something brilliant. They started meetings ten minutes late so it’s easier. Everyone is used to ending on the hour but if you start meetings ten minutes late, then that’s where the break is, and so I love that simple idea. And once companies started adopting that, that was kind of breakthrough. It’s so important that ten minutes to walk into the other room and give a hug to your significant other, or go check on the kids, or whatever it is, so powerful.

The other thing is blocking out time for you to think, do emails, and do asynchronous work. So, for instance, if you’re doing asynchronous collaboration where you’re working on a Google Doc with a group of people, block a half of an hour to do that as if it’s a meeting and protect it as if it’s a meeting. “That’s my half of an hour time to do that work,” and you tell the world that, “That’s my time, and, no, you can’t take that time just because it looks available. It’s not available. That’s my time to do my asynchronous work,” because, otherwise, as we said earlier, it’s just going to get squeezed into nights and weekends, but blocking that time is really precious and important.

So, that was another really important routine. Those are the things. What we found was that the stuff around meditation, etc., it was all very powerful but, at the end of the day, if we don’t change the way we work, none of that stuff can keep up with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. Well, Keith, tell me, any final top do’s, don’ts, implications from this stuff, particularly from the vantage point of either a frontline manager or an individual contributor?

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, I feel that one of the greatest things we can all start to do is start to shift our meeting time out of meetings. We need to make meetings the enemy. And if we imagine saying, “Okay, how can I not make somebody of a meeting with me on this but, actually, free up time?” So, I tell you, like one of my employees who does work for me, actually she’s the individual that helps manage my speaking business, individual contributor.

And we used to have a weekly meeting just to get an update, “How’s the speaking business doing?” and she would go over all the things she was doing and I’d banter back and forth, etc.

And now what she does is she sends me a five-minute recording that I can listen to at my leisure with a quick update. And then if I have any response or feedback, etc., I just shoot her another recording back. It is the easiest thing in the world for me and it has freed up a half of an hour block of time that my administrative assistant is so grateful that he doesn’t have to have as a weekly meeting.

So, start asking yourself, how can you take meeting time off of the people around you off of their agenda. Let’s say you’re going to throw a meeting with your team, and you’re going to talk about X, Y, and Z, give you a piece of information. What we found was that during the pandemic, if you have 12 people in a meeting, only four people feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting. The average is only about four people of 12 feel that they’re fully heard in that meeting.

If, on the other hand, you send, we call it a decision board, out to folks, and say, “Listen, we’re not going to have a meeting on this topic. I’m going to say we’ve got a problem. The problem is we’re falling behind on inventory right now. And I think the solution is X and some of the struggles or challenges I know we’re going to have is this,” and send that out to everybody, and ask everybody at your leisure, “Add to the document.”

Now, you want to do a document that’s a SharePoint document or a Google Doc where everybody can see each other’s answers, and say, “You put your point of view in there.” So, now in a meeting, which you might’ve called a meeting with six people, all six people are going to get a chance to see each other’s point of view. Everybody will be fully heard.

Then you look at it, and then you decide if you even need a meeting. Maybe the problem has already been answered. And if you do need a meeting, you’ll be able to see that, really, we’re only two people that really had an opinion that mattered, so I’m going to have the meeting with these two people and let everybody else off the hook.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot.

Keith Ferrazzi
It’s powerful. Also, some of these people will say, “Well, listen, I think the better person who should be weighing in is so and so.” So, now, originally, you might’ve invited six people but maybe eight people get a chance to weigh in. These other people wouldn’t have even been invited. So, the biggest thing that I can say as a takeaway is start thinking about how you rethink some of the fundamentals of how you work personally. And one of the great evils of wasted time is meetings, so make sure that you work hard to eliminate as many of them as you can, move to asynchronous as best as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And for your speaking business manager, with your quick video recordings, I love Loom myself. Is there a tool you’re using and digging?

Keith Ferrazzi
We’re really simple here on this, and that’s the other thing I found out, Pete, which is it didn’t matter what technology people used. We could jerry-rig anything. It was more about, “How do you rethink the way work is?” The fact that she could literally just send me an audio message in Slack so that if I wanted to, they’re all housed there. Or, if we wanted to get lazy, she could send me a voice text right on her iPhone. But the point was it’s not about the technology. It’s about the mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Perfect. Well, now, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Can you give us a favorite quote?

Keith Ferrazzi
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’ve always been a thoughtful curious agile person. I want more information and I love changing my mind. It means I learned something.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. That’s good. Sorry, I’m just thinking of…

Keith Ferrazzi
Hobgoblins

Pete Mockaitis
Spiderman and Green Goblin and my kids.

Keith Ferrazzi
Exactly. Exactly.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say that my favorite research is the Gallup organizations research on employee engagement, when they really cracked the code and realized how fundamental relationships were. One friend at work was the greatest predictor of an employee’s engagement. And it’s interesting, so many organizations just dismissed that as a critical element of what they focused on, engineering for their employees’ happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Keith Ferrazzi
I would say The Great Gatsby, and that has nothing to do with business. It just has to do with the plight of a man who was deeply insecure, trying to aspire into a society that he didn’t think welcomed him. And that feels a lot like my life as a young man when I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania, a poor Pittsburgh kid trying to do better than my family history had been.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Keith Ferrazzi
I love this new tool called MURAL. It’s a whiteboarding tool. And I love getting on and whiteboarding things and collaborating. But I love it when it’s virtual and I love it when I can pass around between members of meetings, live asynchronously, grow. So, these days, I’ve really started to love this whiteboarding technology called MURAL.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Keith Ferrazzi
Ten minutes every morning. So, snooze to me isn’t go back to sleep. Alarm awakes, I push snooze and I do two things. I spend just a bit of time being grateful and I think about why I’m so grateful. And I happen to be, in my household, not to get too private, in my household, I need my space when I’m sleeping, so my significant other stays on that side of the bed. But that last ten minutes is my cuddle time, just time to be warm and intimate, and excited about the day, and so gratitude and connection to me to start the day couldn’t be used for anything better.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Oh, yeah. It is that, “We can’t get there alone and, therefore, people are so important. And the currency for deeper relationships is generosity. Find the folks that matter to you and be of service.”

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, RadicallyAdapt.com is where we’re engaging with folks and will be for a while around this particular book. RadicallyAdapt.com. You will get all the information that you need to get the video series for free, which we’re really excited to put in your hands. Obviously, if you want to get the book there, you can do that as well. RadicallyAdapt.com. Thanks.

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

Keith Ferrazzi
Yeah, it might be broader than we want for this time, but I would say, going back to my core roots, every single one of us have to recognize that your opportunities in this world will come to you not only because of your competency but because of your relationships, so build a relationship action plan. After today, literally just pick the five people who are most important to your progress and success, and be of service to those individuals.

And I would say, measure the current relationship status you have with them. Zero means you don’t know them; they don’t know you. A five means you could call them up on the weekend and cry about something that you’re disturbed by, so it’s that end of the extreme. A three is what we normally call a friend at work, just an acquaintance. I want you to try to move those five people into being fours and fives, not twos and threes where they usually reside. So, build a relationship action plan.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Keith, this has been a treat once again. I wish you much luck in the new world of work.

Keith Ferrazzi
Thank you, Pete. And thanks so much for your generosity of this amazing audience.

Feb 10
0

742: How to Break Bad Habits and Make Good Habits Stick with Wendy Wood

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Wendy Wood reveals recent science behind habit formation and how you can use it to reshape your own behavior.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The trick to building habits
  2. Why context is so crucial for habits
  3. The one question to control your bad habit

About Wendy

Wendy Wood is a behavioral scientist who is Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California. She is the author of the book, Good Habits, Bad Habits. For the past 30 years, she has been researching the nature of habits and why they are so difficult to change.

Resources Mentioned

Wendy Wood Interview Transcript

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

Wendy Wood
Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk to you about habits, one of my favorite topics here. Could you start us off by telling us about a habit that has been transformational for you personally?

Wendy Wood
So, it’s hard to isolate any one habit that we have that makes a huge difference in our lives because so much of what we do is influenced by our habits, depends on our habits, much more so than we realize. I’ve done some research on how much of our daily lives is habitual in the sense that we’re repeating things without thinking a lot about them, just sort of responding automatically. And almost 43% of what we do every day we’re doing out of habit. So, habits contribute to an awful lot more than most of us imagine.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is intriguing and I was just about to ask you for any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way with your research, it sounds you already got one. But anything else leaping to mind?

Wendy Wood
I think that for your audience, the biggest question is, “How do I change bad habits, unwanted habits?” And most of us do it by exerting willpower, making a decision, but habits don’t work that way. Habits are really part of the non-conscious processes in our brain so that habits form as we repeat behaviors, and they change as we repeat behaviors, too. So, changing habits is not at all what we think it is. It’s not what we usually try to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s sort of like a definitional point, like if we’re calling it a habit, it’s not even an effortful initiative of our proactive will that we’re going for, but rather kind of like something operating in an autopilot-y part of ourselves, definitionally speaking.

Wendy Wood
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Wendy Wood
So, we think of our brain as processing information, as a single unit that tells us when we like things, that records memories, but, in fact, our brains are made up of multiple separate systems that only sort of work together. And the habit system is something that is part of our non-conscious. So, you have habits, I have habits, our dogs have habits. We all learn through experience. It’s a very basic way of learning and it really guides a huge amount of what we do, particularly at work.

So, one of the things we found early on is that people who have jobs actually have slightly more habits than people who don’t, and that’s because our job structure our day so that we’re repeating the same things. You go to the same place, at least you used to before the pandemic, if you’re an office worker. Many of us are still not quite back in the office. We go to work at the same time each day. We wear similar types of clothes. We stop for lunch around the same time. So, work really structures our life in ways that make it very easy for us to form habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued with research on the number of habits. Tell us, how many habits do we have on average or the rough range for people?

Wendy Wood
I don’t think there’s an exact number. As I said, 43% of the time, you are acting on habit. So, almost half the time you’re doing things automatically without thinking and without necessarily making decisions. And you can see why that would be useful because you don’t have to think carefully about how you’re going to get to work today, or think about where you’re going to go for lunch. Usually, we just do what we’ve done before. That sort of work for us in some way. It might not be the best thing but it’s the easy thing and we just repeat it and do it again.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I could see how, sure, conserving mental thought energy is something that we accomplish there. Could you paint a picture for us in terms of for professionals, and maybe all of mankind, like what’s really at stake or possible here? Do you have maybe any startling statistics or inspiring stories showing us what really is possible if we master or fail to master habit-building as a skill?

Wendy Wood
Well, you’re building habits all the time. The skill to master is building habits that work for you, that are rewarding, that are consistent with your goals, and so that’s the skill that everyone needs to focus on. And you do that by repeating behaviors that are productive, that save you money, that are healthy. So, habit memories build as you do the same thing over and over again.

You don’t build habits by decisions. You build habits through repetition. Repeating a behavior in the same context so that the next time you’re in that context, that’s the behavior that springs to mind, and it takes many repetitions for habit memories to form. And that’s why they’re so challenging, is they stick around. So, it takes a long time to form a new habit, and it takes a long time for habit memories to decay.

Pete Mockaitis
You said many repetitions, and I’ve read some numbers cited that are different in a number of places. So, Wendy, could you weigh in on how many reps or how long does it take to form a habit?

Wendy Wood
Yeah, you’ll read lots of things about habits out there because people are fascinated by them. They should be. There’s something that is part of our unconscious that we don’t have access to. We don’t have awareness of how our habits work so it’s really fascinating to speculate, and there’s lots of speculation out there in the literature. But what science tells us is that it takes probably about three months of repetition, almost every day, for a habit to become really strong so that you do it without thinking, so that it becomes an automated part of your everyday life.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, you said about three months, and part of me thinks that that’s a tricky question, like, “How long does it take to form a habit?” Sort of like, “Well, how long does it take to master chess? How long does it take to fall in love?”

Wendy Wood
You’ve got it.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s going to vary wildly based on some contexts and individuals and what you’re achieving. And I’m thinking about when we interviewed BJ Fogg who wrote about Tiny Habits, and his take was, “Well, hey, if it’s super easy and doesn’t require a lot of effortful motivation, you might find that you’re installing habits quite quickly.” Is that fair to say that the time it takes can really vary based upon just how big or small or hard or easy or motivated you feel about something?

Wendy Wood
Well, probably not with motivation because habit memories don’t depend on how motivated you are. Instead, they depend simply on repetition. Repetition and whether you do things in the same way each time. So, you’re absolutely right, it takes a long time to master some things. Playing a Chopin piano concerto, it took me a long, long time to learn how to do that. Playing Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star on the piano? That I can do. So, how long something takes really depends on how difficult the behavior is, how complex it is. Your intuition is absolutely right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess when it comes to habit difficulties, I guess it’s true. Like, if it’s wipe off the counter after making coffee in the morning is a lot easier than head to the gym and do an elaborate workout routine each morning.

Wendy Wood
You got it, yup. Yeah, and that’s true in our jobs, too. There are some things we do that are relatively easy and straightforward and we can form habits for them pretty quickly, quickly being several months. But other things are just much more complicated and never ever become completely habitual.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I see.

Wendy Wood
So, let me give you an example, and this is all part of the idea, the evident research evidence that people have multiple components in their brain, multiple systems, that work somewhat separately. So, very productive writers, if you’re a productive writer and you’re pushing out those pages every day, you probably have a habit to write at a certain place, certain time of day, maybe you write for a certain number of hours, or get a certain number of words on the page. Most really productive writers have these habits that get them to writing. But the actual writing isn’t done out of habit.

Habit is too   a mechanism. That’s your creativity. So, habits and conscious thought, conscious decision-making creativity, they both, together, allow us to do very complex tasks but both are required because if you’re a great writer but you don’t have good habits, then you’re struggling to get yourself to write.

You’re struggling against yourself, “Do I want to do it today? Will I be successful? How do I do it?” You’re wasting all that energy before you even start writing. So, that’s why it’s so important to get your habits in sync with your goals, get them aligned with your goals, your conscious desires. And if you do that, then your habits will help you achieve them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. And I’m thinking, well, the quote that comes to mind, I think, has been attributed to many different writers is, “I write when I’m inspired and I make sure to be inspired at 9:00 a.m. each morning.”

Wendy Wood
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Which I kind of summarize as, “Okay, there are some creative things going on as well as a discipline, habituated thing going on seeded, hands on keys at that time and place.”

Wendy Wood
Yup, “And things are quite and nobody’s bothering me so I have a chance to actually be creative,” which is no guarantee. You’re not going to be creative every day. If you’ve written a lot, you know some days are just crap, you just don’t produce things that you want to keep. But if you have a habit to write, the next day you’ll be back there, and that day, things might work better.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, so let’s maybe apply some of these goodness that you lay out in your book, Good Habits, Bad Habits in terms of thinking about some professionals and habits they’d like to make or break, how do we start with break? Let’s say, folks are like, “I look at my phone too much. I’m always scrolling TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, email when I should be unplugged from work and rejuvenating but I just find myself, ‘Whoa, how did this happen?’ Here I am on my Facebook on the phone.” If folks have that habit they’d like to stop, what do we do?

Wendy Wood
It’s very understandable if people have that habit because our phones, and social media sites in particular, are designed to be very habit-forming. They are set up in ways that make it really easy for us to form habits to use them, in part just because we can take them everywhere. You can take your phone on the bus, you can take your phone to the office, you can take it into important meetings, people take it into the restroom. You can take your phone everywhere. It’s always accessible so it’s always available to be used, and it’s very rewarding. You get on your phone and you learn stuff. So, it has the components of habit formation built into it.

And the challenge is we need to control those forces in our lives, as you said. So, one way to do this is to make it a little bit harder for us to use the phone, and that’s not the way most people think about changing their habits. Most people think, “Okay, if I have a problem with using my phone too much, I need to make a decision, exert some willpower, figure out how to control this thing…”

Pete Mockaitis
“Become a hero.”

Wendy Wood
Exactly, become a hero. But your habit memory will long outlast your desire to control this behavior. Habit memories stick. They don’t go away very easily that some researchers think that once you have a habit, it never goes away. So, the best thing you can do is to put some brakes on it. And we call that adding friction to the behavior.

One great way of adding friction, if you’re in a meeting, is to take your phone and just put it face down because that reduces the cues that you will see to pick it up and look at it again. You’re not going to see the alerts in the same way. Another way is to form a habit of putting it in your briefcase, your backpack, your purse, and zipping it so that you actually have to unzip it in order to use it.

Now, all of this just sounds a little too simple, which is, I think, why people don’t do it but there’s great research evidence showing that it does work. In fact, probably the best evidence comes from anti smoking campaigns.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, do tell.

Wendy Wood
So, the last century, middle of the last century, about 50% of Americans smoked, and then we all learned that smoking causes cancer so we all got concerned about it, but our behavior didn’t change a whole lot. It didn’t change really until the government started putting friction on smoking. So, they banned smoking in public places so you can’t smoke in restaurants and bars anymore, can’t smoke in the office, which makes it just a little bit more difficult to keep being a smoker.

They added taxes onto the cigarette purchases so that’s a little bit more difficult to afford to be a smoker. And then they started removing cues, so that it used to be you could just go into the store and pull a packet of cigarettes off of the shelves, but you can’t do that anymore. You have to ask somebody for the brand…

Pete Mockaitis
To show your face in shame.

Wendy Wood
Exactly, for the brand that you smoke.

Pete Mockaitis
“I need nicotine from you.”

Wendy Wood
And you have to remember exactly what kind, and there are five different variants on every brand that’s out there, so you have to describe it to somebody. They make it work. You have to work for it. And anything you have to work for, people are less likely to do. So, that, now, with after removing cues and adding friction to smoking, only 15% of Americans actually smoke, which is an amazing success story but it was done through friction.

And friction on a behavior that’s even more addictive, more habit-forming than your phone, because there is an addictive component to smoking, obviously, it’s that nicotine jolt that you get when you smoke, but friction helps control it. So, thinking about your experience, in terms of friction, helps give you control over habits that you may not want to continue.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s intriguing and I love a good story with numbers, so thank you for that. And now I’m thinking in contrast to e-cigarettes, like JUUL, really proliferating perhaps by just the opposite, like there’s so little friction in terms of, well, high school students like sneakily are using them in their schools because there’s no smell, there’s no need to light something up. It can be done, hide it in the bathroom or a locker, the exhale or whatever. Friends, family, colleagues can’t smell and judge you in terms of like, “Oh, you’re a smoker, huh?” so you don’t have that stigma there. You have a couple puffs without a whole cigarette.

Wendy Wood
Yeah, for high school students, it has all the benefits and few of the downsides until their parents figure out what they’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Until they get some friction, of course.

Wendy Wood
Yeah, parents can be friction in that case. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Some real penalties. Okay. Well, so that’s really handy, so friction. Now, you mentioned in the book, context, repetition, reward. Where do we put friction in the context bucket or we make the context harder to do?

Wendy Wood
Exactly. You set up context that make repetition a little bit harder, require a bit more thought on your part. And it’s amazing how influenced we all are by the friction in our lives. There’s great evidence that people who are closer to gymnasiums actually work out more often, and that’s not how we think about working out.

We think we’re making a decision, we’re being admirable people, we’re showing willpower, we’re concerned about our health, and so that’s why we go work out. But, instead, another important determinant is how easy is it to get there? And if you can get to the gym easily, you’re just more likely to work out and have an exercise habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, that’s so powerful, it’s like, “How can I make this easier or how can I make it harder?” Can you just lay upon us example after example of cool stories you’ve heard of folks doing some clever things to do that? Well, one, you could move closer to a gym, which that might seem dramatic, but, hey, if that’s a priority for you. I’ve known people who have moved close to a gym, to a beach, to a forest, to a church, kind of whatever is kind of important and useful for them. They factor that into the planning because that context, that ease versus difficulty really does shape their behavior.

Wendy Wood
Yeah, it’s surprising how impactful it is in a variety of different domains. So, people who are sitting, so there’s one study where researchers gave people, in one condition, a bowl of butter popcorn and a bowl of sliced apples. And in one condition, the popcorn was right close to them and the sliced apples were way at the end of the counter. They could see them and they could reach for them but it was a bit of effort.

In another condition, the apples were right in front of them and the popcorn was at the end of the counter. Again, they could see it, they could smell it, and they could get there, and everybody was told, “Eat what you want.” So, when the apples were close to them, they ate a third less calories than when the popcorn was close to them. They weren’t any less hungry and it wasn’t like people changed their food preferences. Instead, it was just people eat what’s closer and are less likely to eat what’s farther away. We’re very simple in some ways. We’re very simple creatures. And this effect of friction on our behavior is very powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, more please. Can we think of some other fun stories of professionals who’ve done things to make things easier or harder and seen cool results from it?

Wendy Wood
Well, one of the ways that you can get exercise very easily in your life is to bike to work. And when communities put in bike lanes, people are just much more likely to bike, protected bike lanes. So, so often, you see these stripes painted down the middle of the road, and as a cyclist, I wouldn’t use them because they’re scary. Cars don’t give you much…they don’t stay away from you in the same way as in protected bike lanes where there’s some fence or some protection between you and the cars.

When cities put in protected bike lanes, people are just much more likely to cycle to work than when they don’t have protected bike lanes. And, again, we think that these things are our personal decisions, that we’re either good people or bad people for doing these different things, but, instead, we’re very influenced by the forces in our environment.

One of my favorite studies was done by a group of researchers in the 1980s, and they were in a four-story office building, and what they wanted to do was they wanted to convince people to take the stairs instead of the elevator while they were at work. So, they started doing just what we all do, which is they thought, “Well, I should convince people that this is the right thing to do.”

So, they put up signs all over the elevator, “Take the stairs, not the elevator. It’s good for the environment. It’s good for your health. Uses more calories. Doesn’t waste energy.” No effect. So, what they did is they decided to add a small amount of friction to using the elevator, and they slowed the closing of the elevator door by 16 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, the whole process of closing the door takes 16 seconds?

Wendy Wood
More than it typically did, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Wendy Wood
They added 16 seconds to it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s enough for me to be like, “Forget this. I’m out of here.”

Wendy Wood
Exactly. And that’s what happened, is that elevator use was cut by a third.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really. I thought it would be way bigger. It’s like that sounds like an eternity.

Wendy Wood
You’re obviously an impatient person.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I can be.

Wendy Wood
But the really cool thing about the study was a month later, they put the elevator doors back to their original speed, and people kept taking the stairs because they’d formed a habit to do that and they weren’t going to mess with the elevator. They just kept taking the stairs. They’d learn how to do it, they figured out, “Yes, it is good for me. It gives me a little bit of a break in the middle of the day,” so they just continued to do it.

And, again, I’m not advocating people change the speed of the elevator door closing in their office, but simple friction tricks like that can be really powerful, much more so than convincing ourselves that something is right, something is the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s an example of a really easy habit that sort of fits in naturally that lock in within a month, so cool beans. So, in good habits, bad habits, with the three bases of context, repetition, reward, it feels like we’ve hit context pretty thoroughly. Can we hear some best practices in the zone of repetition and reward that are within our actionable control?

Wendy Wood
Yeah. So, psychologists used to think that intrinsic motivation was most important, that there was something unique about intrinsic motivation, feeling good because of an activity while you’re doing the activity itself, finding things that make you feel good when you do them, that there was something unique, important, special about that.

And we’ve since learned that it doesn’t quite work that way. It’s just doing activities and having some positive experience. The positive experience doesn’t even have to come from the activity itself. So, researchers gone into kids’ classrooms – math classes – the kind kids don’t like, and played music, gave the kids food while they were doing math problems, gave them colored pens to use for the math problems, and the kids worked on the problems longer just because they felt it was more fun, it was more engaging, more rewarding to do it.

Those are not rewards that are part of math necessarily but if you add them in, they increase our enjoyment of the activity and make it more likely that we will repeat it again in the future so that we’ll form it into a habit. Those kids were more likely then to do math in the future and might form a habit to do their math homework.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s lovely. So, if we could make something more enjoyable from the ambiance, the lighting, the music, the design, the tools, then away we go. It’s true, I like working more with my PILOT Precise RT pen than some junk they gave me at the bank.

Wendy Wood
There you go. And people use this all the time with exercise. People do it intuitively with exercise. You might hate to work out at the gym but if you can listen to interesting podcasts, like this one, if you can find good music, a good book to read while you’re working out, it makes it much more interesting and much more fun, and you’re more likely to do it again in the future, forming a habit. So, you can add in rewards that don’t have anything to do with an activity, and it functions just like an intrinsic reward, something that comes from the activity itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. So, with context, we can proactively think about how to shape things to make it easier or harder to do in the context. For reward, we can actively shape it so we can make something more pleasant or less pleasant. How do you make something less pleasant maybe? If I wanted to make looking at my phone less enjoyable, is there something I can do there?

Wendy Wood
Yeah, there sure is. You can put it to greyscale, take the colors out, and that does a couple of things. It removes cues because it makes it harder to distinguish the different icons and exactly what they are. Then it also removes the rewards. It makes it less interesting for us to get on social media and see different videos and pictures. So, it removes cues, removes rewards, something you can do to control phone use. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very cool. And how about repetition? I guess, just do more or just do less, I don’t know. Anything clever we can do to work this lever?

Wendy Wood
Well, repetition is really a function of reward and things that are easy. So, repetition, you’re more likely to repeat a behavior if you enjoy what you’re doing and if it’s easy to do, so it’s a consequence of rewards and context friction.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if I wanted to get a head start, really turbocharge getting a habit going, would it be worth my while to just try repeating something dozens of times, like, “Okay, I wake up, I put on my running shoes. Roll out of bed, put on my running shoes. Roll out of bed, put on my running shoes”? Like, is that a useful thing to do?

Wendy Wood
Sure, if you go running then.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I was thinking about the actual, like, “For the next hour, I’m going to exit my bed and put on running shoes 50 times.” Is that useful?

Wendy Wood
I wouldn’t do it. I don’t think it’s worth it. I think it is worth it to figure out where to put your running shoes so that you’re most likely to put them on when you have time to go running, and actually walk outside with them and start running. So, finding time in your day, finding a way to structure in to make it easy for you to go running will be more successful.

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

Wendy Wood
I think habits in the workplace are often misunderstood because we tend to think of work as involving both innovation and habitual repetition, and we don’t realize how much our habits enable that innovation so they allow us to get to the point where we can be creative and innovative, and respond to the challenges that we all have at work.

If you have good habits then you’re not struggling with the preparatory stuff. Instead, you’re doing that automatically, and that sets you up to do what is going to be successful today in meeting the new innovative challenges at work.

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

Wendy Wood
I think my favorite quote was an inaccurate one by William James when he claimed that 99.9% of everyday activities are done out of habit. So, William James is a brother of Henry James, if you are an English major, and he is often considered to be the father of modern psychology. So, the fact that he was such a habit enthusiast is great. He didn’t have much data. He didn’t have anything to back up his speculation but he was a real enthusiast.

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

Wendy Wood
I think that probably my favorite study is the one that I already mentioned on elevator use but I can tell you one that we did that I think illustrates how hard it is to change our habits, and it was done at a local movie cinema. We got the people who ran the cinema to allow us to show some shorts at the beginning before people watched the actual movie they came to see, and, supposedly, to thank them for rating all of these movie shorts.

We gave them boxes of popcorn to eat. These were free. Everyone took them. And, unbeknownst to them, half of the popcorn was stale, and it was really stale. It had been in our lab for about a week in a plastic bag, so it was not great popcorn. Half got fresh popcorn. So, you see the setup. At the end of the presentation, we collected the boxes and we weighed them to see how much people actually ate.

And what we found is that people who didn’t have habits to eat popcorn at the movie cinema, and there are such people out there, they ate a lot of the fresh popcorn, they did not eat the stale popcorn because they could tell us, it was awful, and it was. But people with habits to eat popcorn in the movie cinema, they were sitting there, they were holding the popcorn, and they ate the same amount whether it was fresh or stale.

And it just shows that our habits are cued automatically even when we don’t want them to be. These people are telling us, “I hate this popcorn. It’s disgusting.” I actually don’t know that I’ve ever gotten such low ratings of anything in my lab before, so people really did hate it but they kept eating it because they were cued by the context that they were in. It’s easy, it’s what they’ve done before, it was their habit, and they just persisted. They repeated that behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there’s so much there and I believe I first heard of this experiment from Katy Milkman’s book. I think she cited you because I hear her voice in my mind’s ear in the Audible version, “Fresh popcorn.” And we had her on the show, and she was great. So, one, that’s really cool. Hey, that’s you. And, two, it’s like, “Whoa,” if you zoom out and think about it, that is a life metaphor. It’s like, “How much stale popcorn do we have going on in our lives that we’re just kind of mindlessly dealing with because it’s easy and it’s repeated, and that’s the context we’re in?”

Wendy Wood
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
There’ll be some soul-searching there.

Wendy Wood
A lot of our habit, they work for us most of the time but not all the time, but we repeat them regardless of whether they working for us. And we repeat them even after they’ve stopped working for us most of the time. It’s just easier to do what you’ve done before than make decisions. And, as I said, we’re simple creatures. At least the habit system is quite simple.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Wendy Wood
Well, the classics are easy to identify as favorites because, early on in the field, psychologists were not only researchers, they were also philosophers, and so they like to think broadly about social behaviors, so it’s really fun to read some of the early thinking. William James, for example, his Principles of Psychology are really fun to read, in part, because he draws on personal experience as well as the research.

And one example is he talks about a friend of his who would come home for dinner and eat and then change into his pajamas. And if he got distracted and ended up in his bedroom before he ate dinner, he’d just change into his pajamas anyway regardless of who was showing up for dinner, what he was doing. And we all have this experience of continuing to do repeat behaviors that we’ve done in the past that, really, we didn’t mean to do right now, but it’s the nature of habit.

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

Wendy Wood
I think it has to be everybody’s favorite right now, it’s the computer. I’ve been around long enough so that I was writing before we were writing on keyboards. It makes you really appreciate what you got.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a key nugget or articulation of your wisdom that you share that people go, “Oh, wow, that’s awesome,” they re-tweet it, they write it down, they Kindle book highlight it, they say, “Wendy said this, and it’s brilliant and we love it”?

Wendy Wood
No, there is no such thing.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re so modest.

Wendy Wood
No, although, let me give you an example that I give to people, and this is not brilliant. It’s just practical, demonstrating how much we don’t understand our own habits. And that is all of us can use a keyboard. We can all type on a keyboard, some really proficiently. But if I asked you to list out the keys on the second row of your keyboard, you probably couldn’t do that, can you?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m trying not to look. A, S, D, F, G, H, J, K, L. Yeah, that’s exciting.

Wendy Wood
You’re cheating.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “J, K, L all in rows, is that true? Yeah, it is.”

Wendy Wood
You see, you could type those things without any hesitation but actually repeating them back to me is hard because we haven’t stored it in our conscious memory. We stored it in habit memory system, and that shows you the difference, the separation, between the two.

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

Wendy Wood
@ProfWendyWood on Twitter or Instagram. I’m also on LinkedIn and I’d be very happy to converse with people about habits, habit change, challenges they’re experiencing in the workplace with habit.

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

Wendy Wood
Yeah. Be clear about what your goals are, and then make sure that your habits support them so that you don’t have to fight yourself in order to meet your goals. And so often, our biggest challenges are our own habits, what we’ve done in the past. You don’t want to put yourself in that position. You’d be much happier and you’d be much more successful if your habits and goals are aligned.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Wendy, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck with your habits and research and more.

Wendy Wood
Thank you so much. Great fun to talk to you.

Feb 07
0

741: How to Stop Struggling and Start Thriving with Nataly Kogan

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Nataly Kogan shares how to become the boss of your own brain and beat the negativity bias.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why struggle is optional
  2. The two questions to boost your emotional fitness
  3. How to combat your brain’s negativity bias 

About Nataly

Nataly Kogan is a former VC and the founder of Happier, a global technology and learning platform helping individuals and organizations to realize full potential by adopting scientifically-proven practices that improve their well-being. 

Since launching Happier, Nataly has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, New York Magazine and Time Magazine, and has appeared as an expert on Dr. Oz, Bloomberg TV, and “One World” with Deepak Chopra. 

She is a sought-out keynote speaker, having appeared at events that include at Million Dollar Roundtable, Fortune’s Tech Brainstorm, Blogher, SXSW, the 92nd St. Y, Harvard Women’s Leadership Conference, TEDxBoston, and many more. 

 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Athletic Greens. Support your health with my favorite greens supplement. Free 1-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 travel packs when you purchase from athleticgreens.com/awesome.
  • University of California Irvine. Chart your course to career success at ce.uci.edu/learnnow

Nataly Kogan Interview Transcript

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

Nataly Kogan
Thank you. I love the title of the podcast. I’m excited. I overuse the word awesome more than any other word, so we’re in good company.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s meant to be. In fact, your latest book is called The Awesome Human Project. We’ve got a lot of awesome human listeners. Can you tell us what’s the big idea here?

Nataly Kogan
The big idea is that challenge in life is constant but struggle is optional. So, I’m calling official BS on the meme of “The struggle is real” because struggle is something we can reduce by improving our emotional fitness, and what’s real in life is challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there’s a distinction right there. Challenge versus struggle, can you expand on that?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, I think it’s one of the most important insights that I’ve gained on my journey. I spent most of my life struggling. I thought that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I came to the US as a refugee. That was a lot of struggle. And I thought to do anything meaningful in life, you’ve got to struggle, it’s got to be hard. And that’s what I did until I completely burnt out and almost lost everything that was meaningful to me, including this company, Happier, that I was building to help people and companies and teams create a culture of gratitude and joy.

So, that taught me a really powerful lesson that challenge is something we cannot control in life. And, as we all know, the times we’re living in right now, there’s a lot of challenge. Challenge is always there. But we can reduce our experience of struggle by creating a more supportive relationship with ourselves, by strengthening our emotional fitness, by training our brain just like we train our body to be more physically fit, by training our brain to help us get through challenges with less overwhelm, anxiety, and stress.

And not only does that feel better, which I think is a wonderful goal, but that actually gives us more energy, more of our capacity to solve problems, make decisions. And so, everything I share in my new book and everything I teach to teams and companies has come from my own experience, but it’s also backed by mountains of research that show that when you cultivate your wellbeing, when you actually reduce your struggle, when you fuel your energy, you’re more productive, you’re more creative, you’re better at helping people, you’re more awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so then if struggle is optional, I guess I’m curious, if you were to sort of go back in time with your refugee journey, you said there’s some struggle there. So, that struggle was optional. How would you kind of think about it differently in hindsight?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah. So, challenge wasn’t optional, to leave. I grew up in the former Soviet Union, and we left with my parents when I was a teenager with six suitcases and a couple hundred dollars, and we spent months in refugee settlements in Europe applying for permission to come to the US. That’s really hard. That’s a lot of challenge. But a lot of the struggle that I experienced came from my inability to handle my difficult emotions. I had no skills around that. Of course, I felt anxious and I had tremendous loss of identity and self-doubt.

And that went on for decades. On the outside, I became a very successful leader, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, you name it, but on the inside, I struggled because I never developed emotional awareness. I didn’t know how to handle difficult emotions so I just pretended I didn’t feel them. I engaged in tremendous amounts of harsh self-talk and treated myself, to be honest, like a military sergeant who’s not very nice. And those are all things that, in retrospect, I could’ve improved which would have…the challenges would’ve still been there but I would’ve struggled less through them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so then, I’m curious, can you lay it on us, what are some of the training approaches if we want to have less overwhelm, anxiety, and stress? What are some of the most effective things we can do to feel better on those domains?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, this is what my book is about. So, at its core, the way that I think about emotional fitness, it’s a skill of creating a relationship with your thoughts and your emotions that actually help support you. And the thing we need to understand, before I give you some tips, is our brain is not here to make us happy, or to make us awesome, or to help us thrive. The only thing the human brain cares about is to keep us safe from danger. Our brain is here to help us survive.

And because of that, it’s developed certain characteristics that actually can increase struggle. We all have a negativity bias. We see and notice many more things that are negative or could be negative, and our brain ignores a lot of things that are positive or meaningful or okay especially if they’re familiar. Our brain is also afraid of uncertainty. And so, when we’re facing uncertainty, our brain creates a lot more stress and anxiety because it doesn’t know how to keep us safe, and it creates these ruminations on worst-case scenarios as a way to give it control.

And so, I share this little mini-neuroscience lesson because at the core of creating or strengthening your emotional fitness, so you struggle less, is this practice of, what I call in my book, becoming the editor of your thoughts, and understanding that just because your brain gives you a thought, it doesn’t mean it is fact, it doesn’t mean it’s an objective observation of reality, it doesn’t mean you need to go along with it.

So, two questions to ask yourself. When you become aware that your brain is giving you thoughts that are causing you to stress, to struggle, to doubt yourself, to think about worst-case scenarios, two questions to ask is one of my favorite practices in the book. The first is, “Is this thought true?” And, by that I mean, “What are the facts I have to support this thought?”

So, when your thought tells you, “Oh, my God, this project you’re working on, it’s never going to work out,” or, “Oh, my God, your boss thinks you’re doing a terrible job,” well, is this thought true? What facts do you have to support it? Which we often find out when we ask this question, “Well, I don’t have a lot of facts. It’s just a story my brain has made up.” So, that’s the first question to ask, is, “What are the facts you have to support this thought?”

The second question to ask is, “Is this thought helpful?” And by that, I mean, “Does engaging in this thought, does it help me move forward through this challenge? Does it help me bring my best to the situation?” And asking those two questions is a really powerful way to shift your thoughts away from those that cause you stress, anxiety, overwhelm, self-doubt, and actually help your brain be your ally to help you move forward in the best way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds really handy in terms of asking yourself those questions. So, let’s just say you’re in a situation at work, a colleague criticizes or questions something you’ve done such that you’re feeling kind of bummed, like, “Oh, man, I’m such an idiot. That was so stupid. What was I thinking? I’m a moron. Oh, my gosh, am I going to get fired? Or, maybe they are going to fire me.” And so then, you maybe go through these questions, “Is this thought true?” It’s like, “Well, they’ll probably not going to fire me. And I’m probably not a piece of garbage.” And, “Is this thought helpful?” “Well, no, not really. It’s kind of bringing me down.”

And so, we’ve concluded rationally, “Okay, these thoughts are not true and they are not helpful, but, nonetheless, I feel yucky. What do I do?”

Nataly Kogan
All right. So, this brings us to the next skill, which is the skill of what I call acceptance in the book. And the skill of acceptance, I used to hate this word acceptance because I thought it was like being really passive, “Whatever happens, happens. I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a refugee, I’m a fighter.” Well, that’s not what acceptance is.

Acceptance is a skill of looking at the situation clearly, so as you’ve just done, separating the facts from the dramatic story your brain has told you, and then, using that as a foundation to say, “Okay, this is how it is. This is how I feel. What is one thing I could do to move forward in the best way?” And so, in your situation, so you’ve determined that, “Well, my brain is kind of exaggerating. I don’t really have any facts that my boss is going to fire me, and this making me suck at my job if I sit here think about it all day. So, what is one thing I could do to move forward?”

And that answer depends on your situation, but a couple ideas just for the scenario you offered, because it’s a common one. Well, you could focus your attention on working on this project that you’re working on. You could focus your attention on that. You could have a conversation with your boss. Another really important skill that I talk about is emotional openness. So, you could have a conversation with your boss where you can say, like, “Listen, I just want to tell you, in our last conversation that we had, it kind of left me feeling like maybe there’s something I’m not doing. I’d love to talk. I’d love to get some feedback.” Those are all things that you are now in control.

So, you’ve now shifted from being out of control, “My boss hates me. I’m going to get fired.” That feeling out of control is one of the worst things for the human brain. This is how we get into tough spots. And you’ve now shifted into, “Okay, this is how it is. This is how I feel. What is one thing I could do to move forward?” which gives you a sense of control and progress, which brings your best out in the situation. And then, whatever you learn in that next step, you can move forward from there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, we’ve got some strategy sort of in the heat of battle, in the midst of things. Can you talk to us? You mentioned the emotional immune system. Are there some things we can do kind of throughout time, and not just front and center, acutely that will put us in good shape?

Nataly Kogan
Yes. So, if you think about your emotional fitness, again, a great comparison is physical fitness. If you want to be more physically fit, you don’t just like work out once and then you’re done. You have a regular workout, you probably eat healthy, you might take some vitamins. The same thing about our emotional fitness is we have to practice to give ourselves this level of emotional fitness and then we have certain skills for in the moment.

So, a couple things to kind of improve your emotional fitness on a regular basis. One is to practice emotional awareness. We can’t improve something if we don’t know where we are. And most of us have grown up in work environments where emotions are not discussed. I definitely, I worked with some leading companies like Microsoft and McKinsey, and no one ever talked to me about emotions. I didn’t think that mattered. The old idea of “Leave your emotions at the door” is not actually possible. Emotions affect everything we do.

So, we have to get into the practice of checking in with ourselves daily. We check in with friends, colleagues, like, “Hey, how are you? How are you doing? How are you feeling?” We don’t check in with ourselves, and emotional awareness is at the core. So, every day, take a moment to check in with yourself, “How am I feeling? What is my energy level like?”

And research shows that people who practice this kind of emotional awareness actually improve their wellbeing because when you become aware, awareness gives you choices. So, that awareness might tell you, “Wow, I’m really stressed out. Okay, well, how can I support myself? Oh, it’s actually this one thing that’s really stressing me out. Let me go have that conversation.” So, emotional awareness is really, really important.

The other skill that I devote a lot of my new book to is gratitude. So, I think gratitude is one of those things that we all know is good for us, and we think we should do it on Thanksgiving, but I actually mean gratitude as a daily skill. And the reason gratitude is so important – and all the gratitude is, by the way – it’s focusing your attention on things that are positive, that are the moments that in your day of comfort, things you appreciate. They don’t have to be big things.

The reason it’s so important is because of that negativity bias that I talked about that our brains have. Without practicing gratitude, essentially, your brain is lying to you about your reality. You see things much more through a negative lens and that actually drains your energy, increases stress, reduces your ability to be awesome because it makes you use all that energy thinking about all the negative things.

So, having a regular daily practice of gratitude balances out that negativity bias that actually reduces your stress. It helps you have a more centered clear picture of your day so you can be at your best. So, those are a couple practices I recommend on a daily basis to improve your emotional fitness.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you talk about gratitude, I’ve heard a number of flavors associated with gratitude practices. What are some of your favorites and the research associated with them?

Nataly Kogan
Yes. So, I think there are two parts of gratitude that I want to mention. There’s a gratitude practice for yourself. So, my favorite practice, which is also in the book, is what I call the morning gratitude lens. Very simple. In the morning, hopefully before social media has taken away your attention or your reading – your 17th news article of the day, which we know we all do – take a moment, think of three specific things you are grateful for and jot them down in some way.

And this is a practice that counters that negativity bias I just talked about. Really, really important to be specific. So, I work with a lot of leaders and teams, and I ask them, “Tell me something you’re grateful for,” and they say, “I’m grateful for my family. I’m grateful for my health.” That’s very general. Your brain doesn’t really care about general things like that, so be specific. Ask yourself, “Why? Why am I grateful for my family? Why am I grateful for my health?” Be really specific. So, that’s a way to practice gratitude for yourself.

And then a really, really important part of gratitude is to express your gratitude to others. To look at other people, your family, your friends, your colleagues, your boss, your customers, through what I call the lens of gratitude, and to actually share your gratitude with them by, again, being specific, by saying, “Hey, Pete, I just want you to know, I really appreciate your thoughtful questions in this interview.”

Again, when we are specific with our gratitude, it has this really powerful impact, and it’s a gift that gives to both people. So, when I shared my gratitude with you, I remind myself, “Wow, there’s this person in my life who supports me, who’s meaningful, that helps me,” and there’s so much benefit on the receiving end of gratitude.

I think we all know it feels really good. But in the work context, being on the receiving side of gratitude improves motivation, improves resilience. It actually helps you get through more challenges because, at our core as human beings, we need to know that what we do matters. And when someone expresses gratitude to us, that’s what it reminds us of. So, those, to me, are the two sides of gratitude that I encourage you to practice for yourself, and then expressing authentic specific gratitude to others.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also curious, I was listening to a podcast from the Huberman Lab, Andrew Huberman. Love his stuff. And he was talking about gratitude practices with regard to some interesting research associated with hearing other people’s stories in which they were helped, and they expressed their gratitude and/or reflecting upon the times that you received gratitude, when someone was like, “Oh, Nataly, thank you so much. That was awesome. You changed everything for me.” And I thought that was kind of a different take and a different kind of vibe and flavor of gratitude. What do you think about those?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, I love that you brought that up. There is so much research that shows that just witnessing someone sharing gratitude with another person – so it’s not at you, it’s about someone else – improves our wellbeing, boosts our mood, and that is because, at our core as human beings, we’re all connected, and our emotions are connected, our emotions are contagious. And so, a lot of research shows that witnessing or hearing someone talk about, expressing gratitude, actually both boost your own wellbeing and it’s contagious. It encourages you to share that gratitude with others.

And, actually, something I want to mention on that, because a lot of times I work with a lot of teams and companies, and I tell them about this practice that I want them to do this in meetings. So, in a meeting, express your gratitude to someone in the meeting and tell them why you’re grateful for them. And often I’ll get a question of like, “Well, isn’t that like, won’t the other people feel weird that I’m not like expressing gratitude to them? Won’t they feel bad?”

The opposite is true. It actually makes everyone feel good because what you’re communicating to them is, “I am a kind of person who practices gratitude, and I appreciate other people around me.” So, it doesn’t make people feel jealous or envious or annoyed. It actually helps for them to express their gratitude to others. So, sharing your gratitude publicly is always a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Very cool. And you mentioned, and we may have already covered some, you’ve got three mindset shifts that help make happiness and emotional health reality for folks. What are those three shifts?

Nataly Kogan
So, these are my like…what do I call them? Kind of like principles, the core principles, and we’ve actually covered a bunch of them. So, the first is to think of…to recognize that your happiness and your emotional fitness is a skill. It’s not a prize you get at the end. So many of us, and I definitely did this in my life, so many of us live with this idea of like, “I’ll be happy when…”

So, for everyone listening, I’m sure you can relate, “I’ll be happy when I get this promotion,” or finish this project, or launch this thing, or lose weight, or gain weight, or move. And we think that something on the outside can actually give us that lasting happiness, and that can never happen. And there’s a biological reason for that, there’s nothing wrong with you.

The other thing to know about our brain is it’s very adaptable. We get used to things. And so, while you’re working towards that big promotion, your brain is really swimming in a lot of dopamine, it makes you feel good. When you get it, your brain is like, “Yes! Awesome! Got it! What’s next?” And so, “I’ll be happy when…” doesn’t work. Happiness is not a reward.

When you think of it as a skill, when you think of happiness and emotional fitness as a skill, something that you practice – we just talked a bunch of different ways to practice – that actually is what builds that. So, that’s a really important mindset shift. We talked about another one, which is life is full of challenges, and challenges will never go away. Challenge, change, uncertainty is always there, but struggle and your emotional experience of those is something you can improve. You can reduce struggle. So, that’s another core mindset shift which we’ve covered.

And one more, which is so essential, and that is that you don’t need to make any dramatic life changes to feel better to improve your wellbeing. Small shifts in how you treat yourself, in your relationship with your thoughts, in your relationship with other people, small shifts have huge impact when you practice them consistently.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, I’d love to hear then, we got a number of principles and tips and tactics. Can you bring it together in terms of a story of someone who had a pretty cool transformation of doing some of these things and turned things around to become all the more awesome at their jobs?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah. Well, so many examples come to mind, but I’ll use one example of a leader who’s a really amazing woman leader. I do Elevating Women Leaders leadership program for women every year. It’s always virtual. It’s a yearlong program. And when this woman leader came into the program, she’s very accomplished. She was running a huge brand but she was really exhausted, she was on the edge of burnout, and she admitted that she was not bringing her best or anywhere near her best to her work. And she didn’t really quite know what to do. She’s done kind of all the things that she could think of.

And by practicing, first and foremost, just becoming aware of her emotions and developing a relationship with herself that were supportive, so when she felt a difficult emotion, instead of stuffing it down, she actually acknowledged it and found ways to support herself by practicing gratitude. She began a daily gratitude practice on her own, and she began a weekly practice of gratitude with her team where everyone on the team would share a gratitude with other people.

It was an amazing transformation. She talked about how not only did she become, as a leader, better and started to thrive, but she said the entire culture of her team changed. They all began to work much more cohesively together. They were better, more effective. And it was a pretty incredible transformation when you think about these practices. They’re not complicated. But here was someone who went from being on the edge of burnout, not bringing her best, to changing herself in such a way that she encouraged her entire team to elevate their performance.

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

Nataly Kogan
I think the only other thing I want to mention is everything I teach and everything that’s in my book, it comes from my personal lens. I teach things I’ve learned, and obviously I’m a total research geek. And I just want to leave listeners with kind of this reminder that really helped me after I was recovering from burnout, and it’s something I share with teams and leaders and people, and it’s that you can’t give what you don’t have.

We have an epidemic of burnout now going on, and there’s a lot of articles about how things are bad and we’re burning out, but you always have a choice. You always have a choice. There are always things within your control that you can change, and, as we’ve talked about, they don’t require any kind of Herculean life changes. But you can always find ways and practice skills to support yourself, to support your emotional fitness and wellbeing. And there are so many people who consider that selfish or they feel guilty taking care of their happiness or emotional fitness.

And so, I want to break through all that and, again, tell you that you can’t give what you don’t have. If you’re on empty, if you have no energy, if you’re exhausted, if you’re constantly beating yourself up, you cannot be awesome at your job, you cannot show up as a patient, thoughtful, clear leader, you cannot show up in the way that I know you want to, to people you care about. So, it’s probably something I say most often throughout the day, both to other people and to myself.

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

Nataly Kogan
I’m going to share this quote which my teacher, who was my teacher as I was kind of healing from burnout and really going through a process of reinvention. She said to me, she said, “You’re a being, not a doing.” And, at the time, I had no idea what that meant, and I didn’t really care. I was very much to doing. I connected my worth entirely to my achievements for the day. But I find it one of the most inspiring things, and I do want our listeners to hear that.

I think there’s so much more that we can all contribute to the world and to our jobs if we value our being, our essence, our energy, ourselves, and not just connect that to our achievements.

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

Nataly Kogan
Ooh, let’s see. Well, one of my favorite bits of research is…you’ve gone into my favorite area. I’m such a research geek. Okay, let me share one around the negativity bias, gratitude being important because I think it really lands it. So, they’ve done experiments where they have people wear headphones, and in one ear they have negative words coming in, and in the other ear they have positive words coming in.

And even if the positive words are louder and clearer, when they asked people what they recall, they recalled the negative words. Our brain is constantly on alert for anything negative. And I just love that study because it’s so literal that it brings it home this reality that our brain is looking at everything through this negativity lens, and we have to correct it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a research geek as well. That’s so intriguing. And I’m wondering, hopefully, they rotated the headphones, the left and the right.

Nataly Kogan
They have done. And you can look into it. They did all kinds of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And a favorite book?

Nataly Kogan
I would have to say The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, which is probably the book I give to people more than my own books. And it’s an incredible story of this very promising economics PhD student who, one day, decides that he needs to figure out why there’s constant chatter in his brain, like we all have this voice in our head that’s constantly chattering, “You’re not good enough. You didn’t do it.” No, you’re just commenting on everything.

So, he quit and decided he was going to be a yogi and he was just going to be Zen and calm his mind. And it’s an amazing story of how that actually led him to run a $2-billion company we’ve all heard of, and an incredible journey of what happens when we practice acceptance, when we actually accept ourselves and the world as they are. So, I absolutely recommend that book.

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

Nataly Kogan
So, in terms of my favorite app, I love Todoist. For anyone who doesn’t use it, I love it. It’s a way I keep track of all my to-dos and projects. And I’m also an artist. You’re looking at some of my art behind me, so I love my iPad. It’s where I draw. It’s where I write things down. I think those are, for me, two tools. And I’m going to mention one that probably has nothing to do with work, but fresh air. I could not be awesome at my job if I did not go outside for a walk every day.

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

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, the thing that I hear back most often is this idea that I shared of you can’t give what you don’t have. And this is for senior leaders and junior employees, and men and women. I think we have this inner martyr that comes out and where we think we have to go last, and that’s the way to be a good leader, a good teammate, a good colleague. And so, when people have that breakthrough, this understanding of in order to give, in whatever way you want to give, I have to actually fuel myself. So, you can’t give what you don’t have.

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

Nataly Kogan
Very easy. Go to NatalyKogan.com. And I’m very easy to find there. I’m on all the social media but NatalyKogan.com is the hub.

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

Nataly Kogan
Well, my call to action is twofold. I actually love giving homework, so I love an opportunity to give homework. I always give homework at the end of my talks and keynotes. So, my homework is twofold. Take one thing that you heard me talk about and make it a practice for the next five days. There’s no magic, by the way, about five days, just like there’s no magic about 21 days. It takes much longer to create a habit. But five days is a really good amount of time to do something, and then check in with yourself and then see if it’s made a difference.

So, take one thing you heard and do it for the next five days. Make that commitment to yourself. And the second part of your homework is, share your gratitude with someone today. It can be someone at work, it can be someone outside of work, but tell someone why you appreciate them. By the way, you never have to use the word gratitude if you don’t want to. You can say, “You’re awesome because…” Tell someone why you’re grateful for them today, and the impact of that will be so clear to you, hopefully you’ll keep at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nataly, thanks so much for this. And I wish you much awesomeness in the weeks ahead.

Nataly Kogan
Thank you. This was an awesome interview. Thanks for having me.

Feb 03
0

740: How to Reclaim Your Time and Calendar with Rick Pastoor

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Rick Pastoor shares his tried and tested strategies for beating the calendar overwhelm so you can get back to what matters.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why your calendar isn’t working–and how you can fix it 
  2. Powerful questions to keep you on track
  3. The simple trick to knocking out your biggest tasks 

About Rick

Rick Pastoor has always liked experimenting at work. He’ll try things out, then keep what works, ditch what doesn’t. Try. Rinse. Repeat. In his time at Blendle, the New York Times-backed journalism startup, Rick steadily refined his methods. That’s where GRIP was born, a flexible collection of tools and insights that helped the team do their best work.

Originally self-published in Dutch in 2019, GRIP became an overnight bestseller in Holland. Rick’s mission today is the same: helping people make smarter decisions about their time. He divides his own time between his young family in Amsterdam, giving talks on GRIP, his weekly newsletter “Work in Progress,” and a new startup, where he’s building a next-generation calendar called Rise. 

 

Resources Mentioned

Rick Pastoor Interview Transcript

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

Rick Pastoor
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom and hear about the book Grip and your startup Rise but, first, I think we got to go back in time a little bit. I understand there was a moment in your life when you received a letter from your mayor as a youngster, it made quite an impact. What’s the story here?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, okay, so this story is about when I was…I think I was around six. And on my birthday, on my sixth birthday, I received a letter from the municipality, like the local enforcement. It said, “Thank you, Rick, for cleaning up for us.” So, as I was young, and I still do but I cared about the environment in the city, in the local neighborhood actually. So, I started cleaning up stuff when I saw it and then I brought it home, and then my parents had to take care of it.

And for years, I thought that this letter was real, like it was signed from the mayor. And then at age, I think it was 12 or 13, I once brought up this letter, like, “Hey, it was actually weird. Did I get this letter from this…? How did they do that?”

Pete Mockaitis
How did they know?

Rick Pastoor
And then my parents said, “That was fake. That was something that we made up.” So, actually, I spent years thinking that the people in the city actually cared about this kind of stuff, that they noticed me. And I think the reason for sharing this is that, one, I always have cared about the idea that there are some rules that can be helpful, can be ideas that we should care about to keep things in order, and that brings you something, some idea of like you enjoy being in a space that’s nice and neat. So, that’s one idea.

And the second is that, while this was fake, this taught me that noticing these small things that people do that are working well can have a huge, like years’ long effect, of how they perceive the world, how they think about themselves, and stuff like that. So, since then I have made it a habit to try to notice this stuff and reach out to other people and share it with them.

Pete Mockaitis
So, like, “Hey, I noticed this and it’s really cool. Thank you.” Like that sort of thing?

Rick Pastoor
I think that kind of stuff, and I think that, I don’t know if you’ve ever…of course, you’re producing this podcast and you do other stuff, people think that you get bombarded with messages all of the time. And, of course, you probably get a lot of stuff but, still, I also found that, like the book sold over, whatever, 70,000 copies here in Netherlands, and people think that I have like hundreds of emails.

Of course, that is like the number of well-written and thoughtful emails that you get that someone had researched you or someone that really took the time, I can count on one hand every week. So, it’s really easy to stand out in that sense. And I found that to be true also for the biggest CEOs of the world. So, it has served to me as a trigger to don’t hold back in terms of the stuff that I share, also the questions that I ask to this kind of people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. And you haven’t held back when it comes to discovering and sharing advice for working smart, productivity stuff. Can you tell us, what’s perhaps one of the most surprising and fascinating or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this game since you started looking into it?

Rick Pastoor
So, I think the biggest one for me is that the calendar is a really under-looked aspect for a lot of people, and that has a reason, I think. I’m a huge fan of what David Allen wrote in Getting Things Done, and that’s a big starting point for a lot of people when they think about how to structure their work. I found that in a time where we spend actually a lot of time in meetings still and we have a lot of things going on in the calendar, that sometimes there’s a disconnect.

And that’s where I struggled a lot a couple of years ago when implementing this, and I found a way of working around that but, actually, it starts with the calendar. For me, there was a big shift in terms of the level of sanity that I could achieve while doing something as simple as making sure that the calendar is an actual reflection of how I spend my time. Since then, that has been some kind of a message that I’m trying to preach to people around me and which ultimately led to writing the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, David Allen, for folks who are not familiar, he wrote Getting Things Done, which is fantastic, and we’ve interviewed him a couple of times, including toward the beginning – what a guy – before the show was big enough to be meaningful for his publicity. Episode 15-ish. Thanks, David.

And so, I recommend listeners check out his work. It’s so good and the general vibe being, “Hey, download all the stuff out of your brain. It’s for having ideas, not for holding them. Have them in organized lists. Know what your projects and next actions are associated with those projects and you’ll feel a sense of sort of freedom, and things will become unstuck in.” And it’s really true.

I think about it kind of like exercise. It really works and it’s also really easy to fall off the wagon and stop doing it because, hey, more stuff comes at us all the time, and so you got to be pretty vigilant and pick yourself up when you do fall.

So, when you talk about the calendar and the disconnect, was the disconnect you’re referring to is your calendar is not actually truthfully reflecting or displaying what you’re doing with the hours in your life? Is that the disconnect?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, there’s basically two things. One is that if you have a sense of the project and the tasks that you need to accomplish to get these projects done, there’s two big things that I found that I needed to add to make the system work. And one is to make the connection with when something is going to happen. Of course, what David was saying is that there are a certain set of contexts where a task can be executed well, and then you just start off with this list. But this list is endless, of course.

Pete Mockaitis
It really does get big. I’ve got 1800 items in my OmniFocus inbox.

Rick Pastoor
Exactly. And I have the same, and I feel that, when I was discussing this with people, it gets really overwhelming and it never gets done, and especially in a time where there’s no clear, like, I’m opening the door of my office. I walk in and then I walk out of there at 5:00 p.m. There’s no closure anymore. So, we need some boundaries. And if they are not there anymore in the physical world, we need to build them in our digital world and in our own management of how we manage time. So, the sense of, “When is it done?” It will never get done. Our work is never done.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Rick Pastoor
So, artificially, we need something, and I found that in the calendar. So, that’s one. And, two, I found that there’s a disconnect between where I am now and where I’m going with this. And, for me, that’s like David is describing this in “Getting Things Done” with the different levels of height that you’re looking at your life, like different thousand-foot levels, and I struggle with implementing this.

Like, “How does this link to my day-to-day stuff?” So, you have your weekly review, of course. But how does this map out over the bigger things? And that’s the second ingredient that I added in the second part of the book. It’s basically sharing how I do my quarterly goal-setting, annual review, and stuff like that, how do I keep all this stuff in place. And, again, that’s the link to, “Okay, I know where I want to go but when will this happen?” Well, I’m making the link to time again on this level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s a great point in terms of “When does the work get done? Never because it’s endless.” And I find, maybe just to pause there for a moment, I find that to sort of emotionally that’s difficult because I really like to win and to feel like I’m winning, and I really don’t like to lose or feel like I’m losing. Not that I will bite your head off if you beat me in Monopoly or something but I would prefer to win.

And so, it is even more so with sort of my projects, my goals, the things that I’m trying to accomplish. And so then, I guess I’m curious, how do you know, whether it’s the course of a day or a week or an hour that, “Hey, even though the work is endless and always coming at me, I can declare victory. I have checked the box and kind of call this a successful day or week”? How do you get there?

Rick Pastoor
Well, if you zoom out, I think a big part of the way that we live, the stuff that we run into, is getting comfortable with the fact that the time on this planet is limited. And that means that we will find all kinds of ways to think that we have an endless opportunity to change stuff, to fix stuff, to start with things, to do stuff.

And I think, ultimately, being really aware that this day has so many hours, and, thus, forcing me to, upfront, decide how I’m spending it, and then making sure that that at least happens, will give me – and that’s what I found – this gives me fulfillment because this gives me a sense of, “Hey, I’ve mapped this out and this is what got done.” So, that’s one perspective of looking at it.

So, that’s like mapping it out again onto time, does not only force me to figure out when I’m starting, but also when I’m done. And that gives me this in-between, these small milestones, these small runs, like small days within the day where I can say, “Hey, I made this within the hour. I’m even faster, or I’m a bit slower, so I need to adapt.” So, it gives me these check-in points in the day, so that’s one.

And two is “What’s the alternative?” The alternative is that we assume that we’re not living with the fact that time is limited to us, and we never really get close with this. Well, that gives a false sense of opportunity. And, also, how do you prioritize if there’s no boundaries? So, in that sense, bringing that as close to the day as possible, so not thinking in a year but also in a day, really force me to make the tough decision, tougher decisions, on, “Okay, is this what I’m planning now, is it really worth my time if I look back on this?” Well, most of the time I need to swap things around a lot, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s intriguing. So, that question, “Is this really worth my time looking back on it in the future?” So, in terms of like is there a specific articulation of that question or maybe that’s just it right there? like, I think, “A year from now, will I be pleased that I interviewed Rick in this moment?” So far, the answer seems to be, “Yes, Rick, nice work.” And so, that’s just all there is to it or are there some more nuances or layers?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, I think this is also a part of a habit, and I think you and probably a lot of listeners might be familiar with the idea of doing a weekly check-in with yourself in the form of a review or, like in the book, I call this a Friday recap and expand on that a little bit. But, in a sense, I think it’s key to be aware that, without dedicated moments to sit down and reflect on certain time skills, these insights won’t really appear out of thin air. We need to work on that. We need to spend time on mulling this over and thinking about this stuff.

And, for me, the answer is also a structure where I no longer have to decide that I’m going to do it but it’s part of the structure so it happens. Like, it’s not something that you negotiate with, just like you’re not negotiating the fact that there will be a New Year’s Eve, like this is just what’s there. Like, in that sense, it should be something that’s just part of the deal.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing, so I like that. So, it’s just there, it’s just in the structure. And I guess maybe, from like a discipline motivation perspective, the first few times probably does require some will to do it, but then it’s just sort of like, “Well, Fridays at 11:00 a.m. is just when the recap happens. That’s just kind of what happens. That’s just it.” And so, is it just that simple after a few reps, then it’s there?

Rick Pastoor
I think, ultimately, there are two ways to look at it. One is there’s the really habit-forming approach where you’re looking at the technical parts of how will habits get formed. And Atomic Habits is, of course, a great book, if you want to dive into a lot of details around how you get to self-motivate instructions. There’s also the other angle of “What kind of value does this bring to my life?” And I think, again, for me, what I’m doing on a quarterly level where I’m taking this is one or two evenings, and on a yearly level, one or two full days to think about “What happened in the last year and how will this next year look?”

Those are the times where the value of this weekly sessions really sinks in but I also see this as if I skip it a week, and then the next week I feel I’m actually a worse person for it if I’m not doing it. And I think that’s where the rubber hits the road, and I experience that, that there’s something lost if I’m not doing it. And that’s where I feel this is not a trick. This is not something that I do because I feel like I really experience that stuff will fall apart if I’m not doing it.

But, of course, there’s also a connection between, “How do you make this super simple?” And we have the tendency to make things more complicated if things are not working, and I get that. Like, we bring in more complicated software if things are not but, actually, what really works is the other way around. If things are not working, take at least one piece of the puzzle out and then try it again. Like, make it simple instead of more complicated.

Pete Mockaitis
That reminds me of BJ Fogg’s work in Tiny Habits, like, “How can I make this easier?” is sort of like the master question. And I think that’s dead-on. Well, so I want to talk about the book “Grip” and some of the productivity experiments, but we’ve already sort of teased a little bit about sort of like the daily plan, the Friday recap, the quarterly, the yearly. Can you just give us a couple kinds of key guiding-light questions that you prompt yourself with at each of these intervals?

Rick Pastoor
Okay. So, on a weekly level, I’m thinking about, “Hey, what happened in the last week? What made me proud? What went well?” And then, “What are some of the things that did not go as well as I thought they went?” But, also, on a weekly level, it’s way more tactical, it’s way more like I’m tapping each item in my calendar to see if there’s any loose ends. Like, I follow the structure that also David Allen brought us, like, “Hey, go over each project and make sure that there’s a next action,” like there’s a basic checklist.

And then if I move to the quarterly level, I’m specific on using quarters because a month is way too short and a year is too long for setting any type of goals, so that’s why I’m using quarters. Also, it links really well with how a corporate structure works so you can also fold in your work plans a lot easier. And then I’m asking questions like, on the level of one goal, “So, how did my goals go? Did I manage them? And if not, why?”

On category level for each quarter, I have a couple of questions around, “Hey, like in my work, what kind of stuff do I actually want to spend my time on if I’m purely reasoning from my own perspective?” But, also, shifting towards more personal questions, like, “Hey, think about your friends, think about your family. How do you evolve in this, in this network of people? And what do you bring to each of these members of your family, friends, and group around you?”

So, going over these set of questions, zooming out on a quarter level and also on a yearly level, you see that gradually, like it moves from more technical to strategic “Where do I want to go as a person?” in a sort of sense.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, so let’s hear, it sounds we’ve already hit a lot of it. But what’s sort of like the big idea or main thesis behind your book Grip, which will soon be released in English to us Yankees? And let’s hear about some of the intriguing productivity experiments that are inside of it.

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, basically, what I’ve done is I brought a guide that I would’ve found super useful if it was my first job, and it contains a structure for having a better week, and that starts with the three components: calendar, task manager, email/communication, and this Friday recap or weekly review. That’s the first part of it.

And based on what I found missing is that there’s a lot of books and ideas that zoom in on one of these specifics and give you a really helpful tool. But how does this fit into the life that I have to manage? There’s a lot of stuff going on. And how does this fit into the Slack channels that are also there and WhatsApp that’s also there? I need to deal with this. How do I make this happen? So, that’s the first part of the book.

And then, of course, the second part builds up on top of that with the goal-setting. Like, goal-setting, to me, is like a lot of people get mad if I start talking about setting goals.

Pete Mockaitis
“How dare you?”

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. They have this instant negative response because people are using goals in a wrong way. Like, they’re used on them, not with them. It’s like something that gets managed for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. “Here are your goals, Rick. For this quarter, you will be doing these goals.”

Rick Pastoor
Exactly. It’s more of a stick. And what I also hear is that it’s something that is spoken about a lot, like you discuss a lot at work, and then, ultimately, of course, a couple of weeks in, you get completely different directions. Like, we’re not able to stick to them as well. So, of course, it brings in a negative response. So, my goal was to give you something that you can actually play with that brings you something as a person.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. And so, you’ve done some experiments, huh? Let’s hear some of the results.

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, one of the things that I love, and this is not rocket science, but one of the things that I’m a huge fan of is “How can you break things down to the point that you do them today?” And this is something that I’ve seen work for a lot of people, but, of course, we have these big dreams and big ideas.

And, ultimately, what I found, one of the first things that I’ve done aside from the main job that I had as a startup back then, is that I found that it was hard to do a specific type of research in a team, and people were always saying, like, “Yeah, we need more time to do research,” and complaining, basically, about, well, the decisions that were made.

And then I thought, like, “So, okay, how can I break this down as much as possible?” We were building a new version of the onboarding of one of the apps that I was working on. And onboarding meaning, well, the pros of signing up and then getting a new account. So, then I thought, “Okay, what can I do every single day? Well, let me review one specific onboarding for another app, and then write a brief blogpost about it, and then post that.”

So, ultimately, after a month, I had quite a collection, actually, of work which were super simple to do. Like, it was precisely in my circles of stuff that I found interesting, that I’m good at, that give me a good feeling, and also had a good mix with, and add to stuff that we were doing at work. So, this is one example, which ultimately led to writing an article for A List Apart, which is one of the blogs that I still am a fan of for years, which I find super exciting.

So, then one thing leads to another. That also led, ultimately, to the second Fuller Project which was writing a newsletter for every single day of, that was, 2016. And that led to, ultimately, writing the book because I had this material. And then, of course, ultimately, people started asking me, like, “Hey, how do you manage this?” Well, then I point back to the starting point, which is just writing for 15 minutes a day. And that, we all have time for. So, I think that was one of the experiments that I started with super small, and then, well, kept on improving and kept on building upon, which is one of the core things that I still do every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so fun. And I’m just imagining in your workplace, like, “Oh, boy, Rick is the onboarding expert. Like, he’s the master of onboarding.” And it’s like, “Okay, so I signed up for an app a day and wrote about what happened when I got on board for 15 minutes, and I did that for 20 days, a total of five hours. And now I am like the all-mighty onboarding….” Well, I’m just sort of making assumptions that this…

Rick Pastoor
That is fair. No, that’s basically completely fair but, also, as soon as you start, as soon as you do this yourself, you start looking at the other stuff that gets published, gets written, and people get idolized for with different eyes because, sure, there are some things that are truly a ton of work, of course, but a lot of things are also a culmination of tiny bits and bytes every single day. And if you know that, then you also know that, like if you publish hundreds of podcast episodes, like you did, people start asking you, “How do you actually manage this?” “Of course, one episode at a time.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, yup.

Rick Pastoor
One step at a time. And I think we underestimate what we can do if we do this for a longer period of time, which is super powerful, I guess.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. Well, I would stop myself from ranting about how when you Google something, all 10 results look suspiciously similar often, not always, but often. It’s like, “I know what you’re doing, everybody. I know what you’re doing.” And it irritates me. Anyway.

Rick Pastoor
Are you saying with that that you feel that these types of habits are causing this?

Pete Mockaitis
No. I’m just saying when you look at a body of work with a different set of eyes after producing something, it’s true in that I know that there are SEO articles out there saying, “Google something, look at the top 10 results, and then repackage them. And, hopefully, your domain authority, or whatever, will push you to be on the top results. Now you get some traffic.” Well, thanks, you’ve made the world no better, and I find that annoying. That’s my hot take, anyway. Not super relevant.

Rick Pastoor
No, I get what you’re saying, and I think what is true in that is that if you use any type of these kind of hacks to make yourself do stuff, it also matters what you then do, of course, and the direction matters. And I think this is also why I love the saying of Stephen Covey, “You can run up a ladder as fast as possible, but if these ladders are set against the wrong wall, why are you doing it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Exactly.

Rick Pastoor
“What’s the ultimate perspective?” And I think this is what happens in a lot of stuff that you can just copy and paste tips and tricks. That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, well, the combined effort of small steps every day can really surmount to a huge body of work that a lot of people will recognize, but that’s not the goal, that’s not really the goal. The goal is like, “How can you move this mountain for yourself?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I guess, fundamentally, it just feels more generous and loving in the world. Like, you’ve created something that is truly useful as opposed to something that’s just useful for your own sake, like, “Okay, hey, I managed to get some clicks but I’ve made the world know better,” is just kind of sticks me the wrong way.

But, anyway, bit by bit. Also, another thing I want to say about that, I remember back in my consulting days, when we were fresh recruits and we would look at people building these elaborate Excel models, and they showed us an example, like, “Oh, hey, yes, so here’s something I made,” and people are like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s insane. There’s like 50 different sheets and they all interrelate and you can automatically update one assumption and it flows into all these other places.”

And it was just like wildly intimidating but then they always said the same thing, it’s like, “Well, hey, this didn’t start out that way. One day we set out to figure out this one thing.” And they said, “Okay, so we had a very rough one-sheet thing.” And then we said, “Well, hey, actually there are some really dynamic assumptions working underneath it.” So they said, “Okay, so I made two other pages to reflect that, which then linked to the first one.”

And they said, “Well, there’s another section of things.” And so, again, it just sort of builds bit by bit. And then, when it’s unveiled in its entirety, whether it’s a whole book or a glorious Excel model or whatever, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, that’s insane. I could never do that.” It’s like, “Well, no one can in one day. It grows up bit by bit, and then it becomes something awesome.”

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, I do want to add to one of the previous things that you mentioned on “Is it actually worthwhile what you’re doing?” That I do tend to believe that most of these does not happen out of malintent or out of purposefully making something that’s not useful, or just useful for yourself. I think, ultimately, we do want to build or make something, most people, that is, in some way, deeply useful for, one, ourselves, but also for others.

And I think if there’s, in your life, no structure around “How do you gather insights that help you course-correct? Who is your sounding board, in that sense? Who are the people around you that can speak to you about this? Who do you use as a sounding board to reflect on how kind of ethical and moral choices you’re making? I believe that this is also a hugely important part where you can, one, stand out from the pack, and, two, can have huge effects on the direction that you’re following.

Like, if you’re listening to this and you don’t have an answer to this, you don’t have a way to think about this to deconstruct these issues, you’re not course-correcting. And that’s when you’re missing out, I believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well-said in terms of if you don’t have something, some guideposts or values or people to bounce things off of, and you just go down an optimizing shortcut-y pathway to maximize something, you’re going to get into some gross results. I don’t know if this is true, but I heard a conversation with Bethany McLean and Seth Godin, and one of them said that, “If you continually split-test A-B, what gets better results and clicks, a website, it will always devolve into porn.”

And I don’t know if that’s true, but there is a kernel of truth, I think, to it in terms of like what’s more exciting, like, “Hmm,” in terms of capturing a click, if it’s more clickbait-y or provocative, it does tend to, in the short term, get more people curious enough to take a look. So, yeah, that’s a great point about zooming out and getting the broad perspective. But I want to zoom back in.

So, with calendars, you noted a disconnect and you’ve taken it to a whole another level here in terms of you’re not just using your calendar a little bit differently. You have raised $3 million, I see – congratulations – to build a full-blown new bit of calendar software. What’s the scoop here?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, if you think about when you do your best work, if you think about when you want to be focused, when you want to have your meetings, you will probably have some idea, and your listeners will probably have some idea, too, otherwise, you won’t be listening to this. But the question now is, “Okay, think about the rest of your team, think about your teammates, think about the people you possibly manage, the people that you interact with within the company, you probably have no idea or maybe you know, “Okay, this guy is working mostly late shifts. This is not a morning person.” Okay, but that’s as far as it goes.

With Rise, what we want to do is not just build the calendar as an Excel sheet that you fill in but, actually we want to fold these signals into a calendar as we’ve actually done in the last year. We built a scheduling engine that takes this stuff into account, so personal profile, but also the meetings and stuff that you’re attending already. And if you request a time, like, if you say, “Hey, I want to meet for one hour with colleague A, B, and C in the next week,” we will schedule that on a time that’s saving as many focused time minutes as possible for the whole team on average.

So, that’s the biggest thing. We don’t just want to build a pretty calendar, which is something that I think we do, but that’s not the décor because the gist of it is we want you to be in and out, but actually want to help you preserve as much time to focus on what actually matters but also actually have better meetings because they are scheduled at times where you can perform at your best.

And that’s something that’s also linking back to the book but also in how you structure your week, is that we arrived at this, in a time where we just assume that we perform on this very same level on Monday mornings as Thursday afternoons, or at least we expect that of ourselves. Well, of course, that’s not true. And the same is what we’re doing in a year, like on a scale of a year. We just assume and expect from ourselves, from our team, that we perform at our best at all times. Well, that’s not how nature works.

So, there are times where we are just not so focused as we could possibly be, there are times in a year where we need to re-energize. And I think those are things that we actually know that are proven by science, that are backed by research, and stuff that we want to fold into this engine to make sure that you no longer have to think about this stuff, but actually have a calendar guide you to having better days and better weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s certainly intriguing. I guess I’m wondering if there are low-importance meetings that you can schedule for people’s least juicy times. Although, I know if anyone hosting meetings likes to think of it as low importance, but sometimes they might. It’s like, “Hey, these are just the updates that we’re obliged to do by law or something.”

Rick Pastoor
There’s one way to think about that, and that is there is no way for a team to set any type of guardrails about how much time you spend in meetings. So, there is basically just saying, “Hey, can we put it in this week or not?” Like, that’s what we are thinking about. So, that’s also hard to think about more weeks because there is just so much data to consider if you think about just scheduling in a meeting.

And you say low-priority meetings, well, like we know this but it’s just too big of a mental hurdle to think about the other possibilities, but that we can do. So, what happens in Rise is if you schedule a meeting, and the meeting loads for a team, it crosses the boundary that you set as a team, it will suggest, “Hey, possibly move this to next week.” And in a lot of situations, that’s fine. Like, there’s a lot of stuff that can wait.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m curious then, in terms of for our own selves, and maybe Rise does some of this, what are the best times to work? And to what extent are there universals versus individual personal preferences? And how do we masterfully deduce those and work with them?

Rick Pastoor
I think, roughly, there are – and this is not rocket science – roughly, there’s two types. There are the morning owls and there’s late nights, the people that perform better later in the day. And I think if you take those as archetypes, you can split those, again, into two groups but, roughly speaking, there is half of the population that really wants to have their focused time early in the day, and have their meetings maybe a little bit to start around 11:00 in the morning or just after lunch, and then continue into the afternoon.

And there’s another group that prefers to have their meetings in the morning, so to get them done, and have their peak time around 3:00 or 4:00 p.m., and then continues later in the day. And, additionally to this, there’s also a group that is really productive in the evenings, while there’s no distractions, there’s no things going on. What you do see is that you can ask yourself if that happens because of the distractions, or because they are truly more productive at that time.

So, I think that’s an interesting thing that program to impact especially in the next couple of years when people are and will be way more experimenting with disconnecting the work, the usual work times, and figuring out more. But if there’s no construct of an office anymore, and if you can let go of the times more, like you need to appear at 9:00 in Slack and then disappear from Slack at 6:00, what will happen to our productivity if that’s truly possible? But, in a sense, I see two big groups. So, either one in the morning or in the afternoon to focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, can you give us maybe a top do and a top don’t in the realm of calendar, task manager, and communications?

Rick Pastoor
Okay. So, a top do would be, one, make sure that what you do is reflected in this calendar. So, one, that’s meetings, but, two, after that, preparation time, processing time, travel time. Those are three that are very often overlooked. And, of course, you are not the person that is not preparing their meetings, but all the other people are. But we can actually set a good example and make sure that we have the preparation time booked in, otherwise it won’t happen.

And then, connects to that, make sure that what you’re actually working on, so all your tasks, two biggest tasks that need to happen should be in the calendar, that’s what I absolutely believe. That gives a signal to the team, that gives a signal to the people that try to book something in, but also it’s a huge thing for yourself to see a notification pop up and say, “You need to work on this right now because now there’s no excuse anymore.”

So, I’m really saying, make sure that what’s in there, that’s also something that you’re not negotiating with anymore. So, it’s really something that you should actually do. So, that’s really the do part. And the other two parts is what you already mentioned. Like, you should not use your brain for storage. Of course, that’s a mantra that people hear on this channel a lot, but that’s really something that you should not do because you should use your brain as a working memory to focus on what’s at hand.

And then the final one from me would be schedule time for communication, and let that happen at a set time because, one, that’s a skill. Communication is something that we value, like we’re not cutting it out, but very often, what happens, of course, we do our chats and our email while on the go, while we’re, I don’t know, in line in the grocery store, and, of course, we’re not reading things well, we’re not having our full attention. And, of course, stuff runs off the rail with that because we’re not reading. So, I would suggest book off time, like block off time in your calendar to do this communication. If we really value it as part of our work, it should be there.

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

Rick Pastoor
My key quote that I return to is the one, of course, from old president Eisenhower, there’s stuff that’s urgent but not important. Most of the things that are urgent are not important, and most of the things that are important are not urgent. And I’m paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s something that, like every day, is challenging me so much to really think about. If someone puts something on my plate, is that truly because it’s…like should I accept this because it really fits where I’m going? Or, do I do this because, well, really someone else requests this of me?

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

Rick Pastoor
Okay, so the one that I find really intriguing is still this study that’s about how much time do we need to return to our tasks when we are disrupted by something, or when we’re disturbed by something. And there’s a study that’s often quoted, which is that we need – what is it now? 24 minutes? 23 minutes?

Pete Mockaitis
I was thinking the Microsoft study, 24 minutes. You got something fresh for me, Rick?

Rick Pastoor
No, no. We all talk about this study. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel that I need this amount of time to return to the task, but, still, we talk and think about it, and we use this to, I don’t know, take certain directions in how we shape our day. So, I feel this is something that I hope, in the brief, like short time, near time, we will discover that there’s actually something else happening.

And how can we, in a world where so much is happening around us, and we’re disrupted a lot, can we find a way where we’re not dependent on our own discipline so much to get done what needs to get done? So, there’s these paradigms where, of course, if you look at deep work, for example, where…and actually part of Rise is built on top of that, you need as many undisturbed blocks of time to really do work that’s important.

And that’s the idea that most of us start from. But the question is, “Is that something that…can we invent something that really breaks with this pattern that allows us to combine both the fact that we are available instantly, with the fact that we can produce meaningful work if we are still, like in a way, connected and sometimes interrupted by something?” That’s something that I’m fascinated about.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Rick Pastoor
One that I re-read a lot is one of the earliest productivity books, and that’s How To Live On 24 Hours A Day. I don’t know if you know it. It’s a really thin one and I think it’s 1907, something like that, that it was written. And I love it because he’s basically describing that we tend to focus our work in like eight hours a day, and we have like around eight hours of rest, and then, still, there’s quite a lot of time left.

And he’s basically saying, “Okay, if we can, instead of focusing on how can we make these eight hours at work more productive, if we think how can we meaningfully spend those other eight hours, that’s, of course, a 2X improvement,” which is really hard to do with incremental, really small changes in, I don’t know, our day-to-day software and our to-do list and our hacking our kind of stuff. And I think this is, to me, a really useful reminder that I need to be conscious about, or can be conscious about, this other segment of my day as well.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, well, the calendar is an easy one for me. Like, for me, that’s something that I begin the day with and end the day with. I’m actually on the first version of Rise now, which is really nice, and I’m connected to that. I’m also a huge OmniFocus fan, so that’s my go-to task manager.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Rick Pastoor
Favorite habits will be, for me, we have been doing a smoothie every single day for, I don’t know, 10 years. Every morning, I make this.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s in the smoothie, Rick? We have to know.

Rick Pastoor
It’s all veggies. And we started off, and I think this is, again, is something that like you have to ease in a little bit because, like I have some friends that drink this stuff that we make, and they’re like, “What are you drinking because this is disgusting?” But I do feel that, while I cannot prove this, that this has a lot of long-term healthy effects on my energy during the day, but also long-term what kind of stuff do I consume and do I get the proper amount of nutritional value in my body.

So, we started off with a lot of fruits, and then, over time, gradually replaced fruits by more vegetables. And that has been something that, I would say, something that the longest running habit that I’ve been doing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, let’s see, like this morning, what was the recipe in terms of the vegetables?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. Okay, so there is the fruit that is in this is unpeeled bananas, because in the peel of a banana, there is most of the fiber, actually. So, I wash the banana, and then I put it in. There’s – what is it? – linseed, I guess – how do you call it? – in there. There is carrots, there’s spinach, there is kale, there is…let me check. I have to also translate the words in my head so I’m looking. Avocado?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Rick Pastoor
Yeah, it’s the same, huh? Avocado, yeah. So, avocado is in there. And for flavor, I use cacao, is it in Dutch?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cacao? Chocolate?

Rick Pastoor
Chocolate, but, of course, the pure biological version, which is in powder. And spirulina.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s something.

Rick Pastoor
And that’s it. And then water, and that’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go. Cool. All right. And tell us, is there a key nugget you share that seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote back to you often?

Rick Pastoor
Yeah. So, what they’re saying is the first thing that they discover when they start to put in the work in the calendar, saying, “I have way too much on my plate. So, how do I…like, give me a tip to compress it all in.” And, of course, the answer is there is no way. Like, there is no way that’s happening, and that’s actually the exercises you should go through because now you start to see that it will never all fit, and you need to make the decisions that matter.

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

Rick Pastoor
I’m quite active in Twitter so that’s where I’m sharing the stuff. So, that’s @rickpastoor on Twitter, and that’s also where I refer to my newsletter and the other stuff that I’m working on, and that’s the place to find me.

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

Rick Pastoor
I would say that being diligent about how you spend your time, not only on a weekly basis, but I would challenge the people, especially from this podcast, to also spend time on the longer horizon, and not just following what’s offered in the workplace, but consciously thinking about what your system, your structure there, because that’s where you find the real impact.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rick, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun with the book and with Rise and all your adventures.

Rick Pastoor
Thank you so much for having me.