This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

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

Apr 24

859: How to Be a Leader–Instead of a Boss with Todd Dewett

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Todd Dewett says: "Collaborate, don't dictate."

Todd Dewett shares how to harness you and your team’s true power.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why and how to collaborate–not dictate
  2. Why you should go for candor over kindness
  3. The low-cost way to optimize your team

About Todd

Dr. Todd Dewett is a globally recognized leadership educator, author, and speaker. After working with Andersen Consulting and Ernst & Young, he completed his PhD at Texas A&M University in Organizational Behavior as well as a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship.

He was an award-winning professor at Wright State University for ten years, teaching leadership-related courses to MBA students and publishing research. His activities grew to encompass speaking, training, consulting, and eventually online educational courses.

To date, Todd has delivered over 1,000 speeches around the world (including several TEDx talks) and created a library of courses enjoyed by millions of professionals. His clients include Microsoft, IBM, GE, Pepsi, ExxonMobil, Boeing, MD Anderson, State Farm, and hundreds more.

Resources Mentioned

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

Todd Dewett
Hey, great to see. I’m hoping this time, I, in fact, will figure out how to be awesome at my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think you’ve been awesome for, well, at least these last seven years. It has been seven years. Wow!

Todd Dewett
Crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me, any remarkably transformational discoveries you’ve made over the last seven years?

Todd Dewett
Discoveries? I would say two, very briefly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s quick.

Todd Dewett
One is that the online world for education continues to surprise me, and surprise me, and surprise me with its ability to innovate and improve, and its ability to grow. And I didn’t ask for it but, somehow, I’ve got to be a part of that through LinkedIn. So, that continues to blow my mind on what they’re able to do. Just 15 years ago, people were saying, “You can’t learn online. You need a person in the room, right?” So, that’s blowing my mind.

And the other big discovery is, and this is the truth, and it’s a segue to our conversation we’ll have about this book I’m about to put out, but I now know, Pete, I now know with great confidence that I cannot write novels. And here’s how I know that. I’ve tried three times over 15 years, around 15 years, and each of those three times, I’ve ended up with a pile of words that was not useful.

And then the most recent time is the final time. I’m done trying to scratch that itch. I’m comfortable that I tried, but the idea that I was working on the story, then led to the book that we’ll talk about a little bit today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, indeed, let’s do just that. Your book Dancing with Monsters, what’s the big idea here?

Todd Dewett
Well, like I said, I wrote this novel, I was trying to write a lighthearted take on a vampire going through office shenanigans, as we’ve seen in many television shows, I just was intrigued by the combination of those components, and I had fun writing it, as I always do. When I determined it was not good, and my beta reader or two determined it was not good, I sat there licking my wounds, and I thought, “Can I use this idea some other way?”

And for years, I had been interested in the business fable book market. Many years ago, I read Who Moved My Cheese. I read many of the Pat Lencioni books, etc., and I thought, “Well, maybe I can do that. I’d been thinking about that. Maybe that’s a style that fits me.” And so, I just got all passionate one day, maybe it was too much caffeine, and sat down with that idea, a rough small idea from the failed novel, and, out of me came this 18,000-word quick fable in six hours. It’s been edited, thank goodness, since then, but that’s why I had an idea. I had a market, a fable market, and I decided to see if I could write that style, and I think the answer is yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And so, what is the fable here?

Todd Dewett
Well, we got a premise of a monster, he’s the main protagonist, is Joe Vampire, and he’s kind of cocky and full of himself, but not performing well lately, doing the one thing all monsters want to do across many genres for the last few hundred years, of course, which is to scare children. And he’s pulled into a meeting with an HR-type person, which is a witch in the character, in the book, and told, “Look, you’re basically in trouble. We’re going to ask you to prove yourself by leading a team of other monsters who are having issues, and you’ve got a big goal. You’ve got to solve together to figure out whether or not we’re going to let you continue with your monster status,” so to speak.

And so, there is a mummy, and a zombie, and a ghost, and a werewolf, all having huge issues being themselves. The werewolf can’t turn into a werewolf. She’s just the human that’s not able to transform. Issues of that nature. So, Joe fumbles around trying to lead these misfits and does terrible at first and fails before he realized that he’s doing it the wrong way.

And he remembers some amazing advice from his grandfather who was quite capable as a leader, and he starts to humble himself, and he has some epiphanies about what it means to think through empathy and build rapport, and to use kindness as a means of connecting with people and getting them to really try harder for the first time.

And his efforts to humble himself and be a facilitator instead of a dictator really pay off as these monsters discover their inner awesomeness. At the end of the book, they actually…well, I won’t spoil the end. I’ll just say they become a much, much more interesting version of themselves. And along the way, you’ll learn some stuff about leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I was going to ask, when it comes to fables, yup, there are some lessons, some takeaways, some wisdom, hopefully, that readers walk away with. Could you share with us, is there maybe a key quote or excerpt from the book that you think really delivers some of these in spades?

Todd Dewett
Wow! I’m in love with the book. To be honest with you, I’ve never said that about anything I’ve created, so I’ll choose one because it’s personal to me. As I thought about these characters in this short fun tale, yes, some of them reminded me of archetypes of people I’ve written about or seen in consulting, coaching, and so on. And one of them really is reflective of me, to answer your question.

Joe Vampire, the protagonist, had a moment after failing for a while, where he thought to himself, “Maybe it’s not them. Maybe it’s me. And maybe if I get authentic with them about my imperfections and insecurities and fears, which we all have, and I show them something about myself that they’re not going to see coming, which will tell them how sincere I am about trying to reboot our relationship and our efforts toward making progress, that that will work for us.” And he did that.

That came from my life. The fact that he did that in one of the pivotal scenes in this little book came from my life. And I’ll tell you what it is because it mattered enough to center this story in a book. I used to work for Ernst & Young many years ago before I did a PhD and became a professor for years, and I didn’t fit well at all, to be frank with you.

Great job. Prestigious. Everyone thought I should be happy. Look at the young successful professional. Didn’t fit at all. And I knew that, and I didn’t know what to do because I thought I knew where I wanted to go, which was to get a PhD but that was risky and I was scared, “Was I smart enough that I want to go broke?” For all the years, you’ve got to go broke to do that much grad school, etc.

And I was in my loft in Atlanta, Georgia where I used to live, and my mom called, checking up on me one day, she lived in a different city. And I was, in my voice, giving it away that I wasn’t in a good place. And she said, “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” True story. “What’s wrong with you?” And I just broke down, I started crying. I think I was 28 at the time. I started crying, and my mom, not something I normally did at that stage in life, but it happened.

And she said, “What is going on?” And I told her, “I’m very unhappy and I think I know the answer but I don’t know if I should do it.” She said, “Well, why?” I told her what it was, PhD, all that, and she said, “Well, why wouldn’t you? What are you really scared of?” She said it to me kindly and firmly just like that. And I sit there blubbering at my mom, I realized the obvious.

There wasn’t anything to be scared of. I didn’t have kids. What are you scared of? There was nothing to be scared of but I needed someone to smack me with those words and wake me up and push me in a new direction. And that made a huge impression, and that’s why Joe Vampire stepped up and made a huge impression on these other misfit monsters.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is powerful. Thank you. And so then, can we dig into a few of the core takeaway messages then in terms of there are some rules of leadership in the book, such as collaborate, don’t dictate? Can you share with us a couple of the most you think are transformational, and need to be heard by the world, takeaways?

Todd Dewett
Well, I got to tell you, I loved the way you set up these questions, but the truth is most people to do what I do, there’s different ways that we do it from speaking to writing to what have you. There’s not much new under the sun. Sometimes there are new ideas but mostly it’s about finding new vehicles to help us convey well-known useful ideas that people have yet to focus on in the proper way or the proper amount.

The one you just mentioned, actually, is a spectacular example – collaborate, don’t dictate. What Joe and many other real managers have to figure out is that even though they’ve been vested with authority to do stuff at work, they have the legitimate power as a holder of a position in a hierarchy, that does not mean they should use that power just because they have it.

The truth is, a team is optimized not when they receive dictates from a boss but when they feel that they are being facilitated and collaborated with by a person who’s on the team with them, not looking down on them. Now, that sounds terribly simple, and I’m here to tell you the reason this book, and many others, really do focus on a few simple rules that make teams better is because busy people forget them at work every single day.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had leaders just kind of whip out a dictate, “A think I need you to do,” no explanation. It just sounds like an order being given. Now, you don’t need me, Pete, to tell you that adult humans do not like to be treated like children. So, when I thought about the small number of business leadership maxims I want to put in this book, definitely collaborate, don’t dictate, be a partner, not a boss is a different way to say it, was one of the first that came to mind, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then it sounds pretty simple in terms of just do that, just collaborate and don’t dictate. Is there any sort of best practices or do’s and don’ts to following that?

Todd Dewett
Yeah. The book is simple on purpose. And later, if I’m lucky with a variety of companies, I’ll deep dive on exploring what you just asked, but I’ll give you a preview, for example, that you’d see in a deeper training course. There are different types of decisions people face at work. And the question is, if you believe in this collaborate, don’t dictate idea that many of us talk about, is, “Well, what kind of decision are you facing? And when should I be a boss using authority versus a quiet person listening and trying to get input long before I make a decision?”

Well, there’s decisions, frankly, that you have to own with no input. That’s part of the managerial burden that anyone in the leadership structure faces. Things about strategy, things about compensation, who to hire and fire, ultimately, is not for the team to make. Team can have inputs sometimes on those but they don’t own those decisions, and that’s probably proper.

Then there’s decisions where you absolutely are going to own the decision as the leader but you absolutely should spend time, as much as you can, given how busy you are, finding their voice, listening to them, understanding their view, and allowing that to shape your decision because you believe this particular decision is going to feel, they’re going to feel it. There’s going to be an impact on them. That’s a second type.

A third type, and this is most common, I won’t say an unimportant decision but there are a variety of decisions that have to be made all the time where it’s really best to let go completely and allow teams to own it. For example, “To get this work done, do we work a day that everyone’s going to be having a day off? Or, do we work extra hours three days in a row? There are different ways to get the same outcome. What do you prefer?” Let them own the answer to that question.

So, you’ve got to ask yourself as a leader, or as a decision-maker, “What’s the reality here about my need to use the authority versus the benefit, the smart wisdom of gaining their input before a decision is made?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now could you share a bit about some of the other rules: the candor, not kindness; the opportunities, not obstacles; the authenticity, not acting; the be the change, not the boss?

Todd Dewett
Man, we don’t have all day. I love this. So, here’s one that probably is my favorite – candor not just kindness. I want to say that carefully – candor not just kindness. I didn’t say candor and no kindness. What we have right now, and I explore this a little bit, here’s the truth. We have so much love in forward-thinking organizations today for positivity, for kindness, for congeniality. These are things I absolutely value and preach, for sure.

But sometimes we’re so uncritical and so passionate about pursuing those types of ideals that this thing gets created, which some thinkers and scholars have now started calling toxic positivity. That’s the idea that we’re so wanting to be kind, so wanting to not offend others, that we will refrain all kinds of things. We’re really over-shape and resist. Why? “Because I don’t want to really ruffle feathers or cause tension, etc.” That’s a problem.

So, what I like to remind people is that kindness and all of its little brothers and sisters that go with it are immensely important, and that’s a foundation that gives you then the ability to use the other thing that pushes us towards finite needed conversations that are to the point, and that’s candor. Candor, which is just no beating around the bush, saying what needs to be said, this is important, ready, can be done positively. Candor does not imply brusque to the point of negative or mean. It just means you’re saying what needs to be said instead of beating around the bush.

So, here’s the truth, a lot of candor in an environment that doesn’t have a lot of positivity as its foundation, part of its culture, can be damaging quickly. But in a workplace, defined by a lot of positivity and congeniality and helpfulness and kindness, well, then candor is a thing that becomes directive and useful and digestible. That’s the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a bit about the opportunities, not obstacles?

Todd Dewett
Yeah. So, I was talking to a boss the other day somewhere. I still say that word because I’m old. Supervisor is what I’m supposed to say now. And they were lamenting the lack of resources and budget they had for something, “And what should I do about this?” So, I say, “Well, don’t lie about it, don’t hem and haw, don’t tell them there might be more coming later. Own it and be honest, and then try and shape without BS’ing in any way. Try and shape how they feel about the situation.”

Opportunities is about perspective. That’s the whole point of the book. It’s about perspective. We all face challenges, budget-related, people-related, market-related, customer, etc. We all face them. That’s inevitable. That’s a daily if not weekly, we face big ones. How we feel about them, however, is a choice, and that starts with the person who has the most status and the most power in a group, which is the group leader, the supervisor.

There’s great science here that says when you help people see, forgive the cliché, the glass half full, the silver lining, call it what you want to, they will, on average, over time, tend to think about those issues more productively, more positively, and, thus, tackle them more effectively. For no other reason than choosing to think about them in a more productive way.

I’ve said this many times over the years, the greatest things we know about you optimizing you, and you optimizing a team really don’t cost a dime, or they’re low cost, but they usually don’t cost a dime. It just requires you to be a little more thoughtful about how you’re thinking about yourself and others and how you relate.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, no, I think in terms of leadership, this is a really fun 101 dose wrapped in a story that is emotional, fun, and memorable.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, there was something near the end where the HR person, embodied by the character of a witch, I love my HR brothers and sisters, by the way, if you’re listening. The HR person said to Joe, “I’m not sure if your performance, basically, was good enough for you to be saved or not. The committee,” it’s another reference to kind of management or bureaucracy, “The committee is still on whether or not they’d agree but they do know that they love what you had done today and want to offer you a job.” And he says no.

And that’s a big deal. I love that because fit matters and passion matters, and he doesn’t want to go, become the bureaucrat he’s battling against. He actually wants to stay where he is because he’s discovered now, that he’d figured out how to do it, that he loves being a manager. And what he said to her, and I’m misquoting myself because I don’t remember that clearly, what he said was, “One monster who believes in themselves is spectacular. But a monster squad who believes in themselves is truly formidable,” because that’s what he created. And I think that’s true, and that’s the power of a team.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, there’s tons of research. For example, why do people, this is classic stuff, why do people stay with certain jobs over the long term? Is it because of their immense fit with the role? No, although I wish that were true. Is it because of the love of the high pay at this particular job where they’re staying? No, I wish that were true.

The best answer, by far, is that they have a quality relationship with their manager. The number one reason people voluntarily leave, this has been a true finding, a known finding, for 30 years, jobs that they have voluntary turnovers is because of bad boss relationships. So, I loved, in this book, trying to bring that research to life by modelling what bad leadership looks like, by then having that person go through something of an epiphany, and then finding how to do it correctly.

So, there is good research to back this up. What do we know about, for example, perspective that we were just talking about? There’s tons of studies and psych cogs, social sites, org studies, etc. that talk about how we frame decisions and how people react. And when you take the time, and that is always the thing that trips us up at work because we’re so darn busy putting out fires, I respect that, but when you take the time to think, at least the important issues, and think about them first and how you’re going to package them effectively to be understood, and maybe even to motivate people, no matter how challenging they might be, you tend to deliver a better message. That’s powerful research.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And can you name a favorite book?

Todd Dewett
A favorite book. I’ll go with Please Understand Me by Keirsey. One of the classics on personalities, because I’m a huge believer, I actually posted about this today, a huge believer that talent is awesomely important but often overrated. And what I mean by that is what ultimately matters is chemistry. And great teams with chemistry that have less talent than teams over here with great talent and no chemistry often outperform teams with loaded talent.

So, how do you achieve chemistry? Well, you get along by first understanding yourself and then others. And one of the first books that really pushed people effectively to start thinking about personality types and how to understand others who are different than you, was Please Understand Me by Keirsey.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, I would say any kind of feedback tool. One in particular that’s on my mind lately people might check out, there’s a new company using AI called Yoodli. I think it’s Y-O-O-D-L-Y or D-L-I, Yoodli. And they’re trying to help people in terms of presentation and conversational speech. Look into a camera, open their app, speak, have it analyzed six ways from Sunday, using AI, and also attach, using feedback mechanisms, to people that you supply emails for so you can bring in that feedback, try again, and then have the program once again assess how you’re doing on a variety of ways.

I think AI, in terms of helping people study their interpersonal communication is a host of tools emerging there that people are going to enjoy in the coming years.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And do you have a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Todd Dewett
Yeah, I’m into humility because I’ve got plenty of go-go power in me, plenty of ego. And if you are like that, then you’re going to fail eventually. We all do. And so, I like to remind myself on a regular basis that I don’t know it all. And I like to remind myself of my favorite failures, no joke, because those are the things that make me think through what I’m doing now a little more thoughtfully, which is terribly, terribly useful.

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

Todd Dewett
In general, yeah, outside of this book, I have a few that always stick with me that I love to share. Probably the most common is that “More is always possible,” which sounds like a motivational speaker, which is one of my hats, would say. The science actually backs it up. One of my favorite stories ever involves my ex-wife/one of my best friends, who had asthma yet somehow learned how to train for a marathon.

And when she was done, we’re having a conversation, and I said to her, “Wow, can you imagine what more you could possibly accomplish?” She never even dreamed of this because she didn’t think it was possible, and it blew her mind, and she’s been thinking about it and excelling ever since. More is always possible.

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

Todd Dewett
Well, thanks for asking. There are two obvious places. One is my website DrDewett.com, that’s D-R-D-E-W-E-T-T.com and the other is my favorite social media platform, which is LinkedIn. I would love to chat if this brings up questions from anyone listening. Find me on LinkedIn and connect. I’d love to chat.

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

Todd Dewett
I would say just don’t assume you know it all and stop blaming others, which is so easy and sometimes justified but never productive, and ask yourself what you can do differently to continue improving.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Todd, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck with Dancing with Monsters and all your adventures.

Todd Dewett
Thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

Apr 20

858: Managing Small Stresses Before They Create Big Problems with Rob Cross

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Rob Cross says: "That’s really the insidious nature of the microstresses. They all seem small… but it takes a toll physiologically… in pretty powerful ways."

Rob Cross explains the dangers of microstress and provides practical solutions to build your resilience.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why microstress is a much larger problem than we think
  2. Three types of microstress to watch out for
  3. Three solutions for when someone’s causing microstress

About Rob

Rob Cross is the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College and the cofounder and director of the Connected Commons, a consortium of more than 150 leading organizations. He has studied the underlying networks of relationships within effective organizations and the collaborative practices of high performers for more than twenty years. Working with over 300 organizations and reaching thousands of leaders from the front line to the C-suite, he has identified specific ways to cultivate vibrant, effective networks at all levels of an organization and any career stage. He is the author of Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being and coauthor of THE MICROSTRESS EFFECT: How Little Things Pile Up and Become Big Problems—and What to do about it with Karen Dillon.

Resources Mentioned

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

Rob Cross
Thank you so much for having me here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about your book The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems–and What to Do about It. So juicy. But before we dive into that, this is corny, I’d like to dive into your scuba enthusiasm. What’s the story here?

Rob Cross
That was well played, young man.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re certified. How does that happen?

Rob Cross
I did get certified, and I’m a huge believer and a practitioner of some of the stuff we write about, and kind of adding dimensionality to your life in different ways. And so, I did that this past winter with my daughter, and then she’s kind of off and pursuing med school right now, and so it’s going to be one of the things that we use to kind of keep connected, to do short diving trips here and there. But it’s actually pretty easy, and it does bring you into a completely different realm of people, realm of experiences in life, and has been completely worthwhile, completely love it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, do you see dazzlingly colored fish, like on the documentaries? That’s what I imagine when I hear scuba, like, “Wow!”

Rob Cross
It’s completely like that. So, their last certification dive they take you, you’re able to go down to 60 feet with the certification I have, and I may advance that a little bit. We’ll see. But that’s when you get down there, and you’re, “Okay, this is real. If stuff runs out and I can’t get to my daughter’s regulator in time, you’re in trouble one way or the other.”

But you look around, it’s a peaceful sense of serenity like you’ve never had. She touched my shoulder at one point and pointed, and there was a five-foot nurse shark drifting 10, 15 feet away, and it’s just kind of a crazy experience overall to be able to see. What you’re talking about are the really small colorful fish but just also the serenity and kind of sense of being really removed, if you will, in different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And so, you’ve also probably have a lot of cold-water goodness going on as well. Does that happen?

Rob Cross
Yeah, definitely. It depends on where you go. So, you’re actually looking for the warm water but, yeah, definitely.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now I’m pumped to hear about your book The Microstress Effect. First of all, tell us what is the microstress effect?

Rob Cross
So, it is a book focused on small moments of stress. And what got me interested in this was I did a book called Beyond Collaboration Overload about two years ago, and that was very focused on how just all the ways that we interact with other people in our lives today, professionally and personally, but, principally, in the workplace, it’s overwhelming us because of all the modalities and the different instances of having to be on 24/7.

And so, as I got into that work, what became apparent to me is that people are drowning, and that stress is being created, burnout is at an all-time high in most places, and it’s not really the workload that’s gone up that much. Really, what’s gone up over the course of about 10 to 15 years has been the collaborative footprint around the work. We’ve de-layered, we’ve moved to agile-based work structures, one-firm cultures, all these initiatives organizationally that have created greater context and needs for collaboration.

And, simultaneously, we’ve enabled that with all sorts of instantaneous collaborative tools, but it’s created a context where people are overwhelmed. And as I went to these interviews and could see how stressed people were, what I was finding is it wasn’t the big things that was killing us. It was the small moments of stress that people were experiencing that they’re hitting us at a velocity and frequency that our brains just aren’t wired to deal with.

And that was what, over time, was causing people problems in kind of invisible ways. So, it got us very interested both in “What does that microstress look like? How do more successful people deal with it?” and strategies for kind of thriving today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I’m intrigued from a science perspective, any particularly surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made here? Like, is it a big deal, microstresses, or is it, like, “Well, they add up to being just a smidge more in total”?

Rob Cross
Right. I think that’s a really great question, and I love the way you asked it because I think too many people go, “Oh, it’s just one more thing, and then successful people, we’re supposed to deal with that. Just one more thing.” But the problem is our body doesn’t distinguish between big stress and small stress. Our brains do. Our brains can go into flight or fight response and kind of trigger different ways of working with big stress when we experience it.

But the small stress, you sense misalignment with a colleague and you wonder how you’re going to solve it. Or, you see somebody on your team that needs to be coached for the third time and you’re wondering, “How am I going to do that and keep their engagement?” Or, you got a text from a child, and you can’t tell if they’re grumbling for 15 seconds and over it, but you worry about it for three hours.

Rob Cross
So, we know it’s real because we see the body reacting differently. We know, for example, that the same meal processed within two hours of being under this form of social stress can result in, actually, an additional 104 calories, which doesn’t sound like much but you accumulate that over the year, and that can be as much as 11 pounds.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Rob, when you’re saying we burn an extra 104 calories because we’re hyped up or we burn 104 fewer calories?

Rob Cross
No, the reverse, we add it, yeah. And we actually process the food differently in, actually, a negative way. We know that the blood pressure is a problem. One of the neuroscientists we interviewed was describing it as kind of an analogy of having kids jumping on your bed, microstresses being the kids. You got one or two kids jumping on your bed and everything is fine, but you keep adding and adding and adding, and, eventually, the bedframe kind of cracks.

And that’s a little bit of the effect that we see neurologically with this. And I cannot tell you the number of times, going through these interviews, where these are all really successful people, top companies, really successful people. First 10 minutes, it was all rainbows and lollipops, everything is great. And then you get down to kind of minute 30, minute 45, and all the cracks are starting to creep in, and you start to get a real sense of how people are struggling.

And I think the thing that troubled me most with all these conventionally successful people was how many of them described going three, five, eight years in their lives just persisting, thinking you have to fight through only to wake up one day, and go, “What have I done? I’m not who I wanted to be. I’m not where I want to be. How did this affect me in such a way?” And I think that’s really the insidious nature of the microstresses.

They all seem small. You’re just kind of getting over one more thing each day but it takes a toll physiologically and, also, kind of from a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives in pretty powerful ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Rob, you gave us a couple examples of microstresses, but just to make sure we’re all on the same page, can you give us a few more so we can really say, “Oh, those. Okay, I know what you’re saying”?

Rob Cross
Yeah. So, we have a set of them that are really what we call drains to capacity, and they’re interactions that decrease our ability to get done what we have to get done. And so, they create stress as a product of us having to work harder and ignore our family or other things that we want to do with our lives, or they create stress, beverage of underdelivering.

But as an example, one is what I’ve come to call small misses, small performance misses from team members or colleagues. And so, what’s happened in a lot of places is most people are on five, six, seven team efforts. They may only be assigned to one but they’re usually tasked with five, six, seven other collaborative efforts that they have to be a part of and contribute to, given the way work is happening today.

And what we know happens is if you happen to own one, and everybody shows up to your one, let’s say you have four other people on that team, and they show up at 95% done, so they’re almost there, and everybody has reasons, they misunderstood, “My boss pulled me in a different direction,” “My child got sick,” that sounds like small misses, and most people just gloss over it, but that 5% times four people means 20% to you, and you’re stuck with this decision of, “Do I work through the night and push a little bit harder to get it done, or do I underdeliver?” Most people choose to work through and just get it done.

And then what they’ve done is they’ve taught people that, “Okay, 95% is good enough here, and maybe 90% the next time.” And not because people are nefarious, I really want to underscore that. The problem right now is that people are so overwhelmed in all the interviews we did across both these books, that they’re making decisions on which balls to drop nine times out of ten and not how to excel in different ways. So, that’s an example that we see.

Another one very common are when authority figures shift expectations very erratically or consistently. And that would take the form of changing what they were asking you to do, changing the performance expectations of what they had, or just emotionally being a very different person from point A to point B, and that create stress on you, individually, but then it also manifests in the second order when you have to go protect your team, or you have to go and find other people to help because the direction has shifted and you’re stuck doing things you committed to colleagues before in a prior direction, plus you’ve got to figure out new people you need to work with in different ways.

So, there’s 14 of those but that, hopefully, gives you a couple of them to get a sense of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m thinking about home life as well. What are some microstresses there?

Rob Cross
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So, one of my favorite examples is my daughter, Rachel, is somebody who’s a high-level junior tennis player. We travel the country together, and she would, as a product of having a father that knew nothing about the game at all except just trying to help her, she got very used to relying on me and to kind of talk about things that were bothering her.

And what that did, we have a super strong relationship, but what that created over time was a tendency where if anything was going wrong, she would let me know about it, just text me very quickly. And, usually, it was exactly what I was referring to earlier, a ten-second text that she wouldn’t even be thinking about. She’s just telling her dad, and yet I would worry about it for three or four hours, until one day we kind of discovered it.

And so, it’s an interesting thing with our home life, with our friends. Here is a little being that is simultaneously the greatest source of purpose for me in life, humor, all sorts of great wonderful things, yet also is a source of microstress in terms of second-hand stress that gets created and passed on. And what we did in that case is just say, “Well, don’t tell me if it’s not important to you, and I’ll avoid my four hours of anxiety.”

We’re laughing about it, of course, and she knows I’m there if anything is serious, but that’s really the trick of this, especially the people we’re closest to. They tend to be both our primary sources of joy and purpose and life satisfaction, and simultaneously our primary sources of different elements of microstress. And the trick is, “Can you adapt the interaction?” Not dump the relationship, but can you see it in the interaction and make small shifts like I’m describing with Rachel? And we have tons of those opportunities when we start looking for them that have a material impact on our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And you say second-hand stress, is this a common notion, it’s like we pick up almost like a contagion what’s going on from other people?

Rob Cross
Right. Very much so. Yeah, that was definitely one of the microstresses we deal most prevalently. And it can take the form of an aggressive tone on a Zoom call, how people are sitting, just dejected posture, convey us a tremendous amount. It can be just typical stress that’s processing through us and we take it to somebody else.

So, one of the most common things we would hear is people would get upset about something at work, and we go home and talk to our significant other about it. And because they don’t know the whole story and ways that maybe we caused part of the problem, they just take our side in it and they’re providing empathy, they think, but they further spin us up and kind of create a second layer of stress, if you will, that it feeds back on us if we’re not really thinking carefully about how we’re turning to others, if you will.

So, again, there’s a whole kind of suite of those ways that the initial moment of stress is one instance, and then it tends to also go forward in different ways if we’re not careful about it, in what we call second-order stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us the physiological symptoms to help distinguish between just nothing, like not a big deal at all, versus microstress, versus a traditional stress fight-or-flight response? Like, is it that my heartrate bumps up 20 beats per minute on a fight or flight? Or, how do I think about that?

Rob Cross
Yeah, I think you feel that rise in blood pressure, the rise in flushing in the face, the anxiety you feel in the moment. I would say that a microstress, if I were trying to make it in layman’s terms, is more of a, “Oh, my gosh, another irritation in my day, and it’s another thing that’s just going to sit in the back of my mind. It’s not insurmountable, I’m not panicked, but it’s another thing that I’m processing and I’m holding on to.” That’s the things that we tend to really try to get people to focus on.

So, when I’m working with this, and we create a table that has these 14 microstresses down one side and then the sources of them – a boss, colleagues, loved ones, team members – across the top, and I’m asking people to go through and really identify “Where are two, three, or four of these that are systemic enough in your life that you should do something about it, that you can change the nature of the interaction, you can create more time between those interactions, you can shift things in a way that has some material impact for you?”

That’s how I’m trying to hone people in on where to take action and what matters. And, universally, people look at that, and they say, “Well, can I put 10 checkboxes?” and I’m like, “No, because if it’s everything, it’s nothing.” You want to hone in on “What are the three, four areas that, if I can take concerted action against, will have a big impact for me?”

And I would really underscore for people listening here the worthwhile nature of doing that. We have a kneejerk reaction to look for the positives in things, to say, “I need to go do more fun things,” or, “I need to meditate and do gratitude journaling and things like that to get through the stress.” What if you could remove it?

And what we know, from all of social psychology, generally, is that the negative interactions have three to five times the impact of the positive. So, what if we actually focus on “How do we shape those interactions to take that out of our context?” By not doing that, we actually end up leaving the higher-leverage stuff on the table versus actually kind of going after it and trying to structure the context that we’ve let accrue around us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you mentioned one microstress category, drains your capacity to get things done. Could you tell us about those that also deplete your emotional reserves and that challenge your identity? And maybe give us a story that brings them all together.

Rob Cross
Yeah. So, the deplete emotional reserves, I mean that’s what it sounds like. It’s the interactions that hit us and kind of hit us emotionally. The most common one is what most people are used to thinking about, are conflictual conversations. And some people are wired to love those, but many people aren’t and they worry about potential interactions. Before the interaction, they’re stressed out during the interaction, and then they will go and replay it in their mind five times afterwards, maybe even talk to other people and drag them through the mud as well.

And so, that’s a more conventional one that we know. You can do an awful lot about it if you just address it early and address it with evidence in certain ways versus letting it accumulate up. Another one that’s a little bit less obvious is just the stress we feel for having to take care of others and worrying about them, whether that be people on your team, an aging parent, a child, a friend that’s in trouble.

One of the fascinating things about microstresses is they have a greater impact on us because they’re coming at us through relationships. It’s not just bad news on social media. It’s the fact that this is coming to me through somebody I dislike, and that’s going to magnify of it, or it’s somebody I love and that’s going to magnify the effect of it. And, in fact, we find that the people we love and care about are just as big contributors as the conventionally toxic people that we would associate with more conventional forms of stress.

And the last one you asked about was the challenges to identity, and that’s oftentimes just small pushes or interactions that are kind of slowly pushing us away from being the people we set out to be. And so, it can happen, as an example, with performance expectations that don’t line up with your own values, whether it’s being overselling in situations, or with all the physicians and nurses we talked to that was not getting enough time for patient care.

They kind of went into that industry, that business with an eye to taking care of people, and yet as systems have evolved, they have less and less ability to do that at the level that they feel good about. So, those are the three challenges: drains to capacity, and challenges emotionally, and then challenges to value orientations. And you can get a sense that they become progressively a little bit more subtle but a little bit more impactful over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, what do we do about them?

Rob Cross
So, what do you do? So, for me, it’s a three-pronged idea as a starting point. One is, how do you isolate out three, four, five that are hitting you systemic enough you can do something about? And that’s what I’ve already just spoken to a little bit. Second pass through it, for me, is how do you stop causing it? When we have people go through this table, it always catches people off guard when I say, “Okay, which ones are you causing unnecessarily in your life?”

And the reality is we don’t want to create stress, yet what I see, if I’m polling on large webinars with these ideas or other things, I have a couple thousand people, and I’ll say, “What are the stresses you’re experiencing?” And then I shift gears, and say, “What are the stresses you’re causing?” And almost every case, the profiles are very similar. So, the stress we experience, we tend to pass on to others, and so you want to stop that, just from an identity standpoint. You don’t want to be somebody that creates stress.

But the other reason you want to stop doing it is, I’m very convinced that the stress we create in one form, oftentimes boomerangs back on us in a different form. And so, we push a child a little further than we should, and they become belligerent or morose. Or, you lean on a favorite employee because they’ve always come through for you. Lean on them one step too hard and they start to burn out and disengage and it creates more work for you in another way. So, it’s a subtle but a really important thing to think about where you’re unnecessarily causing it.

And then the third pass for me is “Where do you need to rise above some of it?” And so, most people have had experiences in their life when they’re grumbling about how bad everything is, other people driving you crazy, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then something truly traumatic happens. You get a significant health scare, somebody you know passes away, whatever it is. But you look back and all this stuff that mattered so mightily, ten seconds go, and realized none of it mattered at that moment.

And what I’m really convinced of is the top people in our interviews, and we call them the ten percenters because it was about in one in ten that were really just living differently, that’s kind of how they go through life without the trauma. They tend to rise above a lot of the minutiae in different ways. And one of the most powerful ways they’ve done that is by being an authentic part of at least two and usually three groups outside of their profession.

So, the stories that always ended up poorly were the people that just let go of everything outside of work and direct family, and the ones that generally trended far more positively were people that maintained that dimensionality in their lives, and not just activities but putting that activity in a group of people with different perspectives and values that help to shape perspectives that you’re taking into your life.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re talking, like, rotary, chess club, church, like three groups outside of work. What kinds of groups are you talking about?

Rob Cross
Yeah, it could be those forms, it could be other forms. One of my favorite interviews, actually, literally, my first interview in this body of work, we were very focused early on, on “What are the ways relationships affect physical health, growth in and out of work, purpose and resilience in our lives?” And so, I just asked this woman, a really lovely British accent, I won’t try to emulate here, but I said, “Just tell me about a time in your life when you were becoming more physically healthy, whatever that means to you? not what you were doing, but what was the role of the connections around you?”

And so, she kind of chuckled and said, “Well, Rob, I was somebody that dodged gym every chance I could in high school. Wanted nothing to do with physical activity.” And she said, “That worked for me up until about my late 30s, and, all of a sudden, my doctor gave me a stern warning and said ‘You need to do something about this.’”

And so, her reaction was she started walking around a park outside of her flat in London. And then because she was going at the same time every day, bumped into a couple of people that were walking that same route, and they fell in together and started talking, and then they would walk longer routes, they did a charity walk, and then a charity run. You can kind of get where I’m going to where I was interviewing her ten years later, and she was planning vacations where she’d do a marathon with her husband first before going on vacation.

And this was the person that dodged gym in high school. And so, what she said is, “The identity of being a runner with that group, and the accountability, them expecting me to show up, enabled me to push back on things in ways that I hadn’t been doing for most of my life. Just on the margin, I was pushing back on things that were creating stress.”

But the real thing that she said mattered was that, “This was a diverse group of people that I never would’ve spent time with. They weren’t life science executives. It was the mailman, an IT person, people coming at life very differently.” And she said, “They saw me at my worst, I saw them at their worst,” and it was the perspectives that they brought and the friendships and the different vantage points into her life that just created a different perspective overall.

So, it’s that kind of thing, and it can come from any of the walks of life. You just mentioned music, religion, poetry, art, book clubs but it is always important to me that it is put in some form of group. It’s not typically running by yourself. That may be part of what you do but it’s typically putting that activity in a group and the diversity of perspectives that come into that with you that seems to be the real thing that matters.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, within the group, and maybe this is not knowable, but there’s good research showing that friendships, good social support, is a big buffer to stress. And so, it seems like that’s one element but you’re highlighting something beyond that, is a diversity of experience that kind of helps you get grounded, and say, “That doesn’t really matter.” Is that fair to say?

Rob Cross
Right, yeah. And I think, like you’re saying, there’s just emerging evidence from the Harvard studies, from the work done in the book Together that shows that people with quality relationships, they lived 2.14 years longer, they’re less susceptible to colds, like, we could spend an hour on all the benefits of having a couple of close relationships in your life. They can be friends, they can be intimates. But what’s interesting to us, as we look at this, is that’s not the only way we get resilience.

So, again, a great example of that was a neurosurgeon that was in our interviews, and he was stressed out. World-renowned in what he did but he’d allowed life to evolve and to just his profession, and was a highly consuming profession and family, and he had no kind of dimensionality built in. And on a whim, he said, “I’m going to go play guitar.” He used to play guitar in high school, and he went into a music shop and got a guitar.

And as he was walking out, he saw a flier for a group looking for a guitar player in a band. And there was something like, “What we lack in quality, we make up for in volume,” I think on the flier. And he, on a whim, went and tried out with them and got into the band, and he called me like two months after that, and he said, “This has been one of the best experiences of my life because I’m hanging out with 20-year-olds and I’m doing something completely different. I’m hearing different stories, different ways of living your life, different things around what matters in their worlds, and it’s just given me a totally different slant on life.”

Now, the key to it for me is that those were not his best friends, those weren’t the two, three, four, five intimates that we can sustain in our lives. And so, I think what we’re seeing is you find resilience through certain kinds of interactions that you build into your network but not all of it has to come from your intimates – your wife, your husband, your partner, and your parents. In fact, the way that most people have lost close relationships is actually, I believe, too much pressure on those categories of people to absorb all the interactions around us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, okay, so we heard a running group, we heard a band. What are some other groups that are rocking for folks?

Rob Cross
People derive this dimensionality from so many places, but I’ll give you some broad categories. It was almost always one that was physical for the people that were doing particularly well, and, in particular groups that required you to show up. It wasn’t optional, so, like tennis, or basketball, or other things like that where there was an accountability, and the group didn’t go on if you weren’t there. It just kind of kept up that consistency of returning embedded in.

There was often ones that I’ll say are more aesthetic, and that could be spiritual commitments that people are making but it could revolve around music, poetry, book clubs, museum outings, foodie, dinner groups, all sorts of things that were more about an artistic or spiritual side of life. And then, oftentimes, it was purely social that one of the strategies, if you’ve fallen out of these groups and you don’t have them, and that’s the most people through COVID, one strategy is you do what I mentioned with the neuroscientist, you reach back to a hobby, and use that to slingshot forward.

Another equally effective strategy is to reach back to ties that have gone dormant – college friends, friends soon after you graduated from college – and use some activity to reignite that group – hiking, dinners, whatever it may be. So, there’s a lot of strategies like that that people would use but I think the things I would see is they would tend…the people that were doing particularly well had dimensionality built out in terms of a physical realm, a spiritual or aesthetic realm, a social and an intellectual realm that they were pursuing.

Pete Mockaitis
And that is often a means by which we support the perspective that all this stuff is not that big of a deal. So, how would you articulate that, that concept, like the clarity?

Rob Cross
I view it as rising above. Yeah, you kind of rise above. It puts in perspective. And I do not, at all, want to make this sound like rose-colored glasses but that it helps you start to get a different sense of why we’re living. There are so much, so many messages come at us that feed a very narrow model of what good looks like, what success looks like.

And we, as a society, have never had more ability to shape what we do and who we do it with than today, but we give it up a tremendous amount. And what we’re seeing is that, adding that dimensionality and preserving it, is one of the things it does is it just helps keep in perspective what’s significant, what’s important, what isn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any other key findings among these ten percenters?

Rob Cross
Two things that pop to mind immediately. One is they were really good at tapping into others for resilience. So, we’re conditioned to think about resilience as something that we own, we have grit or fortitude or internal toughness. But if you asked hundreds of people about how they made it through difficult stretches and focus not on what they did but on how they leaned into others in that situation, whether it was “I didn’t get the promotion” up to “My spouse died of pancreatic cancer,” you find that we tend to get seven benefits from others in tough times.

You get empathy, for sure. You get perspective that this isn’t maybe as big a deal as you think. You get a path forward from people maybe that had been there and can say, “Here’s the way to proceed.” You get laughter from friends, and that turns out to be really important. And so, what we were seeing is that people that would weather difficult stretches better typically had those connections in their lives, have gone through in their life in a way that built those relationships, and, importantly, they know how to use them for them.

So, some people, it’s really laughter that they need to reset. Others it’s empathy, and then a path forward. And so, that was a big distinguisher, the degree to which we’re conditioned to think resilience is something we have, and yet it’s really in the interactions and the quality of the connections that we have around us as well.

The second thing for me is that the happiest people in the work, they were not all pursuing magnificent things for happiness. Like, they weren’t hiking Everest, or writing concertos, or sailing the ocean. Really, what it boiled down to is that they tended to live the small moments more richly in connection with others.

And so, as an example of that, again, one of my favorite interviews was a Silicon Valley executive, kind of mid-40s, a woman, type A, hard charger, wildly successful by anybody’s definition, and she had been a runner in college, and she said, “Rob, when I came out of college, I continued to run. And what happened to me is if every year I didn’t get a personal best on what I was running with, whether it was 10K or marathons, that was a bad year for running. And you know that’s a losing strategy. Eventually, life is going to catch up to you.”

And she said she woke up one day and realized that that was somebody else’s idea of fun, that was society’s definition of why you run for those times. And, really, what she wanted to be doing was running with her daughter, her daughter’s best friend, and a parent in the neighborhood. And so, they started running, and it actually evolved into this community group, and she got a great sense of purpose out of being more closely connected with her daughter, and more closely connected with that community.

So, what she was doing, and what I’m always trying to emphasize to people, is she wasn’t saying, “I need to go find another job to have purpose,” or, “I need to feed the world’s hungry.” She was saying, “How do I take what I already am doing and pivot it just slightly in ways that will pull me into interactions, into relationships that’ll make a more meaningful life for me.”

And that’s what we saw over and over again. The people that were really doing well, it wasn’t the big things. It was that they lived the small moments better and more authentically with other people around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’d also like to touch on this notion of engaging the people that are causing the microstress. Some people say, “You can’t change other people, Rob.” But tell me, if I’m seeing, okay, there’s a particular person who’s doing a thing a lot that’s a recurring sense of microstress, what are my options?

Rob Cross
Yeah, I think there’s a couple. And everybody will have examples of people in their lives that they can’t shape. And, again, I would also urge thinking about the positive connections too. And what I described with my daughter is an example. How do you find those opportunities to shift interactions that you may not even be thinking about? Like, I wasn’t thinking about those ever as microstresses when she was ladling stress on me. I just thought, “Oh, I’m the provider. I’m a good parent. I’m a good dad. Whatever it may be, and this is what I need to do.”

So, you are probably drifting towards, “Here’s the person that’s driving me nuts,” and that’s a form of microstress, too. But what I want to emphasize is we live in a sea of this stuff, and there’s opportunities all over the place. Now, when it is the conventional person that’s driving you crazy, of course, the lead is always to reset the connection.

And the more effective strategies are always saying, “Let me start with me. What am I doing that’s kind of leading you into this behavior, whatever it may be that’s driving you crazy?” and then try to move from that to what could they do, or what could they shift that would have a positive impact on you. Always providing evidence of the impact of the behavior and the tactics that they’ve been taking.

That’s one approach, where you have the opportunity to actually shift the behavior. And there’s a ton of great stories of people that actually developed the courage and went into the situation and found it was much more cathartic than they had feared. A second is to find ways to increase the timespan between the interactions. Third is to embed those interactions with other people.

So, if it’s one person that’s driving you crazy, bring them to lunch with three others, and not kind of have the interaction in isolation. So, there’s a whole set of progressive, I guess, actions you can take depending on how entrenched it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I’d like to shift gears into stuff you can do by yourself in terms of what about, you mentioned, exercise, breathing exercises, affirmations, meditation, visualization. Are there some stuff we can do that’s super effective to alleviate microstress that’s 100% in our control?

Rob Cross
Yeah, very much. And meditation is one, like super proven effect, and mindfulness practices in general. It doesn’t have to be massive. It can be small time commitments that people are making to meditation and breathing exercise. And there’s also some really neat breathing exercises through the day that can have impact as well that has been proven to be super effective.

Gratitude journaling is one of the most prominent and effective shown up over and over again to have perspective to help us keep our minds set on the positive. As a professor, a lot of times, I’ll be in an audience where there’s executives or undergrads, and I’ll have the individuals in the room, just as an experiment, I’ll say, “Tell me all the things that are stressing you out.” And it’ll be 18 things, very quickly that’ll come out of their mouths and I’ll get them on a flipchart or chalkboard or whatever.

And then I’ll switch gears and I’ll say, “Okay, now tell me the things you’re grateful for in the moment.” And it starts a little slower but what, comically, almost always comes out is an almost identical list of things. Somebody complains about having tuition they have to pay for, well, they’ve got a kid that’s successful and starting to thrive. And somebody complains about a mortgage, well, they’ve got a house that they’re safe in, as an example.

And so, gratitude journaling can help us from our drift to the negative and our tendency to do that to kind of see things on a more positive light. And I’ll give you one more thing that does go back to connections. This is a great experiment that a colleague suggested, and my co-author and I did it here. If you’re trying to rejuvenate connections that have gone dormant, people you haven’t talked to in a while, they’re proposing a challenge and say, “Just make seven-, eight-minute calls. Take one week. Write people, say you just want to catch up for eight minutes.”

And they’ll laugh at you, they’ll say, “Eight minutes? What are you talking about?” But it’s just a small-enough time block that nobody says no, nobody says it’s too busy, or “We have to wait four months to find it.” And that can be a really neat way to kind of rejuvenate connections that you want to be back in touch with and have a pretty positive impact as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. And you said breathing throughout the day, I’m intrigued. Is there a particular timing or way of breathing? How does it go?

Rob Cross
Cadence for me. So, it’s a four by four by four by four. So, four seconds on the in-breath, four seconds hold, four seconds exhale, four seconds hold. And it’s just one technique of a bunch to just kind of calm and bring presence in a little bit more.

Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned it doesn’t have to be long stretches of time. Like, how many minutes of this breathing or this meditation stuff is enough to make a significant impact?

Rob Cross
That’s a great question, and that’s going to drift beyond a lot of my expertise in terms of knowing the specific time intervals. I hear people routinely starting with 10 minutes, and then some people can take it much, much, much further than that. But it isn’t hours of time, let me say it that way.

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

Rob Cross
I don’t think so. I think we’re good.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rob Cross
So, I think probably, and this will sound a little bit corny, but it’s, “Ask not what you can receive, but what you can give.” I’m not getting it exactly right but I think that, to me, it’s a mindset that I have as I go forward in the work that I’ve been doing for some time. And I think it pays off in pretty significant ways.

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

Rob Cross
Favorite experiment for me is a whole body of work that’s kind of showing the effect of the relationships in our lives. So, my own work showed that having these energizing interactions is typically four times the predictor of a high performer as other things that we see happening in the relationships. And then, of course, the negative in my work is about two times as much. So, for me, that body of work is always really emphasizing the importance of managing the negative interactions, whether they be things we’re experiencing or things we’re causing in different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Rob Cross
Favorite book right now would be Together, and that was the study that was done around loneliness and the epidemic that it’s hitting in society today.

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

Rob Cross
Favorite tool. I would have to say my iPhone. Constantly in connection with different people that way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Rob Cross
Favorite habit is exercise with other people. So, I’m a heavy cyclist and I love tennis as a vehicle, not just be physically be out there but be with other people.

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

Rob Cross
Would look at my website RobCross.org, and there’s also the Connected Commons, the consortia that I’ve cofounded and direct research for as different ways to see us, a bunch of the research there.

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

Rob Cross
I would say lean into the small moments, really pay attention to the small moments and leverage those, whether that be adapting the negative or leaning into the positive in a different way. That’s what we have way more control over than we tend to give ourselves credit for in today’s workforce.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rob, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of good times and even less microstress.

Rob Cross
All right. Thank you so much for having me here.

Apr 17

857: How to Stop Feeling Doubtful and Start Feeling Successful with Laura Gassner Otting

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Laura Gassner Otting says: "Success wasn’t an endpoint but it was a waypoint."

Laura Gassner Otting reveals the surprising reason why success can sometimes feel like a burden—and what to do about it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why success often makes us feel conflicted
  2. How to turn impostor syndrome on its head
  3. How to find your confidence when doubt settles in

About Laura

Author, Catalyst, and Executive Coach Laura Gassner Otting inspires people to push past the doubt and indecision that keep great ideas in limbo by helping audiences think bigger and accept greater challenges that reach beyond their current, limited scope of belief.

She delivers strategic thinking, well-honed wisdom, and perspective generated by decades of navigating change across the start-up, corporate, nonprofit, political, as well as philanthropic landscapes. Laura is the author of Limitless: How to Ignore Everybody, Carve Your Own Path, and Live Your Best Life (2019), as well as Mission-Driven: Moving from Profit to Purpose (2015). Her most recent book is Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It (2023).

Resources Mentioned

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

Laura Gassner Otting
Hey, Pete, I’m glad to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom of your latest work Wonderhell: Why Success Doesn’t Feel Like It Should . . . and What to Do About It. Whoa, that’s a big concept. Laura, what even made you think this is a thing you want to write?

Laura Gassner Otting
Well, I think a lot of personal development and self-help authors write the books that they needed but they couldn’t find. So, when my last book Limitless that I talked about on your show last time came out, I suddenly found myself in this place where I was like, “Oh, that book did okay. It did pretty good. I wonder what pretty great would feel like?” And I saw this potential that I had in me, that I didn’t even have a mailing list when the book came out, and it debuted as a bestseller, and it was, like, “Pretty amazing. But how do I make it even bigger? Like, how do I do the next thing?”

And in that moment of success, well, I thought I was at the end of the line, I thought I was done, I was finished, I published the book, great, I suddenly realized that success wasn’t an endpoint but it was a waypoint. It became this portal that showed me that there was even more inside of me. And so, I had this moment where I realized, like it’s exciting, it’s humbling, it’s amazing, it’s wonderful, but also now I have this burden of potential that’s sitting on my shoulders, and I’m filled with anxiety, and fear, and dread, and uncertainty, and doubt, and impostor syndrome, and exhaustion, and burnout.

It’s wonderful but it’s kind of hell. It’s sort of Wonderhell. And so, I went about reading all the self-help books that were out there, like I 10X’d, and I crushed it, and I leaned in, and I washed my face, and I apologized, and all the things I was supposed to do, and, Pete, none of them worked. And so, finally, I was like, “All right. Well, there got to be people who know.”

So, I just started talking to other people who have been super successful people.

And it turns out that there are no answers, that we don’t actually get through these moments of Wonderhell but we just learn how to get more comfortable in them because on the other side of this Wonderhell is just the next one, and the next one, and the next one after that. And so, the book really talks about everything I learned from these people and how they learned not just to try to survive these moments but how to look forward to them, and thrive in them instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then let’s capture the main idea here. So, we achieve a success, a goal, a victory, something cool, and maybe it exceeds your expectations, like, “Whoa, all right, there we go.” And so then, you’re suggesting the common emotional experience for such achievers goes like what?

Laura Gassner Otting
Well, so what happens is every time we experience success, whether it’s a huge success, like, “I just sold my first company,” or a small success, like, “I just sold my first consulting contract,” or, “My first tube of lipstick.” Like, it doesn’t have to be like this huge massive thing. We think we’re like, okay, we’ve been sold this bill of goods, like, once we succeed everything gets easier. Like, once you just get to the other side of this project, this potential, this committee, this promotion, everything will get easier.

And what I learned from my own experience and from all the people that I talked to is that it actually doesn’t get easier. In fact, it gets harder because every time we achieve something, we realize that there’s more inside of us. Like, the success becomes a portal to everything else we could be. And so, we feel this faster pace, this bigger hunger, this drive to see what else is out there and what else we could be. And because of that, success never feels as good as we think it’s going to feel because it’s never the endpoint. It’s just a waypoint.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued, Laura, when you said bigger hunger, I think sometimes, I’ve heard tales – I’ve experienced a touch this myself – that instead of a bigger hunger, it’s just like, “Okay, well, I’ve been chasing this thing for a long time, and I got it, and that’s really cool, but now what? I don’t really have a new big dream or goal or thing I’m after.” And, in a way, it could be sort of a downer, I think there’s less hunger. So, do you see that as well? Or, how do you think about this vibe?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, absolutely. And for a lot of those people, there’s this moment that feels almost a little bit like burnout. So, the book, I wrote the book, it sort of emulates an amusement park, where, like, you go to an amusement park, you think it’s going to be fun. You can go to all the towns, you can go to all the rides, you can eat all the food. It’s going to be great.

And then it’s like 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, and you’re a little sunburned and you’re a lot dehydrated, and that corndog in your stomach is not so happy, and you’re in line for the rollercoaster, and you’re like, “Do I really want to go on this? Like, I was told this was going to be fun. I thought this was going to be fun.”

So, success is kind of the same way, where you get to that goal, and you’re like, “I thought this was supposed to be fun. Like, why do I just feel kind of blah? Like, why doesn’t it feel better when I’m here?” So, the book is sort of organized around an amusement park, and there’s three towns: there’s Impostor Town, there’s Doubtsville, and there’s Burnout City.

So, burnout city, the first ride, like all the chapters are rides, the first ride of burnout city is the merry go round, which is that moment where you just say no hustle porn, you’re like, “I’ve done the thing, I’ve crested the mountain, and maybe right now, like, I’m okay where I am. Like, I achieved the big work thing, and now I want to spend time focusing on other parts of my life.”

So, we’re told that we need to keep going, like bigger, better, faster, more. As soon as you achieve something, you need to be “What’s the next thing you want to achieve?” And so, for a lot of the people that I spoke to, they saw their lives sort of in these seasons, where there’s a time for them to be building their businesses, there’s a time for them to be growing in their jobs, but then there are also times when they’re like, “You know what, maybe I don’t want to take on the next big thing, the next big promotion. And maybe I don’t want to syndicate my podcast. Maybe I don’t want to take on the job that’s going to put me on the road all the time because I’ve got small kids.”

So, it’s not even necessarily a case of “I don’t know what the next big thing is.” It can also be a case of, like, “Even if I do know what the next big thing is, maybe I don’t want to do that. Like, I don’t need to keep bigger, better, faster, more growing. I just want to expose other parts of my life right now because I’ve already done that thing over there.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, hey, since we’re in Burnout Town, let’s complete our tour, and then visit the other two towns. And so, yeah, if folks find themselves in this kind of a spot, are there some cool stories or best practices you recommend for dealing with that effectively?

Laura Gassner Otting
So, one of the stories that I actually talk about in Burnout Town is the story of Jordan Harbinger, who is of the Jordan Harbinger Show, a very popular podcast, and he was approached to syndicate his podcast, a very successful podcast, people approached him to 10X the thing.

And he looked around, and he said, “You know, I spend all day long talking to incredibly successful humans who are all coming on my show at the time when they’re like launching a book, or a launching a course, or launching a mastermind, or some sort of thing.” And he goes, “And I interview them, and they’re like, ‘This is the part that sucks. This is the part where I’m on the road all the time. This is the part where I don’t see my kids. This is the part where I’m spending money out the wazoo and I don’t even know if I’m going to get it back. This is the part that sucks.”

“And then, afterwards, they’re like, ‘Hey, so, Jordan, when are you going to write your book? When are you going to have your mastermind?’” And he’s like, “No, it sounds terrible. Why would I want to do it?” So, when he got approached to syndicate his show, he looked around and he said, “Everybody I know who is doing the thing, everybody I know with a private jet is miserable. All they do is tell me about how expensive the private jet is.”

“And so, I looked around and I thought, ‘Why did I get into this in the first place?’ I got in this the first place because I want a ton of flexibility in my life. And he said, “Now, I’m married, I’ve got a baby, I’ve got another baby on the way,” and he’s like, “There’s only so many days I could say to my kids, like, ‘Hey, it’s Tuesday afternoon, your dad has got a super flexible job, let’s go to Disney World today so we can avoid the long lines on the weekend.’”

He’s like, “There’s only so many years I could do that before my kids are, like, “You, you old fart. We don’t want to hang out with you. We want to hang out with our friends and go play XBOX or something.” So, he was, like, “When I got approached for that, I thought about all the people that I talk to who are hustling, and who were exhausted, and who were miserable, and I looked at my little babies and I thought, ‘Nah, I’m good. I’m going to stay right here for a little while, and then, the syndication thing, it’ll be there later.’”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And as I think about Jordan’s example, because I sort of follow his podcast world, and he’s done quite well for the show, I guess, without taking that pathway, and is, in fact, really a leader in this space, specifically, of smartly purchasing – not to get too much in the weeds and minutiae of the podcast industry – but smartly purchasing promo spots for his own show on other podcasts, which he recoups via just audience growth and then selling ads on his show in a beautiful replicable kind of scaling way, which is, like, “Oh, maybe that’s my future, too.” Thank you for sharing us the pathway to that. So, he’s still hustling, in a way, but on his own terms, it seems.

Laura Gassner Otting
On his own terms. And, speaking of podcasts, there’s another podcaster I interviewed for the show is Jonathan Fields, a dear friend of mine. And Jonathan talked about his own experiences with burnout, and his really were focused around this question of perfection. So, when he was younger, when he was a teenager, his grandfather just passed away, and they were cleaning out his grandfather’s house.

And he said, “Well, I went down to the basement and I found this pile of old paint and an old doorframe, and I stuck the door on a bunch of cement blocks, and I just started painting. And I lost myself for hours in the painting. And it was the first experience I ever had of being in flow about something. So, I decided I wanted to start painting album covers on jean jackets. And, in my mind, I had this vision of what the album covers would look like on the jean jackets, and then I would try to paint them. And I was not able to produce what I saw in my mind, the thing in my mind that I, literally, had no right to expect because I had no experience painting.”

And he said, “And then I would take these terrible jean jackets, and I would destroy them, and I was so filled with self-hatred about the fact that I wasn’t perfect at this thing, that the self-punishing behavior became super damaging.” And he said, “I took that perfectionist drive, and I took that through law school, through an early career in law. And so, one day I realized that I was, literally, putting myself in the hospital because I was so stressed about the perfectionism.”

And he said that he learned much later, and I learned this through my research, that there are three different types of perfectionism, and there’s only one which is like self-oriented, like wanting more from ourselves, which is even remotely good for us. But what he said was, now, he’s older, he’s in his 50s, he looks back and he says, “The truth is I just released my last book. It debuted as a US Today instant bestseller.”

He said, “I’m not that proud of that.” He goes, “I’m proud of it but I’m prouder of the fact that on page 34 or the third chapter, or the third paragraph of chapter four, there’s a paragraph that I couldn’t have written five years ago. I wasn’t capable of doing it. And now I know that when I see something that’s hard, I don’t go, ‘God, I can’t do it. I’m not perfect.’ I think isn’t it amazing that I get so spend the next 10 years getting better at that thing?’”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, from the stories of Jordan Harbinger and Jonathan Fields, and your other research, any sort of key prescriptive to-dos you’d recommend if folks are in that space of, “Hey, just had a big success, and now having some burnout”? What’s to be done?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. Well, I think that there are a lot of different ways that we can define success, and I think that when we finish one thing, we assume that the next success should be something else in that vein, like, either we’re going to build the next bigger business, we’re going to get the next bigger job, or we’re just going to just keep going on the same path.

And I think, based on 20 years on executive search and interviewing the most successful people in the world, I called all of them because they were super successful. They all called me back because, despite that success, they weren’t very happy. So, they were like, “Oh, is there another job, another promotion, another title, another organization out there?” Like, we think we’ll be happy when.

So, what I learned in that work in two decades in executive search is that we start our careers thinking that success is defined a very specific way. Like, whatever somebody told us at some point, whether it was a teacher, or a parent, or a boss, or an internet celebrity, or a guidance counselor before we had a frontal lobe, we were 17 years old, we start our career with a certain definition of success, and then we follow our entire career with this same one.

And I would say, like a specific tactic would be to ask yourself, “What actually makes you happy? How do you define success?” For some people, that success may be, “I want to make a bajillion dollars.” For other people, it may be, “I want to make just enough money but I want to be at home every night and have dinner with my kids.” For other people, it might be, “I want to cure cancer.” But everybody has different definitions. And even as we change, the world around us changes also.

So, my tactic for people is to check in with yourself. Don’t just blindly keep doing the same thing you did before just because it’s now. Like, keep thinking about it. And I think the pandemic is actually a perfect time to do this because I think a lot of us woke up in the middle of the pandemic, and we’re like, “You know, when life goes back to normal, is the normal I’m going back to really the life I want?” And I think, for a lot of people, the answer was “Not really.”

I don’t know anybody that came out of 2020, 2021, even 2022, not thinking that there were some changes that they wanted to make in some way. And so, I just think it’s a perfect time right now to reassess and to reprioritize.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you take us to another town within Wonderhell and share with us what that’s about?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. So, why don’t we go to the beginning? Let’s go to Impostor Town.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Laura Gassner Otting
So, Impostor Town is every time we figure out that there is something in us, something more that’s in us, something that we’re capable of doing. There’s also a voice inside of our head that goes, “Are you sure you should be doing this? Are you sure this is for you? Are you sure that nobody’s going to figure out that you’re a fraud, that you don’t belong here?”

And so, Impostor Town is there’s this great moment of, “This is exciting. This is something I want to do.” But then we hear these voices that go, “Oh, my God, you haven’t done this before. Don’t do it. You’re going to get hurt. It’s going to be a problem.” And I think we have to turn those voices around and hear them not as limitations but as invitations.

So, it’s not, “Oh, my God, you haven’t done this before,” it’s, “Oh, my God, you haven’t done this before. What an opportunity.” So, with the people that I spoke to, and I thought, Pete, let me tell you, I thought I was going to talk to these incredible people, like I said, glass ceiling shatterers, Olympic medalists, startup unicorns, and they were going to tell me how they got through impostor syndrome, like how did they finally get through it.

And much to my chagrin, it turns out that there’s no way to get through it. Like, everybody, each one of them at every stage, at every age, at every level, had impostor syndrome because each time they were going into a room, they were going into an opportunity, they were going into an office, they were going into a possibility that they did not think was available to them before. Like, every time we succeed and we look to the doors of success to what else is out there, there’s other doors behind it that we don’t know are available to us, even if we know they exist.

So, this impostor syndrome, the people who were able to thrive in wonderhell didn’t see the impostor syndrome as a limitation, but they saw them as actually these incredibly helpful allies that told them if they were on the right track. And I thought that that was a pretty great way to turn that idea around because if you just think about impostor syndrome alone, like the gall of the term impostor syndrome, like, “Oh, you’re an impostor. Maybe you should leave. You have a syndrome. You’re sick. Maybe you should lay down.”

So, if we think about impostor syndrome and we think about ourselves as the impostor, we’re the ones that are wrong, when, in fact, most of the people who feel impostor syndrome are trying to operate in an environment that wasn’t built by them, wasn’t built for them. Like, unless you’re the madman of the 1950s, too female, too gay, too black or brown. We’re trying to get into rooms that were not built for us, that don’t accommodate us.

And so, the impostor tries to change the shape of themselves to fit into a room that wasn’t built for them, when, in fact, we should be demanding that the rooms themselves change shape. So, this idea, this notion of sort of turning this around and not saying impostor syndrome where something is wrong with me, but impostor syndrome is actually telling me that I’ve gotten to a place that I never knew I could get to, and isn’t that awesome, was a really interesting mindset shift for me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Okay. And can we visit the final town?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yup, so the final town is Doubtsville. And Doubtsville is when you are starting, you’re there, and you’re like toes over the edge of incompetence, which, honestly, is the most fun place to be. Like, the only things I’ve ever done in my life that I was excited about were things that I didn’t know how to do. Like, it’s not that interesting to do the puzzle again. You want to do a new puzzle. You want to do something different.

So, Doubtsville is really, like, you found yourself in this place, you don’t quite know what to do, and you’ve got to figure it out, you’ve got to find your own way, you’ve got to realize that you are flying without a net, that there’s maybe never been a net there ever, and you’ve got to figure out who you want to have around you, who belongs in the sidecar with you, and, frankly, who doesn’t.

And, also, how do you manage uncertainty, how do you figure out when everything in the world is completely brand-new and unknown. So, in these moments when we don’t quite know who we are, or where we are, and how we should be, these are the stories that I learned about, about how to get us through those moments.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are some of the top things to do?

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. So, some of the stories that I love were, first of all, I did an interview with Jen Welter who was the first female coach of the NFL, and before she became a coach, she actually played for a very short while. And when she was at the training camp, she said to the coach, she was like, “Listen, you’re either going to have to cut me or kill me because I’m not quitting.” She stands of all of 5’4” I think.

But what she did is she decided she was going to break down all of the plays, all of the moves into their component parts. And when she did that, she began to understand the game in a way that, actually, made her into a really good coach. She didn’t know it at the time, but it made her into a really good coach, and so, she became a coach for the NFL.

And when she became a coach for the NFL, she had this moment where she realized, like, “There’s no roadmap, there’s no safety net, there’s no buddy who’s done this before me. I’m going to be the first girl but I’m dead set on not being the last girl.” So, she knew she had to do well by all the women who could come after her.

And she said, “If I decided to do what everybody else did, and I tried to go toe-to-toe with these giant football players and yell at them, I’d be toe-to-toe but I’d also be, like, eyeball to bellybutton. Like, I wasn’t going to be able to do the thing the way everyone else had.” So, she said, “I became the master of the lean-in, of the pull-aside, and I pulled the players aside, and I would whisper because everyone can lean in for a whisper.”

“I became the queen of the pull-aside, the strong pull-aside, and I would whisper, and I would tell the players what they should do. And I was so good at it, and they could tell that I knew the game, and I loved the game, and I understood each component part, that when I finished, they were like, ‘That’s great, coach. What else you got for me?’” People respected her.

So, she could’ve done it the way everybody else did it, and failed. Like, in this moment of doubt, a lot of times we go, “Who else is out there? How are they doing it? Let me do exactly how they’re doing it.” Or, she could say, “I have to do it my way. I have to learn to do it my way. And if I do it my way, and I’m the very best at my way, then I can succeed.” And so, I think a lot of times we forget that what got us there, it might not be enough to get us where we want to go but it certainly is enough to build on a foundation of where we’re going from there.

Another story I’ll tell you from that section is a story of Dorie Clark. And Dorie, she’s an author who I know, she’s written a lot of great personal development books, and she’s a professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. She’s one of the top business thinkers in the world, but she also wants to become a Broadway producer.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. She mentioned this.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yes. Yes. So, this is one fun little thing. One of her books is called Reinventing You and it’s all about how to reinvent yourself. And so, she’s reinventing herself as a someone who’s going to score Broadway musicals. And so, she decides she wants to do this, and she applies and gets rejected from it, and applies again after some coaching, and finally gets into one of the top Broadway musical scoring programs in the world.

And so, she’s there on the first day, and everybody is going around the room talking about what they’ve done, and this one’s won a Tony, and that one scored six musicals, and she’s like, “I’ve scored three whole songs. And I could either have, in that moment, put up my hoodie and shrunk back into my sweatshirt, and left the room, or I could’ve said, ‘You know, Dorie, you’ve been really successful in other parts of your life, in areas where you didn’t know what you were doing, but you knew how to become better. You don’t know how to do this. It’s not that you’re not good. You’re just not good yet.’”

“So, everything that got me to here was what I was able to do, the habits I was able to build, the network I was able to create, the grit, the tenacity, the hunger, the weight, all of those things, that was enough to get me here. And all I can build on all of those things to get me to where I want to get to. So, it’s not that I’m not good, I’m just not good yet.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. That’s really good. And I’ve heard it said, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you need to find some other rooms.”

Laura Gassner Otting
I say that all the time, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe you told me that, Laura.

Laura Gassner Otting
If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

Pete Mockaitis
And Dorie often is the smartest person in a lot of rooms, and so it’s pretty cool to be able to step into that spot. And I think it’s actually quite endearing if someone said, “Hey, you know what, you guys have wisdom and experience far beyond mine, and I’m really excited to learn from you all.” As someone who is more experienced in that room, I get excited to be with that person, and say, “Ooh, here’s someone who’s eager and they’re not…I guess, they’re opposite of stuck up, inflexible, un-coachable. It’s exciting to say, ‘Ooh, someone’s about to have a transformation here, and I get to have a little role in it.’”

And, well, I guess, that’s kind of my thing. But even if it’s not, even if you’re not a podcaster, or in the personal development world, it’s just a good human feeling to be a part of that.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah. It’s funny, people always ask me, like, who’s in my inner circle, and I say, “I have three types of people in my inner circle.” I have aspirationals, like people who I want to be when I grow up, people who are way more successful than I am in the thing that I want to do, my aspirationals. They are the ones that I call for advice, they are the ones who give me these mentoring moments, they are the ones who give me, like, a kick in the ass when I need it. They don’t let me settle for mediocrity. My aspirationals.

Then I have my peers. And my peers are the ones who are like, they’re in the foxhole with me. They’re on the same track as me, and we complain about stuff together, we whine about stuff together, we celebrate together, we learn from each other because they’re learning one thing about what we’re doing, I’m learning another thing so we can power of two. So, the peers are really great.

And then there are the mentees. And having people come to me for advice, I have found, is the greatest way to get rid of my impostor syndrome ever. It’s the greatest way for me to get rid of my doubt ever because if I’m teaching somebody something that I know, I might not even remember that I know the thing. Like, it’s a great reminder of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve learned, how hard I fought, and I think that if you can, on a regular basis, be part of somebody else’s transformation, it continues to build your own transformation because it reminds you that you actually do know a thing or two.

Pete Mockaitis
That is perfectly said, and that’s been my experience a number of times when folks are asking for advice, or, “Hey, Pete, could you do a talk on this thing?” And I thought, “If I were in your shoes, and you want to talk about productivity, I’d probably book David Allen or Greg McKeown, or if you want to talk about effective presenting, I’d probably go to Nick Morgan.” I’m thinking of the super luminaries in the field, and they’re like, “Yeah, Pete, but we don’t got that kind of budget.” I was like, “All right, fair enough.”

Or, it’s like, “I just want to have a quick chat because we’re buds. Just tell me what you know.” I was like, “Well, okay, I guess, sure.” And then I just get on a roll, and then it’s like been an hour, and they say, “Okay. Well, I want to be respectful of your time,” and I’m thinking, “No, I’m having fun and actually I have a lot more to say apparently about this thing.”

Laura Gassner Otting
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess you got to go, so I guess just take those 12 points and five experts and six books, and, hopefully, that’ll do something for you.” It’s like, “Huh, I guess I know a lot about that thing.”

Laura Gassner Otting
I know but isn’t that great, though? Don’t you find that in those moments that you’re like, “Oh, okay, maybe I am myself becoming a luminary?” And that’s pretty cool. I think it’s pretty amazing because, look, like you are a professional student, I think that’s pretty cool. Your job is to learn all day long, is to read books, and to watch talks, and to talk to people about big ideas. That’s pretty special. So, yeah, I think people would be really lucky to be able to bend your ear for some advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Well, thank you, and it really is a dream come true, and I appreciate, it just feels nice personally to be reminded of that. And so, when people say, “So, Pete, what’s next for your career?” it’s funny, part of me thinks, “Well, this is kind of everything. Does there need to be a next? I’m not sure.”

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, I can’t tell you how many podcasts, how many journalists, how many just friends that I’ve talked to, like, “What’s your next book is going to be about?” And I’m like, “My next book? Can I just have this book right now? Can I have this one?” Yeah, but I think that’s a thing. I think people need to put us in a box. Everybody likes to have shortcuts.

So, when I sold my last business, I sold my last business to the woman who helped me build it, and I ran into an old friend at Starbucks who I hadn’t seen in years, and she was, like, “So, what are you going to do now?” And I looked at her, and I’m like, “I don’t know. I’m going to figure it out.” And she just did not know what to do, she had this look of fear, of horror, of uncertainty.

I think part of her was, like, jealous that I suddenly had freedom to figure it out. I think part of her was questioning whether or not she should leave her job so that she can do something else. I think part of her was like, “I don’t know who you are when you’re not LGO CEO of the search firm. Like, where do I refile you?” I was like a hanging chad, like she didn’t know what to do with me, and I think people want that shortcut.

So, I think a lot of times when we ask people for advice, they rush us to solution because they’re uncomfortable sitting in the discomfort with us. In 2021, I was very, very ill, like I didn’t know if I was going to see 2022. Like, ten months of chemotherapy. It was a bad year. And I had so many people that were like, “Oh, you’re going to be just fine. You’re going to get through it.” And as soon as I was through it in remission, it was like, “It’s behind you. It’s never coming back.”

And, finally, I had to turn to some of those people and say, “You know, when you tell me in the middle of it, or just after it when I’m still processing it, that it’s all fine and it’s over, you’re actually discounting me and my emotions, and needing to actually understand what happened. And I understand that you’re not comfortable with me saying, ‘Yeah, I’m a little worried that maybe it’ll come back.’ But just because you’re not comfortable, doesn’t mean you get to steal that away from me. Like, if you’re not comfortable sitting in my discomfort with me, you can go. It’s fine. You can leave.”

But that people feel the same way, whether it’s about health, whether it’s about divorce, whether it’s about unemployment, like whatever the sticky thing is, it’s kind of I just want to say to people, “You can just say, ‘Oh, that seems really hard. I’m sorry you’re going through that,’ or, ‘That seems an adventure. I can’t wait to see what you do next.’”

Like, it’s okay to be in the unknown. Wonderhell is all about that. It’s, like, “How do you sit in the discomfort of not knowing where this is leading to, knowing that it could lead somewhere amazing, or you could fall really short?” And I just think we all have to get a little more comfortable being uncomfortable sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, that’s powerful stuff. I’m tearing up over here.

Laura Gassner Otting
That was a lot. That was heavy.

Pete Mockaitis
One, you’re just such a gift to the world, and I’m glad you made it. And so, that’s great. And, two, I’m thinking about my mom when… she’ll share some things, “Oh, hey, Pete, so-and-so from hometown Danville, well, yeah, I saw on Facebook there are some tough stuff going on. Like, her son had really dramatic burns from a fire, and they’re in the hospital and they’re not quite sure what’s going to happen,” or, “So-and-so’s child has cancer and so there’s photos of this precious six-year-old who’s bald and it’s tough stuff.” And then my mom, she’ll say that, “I really don’t like it when people on Facebook say, ‘You got this.’”

Laura Gassner Otting
Oh, God, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, one, it’s just sort of an annoying phraseology, like she was an English teacher.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yes, that’s not grammar.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, but much more deeply, it’s like, “Okay, you have no idea, like, what I got and what I don’t got. And you saying, ‘You got this’ is I get you try to be supportive, like that’s some encouragement.”

Laura Gassner Otting
It comes from a beautiful place but it is misfired.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it often doesn’t feel great to receive that because exactly what you put your finger on is, like, we’re kind of rushing past the fact that this is a hard struggle with some suffering, and it’d be cool if you could be there with me, and maybe provide some practical support.

Laura Gassner Otting
So, I will say this, like it was beautiful to see how many people showed up for me, how many people did give me the “You got this” messages. It was wonderful to know and yet, also, it was hard. At the end of the whole thing, I didn’t even tell my family, like my husband and my kids, just how hard things had gotten for me because I didn’t have the energy to take care of them and their fear and their worry, and them wanting to take care of me.

And so, it’s a very interesting thing because you really do have no idea what somebody is going through. So, even the people living in my own house had no idea just how dark things had gotten inside. And I just think, I have a friend who he knows that I’m doing all these podcasts in advance of the book coming out, and he knows that I have this cold that you can hear so well right now. My apologies for that.

And he sent me a message, and he said, “How can I support you in this moment?” And I thought, “What a great question.” It’s not like, “You’re fine. You’ll be great. Power through.” He’s like, “How can I support you in this moment?” I was like it’s just somebody who is there to just keep you company. Sometimes you just need somebody to keep you company in your misery.

And to bring this back to work stuff, which is what the podcast is about, I think a lot of times in the work environment, we’ll have somebody who’s dealing with something that’s hard, and we want to fix it, we want to help them, we want to get through it because it’s awkward, it’s uncomfortable. But I think sometimes just saying, “What do you need right now? How can we support you in this moment? What do you need right now?”

And I think that really changes everything from “We need you to get better and solve the problem so you can get back to dealing with the work,” to, like, “You can be a full person here. You can be who you are and we respect that because we know you’re coming back stronger.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really beautiful, Laura. And in terms of providing support, whether someone is going through the unique situation of Wonderhell in one of those three flavors, or in any number of other things. I remember when I was 15 years old, and my dad died suddenly, he was bicycling, he was hit by a truck.

Laura Gassner Otting
Oh, goodness.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that was tragic, and my mom said some of the most meaningful supports people offered, and it was that kind of a question. And what came about was, I was 15 years old, and someone said, “How can I support you?” and she said, “You know what, hey, you were a former driver, Zed,” props to my mom, she’s awesome. She just was able to identify and claim it, and so no, “Oh, no, no, I don’t want to be a bother or a burden.” It’s like, “No, you need it and take it in your time of need.”

She’s like, “Hey, my son is 15 years old, we got to get those state of Illinois 25 hours of driving to get a driver’s license. It’s very high stress for me, and you’re a pro, so could you please do some hours with him?” And he said yes, and so I spent some time driving with the dude, and that was super helpful. And then someone else, my mom said, “You know what, my kids love swimming, and you’ve got a cool pool. Like, would it be okay if, from time to time, they went there.” He’s like, “Absolutely. You could come anytime. I’ll let my family know and the neighbors know, and you just drop on in.” And that’s just really cool to have those little bits of support in that tough time.

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, think about how much more that meant to you than somebody dropping off teddy bears and fruit baskets at your house. I think about that all the time. Thank you for sharing that story, by the way. I’m honored that you shared that with me. There was a funeral in my neighborhood about three days ago. I was driving through the neighborhood and I don’t know the family.

But I was watching all these people walking up with baskets of food, and I was thinking to myself, “They’re probably going to throw out so much food at this house. The last thing somebody needs is somebody else’s homemade banana bread.

And I was thinking, “God, what would be great is to know, ‘What’s happening inside that house. Who are the kids? What do they need?’” The fact that your mom was able to ask that, I say to people all the time when they have newborn babies, I’m like, “Everybody’s going to come and be like, ‘What can I do for you?’ hand them the baby, and take a shower. Do whatever you need to do. When somebody asks, don’t be like, ‘No, no, it’s fine. Let me make you some lunch.’” You’re not there to entertain people, “Here’s the baby. I’ve done the entertaining. I had nine months of it. I made this baby. You can look at it while I take a shower.”

But I think we have to get better at asking, especially if people don’t know how to ask us. Think about how good that guy felt being able to take you to drive. Think about how good that person felt letting you use their pool. Like, it wasn’t hard for them. Think about the last time you helped somebody do anything. Think about how good you felt when you helped that person. Like, why are we stealing the gifts of helping from other people? I think we should look at it that way and not be so embarrassed to ask.

Now, I say that being here, sitting here on the edge of my book launch, and just dying and I’m asking people nonstop, “Please buy my book. Please buy my book. Please buy my book.” But every time somebody asks me to buy their book, I love it. I’m so excited to help them. So, I don’t know, I think we have to really be okay knowing that the person who is dropping in and trying to help us, even if they don’t know how they can help us just because they’re uncomfortable in the discomfort, not because they’re offering the thing that they want to offer. They’re just like stabbing in the dark.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. And that’s hitting me in terms of I remember, I’m 15 years old and people, the first person who showed up with those aluminum foil casserole dishes at the door and just handed it to me.

Laura Gassner Otting
Mystery casseroles.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s, like, I was 15 and didn’t have lots of experiences with some of it, I didn’t even know what was happening. I was like, “Mom, someone came by and they gave us this food. So, I guess we’re having…”

Laura Gassner Otting
Very heavy mystery tin foil.

Pete Mockaitis
She had to explain, “Well, yes, Pete, when someone passes away, that’s the way people try to show support so that we don’t have to worry about cooking and stuff.” I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess that makes some sense.” And then a few days later, I was like, “Well, our freeze is sort of full so I don’t really know what we’re going to do with this.”

Laura Gassner Otting
Like, it really does come out of the best part of them, like it is the best sign of humanity that I know that people surround people in crises. We just have to be okay saying, “You know what would be better than that mystery casserole? Like, if you could just take my dog for a walk while I just sit in my living room and cry for a few minutes.” Sometimes that’s what we need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That is perfect. And when you talked about books, I’m thinking about a mentor of mine in my episode one, Mawi Asgedom. He understood, he’d done books, he’s like, “All right, Pete, so here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to buy ten of these books, and I’m going to send each of these to someone who I think could really be into this book and want to buy more and maybe book you for some speaking as you’re kind of entering this next phase.” I was like, “Well, that’s awesome. I could not have imagined or had the audacity to ask for that, but that is perfection. So, thank you for that, Mawi.”

Cool. Well, that’s an interesting little detour we’ve taken, Laura, how to be helpful and how to ask whether we’re in the midst of a Wonderhell or any number of needs that you or someone else has. That’s powerful stuff. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Laura Gassner Otting
Well, I would just say that Wonderhell is a sneaky little bastard that only presents itself to people who are worthy of it. So, if you’ve achieved something in your life, cool, I’m happy, and none of this is resonating with you, you’re probably where you are at the top of your potential, and that’s awesome. But my guess is that as you’re hearing it, you’re like, “Yeah, I have felt that.” And if you have felt a little bit of it, it’s because you are made of more. So, if you are feeling Wonderhell, it’s not a bad thing. It’s just a sign that you are capable of the thing that you can envision.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote?

Laura Gassner Otting
There’s a Henry Rollins quote, and I don’t remember exactly what it is, but it goes something like, “There’s no down time, there’s no up time, there’s no work time, there’s no life time, there’s just time. So, get on with it.”

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

Laura Gassner Otting
So, my favorite piece of research right now is one that I actually quote in the book that says that, “People who flip a coin, and the coin flip tells them go, like do the thing, leave the marriage, take the new job, move across country, whatever the thing is, they are happier months and years later, regardless of the outcome of how that decision turned out than people who flipped the coin, and the coin told them to just stay where they are and not do something different.” So, this idea that action beats stagnation is fascinating to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Laura Gassner Otting
I think one of my favorite books is Ursula Hegi’s book Stones from the River. It’s a fiction book. And the reason I love it is that it’s a story of this woman named Trudy, she’s a zwerg, which is dwarf in German, and it’s a story of the history of the small town during World War II. And Trudy is one of those people who could be easily ignored because she’s a dwarf, and she’s not usual from everybody else.

And throughout the book, she actually is able to hide Jews in her attic, she’s able to hear German soldiers talking about what they’re going to be up to, and then get that information to the British resistance. Like, the whole book is about how she has overcome what the world thinks of her and defined for herself what her life is going to be, and created this big rich life out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Laura Gassner Otting
I love Notion. I love Notion. Notion is where I organize everything. But if you can look back there on my bookshelf, there’s a hammer that I won as being the fastest lightweight 40- to 49-year-old woman on an indoor rowing competition, a 2K competition. And the trophy that you get for it is a hammer because you’re supposed to drop the hammer. So, if we’re really literally, like, your mom would be proud talking about tools, that hammer.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Laura Gassner Otting
My favorite habit is having accountability buddies in everything that I do. I’m a motivational speaker but I will tell you that I think motivation is BS because if it’s 5:00 in the morning, and it’s 40 degrees outside, and I have to go for a 10-mile run, I’m not going to do it. I’m going to roll over, and I’m going to turn off my alarm because I am lazy, and I am girl from Miami who likes the warmth.

But if it is 4:00 in the morning and it is 20 degrees outside, and I told I was going to meet you for a 10-mile run, I will be there every single day of the week because I will always break a promise to myself, but I will never break a promise to you. So, my favorite habit is finding accountability buddies for everything that I want to do.

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

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, people quote back to me all the time, “Stop giving voice in your life to people who shouldn’t even have voices.” Like, all those people in our lives who we let give us all their opinions about who we should be and what we should be in, and how we should be in, and God forbid, what we can’t be, and we listen to all of them with equal volume when, in fact, most of them don’t know us, and they don’t know what they’re talking about anyway.

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

Laura Gassner Otting
Yes. So, my name is Laura Gassner Otting. All my good friends call me LGO, so you can find me on all the socials at heyLGO, and heyLGO.com is a shortcut to my website. You can also find out much more about Wonderhell at WonderHell.com or pick it up at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, anywhere fine books are sold.

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

Laura Gassner Otting
Yeah, my final call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs is to figure out whether or not everything that’s on your calendar, on your to-do list, in your email box is stuff that is furthering your goals and your callings or it’s furthering someone else’s. I would ask people to figure out whose dreams are you working for. And if those dreams are not your own, think about whether or not you should be doing something else.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, this has been a treat. I wish you, the book, all the success.

Laura Gassner Otting
Thank you so much, Pete.

Apr 13

856: How to Awaken Your Genius and Become Extraordinary with Ozan Varol

By Podcasts No Comments

 

Ozan Varol says: "Embrace your useful idiosyncrasies, spend time on airplane mode, and be careful where you point your attention."

Ozan Varol reveals how to surface your unique talents that enable you to achieve extraordinary results.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The surprising technique writers of The Office used to keep their ideas fresh
  2. A powerful question for uncovering your hidden genius
  3. How being a people pleaser is killing your genius

About Ozan

Ozan Varol is a rocket scientist turned award-winning professor and #1 bestselling author. He is one of the world’s foremost experts in creativity, innovation, and critical thinking. His writing has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Time, Washington Post, and more. His latest book is called Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary.

Resources Mentioned

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

Ozan Varol
Thanks so much for having me back, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your latest work Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary. All things I enjoy doing, so it seems like we’re in the right place here. And to kick us off, I was so intrigued by one of your bullets. I love the show The Office. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them all a couple times, and you say there’s a surprising strategy that boost creativity, that the folks who wrote The Office used right off the bat. Can you tell us about this?

Ozan Varol
Absolutely. The Office is also one of my favorite shows of all time, and one of the things that’s extraordinary about that show is that they had, I think, over 200 episodes, but they were able to maintain the quality of the show throughout, which is really, really difficult to do. And so, they did have this strategy that I talk about in the book, which is, in the writers’ room, when they got stuck in a rut, when they’re, like, the ideas stopped flowing, they would play a game.

So, they would stop working on The Office and they would start putting together an episode for Entourage. And if you remember, Entourage is an HBO series about Vincent Chase, this actor who lives in Hollywood with a bunch of his friends. And so, the writers of The Office didn’t work on the show but when they found themselves in a creative rut working on The Office, they would say, “Okay, let’s play a game. Let’s put together an episode for Entourage.” And whenever they played this game, they only had one rule. The episode had to end with Vincent Chase, the main character, winning the Oscar for Best Actor. And with that constraint in place, they would play.

And so, they do this for about, I don’t know, half an hour or so, and then they would go back to working on The Office, and something interesting happened whenever they did this. By virtue of playing this game, and coming back to their own work, their creativity would dramatically increase, like the ideas that weren’t there before, all of a sudden, would start to flow.

And I mention that, or I talk about that story in the section of the book about the importance of playing. And so, for the writers of The Office, this is a way of setting their own work aside, and then playing with someone else’s show, someone else’s project. And when they went back to their own work of actually writing an episode for The Office, that playful mindset would carry over.

It was like it’s a way of warming up your creativity muscles before you start doing really heavy lifts. And having done that, yeah, it would be much easier for them to actually creatively write the episode for The Office that they were working on.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting about that play there is it’s not that wild. It’s not, like, “Okay, go grab some Play-Doh,” or, “Imagine how I would make a rocket out of Sharpies.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re still writing a TV show,” and yet it’s play in the sense that, I guess, there are no stakes there.

Ozan Varol
Yup, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “We’re not going to be putting this out into the world, so be thinking just be whatever you want.”

Ozan Varol
Exactly. And you hit the nail on the head there. It’s very low stakes, there’s actually no stakes at all. Like, the episode for Entourage can suck and it’s not going to matter at all because it’s never going to air. And so, people listening to this might see that as a waste of time but, again, for creativity to happen, especially when you’re stuck in a rut, play becomes really important.

And you don’t have to be a writer to do this, by the way. So, say, you’re in the marketing world, and if you find yourself stuck in a rut, take 10 minutes and come up with marketing ideas for a competitor’s product, like put together a Super Bowl commercial for a competitor’s product, and then come back to your own work, and you’ll find that that playful mindset, that you just created by taking just 10 minutes to play with somebody else’s problem, somebody else’s product, will carry you over to the issue or the problem that you’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Well, so you’ve got a number of these approaches in your book Awaken Your Genius. I’m curious to hear if there was a particularly striking, counterintuitive discovery you made that made you go, “Oh, wow, aha” along the way that’s really stuck with you.

Ozan Varol
One of the points that really stuck with me that I use probably on a daily basis is it goes back to something that my high school soccer coach would tell me, and then I came across a research study which essentially validated what he was saying all along. So, I’ll begin with what he would tell me, and then I’ll bring you to the research, and then share with you what I do on a day-to-day basis to implement this mindset.

He had this saying, he would say, “If you’re not in possession, get in position,” meaning if you’re not in possession of the ball, move to a different position on the field where you’re open to receive the ball. And it turns out that the same idea applies to you, regardless of the type of work that you do. And so, if you’re finding yourself stuck, if you’re finding yourself without the ball, if you’re finding yourself in a rut, move to a different position. So, physically move yourself away from the position that you’ve been sitting in into a different location.

What happens with the way that most of us work, we’re like sitting in the same position, in the same chair, looking at the same computer screen for hours and hours at a time, and that space we’re operating in gets associated with the same old thought patterns, traditional ideas, and so it becomes really hard to change the status quo and generate new ideas.

But the simple act of picking up your laptop and walking to a different location, it might be a café, or what I do at home is I walk to a different room in our house, with different decorations, different books on the shelves, different background, different everything, and when I do that, that space becomes this, like, blank canvass that I can project new ideas on, and because that space is not associated with the old though patterns that I’ve been operating under for a very long time.

This is why, by the way, research shows that smokers, for example, find it easier to quit when they’re traveling because the new location doesn’t have the same patterns associated with their smoking habit as their own home. And so, it’s really easy to implement in practice. If you’re finding yourself in a rut, pick up your laptop, move to a different place. Walking also helps. Research shows that walking significantly boosts creativity.

And walking, by the way, without audiobook, without podcast, without a phone call to keep you company, just you and your thoughts, there are so many stories of scientists, literally, walking themselves into the right answer. It seems like a really simple practice but it can really create a fundamental transformation in the quality and the quantity of the ideas that you might generate.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And that context stuff, you mentioned smokers, that’s wild. I’ve heard that some war, maybe it’s Vietnam, maybe it’s multiple wars, soldiers from the US, a good chunk of them, engage in some hardcore drugs, like cocaine or heroine or something, when they’re off in the theater of war. And then they came back, and the vast majority of them just had no problem.

This is mind-blowing because it’s, like, among the most addictive substances in existence, and then it’s like, “Oh, well, hey, you know, different people, different country, different scenery, different activities, and hardcore narcotics are just not part of my life anymore.” Just like that. Mind-blowing stuff.

Ozan Varol
Amazing. Yeah, I hadn’t heard of that but it makes sense if you think about it. So much of our behavior, our habits, our ways of working in the world are just tied to the environment. And the moment you put yourself in a drastically different environment, it becomes much easier to change. And this is why, by the way, one of the things I love most is international travel.

When you go to a foreign country, your whole world becomes topsy-turvy, like the majority becomes the minority, surrounded by echoes of this language that you’ve never heard before. You return to infancy when your mother tongue was foreign to you. You become a young fool again. And so, everything is new and it becomes so much easier to generate new ideas and get out of old patterns of thinking simply by breathing foreign air, which is pretty remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, we’ve got a number of fun strategies and ideas. Could you hit us with of the big idea, core thesis of the book Awaken Your Genius?

Ozan Varol
Sure. And I pick the word genius on purpose. So, genius, most often, is used to mean smartest, or the most intelligent, the most talented, and that’s not the way I used genius in the book. There’s a quote that opens the book from Thelonious Monk, he says, “Genius is the one most like himself.” Genius, in the Latin origin of the word, means the spirit attendant at birth in each and every person.

So, each of us is like Aladdin, and our genie, or our genius, is bottled up inside of us waiting to be awakened. And the core thesis of the book is this, no one can compete with you at being you.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’ll smoke them.”

Ozan Varol
You are the first and the last time that you’ll ever happen. And if your thinking is an extension of you, if what you’re building is a product of your inner wisdom, you’ll be in a league of your own. But if you suppress yourself, if you don’t claim that wisdom within, then it’s going to be lost. That genius is going to be lost both to you and to the world.

And so, at a time when so many people and so many businesses are looking externally for answers, outsourcing their thinking to algorithms, copying and pasting what their competitors are doing, I wanted to write a book to give people concrete tools to escape that culture of conformity and unlock original insights within their own depths and unleash their own unique genius.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if awakening the genius is what’s happening here, could you give us a cool story of a sleeping genius and how they awoke and what happened?

Ozan Varol
Yeah, the first name that popped to mind is Johnny Cash. In 1954, he walked into an audition room at Sun Records, and at the time he was a nobody. He was selling appliances door to door and playing gospel songs at night with two of his friends. He was broke. His marriage was in ruins. And for his audition, Cash picks a gospel song because that’s what he knew best, and gospel was really popular in 1954. Everyone else was singing it.

The audition doesn’t go as Johnny Cash plans. As Cash begins to sing this dreary slow gospel song, the record label owner, who’s name was Sam Phillips, he pretends to be interested for, like, 20 seconds before interrupting Cash. He says, “We already heard that song a hundred times, just like that, just like how you sang it. This song,” he says, “is the same Jimmy Davis tune we hear on the radio all day about your peace within, and how it’s real, and how you’re going to shout it.”

He looks at Cash, and he says, “Sing something different. Sing something real. Sing something you felt because that’s the kind of song that people want to hear. That’s the kind of song that truly saves people. It’s got nothing to do with believing in God, Mr. Cash,” he says. “It has to do with believing in yourself.” And that rant jolts Cash out of his conformist “Let me sing you some good old gospel” attitude. He collects himself. He starts strumming his guitar. And he starts playing the “Folsom Prison Blues” in that deep distinctive voice of his.

In that moment, he stops trying to become a gospel singer and he becomes Johnny Cash, all because he rejects the tendency to conform, and decides to embrace the genius within him. And I think that’s one of the best stories, the most memorable stories about how somebody who walks into that room as a sleeping conformist, and walks away by awakening the genius within him.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious, so Johnny Cash, he’s already got a pretty good sense at the time, I’m assuming, I’m not as familiar with the ins and outs of his story. He’s got a pretty good vibe that, “Music is the thing I care to do,” so he’s got a zone that he’s operating in. To your point about how we are one of a kind and the best at being us as we can be, so we want to be ourselves and tap into that fully.

I guess, I’m thinking, how do we even know where to start in terms of the zone that we’re going to be operating in if we’re not even at the point of Johnny Cash, “All right, I’m doing music”? I think many of us in a career, it’s like, “Well, I don’t know, I like helping people, I like figuring stuff out, I like communicating, and, I don’t know, I could do any number of jobs.” Where do we start?

Ozan Varol
Yeah, great question. I talk about a number of strategies in the book. I’ll share one of them here. One is to ask yourself, to look back on your life, and figure out what your useful idiosyncrasies are. And you might actually ask your partner or best friend about them, like, “What is it that makes me different from other people?” your superpower, the thing that you can do better than the average person, and see how you’ve used that power in the past. And I really encourage you to dig deep when you do this exercise.

So, for example, if you tell yourself, “Well, I’m really good at organizing events,” dig deeper into that. So, just because you’re a great event organizer doesn’t mean you can only be an event organizer. That means you’re great a communicating with people, that means you’re really good at rallying others, that means you’re really good at putting people together in a space and creating an informative entertaining event.

And so, the goal is to tease down those Lego blocks of your talents, interests, preferences, useful idiosyncrasies. And once you’ve got those Lego blocks figured out, then you can build other things with it, build other things with that you haven’t built in the past. And it might be staying within your current line of work, and switching from singing gospel to actually singing “Folsom Prison Blues.” It might also mean switching to an entirely different field.

But the first step is trying to figure out what your useful idiosyncrasies are. And this is really hard to do. It’s really hard to do in part because, at some point in your life, you were probably shamed for having those idiosyncrasies because they made you weird or different from other people. And so, we learn to conceal them, we learn to suppress our superpowers because they make us different from other people. But if you can figure out what those superpowers are and lean into what made you weird or different in the past in a useful way, that, in and of itself, can make you extraordinary.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. That phrase useful idiosyncrasies is way more useful in terms of surfacing the goods as oppose to “What’s your superpower?” which is a cool powerful useful question. I recommend interviewers ask it. Let’s understand that, hopefully, the interviewee has some self-knowledge to be able to disclose that. But if you’re kind of working towards that, useful idiosyncrasy is handy.

It’s funny, I’m thinking that when I was in high school, in the summer, I remember there were a few times, and I was ridiculed for this, I was hanging out with my friends for, yeah, a good long stretch of time, maybe six hours, and I thought, “You know what, I’d like to go home and read business books now,” and I’m, like, 15 and they didn’t care for that. They thought that was a little bit alienating, like, “You prefer to read business books than hang out with me.” I was like, “Well, we’ve been hanging out for a long time, and kind of…”

And so, this is a really fun job, getting to talk to people who write a lot of those such books. And so, yeah, that’s interesting, is that it’s useful and it did bring about modest ridicule from my friends there. Could you just lay it on us a bunch more examples of useful idiosyncrasies?

Ozan Varol
Sure. In my life, one of the useful idiosyncrasies has been storytelling. And if I look back, and this is also really useful, too, looking back at your middle school years, your high school years, before you became an adult, like you enjoyed reading business books, for example. I loved writing stories. Actually, from the first time I learned to read and write, I would type stories on my grandfather’s old typewriter.

And looking back on my life, that core ingredient, that useful idiosyncrasy, that basic Lego block has been there all along. So, I went into, for example, the practice of law. I was in rocket science first and then switched trajectories and went to law school, and became a practicing attorney. And as I was a practicing attorney, you’re writing briefs for the court, you’re in oral argument, which is essentially storytelling. You’re telling stories on behalf of your client.

And then I was in academia, and I was a law professor and taught these big classes filled with first year students who are taking these required classes, and many of them did not want to be in the classroom and so I had to come up with ways of telling engaging stories to that audience to get them excited and energized to be in the classroom.

And so, that core ingredient has been there all along, that ability to tell stories, but the recipe that I’ve made with it has changed over time. And so, now I use storytelling in my writing, in the books that I write, in terms of telling stories that are going to make principles stick in a way that, like, simply dry-listing something is not going to.

And so, that’s another example of a useful idiosyncrasy. And we all have them, and the beauty is they’re all different for each of us. So, people listening to this may not have storytelling as one of their Lego blocks, they may not have the desire to read business books for fun as one of their useful idiosyncrasies. But if you look back on your life and go back to the very beginning, before the world told you what you should be doing, what you were actually excited to do, you’ll begin to notice these themes and trends and core ingredients of useful idiosyncrasies that have carried over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. As I’m thinking about my kids now, my son Johnny, who just loves to make some kind of a drawing, and there might be stickers or whatever, and then put it in an envelope and seal it, and then write “Mama, Dada,” whatever on it. So, he’s five and he can write a few words, and I just think it’s so funny because this happens almost every day.

And it’s funny because you think, “Oh, what a precious gift from my child.” And it was like, “Well, yeah, but I’ve got dozens and dozens of them, and I don’t know what I’m supposed…” It feels wrong to throw them away. It’s like, “Should I curate?” But it’s funny, he just keeps bringing it, and he loves giving these creative gifts to us. And I just wonder if that is a fad, a passing fancy, or if that’s going to be a core thing and where that will land.

Ozan Varol
Sure. It’s amazing that he does that, though.

Pete Mockaitis
It is.

Ozan Varol
If you think about it, it’s not like he learned that from anywhere. It’s just naturally coming to him. It’s so cool that he’s sharing that gift with you, and that you’re leaning in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It does. It feels good, like, “Oh, this is for me. Thank you.” Okay. So, we’ve got storytelling, we’ve got business books. I’d love to hear a few more just for people to see themselves in that.

Ozan Varol
Sure. For me, another one was programming, like, I fell in love with computers at a very young age, and I was definitely shamed for it. I was the president of my high school computer club, and that did not bode well for my dating life but it gave me crucial skills that I could use later on in life. And so, even now as a writer, I lean into technology in a way that most writers don’t.

And I think those rare combinations can also be really helpful. So, there’s really nothing novel about a singer who can dance, but a lawyer who can also do computer programming, or a doctor who knows something about the law, for example. Those rare combinations of ingredients, useful idiosyncrasies, can be really powerful because you can use those tools from very different fields to create things in your field that no one else can because they don’t have the depth of knowledge that you do.

So, they honestly can be anything. It could be effectively communicating with other people. It could be simplifying really complex things. So, some people are amazing at taking a really complicated thing and then explaining it to somebody who’s a complete beginner in language that they can understand. Really, really rare but extremely powerful skill.

Empathy is another one. People who can read the energy in the room can see what other people are feeling. Say, you’re marketer or a salesperson, and you can actually see the tension. You can see that the pitch you just gave to the potential client isn’t really resonating, it’s not really sitting well. The ability to recognize that in the moment, and then tailor your pitch accordingly, to lean in and get curious about the client’s perspective, is also a superpower that a lot of marketers don’t have.

And so, think about those skills that have been there from a very young age, and see what they might be. And then you can take those and build new things as you go along.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. It’s funny, I’m also thinking now about, I guess, another idiosyncrasy is that I just do an excessive amount of product research in terms of buying something just because I really like optimizing, in general, or finding the best toenail clipper. It’s like, “I’m only going to get one, so why don’t I just get the best one that there is, and you feel that decadent luxury because I’m not going to have the fanciest house or car in the world, but I could get the most high-performing nail clippers.”

And that’s also paid off in terms of guest selection. So, Ozan, not to toot your horn, but we do a boatload of careful prep, and research, and thought in choosing each guest, and it’s a blessing having tons of incoming pitches to be able to be so choosy. And it’s paid off in terms of show growth, and quality, and engaged listeners, and all that kind of thing.

Ozan Varol
I love that. And the example you just gave is a perfect one because you’re applying it in very different contexts. You’re applying it to selecting products that are going to be useful for you, but you’re also applying it to selecting podcast guests. And so, that useful idiosyncrasy of curation can be applied in very different contexts, so it’s not just limited to one. It can be applied to so many different areas.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Ozan, I’ve got just a few random things I want to know about because your table of contents and pitching things really intrigue me, but I want to give you the floor first. Is there anything that’s just so critical we must know about awakening genius that you want to make sure to get out there?

Ozan Varol
I think we already talked about the crux of the book, but I just want to add one thing. I think it goes back to the comment or the discussion we just had about useful idiosyncrasies, which is that there’s this desire to try to appease everybody, to appeal to everyone. And when people do that, you end up appealing to nobody. You actually reduce the force of your strength because you become ordinary, you become like every other gospel singer in the world.

And we notice things because of contrast, so something stands out because it’s different from what surrounds it. If there is no contrast, no anomaly, no fingerprints, no idiosyncrasy, you become invisible, you become the background. And the only way to step into your genius is to actually embrace, not erase, your idiosyncrasies, your useful idiosyncrasies.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that. Now, that’s making me think of Bo Burnham, if you know the comedian-musician.

Ozan Varol
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, I’m a little late to the game but I just saw his special “Inside,” which I just thought was so brilliant. And as compared to most comedy specials, we have a form we’re expecting: a stage, an audience, some jokes, a microphone. But then he does this thing where it’s all inside with different creative tidbits. And it has stuck with me like no comedy special ever has.

I’m thinking about it again and again, and it does feel all the more genius, and I’ve recommended it many times, and I guess, hey, and on the show. That contrast is powerful. And I’m sure it’s not for everybody, “This is really kind of weird,” and tune out but those it’s connecting with just go gaga for it, and share it, and grow it, and all kinds of good things happen.

Ozan Varol
Yeah, that’s exactly right. Because then you’re setting up this light beam and you’re attracting people to that light beam who really want what you’re offering. And I think a lot of people don’t do that. We’d rather fail singing the same gospel song that everybody else is singing than risk failing individually. Another talented person, an extraordinary person that comes to mind who did just that is Bruce Springsteen.

I recently saw him in concert, and I was blown away. Like, it was my first Bruce Springsteen concert, and here’s this 73-year-old guy who’s like jumping and dancing and sliding across stage, and pulling off all of these moves that would put people in their 30s to shame. And as I was watching him on stage, I was reflecting on how he’s had this sort of longevity that he had. He’s been doing this since 1965.

And it’s not his voice. So, his voice is not amazing, and he readily admits that. And he can play the guitar but, as he writes in his book, Born to Run, which is excellent, by the way, he says, “Look, the world is filled with great guitar players, and many of them my match or better.” But the thing he did, instead of trying to out-sing or outplay other musicians, he leaned on the one useful idiosyncrasy that made him different from everybody else, which was his ability to write song lyrics.

So, he became a sensation for writing lyrics that capture the blue-collar spirit, and tell the gap between the American dream and the American reality. And this man, who was initially dismissed by agents and bandmates and critics, just about everyone, eventually became rock and roll sensation because he leaned into the one quality, the one useful idiosyncrasy that actually made him different from other people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Thank you. All right. You’ve got a few teaser bullets I just got to know about. You say our most scarce resource is not time or money. What is it? And how does it matter for awakening your genius?

Ozan Varol
It is your attention because attention doesn’t scale. You can pay attention to only one thing at a time, and your reality on a moment-to-moment basis is defined by what you pay attention to. So, if you pay attention to junk, your life becomes junk. If you’re paying attention to useful sources of information, then your life becomes more colorful.

And so, I think, as they say in the movies, with the gun, like, “Be careful where you point that thing,” be careful where you point your attention because it’s going to fundamentally shape your reality. And there was a time in my life where, four or five years ago, I would wake up and the first thing I did in the morning was to grab my phone, immediately check email, immediately check the news, immediately check Instagram, and it was the digital equivalent of gorging on a bucket of M&Ms for breakfast every morning.

I would immediately pollute my mind, and then my mind and my output, by the way, would turn to junk because that’s what I was taking in, that’s what I was paying attention to. So, if you want to change your reality, start by changing what you’re paying attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Well, now I got to know, what do you read in the morning now instead?

Ozan Varol
I don’t read anything in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Ozan Varol
My mornings now are reserved for creating. So, one of the first things I do in the morning is to journal, to free-write. So, not journalism, like I’m describing what I’m going to do or what I did the day before, but what kept me up at night, or an idea that keeps bugging me, something that has just been top of mind for me, and I just sit down and I write it. I do this thought dump in the morning, and that’s how I start my morning. And then I write in the morning.

And everyone is different, but for me, the morning is my most creative time. And so, I now reserve that morning for creation as opposed to consumption.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. Now, how does detecting BS help us awaken our genius, and how do we do it?

Ozan Varol
Awakening your genius isn’t just about that inner journey of finding the wisdom within. It’s also about the outer journey, which is getting information from outside sources but, crucially, figuring out which sources are useful and which ones are not, filtering out low quality or sources of information that might mislead you. And I have an entire section of the book dedicated to providing readers with a toolkit for doing just that.

But one of the simple ways to do this, which most people don’t do, is to actually read the article. It’s become so prevalent to just read the headline and then jump to a conclusion based on the headline, hit the retweet button based on the headline. Just reading the original article is something that so few people do.

But if you just take a few minutes and read the actual source of the thing where that headline came from, and if you want to go down the rabbit hole, then actually go back to the primary source, which, again, most people don’t do. But that one thing is going to set you apart from other people, and you’re going to find things, little nuggets of information that people miss because they are just so focused on the headline.

And I’ll mention one more thing. There are ten strategies in the book on this. Pausing and asking yourself, before you accept what you read, a simple question, which is just, “Is this right? Is this right? How can I poke holes in a curious way?” So, skeptical curiosity, not just being skeptical of what you’re reading but approaching it with curiosity is such an important skill that most people don’t have.

And one of the examples I give in the book is from this Mars mission that I worked on where it was reported by a journalist in a tweet that one of the two rovers that I worked on, its final transmission to Earth was “My battery is low and it’s getting dark.” And it got retweeted like millions of times, a bunch of media sources picked it up, and the story is false.

Before the rover died, it sent back to Earth a bunch of routine code that included, among other things, its power levels and the outside light reading. And then a journalist, who didn’t let facts get in the way of a good story, then took a short section of that random code, paraphrased it into English, and then tweet it to the world that these were the rover’s final words, and then millions of people hit the retweet button, and a bunch of media outlets published stories all without pausing and asking, “How does a remote-controlled space robot spit out fully formed English sentences designed to tug at people’s heartstrings?”

It’s so useful to ask, step back, and ask, “Wait a minute. Is this right? How does a reporter know what the rover said?” And then that would lead to additional questions, like, “Well, how does a Martian rover communicate with Earth in the first place? Does it use fully formed English sentences? Like, how do we know what the rover is doing at any moment?” Those questions are guided by a skepticism of the reporter’s claims but, more importantly, by curiosity about the underlying truth. And questions like that will lead you to places that few others dare go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your strategy for asking better questions?

Ozan Varol
One of the ways you can do this is to ask what I call a soliciting question, and it solicits a more insightful answer. I’ll give you an example from my life when I was a law professor. I would pause during class from time to time, and ask, “Does anyone have any questions?” Nine times out of ten, no one will raise their hands, and I’d move on, confident that I’d done an amazing job of explaining the material.

Well, I was wrong, there were plenty of students who were not getting it. The exam answers made that clear. So, I decided to run an experiment. Instead of saying, “Does anyone have any questions?” I began to say something like, “The material we just covered was really confusing. I expect many of you to have questions. Now is a great time to ask them.”

The number of hands that went up increased dramatically. And I realized in hindsight that “Does anyone have any questions?” was actually a stupid question. I’d forgotten how hard it was for a student to raise their hand around, like, hundred of their friends and admit that they didn’t get something or they didn’t understand something.

The way that I reframed that question normalized confusion. It made it easier for students to raise their hands and admit that they didn’t get it, they didn’t understand it, because I made it clear that this material was really difficult. And I think we ask stupid questions all the time outside the classroom as well.

So, if you’re a manager and you ask a team member, say, during a quarterly review, “Are you facing any challenges?” most people will say no. They will say no because they might fear that admitting that they’re facing a challenge is going to be seen as a weakness by their boss. But as a manager, if you say something like, “We just finished a really tough quarter. Everyone is facing significant challenges. I’d love to hear about yours.”

Now you’re much more likely to get a more honest, insightful response because, now, you’ve normalized challenges. Now, you’re saying, “Look, everybody in the company, everybody on the team is facing challenges. I’m just curious about the specific challenges that you’re facing.” And so, phrased that way, it becomes easier to create psychological safety and for people to open and give you a far more insightful answer than the one that you, otherwise, would’ve gotten.

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

Ozan Varol
I love this quote from Rumi, “As you walk on the way, the way appears.” The implication being that the way is not going to appear until you actually start to walk. I think most people ignore the fundamental tenet of that quote and they want perfect information about the precise destination and all the twists and turns that are going to get them there, but life doesn’t work that way.

Life has a way of lighting the path ahead only a few steps at a time. And as you take each step, you go from not knowing to knowing, from darkness to light. And the only way to know what comes next is to start walking before you think you’re ready.

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

Ozan Varol
There was a study I came across where they put students in a room, they took all of their devices away, and they were given the option of either doing nothing or administering themselves an electric shock. And I don’t remember the precise figures but a shockingly high percentage of people chose to shock themselves, and it was painful, rather than just sit there for 15 minutes just by themselves and their thoughts.

I like this research study because we’ve lost this ability to just sit and be with our thoughts without reaching for the nearest available distraction, whether it’s a shock from an electric device or a shock from your smartphone. And there’s so much value in putting yourself on airplane mode, and just sitting there with you and your thoughts, and letting yourself daydream.

That’s where the best ideas come from, and that’s why you get your best ideas in the shower is because it’s that few moments in your day where you’re actually completely free of notifications and distractions. It’s just you and your thoughts. Imagine the types of ideas that you might be able to generate if you replicate those shower-like conditions more frequently throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Ozan Varol
Well, I have so many favorite books but the one that popped to mind is How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It just opened my eyes into this whole new world. Well, actually, it was an older world because the research was done back in the ‘60s and ‘70s by using psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. And he goes back to the research and brings it back alive. And it just opened my eyes to these alternative forms of healing that I knew nothing about.

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

Ozan Varol
I love Roam Research for taking notes. When I mentioned free-writing and journaling before, that’s something that I journal in and write in. I keep it open on my browser throughout the day, and I just jot down whatever is coming up. And I have this setup in there where I can go back and review notes that I took three months ago, six months ago, and a year ago.

And I find that review process really helpful, to go back and what I was thinking about a year ago, or six months ago, because when you spot these same themes emerge, same ideas, same thought patterns keep repeating themselves, it becomes harder to ignore them.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ozan Varol
I already mentioned it, but I’ll come back to it. Favorite habit is putting myself on airplane mode. So, just sitting with just a notepad and a pen and nothing else, or going out for a walk, no podcast, no audiobook, nothing, just me and my thoughts. And those moments in the day where it seems like nothing is happening end up being the most productive moments because that’s when my best ideas come.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite resonant nugget, something you share that people seem to latch onto, retweet often, etc.?

Ozan Varol
“Creativity isn’t produced; it’s discovered,” is a quote that gets retweeted a lot, or gets repeated a lot, because we have this industrial-age mentality that we bring to knowledge work. Like, if you’re just sort of nose-to-the-grindstone is the best way to generate ideas, and that’s not accurate. Ideas actually come in moments of slack, not moments of hard labor.

Like, if you’re trying to innovate, you’re not going to do that by trying to hit inbox zero. They happen when you step away. And taking your foot off the pedal every now and then can actually be the best way to accelerate.

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

Ozan Varol
You can get Awaken Your Genius wherever books are sold. If you go to GeniusBook.net, there’s a special bonus that you can get there for ordering the book, which says free mini course that you can watch in less than 30 minutes with 10 life changing insights from the book, similar to the ones you heard here today.

And if you like to keep in touch with me, I’m not active on social media just because my attention, I found, is better pointed in other directions. So, the best way to keep in touch with me is to join my email list. I have one email that goes out every Thursday to over 45,000 subscribers, and that you can read in less than three minutes. And you can sign up for that by heading over to my website, which is OzanVarol.com, that’s O-Z-A-N, V as in victor, A-R-O-L.com.

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

Ozan Varol
I think just recapping what we covered so far, embrace your useful idiosyncrasies, spend time on airplane mode, and be careful where you point your attention.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ozan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and moments of genius.

Ozan Varol
Thanks so much, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

Apr 10

855: Turning Anxiety into Your Source of Strength with Morra Aarons-Mele

By Podcasts No Comments

 

Morra Aarons-Mele says: "Don’t run away from [anxiety]. Don’t even try to control it. Just try to understand and learn from it."

Morra Aarons-Mele shares powerful tactics for channeling anxiety into a productive force.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why it’s powerful to admit you’re anxious
  2. The common thought traps that hold achievers back
  3. Three powerful solutions to stop negative self-talk

About Morra

Morra Aarons-Mele is the host of The Anxious Achiever, a top-10 management podcast that helps people rethink the relationship between their mental health and their leadership. Morra founded Women Online and The Mission List, an award-winning digital-consulting firm and influencer marketing company dedicated to social change, in 2010, and sold her business in 2021. She helped Hillary Clinton log on for her first internet chat and has launched digital campaigns for President Obama, Malala Yousafzai, the United Nations, the CDC, and many other leading figures and organizations. She lives outside Boston with her family and menagerie.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Pete, it’s awesome to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so delighted to be chatting with you. And you mentioned you had some laryngitis, but you are summoning the power to chat with us, so I’m really touched. Thank you.

Morra Aarons-Mele
The podcast gods are speaking to me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, hey, it has been 600-ish episodes since our last conversation. So, I’d love to hear if there have been any particularly extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made about life, business, mental health, anxiety, or any or all of the above since we last chatted?

Morra Aarons-Mele
The reason why I’m talking to you today and why I wrote my new book, The Anxious Achiever is because last time I talked to you, I had a book called Hiding in the Bathroom, how to get out there when you’d rather stay home, and it was a guide for introverts or people with social anxiety who have big ambitions and big career dreams on really how to build that professional network, really ignore the phrases we all grow up with, like, “Never eat lunch alone,” and, “Crush it,” and all the things that people like me who are introverted and anxious don’t like to do, and really tap into our true selves and how we can sell and execute and start a business as well as any extroverted person out there.

And what I found, as I was talking about that book, I would talk about my own anxiety, I would talk about my decades-long struggle to manage not just my anxiety but also clinical depression, and people would instantly tune in. It was like a valve had opened. And this was before the pandemic even, but people wanted to talk about it.

They wanted a place to feel seen and heard, and talk about how their anxiety impacted their career, their leadership, their success, their dreams, their ambitions. And I pitched a podcast to the Harvard Business Review, I called it Anxious Ambition, and it really meant to get at that interplay, the tension, between those of us who feel almost powered by anxiety. Anxiety is our oxygen, as my friend, Jose, says.

And we only know how to drive ourselves through anxiety. We credit our anxiety with much of our success but it also takes such a toll on our mental health. We think, “I’m only going to get promoted if I work night and day, or if this is perfect, or if I just assume the worst is going to happen, and maybe the best will happen.” And we forget that anxiety becomes a habit and, along the way, we’re doing a lot of things that don’t work for us.

And I launched the show with Harvard Business Review in 2019, and it’s just been an incredible experience to touch base with so many people, including some famous people, who are anxious achievers, or who manage really serious mental health challenges, like bipolar, like obsessive compulsive disorder, or who are neurodivergent and have to work differently, and hear about their journeys and how they manage.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Thank you for sharing that backdrop with us. And so, one takeaway right there, it seems, that by opening up, you didn’t have people shun you, or say, “Oh, I guess Morra can’t handle this opportunity because she’s broken,” but, no, just the opposite. Folks have opened up, and said, “Yes, I, too, am working through some things,” and they feel a sense of connection and are drawn to you and tune into you, and more doors have, in fact, opened up by you being vulnerable and sharing what’s going on there.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I have never, in my hundreds of interviews, met someone who said bad things happened when they opened up. Never.

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I interviewed a senior executive at Google, a VP at Google, who ran a huge piece of the tech organization, and he was an early, early voice on workplace mental health, and he said, “I actually think it helped me in my career.” He became sort of a leadership guru, and taught classes on leadership for all of Google. Like, he became a beacon in the organization.

I’ve heard other leaders credit their sort of accepting and managing and living through their mental health challenges as making them not just more successful but just more compassionate, more empathetic, more self-aware, all these qualities that we know people want from their leaders.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful stuff, yes. All right. Well, Morra, that’s encouraging, exciting stuff to hear about that. And within your book, you had a fantastic endorsement by Andy Dunn, a Bonobos cofounder, who said, “Astonishing. Not just for anxious achievers. This book is for any human being who wants to transform their mental health.” I was like, “Ooh, that sounds like me and lots of us.”

Morra Aarons-Mele
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you share with us, maybe, a really cool story of someone who had some fears, some anxieties, or another mental health challenge, and then they found some transformation to that as well as their career?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Absolutely. I just interviewed a guy who, he’s not in the book, unfortunately, but I’m going to tell you his because it’s powerful. His name is Jimmy Horowitz, and to say he’s one of the most powerful man in Hollywood is not an overstatement. He is Vice Chairman for Business Affairs at NBC Universal, so it has about $150 billion market cap, very large company.

And not only that, Jimmy is really the business guy behind a lot of the movies we watch and the shows we watch, and the news we watch. He’s a negotiator. He makes deals. He makes things happen. And I talked to Jimmy about his own transformation as a very, very senior leader, acknowledging that he was depressed. And one of the things that he talked about, because he kept it secret for a long time, like a lot of people do when they’re going through mental health stuff. A lot of us keep secrets of many things at work. Sometimes it’s appropriate to keep that secret. We can talk about that later.

And Jimmy said that when he came clean, when he went public about his depression, he found that he conducted his business with a new more compassionate lens that created better outcomes. He’s a negotiator, like his job is to sit down with the Ari Emanuels of this world, like tough, tough Hollywood people and get deals done. But what he learned through his own really tough journey with clinical depression tuned him in to what his counterparties needed across the table, the outcome that was good for both of them. And that was something he had always tried to do but it was almost like his ears were reopened.

And with this staff, too. He said, “Before, I grew up in a culture where you never left before your boss left.” And doing a lot of work on his own mental health, and also being the executive sponsor of a broader mental health program at NBC Universal, showed him that’s not productive, that’s unhealthy. It’s not good for anybody, and there’s sort of a cascade of change.

And I just love that story because I think that we can all become more resilient, more powerful, when we go through something hard and learn from it, but it has such a powerful upstream and downstream effect on the people we work with, because when we’re anxious, depressed, struggling, we often act out on those around us unconsciously. We don’t even know we do it. And so, when you’re more aware, when you get a handle on this stuff, everyone benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s powerful. Well, so then it sounds like maybe we’ve covered this, but how would you articulate the big idea or main thesis of The Anxious Achiever: Turn Your Biggest Fears into Your Leadership Superpower?

Morra Aarons-Mele
The big idea is that anxiety is a normal human emotion, we all experience it from time to time. It’s part of leadership. In many ways, I joke leaders are paid to be anxious. Leaders are paid to look towards the future and plan for worst-case scenarios and sort of be vigilant. And that if you understand what your anxiety is trying to tell you, don’t run away from it. Don’t even try to control it. Just try to understand and learn from it. You can emerge more resilient, stronger, better at communicating, more self-aware, and also learn to channel your anxiety for when you really need it.

I think many of the people I have interviewed, and myself included, I’m not talking about hugely clinical anxiety where you can’t get out of bed and life is a day-to-day extreme challenge. I’ve been there. I have been there. I have been that person who, literally, cannot leave her bed because she’s so anxious. That’s not the kind of anxiety I’m talking about in the book. I’m talking about the anxiety in the middle of the spectrum that so many of us are experiencing right now because life is really uncertain and things feel scary, and we don’t feel like we have any control. That’s present for us.

When you really take the time to understand how it shows up for you, why, what’s triggering you at work, and how you react, you go through that work and it’s hard work and it takes practice. You then can understand when anxiety is showing up and you should go with it. Like, before a big event, before a speech, before a talk, you want to feel anxious, we need some anxiety, and when to basically tell your anxiety to buzz off because it’s not a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds super powerful. And I’m intrigued, the ‘buzz off.’ Sometimes I tell my emotions to do that and they don’t respond. How does this work, Morra?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I know, emotions are tricky. As told by a wonderful psychologist, Christine Runyan, in my book, anxiety is connected to our lizard brain. It is an ancient, ancient emotion because it helped keep us alive. Anxiety is basically a threat appraisal, a sense of something dangerous, and back in the cave days, that really could keep us alive because if we had a sense that something was rustling in the bushes, and we needed to run, that was good.

Nowadays, our bodies still get that sense that something dangerous is rustling in the bushes but that could be our 4:00 p.m. with Bill that we’re really dreading. We don’t have the ability at the base level to judge what’s a real threat and what’s not. And so, that’s why anxiety is really tricky because sometimes we feel it and we don’t even know why.

But it is through the process of noticing, naming your anxiety, and really tuning into it that you get to understand, “Wow, I’m really anxious right now. Why? Why did that name in that email inbox make me feel nauseous?” Did you ever have that happen? Like, you see someone’s name and you’re just like, “Oh, my God, no.” You feel nauseous and anxious, and you have to shut your laptop.

“Why do I get a migraine and feel very, very, very anxious before my Thursday p.m. staff meetings? What’s that trying to tell me? Why is this negotiation so hard? Why am I feeling like an impostor, like I don’t deserve it? Why do I instantly assume that this one piece of bad news means I’m going to get fired?”

Really interrogating why anxiety shows up for you, and it shows up for us all in different ways, and we all have different triggers of anxiety, begins the process of sort of unlocking it and gaining the ability to eventually be able to tell it, “You know what, it’s just a feeling. You can go away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Morra, I’d love to get your take on that, that curiosity, that interrogation, that why. I think sometimes I might be too curious for my own good in this department, and as I dig into some of my emotions, I just amplify it more. I’m thinking about, often if I’m, like, really irritated by something, it’s like, “Oh, why am I so angry about that? Well, because it’s bull crap for all of these reasons.” And then I kind of get more worked up.

And then I think it’s also perhaps a tendency to try to solve rather than feel the feelings, as former consultant, guilty as charged, trying to do that.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Where’s your PowerPoint?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, get some spreadsheets and segment that bad boy. So, yeah, I’d love your take on that. For those of us who are wired in this fashion, how do we navigate this curiosity most effectively?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh, my God. I found myself, just today, I really had sort of minor anxiety panic attack at about 11:00 and I couldn’t even figure out why. I just, all of a sudden, started shaking, and it was hard to breathe, and I couldn’t focus, and my hands were jittery. It was a lot of big emotion, and I was like, “What’s happening? You were just working on a spreadsheet.”

And I realized that I had gotten triggered by a bunch of the names on the spreadsheet who made me feel like I was an impostor and they were going to shame me if I reached out to them, that I was going to found out. That’s the thing, is that emotions happen mostly for a reason, and our challenge is that we want to instantly tamp down the uncomfortable ones, so you would instantly try to solve something because it’s uncomfortable for you.

And the work is not instantly doing whatever coping mechanism you want to do, whether it’s solving something, whether it’s getting at that Excel spreadsheet. My husband does that. He models everything out when he’s really uncomfortable. And to sit with it. If you’ve ever done therapy or meditation, what do they say? They say you have to ride the wave. The goal is not for the waves of life and its difficulty to stop coming. They’re going to keep coming. You’ve got learn how to surf the waves.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you mentioned the work, and understanding, and noticing, and naming, and tuning in. That’s cool. You also highlight a number of anxiety profiles in your book. Can you share some of those so that we can maybe get a jumpstart on some of this noticing?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, it’s really, really important to start noticing your thoughts when you get anxious. And we all have a tendency to get stuck in what are called thought traps. These are sometimes called cognitive distortions or automatic negative thoughts, and different people have their different sort of go-to thought traps. You may be someone who, when you feel anxious, you are a catastrophizer, you instantly assume the worst.

And what do you do when you assume the worst? You dive into action and drive your team crazy because you’re micromanaging them because you’re anxious about the worst thing happening. Or, do you avoid? You convince the worst is going come so you stick your head in the sand. Are you someone who gets perfectionistic when you’re anxious? Perfectionism and anxiety go together like peanut butter and jelly. We think perfectionism often is something that should be admired. It’s what the best people do.

And one of the things that I have learned in my study and research along the way is perfectionism is really often about anxiety. It’s that sense of, “If I’m not perfect, if I’m not the best, I’m not worth it. I’m a failure, and so I better become the best,” however that means to you, whether it’s overworking, or never stopping, or, again, micromanaging your team and driving them crazy. You may be someone who has impostor feelings, and it’s really common. I should say all of these are very, very common signs of anxiety and they become habits over time.

So, you may be someone who, when you’re anxious, you’re showing up at a new job for the first day, you feel like a fraud, you feel like you don’t belong. You may be someone who has a lot of social anxiety and, therefore, when you come into an arena where you feel uncomfortable or different, your mind goes to a place of, again, “I don’t belong. I’m not worth it. These people think I’m dumb,” whatever your greatest hits of negative thoughts and thought traps are.

And so, anxiety shows up for us in many, many different ways. It’s informed by our childhoods. It’s informed by the family systems we grew up in. One of the things that I talk about in the book is I think a really powerful thing for many of us anxious achievers, it’s the idea that you may be an over-functioner, that you may have grown up in a family where you were expected to do a lot, or you may have grown up too quickly, or had too much asked of you at a young age, and you’re used to just outperforming.

You’re used to just trying your best and making sure bad things don’t happen, and that can show up in your life and your career as someone who always takes control, who work super hard to make sure those bad things don’t happen. And that has a huge effect, again, on your colleagues, on your leadership. And so, we really, in the book, go in and look at things that inform what’s made you anxious, and also how it’s showing up for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then can you share, when it comes to if you have some unhealthy coping mechanisms that pop up, I’m particularly interested on how one tackles negative self-talk?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I would say that negative self-talk underlies all of this stuff. And so, again, your negative self-talk probably is personal to you. Like, we all have our negative self-talk. Mine is, “I’m lazy. I’m lazy and I don’t deserve this.” And part of what you have to do is you have to practice new self-talk.

And before you can do that, you need to make sure of a couple things. The first is sometimes we’re so anxious, we can’t even hear ourselves think, like any strategy that we would have that would involve using our cognition, like telling ourselves something, “It’s just not going to work,” because we’re super anxious, we’re worked up.

And that’s when breathing is really important. And I know we’ve all heard this a million times, that if you send your breath into your belly, and you exhale, it will make you less anxious and calm you down, but it’s really true. So, if you’re at a level of, like, “I’m so anxious, I really don’t even know if I can have a conversation with myself right now,” some breathing will help, physical things can help.

And then one of the things that I found really powerful for dealing with a negative self-talk is asking the self-talk, “Are you true?” And, again, anxiety can make us a little bit unreliable, so it’s good when you want to interrogate that self-talk to have facts or more neutral statements at the ready. That’s why it’s really great to have someone you can call, and say, “This 9:00 a.m. meeting means I’m going to get fired tomorrow because I never belonged in this job, and my boss has had it out for me, and I just haven’t worked hard enough, and I know that’s what this 9:00 a.m. meeting means.”

It’s really great to have someone you can call, and they’ll say, “Well, is that really true?” “I flobbed the slide in the huge presentation, and so that means my boss is never going to promote me.” “Is that really true? You’ve worked here for three years, and you’ve never made a mistake like that before. Do you really think that one wrong number in a slide means you’re going to get fired?” Our minds go to big places.

And so, trying to get a little distance, trying to get a little evidence against what you’re thinking, trying to have what psychologists would call a more balanced thought, these are all skills that you can use to slowly, slowly start to numb that really loud self-talk.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Morra, you’ve got so many good things, and so many directions I want to go all at once, at least my favorite podcast or problem to have. When you mentioned having facts at the ready, that really resonated because, boy, I think I got it from a Tony Robbins book when I was a teenager. There’s a diagram with like a table with different legs for facts to support a belief. And I found it super useful.

I remember, in college, I had a bit of a rough patch because, in high school, I was winning, winning, winning so many things, Homecoming King, valedictorian, yadda, yadda, yadda. And then, in college, I just got a string of rejections, I was like, “What is going on?” And I remember, navigation has never been my strong suit, and I remember this so clearly, I was looking at a map, I’m getting old, I’m looking at map on paper while someone was driving, and I guess I gave some wrong answer as to when and where we should turn.

And then someone just snatched the map out of my hand, and I felt, “Ugh,” like I failed. And I guess that’s probably my thing, is that maybe it’s like perfectionist-ish in terms of like I’ve heard it called the idol of performance, like, “I want to do a great job. It doesn’t have to be perfect but it has to be excellent. And if I’m not doing an excellent job, it feels like my value is somehow diminished or I’m a loser.” And I know this is malarky, I know it’s foolishness, but sometimes it feels like it’s true, and that’s not pleasant. So, I guess that’s my mental health thing.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’m sorry, I was going to say the famous trope is feelings are not facts but feelings often feel like facts.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well said. Yeah, that’s true. Maybe it sounds much of a trope for me. It might be the first time I’ve heard it but I like that. And so, having your facts at the ready, I remember I wrote down just a list of accomplishments, like, “Okay, I know I feel like I’m screwing up right now, like I’m not doing so well, but, foundationally, it is a belief, based on real evidence, that I have achieved many things, and I am capable and competent.”

And so, I wrote it in this notebook, which I still have, and I don’t remember when I felt good enough to stop, but I think I have, like, 130 plus examples of achievements and things showing, like, “Okay,” and I referenced it numerous times, like, “Oh, man, I feel like a loser. I keep screwing up everything.” It’s like, “Everything, Pete? Let’s take a look. Let’s take a look. Hmm, I see 130 plus things that went quite well. So, all right.”

It really did help reframe things in terms of, “All right, this is a bummer, that these couple things haven’t worked out but the overall trend is pretty solid here.”

Morra Aarons-Mele
Oh, my gosh, that is like an A+ in cognitive reframing. That is amazing. I encourage people to do it. I call it a brag file or a clips file. You know how journalists will keep clips that they’ve written. It is so powerful. And, again, when you know where your sort of soft underbelly is and what’s going to set you off, you can have something at the ready that’s really going to help.

So, one of my real anxiety triggers is money, and when I ran a business for 11 years, I would get bad money news sometimes. It was either bad macroeconomic news, like banks failing, or it was, “We’re not going to make our numbers,” whatever. And I would instantly go from zero to a hundred in terms of catastrophe.

And I learned that I had to have my business partner, who’s great with numbers and not emotional around them, back me up and give me the more balanced and likely scenario. I needed to see those numbers on the page so I could stop thinking we were going bankrupt tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. I also love what you had to say about thought patterns and cognitive distortions. I’m thinking of Dr. David Burns, Feeling Good, Feeling Great.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Greatest.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic books. I recommend them. I’ve tried to get the good doctor on the show. I have to prompt this.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Me, too. I have, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Have you got him?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I have not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, he’s a little elusive but anyone knows the guy, anyone who knows him, we’re after him. So, I think that’s one, I’ll just say look him up. He’s so good. But some of those cognitive distortions could be categorized, like catastrophizing or all-or-nothing thinking, and it’s amazing how they pop up so much. And I think, for me, one is called emotional reasoning in terms of, “Oh, because I’m angry or irritated, some bull crap must be afoot somewhere and I’m going to find it.” And now I’m looking for it so that I’m slanted and looking in that direction.

So, that is some eye-opening stuff. I’d love to hear, you said, “Is this true?” any other pro tips when your mind is acting a fool, how you kind of get closer to clarity and truth?

Morra Aarons-Mele
So, another tactic that I absolutely love, Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett at Kent State calls this the so-what chorus. And this is another sort of exercise you might get if you took cognitive behavioral therapy, “So, okay, I’m really, really, really upset because I got that negative comment in my 360, and, oh, my God, I’m just so mad at myself. Like, if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t have gotten that comment,” and that’s both emotional reasoning, it’s mental filtering. The rest of the 360 could’ve been great, and you’re fixated on that one negative comment, and you’re ruminating, you’re dwelling on it even though there’s nothing productive you can do about it now.

Something you can do, again, get distance, take the teeth out of the anxiety, is to say, “Okay, so the worst happens from this. I get that negative comment from the 360. It’s all my fault and my boss knocks me out of the running for promotion. So what? I’m not going to get promoted. So what? It’s going to be horrible. I’m going to be ashamed, everyone is going to look at me, like, ‘Why didn’t he get promoted?’ I’m going to earn less money. It’s just going to be awful. So what? I’m going to feel bad.”

And you play it out. And a lot of times, certainly in what we’re talking about now, the world is not ending. The so-what is manageable. And, again, it’s that process of building a muscle that lets you sit with discomfort, yeah, maybe you did screw up, maybe that comment on your 360 really hurts, but it’s there. And the more distance we can get from all the uncomfortable feelings around that the better.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, we look at the so-what, or the whys, or the implications repeatedly, and I suppose the bottom of all of them will probably be an emotion. Is that fair to say, like, “Oh, and then I’ll feel a certain way. Okay, that’s where the end of this chain goes. All right”?

Morra Aarons-Mele
It could be. Or, even if you play out, “So what? I’m going to get not promoted, and then I’m going to get layered, and then they’re going to want me to leave, and I’m not going to have a job.” You sort of play it out until you realize, “Okay, these are very unlikely but even if, God forbid, I lose my job, I could probably get another one.”

And so, it’s not saying that the bad feeling isn’t correct at some level. Life is hard and we’re messy and we make mistakes all the time. We’re human. I’m not telling you to pretend like everything is fine. But I want you to give it the proper weight and consideration because, often, when we’re anxious, things get very, very intense when they don’t need to be, to your point.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Morra, I’d love it, before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things, if you have any other super favorite practices or tactics that make a world of difference in this stuff.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think that one of the things that I have learned and has been powerful for me is really, really important if you’re working from home, and if you’re on a lot of Zoom. And if you’re not working from home, and you’re out and about, or going into an office every day, you probably have your corolla but research shows that anxiety shows up in our body. Anxiety is a 360 reaction.

And, often, one of the ways to start tuning into your anxiety is to pay attention to your body and notice how it feels throughout the day, and notice how it feels before you’re standing Thursday meeting with your boss. When does your heart start beating? When do your hands start shaking? Are you clenching your muscles? So many of us clench, we clench down, we make our bellies really, really hard, and we clench our wrists, and we clench our jaws because we’re anxious and we’re stressed.

Your body is an amazing way to start tapping into this stuff, and you’ll probably feel better, too, because a lot of us take out our feelings on our bodies, and that makes it even harder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any thoughts associated with indicators that might be great to seek therapy?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I believe everyone should be in therapy.

Pete Mockaitis
Ah, yes, no indicators to see. Just do it.

Morra Aarons-Mele
I know that there are too many access issues to count, and cost issues. I know that. We are in a crisis of shortage, but if you can, therapy unlocks so much. Self-awareness is, I just saw a survey, it’s the most-prized quality in leaders because self-aware leaders are better people to work with. And therapy is just like the quickest way to unlock a lot of self-awareness I know.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
My quote is a little bit basic but it’s “The perfect is enemy of the good.” It’s something that I tell myself every single day and that I sort of hold up as an ideal as I try to manage my own perfectionism, and just take a lot of the investment and emotion out of every single thing I do because it’s just not worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, I was going to say Feeling Good, the Feeling Good handbook by Dr. David Burns. Another book I really love is the The Anxiety Toolkit by Dr. Alice Boyes. I love really, really practical approaches to managing anxiety. Again, not anxiety that is crippling and totally disabling, but anxiety that you’re noticing and that you want to try to get a handle on.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Something that I use to be awesome at my job is breathing. I have found, over the past year, when I was in a very dark place, that keeping an eye on my breathing throughout the day is one of the biggest indicators towards keeping me energized, keeping my body pain-free after sitting on all those Zooms, and really helping with my mood and my anxiety level. I really clench my belly and don’t breathe deep. I just keep it all in my chest and that sets up a world of problems for me. And so, to be awesome at my job, I have to pay attention to my breathing.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is there a favorite breath-work practice or ratio or style that you love?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I’m a 4-7-8 girl.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that for going to sleep?

Morra Aarons-Mele
No, some people use it for going to sleep, but, for me, it helps me relax because it’s a little bit longer. So, you can do four breaths in, hold it for seven, and then try to exhale slowly, ideally, through your nose, for eight beats.

Pete Mockaitis
Four seconds in, seven seconds hold, eight seconds out. All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Morra Aarons-Mele
I think that the title of my podcast and my book is something that people smile at and feel really seen by Anxious Achiever. Again, it sort of takes the teeth out of something that is hard for a lot of people to talk about. And I find that it gives people a smile and opens up doors.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
Well, I would love them to buy my book wherever they like to buy books. I’d love you to check out my podcast. There are over a hundred episodes full of amazing leaders, experts, psychologists, cutting-edge thinking, stories, all about work and mental health. And if you want to send me a message on LinkedIn, I’ll always write back.

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

Morra Aarons-Mele
My final action is to really, really practice tuning in. So much of what we do at work is from habit, it’s reflexive behaviors that we’ve been doing for years, and they’re not behaviors that are suiting us or the people that we work with. The way to become more awesome at your job is to become aware, and it starts with tuning in to what you’re feeling and when, and how your body is feeling, and how you’re reacting.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Morra, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you all the best.

Morra Aarons-Mele
Thanks so much, Pete.