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601: The Four Pillars of High Performing Teams with Mike Robbins

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Mike Robbins discusses the four features of peak performing teams.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The one thing that builds a culture of trust
  2. The subtle ways we build—and destroy—belonging
  3. How to care in order to challenge

About Mike

Mike Robbins is the author of five books, including his brand new title, WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER: Creating a Team Culture of High Performance, Trust, and Belonging, which released April 21st.  For the past 20 years, he’s been a sought-after speaker and consultant who delivers keynotes and seminars for some of the top organizations in the world. 

His clients include Google, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, Genentech, eBay, Harvard University, Gap, LinkedIn, the Oakland A’s, and many others. 

He and his work have been featured in the New York Times and the Harvard Business Review, as well as on NPR and ABC News.  He’s a regular contributor to Forbes, hosts a weekly podcast, and his books have been translated into 15 different languages. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Mike Robbins Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mike, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Mike Robbins
Pete, thanks for having me. It’s an honor.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. And, right now, you do speaking and consulting on high-performance teams, but in a previous career, you played baseball. What’s the story here?

Mike Robbins
I did. I did. Are you much of a baseball fan?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’ve enjoyed attending some games in my day, but I don’t follow much of anything sports.

Mike Robbins
Hey, it’s all good, man. Baseball is an acquired taste, so to speak. I grew up in here in the San Francisco Bay Area where I still live, and played baseball as a kid. I actually got drafted out of high school by the New York Yankees. Didn’t end up signing with the Yankees because I got a chance to play baseball in college at Stanford, and then got drafted out of Stanford by the Kansas City Royals and signed a contract.

And the way it works in baseball, you get drafted by a major league team like the Yankees or the Royals or the Cubs or any of the other teams in the major leagues, you have to go into the minor leagues, which I did. And I was working my way up, trying to get to the major leagues. Unfortunately, I was a pitcher and I went out to pitch one night, I threw one pitch, and tore ligaments in my elbow and blew my arm out when I was 23 after starting when I was seven.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man.

Mike Robbins
I know. And then three years, two surgeries, and a lot of time later, I finally was forced to retire from baseball. But, you know, learned a ton, it was definitely disappointing the way that it ended, but, ultimately, went into the dotcom world in the late ‘90s, had a couple different jobs working for some tech companies, and realized, which I didn’t know going in, that there were going to be a lot of similarities particularly from sort of a team and performance standpoint that were somewhat similar in baseball that were similar in business, and that’s actually what prompted me to start my consulting business almost 20 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. And, yeah, pitching, man, it looks violent what’s happening to the arm.

Mike Robbins
Yes, not a natural motion. Not what you’re supposed to do with your arm over and over and over again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m glad you’re feeling okay and you landed on your feet, and that’s good news. So, let’s talk about some high-performance team stuff. Just to kick it off, what would you say is maybe one of the most surprising, counterintuitive, fascinating discoveries you’ve made about high-performance teams?

Mike Robbins
Well, I think one of the things I realized early on, and again this goes back to my sports days, is it’s not always the most talented teams that are the most successful. Obviously, you need some talent, right? But anybody listening to us, whether you manage a team, or you work within a team, or have been on any team in your life, you may notice it’s not always when you have a team of rock stars that that ultimately makes the team the best.

I often ask when I’m speaking to groups and teams and leaders, Pete, I’ll say, “How many of you have ever been a part of a team where the talent of the team was good but the team didn’t perform very well?” and whether I’m speaking like I was six or eight months ago in front of an actual live group of people or we’re on Zoom or Skype, most people will raise their hands or nod affirmatively. And then I’ll say, “But on the flipside, have you ever been a part of a team where it wasn’t like every single person on the team, in and of themselves, was a superstar but something about the team just worked?” and, again, just about everybody can relate to that.

So, again, we all kind of know this but we think, and, again, a lot of managers and leaders that I worked with, or companies, were trying to hire the best and the brightest, which is important, but, ultimately, there’s something that happens when groups of people come together. And so, high-performing teams is about, yeah, we have to have a certain level of talent, but people need to understand their roles and it’s really about the relationships amongst the team members and the level of commitment or engagement the people have to the work that has a lot more to do than the actual talent of the individuals on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that totally resonates. And maybe could you maybe get us going here by sharing an inspiring story of a team that went from, okay, doing fine to really kicking it into high gear when they adopted some of your best practices?

Mike Robbins
Yeah. Well, a lot of examples. I think of there’s one team that I worked with a number of years ago and they, as a team, this was at Adobe, great technology company, great software company, and I’ve been doing a lot of work with Adobe, and the leader of this team actually changed, so the team members were all the same. But I’d worked with this leader, she was with another team, she took over the team. And what was interesting, so, again, none of the team members changed, and it took a little while at first, and part of what she really implemented was, “Hey, we need to communicate more authentically, be even more vulnerable with each other, be willing to fail.”

And a lot of times when a new leader starts with a team, everybody is a little bit on edge, everybody is a little bit walking on egg shells, wanting to impress the new boss. And one of the first sessions that she did with the team, and I wrote about this actually in my book Bring Your Whole Self to Work that came out a few years ago, but she did a series of sessions and had me help facilitate some of them where people really got real. She started, one of the things she said was, “I’m not sure I should’ve taken this job. Like, it’s a promotion for me but I really like the team that I was with before,” and sort of set a tone for, “We’re going not try to perform for each other, meaning impress each other, we’re going to perform with each other.”

And this team that was doing pretty well and had some pretty good talent went to a whole other level over the next year by really building a deeper sense of trust and communication. And, ultimately, what we call and what we now know as called psychological safety which basically means there’s trust at the group level, the team is safe enough for people to speak up, admit mistakes, ask for what they want, take risks, even fail not that we want to but we know we’re not going to get shamed or ridiculed or kicked out of the group for doing that.

And I’ve seen that over the years so many times with teams and with leaders, a willingness to really go there, a willingness to understand, as my most recent book is called We’re All in This Together, that we’re all in this thing together. Again, this idea of performing with each other as opposed to trying to impress each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I think it’s great distinction right there, performing with instead of performing for. And so, you’ve got sort of four pillars of a culture of high performance, and the first one is psychological safety. So, that’s come up a few times on the show, and for those who don’t know, could you give us the quick definition? And then maybe just share with some of the best and worst practices. I think there are some subtle ways we erode psychological safety. I’d love it if you could flag some for us.

Mike Robbins
Oh, for sure. Well, again, psychological safety, basically, the way I think about it, I had a chance actually to interview Amy Edmondson from Harvard Business School, she’s basically the world’s leading expert in psychological safety. And it’s group trust. Again, it means the group norms are setup in such a way that we know when we’re on a team with psychological safety, as I was saying before, we’re not going to get shamed or ridiculed or kicked out of the group for simply having a different opinion or making a mistake.

And trust is more of a one-to-one phenomenon, Pete. So, you and I can have trust with each other or not. That trust can get broken. It can get restored. Psychological safety is more, “How much, if we’re part of a team, how much trust do we feel that the team exhibits as a team, as an entity, so to speak?” And so, one of the things that’s really important in how you can build more psychological safety, if you happen to manage a team or be the leader of a team, is, like that example I mentioned, this leader from Adobe who since has left and she’s now at Intuit, but she really was able to show up in a way that she was vulnerable with her team. She was willing to share how she was really feeling, admit mistakes, admit whatever was going on, as I like to say, down below the water line, if you will, of the iceberg. That can help create more psychological safety.

Also, whether you’re in a management position or not, how we respond both as a leader and as team members when something doesn’t go well, when there’s a failure. So, that’s a moment, often I say, “Look, nobody likes to fail, teams don’t like to go through stress, but almost every team is these days especially, but how you respond to those moments can either make or break how much psychological safety there is.”

An example being somebody doesn’t deliver on a project or doesn’t perform at a certain level, how is that responded to? Is it dealt with directly but is it also dealt with in a way that is respectful of the human beings involved? Again, if we get called out, which isn’t always a bad thing, but if I know I’m going to make a mistake, let’s say, Pete, that you’re the boss, and I screw something up and you chew me out in front of the team, maybe even I deserved it to some degree, but that’s probably going to have me and everybody else go, “Uh-oh, don’t screw something up around Pete because he’s going to jump down your throat.”

On the flipside, not that we’re going to sugarcoat it, or people have to be grownups, but if I make a mistake and it gets handled in a way but you deal with it directly but respectfully, now that sends the tone to the rest of the team, “Hey, you know what, this didn’t work out the way we wanted to, but we’re really glad, Mike, that you brought that forward, you took that risk, even though you failed. Let’s do more of that.” It’s like, “Okay,” well, then that reinforces, “Hey, we can take risks and make some mistakes,” and now that sort of sets that tone amongst the team members.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that so much and, boy, I’m having a flashback, and it was in my early with my first project with Bain, I think, they thought, “Hey, this guy is an intern so he can handle a lot of hard work and challenging stuff.” And so, I was in charge of this giant Excel business and I was making some mistakes and it’s creating some embarrassment, and it was very uncomfortable, and sure learned a lot.

Mike Robbins
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
But I remember I was having a chat with Brett, we’re having a little sort of a little mid-point feedback check-in, and I knew what I was doing wrong, and I’d started to make some improvements. But I just loved the way he set the tone, he said, “Well, you know, it’s just work.”

Mike Robbins
That’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Hey, we’re safe, we’re healthy, and the project is still going. But, yeah, we got some things we got to focus in on.”

Mike Robbins
That’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
And I really appreciated it. And even when you feel like you’ve screwed up about as bad as you can, you can bring some humanity and some comfort into those situations.

Mike Robbins
It’s true. And I think that’s an important distinction. Look, one of the things that happens, and I see this a lot in Silicon Valley and with a lot of tech companies, but just companies in general that want to be progressive, we want to have a really positive working environment, is that I think sometimes we err on the side of being nice versus kind. Nice is often sugarcoating, withholding, not really addressing it. Kind is where we have a sense of kindness, a sense of empathy, a sense of compassion, maybe even some levity and some humor. But, again, if somebody makes a mistake, it’s important that we address it.

I remember actually years ago at Stanford, I remember pitching really bad, and my pitching coach said to me, “You know what? Well, there’s good news and bad news. Which do you want first?” And I said, “How about the good news?” He said, “The good news is there’s a billion people in China that don’t know that you just pitched like you know what, right?” He said, “The bad news is we got some things to work on.”

And, again, to your point, it sounds like your example from Bain, I think there’s a way in which we can address issues and challenges, and even failures. Amy Edmondson from Harvard said to me, she said, one of the things she wishes about psychological safety is that we had maybe named it something else because sometimes people hear this concept of like safe space, meaning like you can’t say anything negative. She said, “That’s not like it at all. Teams that have a lot of psychological safety really have a lot of give and take, and there’s a lot of open, honest dialogue and debate and conflict, and challenging each other. It’s just we know it’s safe enough to do that.”

When I work with a team, Pete, and people say, “Oh, well, no one ever…there’s never a conflict. We never have any issues,” I’m like, “Okay, somebody’s lying and/or it’s not safe enough to do that.” So, those are the things that we can see. Even at home, sometimes my wife and I, we have two girls who are 14 and 12, and the girls will really get into each other, say stuff to us, and I’ll say to my wife, “Look, we do need to teach them about ways to communicate respectfully, of course, but the fact that they feel safe enough to speak up to each other, to us, is actually a sign that there’s something healthy going on here, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t say anything.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, let’s talk about the second pillar then, focus on inclusion and belonging. What do you mean by this?

Mike Robbins
Yeah. Well, look, this is so important. I wrote We’re All in This Together last year and finished up writing the book in the fall, and didn’t know it was going to come out in the midst of a global pandemic on top of sort of a national and somewhat global reckoning around racial injustice in our country, specifically in America. But what I’d seen so, look, diversity has a lot to do with representation, right? And we may or may not be in a position where we’re hiring or we’re the people making the decisions on who gets hired. What we do know from all the research is that racially-diverse and gender-diverse teams perform better than teams that aren’t diverse.

But what I really focus on in this particular pillar in the book is on inclusion and belonging, which we have a lot to do with whether we’re making hiring decisions or not. And inclusion is about, really, doing anything and everything we can in our power to make sure we’re not overtly excluding people, particularly people who come from non-dominant groups. Myself being a straight white, cis-gender man, looking at, “Okay, how am I communicating? How am I operating? How am I thinking? What am I doing? What am I saying?” for anybody who’s a woman, a person of color or identifies as part of one or any minority group, it’s trying to, as best we can when we’re in positions of power or authority, do things and say things and be mindful and be open to feedback so we’re not excluding people consciously or unconsciously.

But even deeper than inclusion, as important as it is, what we’re ultimately trying to get to is a place of belonging. And what we know from Maslow’s Hierarchy, and so many other things, is that belonging is a fundamental human need. Everybody has a need to belong. And so, from a leadership position, but also from a team perspective, whatever we can do to create an environment where people feel as much as possible like they belong, the more engaged they’re going to be, the better they’re going to perform, and the more trust.

I mean, psychological safety comes first but we got to focus on inclusion and belonging because they’re so fundamental to so many aspects of success, especially in today’s world.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’d love to hear a bit about the how there. I’ve certainly been in environments where I felt very comfortable, it’s like, “Oh, yes, I belong here and it’s great.” It’s sort of like, I guess, in my experience it’s sort of like people sort of delighted in me and my quirks and what I brought to the table versus, and a lot of those are sort of non-verbal cues, and it’s sort of like, “You know, we kind of all like each other more than we like you, and we’re not overtly saying cruel things to you,” but I just got the vibe, like, “Yeah, I guess I don’t really belong here. I’ll kind of move along.”

So, can we make that explicit? What are the things, the practices, the do’s and don’ts?

Mike Robbins
Some of it starts with a sense of emotional intelligence and social intelligence and, ultimately, even cultural intelligence. Something as simple as just me even asking you the question “Are you a baseball fan?” And then you say, “Well, no, not really. I’m not into sports.” That’s actually a really important thing to know, not because it doesn’t really matter if I like baseball and you don’t, but sometimes we make a bunch of assumptions, “Oh, you’re from Chicago. You must be a Cubs fan, and blah, blah, blah,” and, all of sudden, you’re like, “What the hell is this guy talking about?” And, inadvertently, I’m trying to connect with you, but what I’m actually doing is creating more distance and separation if I don’t know that as an example, right?

And, again, there are a lot of things that we do, and this happens. Look, I travel. Well, I used to. I don’t as much these days. None of us are traveling. But I travel around the world, and I go places, and I think of myself as a pretty open minded culturally-sensitive person, but the moment I step outside of not only the United States but the Bay Area where I live, I realize, “Oh, my goodness, my worldview is so influenced by where I live, where I grew up.” That’s not a bad thing. It’s just something to be aware of, to be mindful of.

Oftentimes, I’ll be sitting in a room and I’ll make some comment about just the gender dynamics, and some of the men in the room, not because they’re sexist necessarily, just they’ll look around and go, “Oh, is it mostly men in this room?” Like, they’re not paying attention. Whereas, every single woman at that table or in that room knows exactly that there’s, “Oh, there’s four women in this room.” Do you know what I mean? So, things like that.

Again, a lot of times with some of these issues, some of us either aren’t paying attention to them because they don’t relate to us personally, or we may be are paying attention to them but we don’t know exactly what to say, or how to say it, or how to address it, so it actually leads into pillar number three, without jumping too far ahead of sweaty palm conversations, which is so fundamental that a lot of what we can do, right now especially, is ask questions and be curious about things even if we might be a little uncomfortable with respect to, “Are there things that are happening that are creating less inclusion, less belonging? And if so, let’s talk about that.”

And the challenge is that we often get defensive because immediately we feel like we’re being accused of something, when, in reality, if you’re committed to your team having a culture of belonging, then you want to know if there’s anything that’s being done or said by you or anyone else that’s getting in the way of that. And, in some cases, people who, what I know from my research, I don’t know from experience because, again, I’m male, I’m white, I’m straight, but when I talk to people from different groups, depending on how much psychological safety there is or how safe they feel, they may not always feel safe even bringing that stuff up. So, those of us who are in positions of power or authority, if we happen to be asking questions about that.

I think about this. I learn all the time from my wife and from my daughters of things that I don’t see just along the lines of gender. One of the stories I share in the book, my wife Michelle and I were at a workshop, and the woman leading the workshop said, “I’m going to ask the men a question, then I’m going to ask the women a question.” It was a workshop that was sort of for couples and about our relationships. And she said to all the men in the room, “When was the last time you felt physically unsafe?” And she said, “Just raise your hand one time and I’m going to name off some timeframes. Is it in the last 10 years, five years, a year, six months, three months, a month, a week, the last 24 hours?” I raised my hand for sometime in the last year. I could remember a specific moment I was in DC on a trip and got lost coming back to my hotel, and was walking around in the dark, didn’t know where I was and just felt.

She asked the women the same question, Pete, and she’s gone on 10 years, five years, none of the women were raising their hands, and I’m like, “What’s going on? Why are they not raising their hands?” She gets to one week. A couple of hands go up. She says, “Within the last 24 hours,” almost every woman in the room raised their hand, that they had felt physically unsafe at some moment in the last 24 hours, including my wife sitting right next to me. And I’m like looking at her, and I’m looking around the room, most of the guys in the room were all looking around, go like, “What? When? Where? What is going on?” And the women were looking at us like, “How do you not know this?” And the woman leading the workshop said, “This is one of the fundamental differences between men and women, and we almost never talk about it.”

And, again, that’s just an example that, “Oh.” Again, in the working world, in the environment that we’re in, like, “Oh, these things play a big role.” And if we can be more mindful, be more curious, be more open, be more humble about trying to see things from different people’s perspectives, and then being interested in creating the most inclusive environments where people really feel like they belong, now people are going to feel more like they have a seat at the table, and they’re not busy sort of defending themselves or holding themselves back as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, there’s a lot of great stuff there in terms of the mindset and the awareness and the assumptions, and I think that a lot of times the non-belonginess comes about when folks make assumptions. And sometimes I hear it explicitly in terms of they say, “Well, obviously this…” It’s like, “Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.” Or words like, “Well, unless you’ve been living under a rock, you certainly know about this.” It’s like, “Well, I didn’t know so I guess…” Or there seems like there’s sort of contempt for a viewpoint.

And, politically, what I find quite intriguing is, oh, boy, there are some data that shared that large swaths of us, regardless of Republican, Democrat, are just fearful, it’s like, “Don’t even bring it up because you might get fired, and some people are willing to fire and think you should be fired.”

Mike Robbins
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Or then there’s so much contempt as a baseline assumption that, “Well, of course, all of us vote this way or that way.” And there are some surprising…if you really dig into some data, I’m a nerd for this, like it’s surprising. For example, I learned, so you’re in the Bay Area, for instance, you might…I was surprised to learn, I checked the sources every which way, but in the Bay Area, there are more Trump voters in San Francisco proper than there are LGBTQ folks in San Francisco proper, indeed.

Mike Robbins
Really? Interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you wouldn’t expect that.

Mike Robbins
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine the Trump voters aren’t speaking up. And then when there are…and so let’s go with either side politically or racially or anything. If you just have it as an assumption, “Well, of course, we all believe this and, thus, I have license to speak about the other…a set of views in a contemptuous way,” I think that shuts down the belonging in a hurry.

Mike Robbins
It does. I see this because, living where I live, which is sort of at the macro level to your point, one would assume, “Oh, it’s pretty liberal politically.” So, if you have conservative views, you’re going to be more in the minority, although, to your data, it may be more widespread than one thing. But, again, even growing up here, I know if you share conservative views out loud in this area, ooh, that’s very risky to do. On the flipside, when I travel to other parts of the country that are more conservative, and I meet people, or people have conversations with me, and say, “Oh, my views are a bit more liberal but I don’t really share that out loud because that…” you know

And so, I think if you think about this, this isn’t simply just about Left versus Right here in the US, although it’s a very relevant issue right now given that we’re in a Presidential election season, I think from a leadership standpoint, and from a team standpoint, I’m not one that believes we should never talk about anything controversial at work. I think that stifles authenticity. I think that’s unrealistic. However, I do think we need to be mindful of not making assumptions that everybody agrees and believes what we believe because that does create, “Oh, when I realize…” even if you take it out of the political realm.

I was talking to a group of people the other day on a Zoom session, and we were talking about what makes it difficult to speak up. And somebody said, “When I know that I have a minority opinion.” And they weren’t talking about politics. They were just talking about, like, “I’m the only one that thinks this about this decision. Everyone else is on board.” That actually is really hard to voice, because, “Do I really want to be the one dissenting voice in the room when everybody else seems to be on board?”

But, again, if you think about it, if that person doesn’t feel safe to bring that up, and the group isn’t interested in knowing where people stand, we still will go with the majority and we’re going to move on, but that person that makes a mental note, “Oh, if I have a dissenting opinion, I better just keep it to myself.” And that starts to become part of the culture of the team, and then we don’t even know what we don’t know, what we’re missing, and people are less engaged, and people aren’t really speaking up, or they’re not totally bought in, so all of these things go to both psychological safety and belonging.

And then that leads to pillar number three, which I alluded to, which I call embrace sweaty palm conversations, which is about, you know, I had a mentor years ago, Pete, say to me, “Mike, what stands between you and the kind of relationships you really want to have with people is usually a 10-minute sweaty palm conversation you’re too afraid to have.”

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds right.

Mike Robbins
Yeah. He said, “If you get good at those 10-minute sweaty palm conversations, you’ll build trust, you’ll resolve conflicts, you’ll talk about the elephant in the room, you’ll work stuff out, you’ll get to know people who are different than you.” He said, “But if you do, like most of us, and you avoid them because they can be awkward, or uncomfortable, or you say the wrong thing, or you unintentionally offend people, or put your foot in your mouth, or it gets weird, then you end up just sort of having mediocre lukewarm type of relationships.”

And it’s tricky. I don’t love having sweaty palm conversations. They are not my favorite. But if a team is really going to perform at the highest level, if we’re really going to build trust one-one-one, and psychological safety collectively, if we’re really going to be able to have that sense of belonging, we got to be able to have those sweaty palm conversations. If I really screw up, I need someone who can come to me with kindness but also with some directness and authenticity, and tell me, like, “Hey, man, you really screwed this up. We got to work on this,” but do it in a way that doesn’t have me walk away feeling like, “I’m an idiot, and I’m a loser, and everybody hates me,” because that’s not going to be helpful. But, at the same time, you know what I mean? And that’s predicated on the ability for us to engage.

And, look, right now, it’s harder to have sweaty palm conversations via Zoom or Skype or WebEx or the telephone, not that they’re necessarily easy when we’re in person, but we don’t have the same sort of body language and physical cues to go on, but we still need to have them so we got to continue to develop our ability both individually, but they become easier if the team has more of the norm of, “We’re going to have those conversations in the room even if it’s a Zoom room. We’re not going to have the conversation afterwards, or send little text messages or IMs to each other about what we really think. We’re going to actually talk about it directly.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, hey, talking about vulnerability, I’ll put you on the spot. What happened, a couple of examples of the sweaty palm conversations, that were quite meaningful?

Mike Robbins
Well, gosh, I think of like I’ve had a whole bunch of sweaty palm conversations with my team over the last few months. When COVID first hit, we had…look, the way I make money, Pete, the way I’ve ran my business for all these years, the vast majority of revenue we generate is through speaking engagements that either myself or someone on my team goes and delivers in person. Every single one of those, it was on our calendar, got either cancelled or rescheduled or just went away within a matter of like two weeks.

So, I had to say to everybody, “Listen, I don’t know if we’re going to have a business anymore in the next six months. I hope so.” And then it was a bunch of individual conversations with everybody on the team about their roles, how they were doing, what they needed to do, and we had to let someone go, which was a really uncomfortable conversation, as often happens in business. And none of those were fun or easy for me, and, at times, I’m a pretty emotional guy, I was a little bit scared and stressed out as would make sense.

And, again, I think it’s just important for us, when we have those conversations with people, they don’t always go well. That’s the thing. Like, I had a situation recently where I had to have a conversation with someone, we had a little conflict going, and we had the conversation, and it blew up the relationship, like didn’t really work out well. That’s not usually what happens but that’s the fear that we often have, “Hey, I’m going to address this thing,” and this person is basically going to say, “Well, have a nice life. See you later.”

But, again, in hindsight, in that situation, for me, I realized, “You know why that happened? First of all, I addressed some of it by email before so it already didn’t start off in a good way. And, second of all, there were a bunch of sweaty palm conversations that I didn’t have leading up to that one that, ultimately, had that thing blow up.” So, again, it’s a constant work in progress. I mean, this stuff is messy. But great teams talk to each other and not about each other. It’s easier for me to go tell my wife that you’re getting on my nerves, let’s say if you and I are on a team together, than it is to go talk to you, “Hey, Pete, we got to talk about this thing, man. I got this issue. Let’s try to work it out because I don’t know how that’s going to go.” That’s vulnerable to have the conversation with you. It’s easy for me to go complain to my wife about it because she’s probably going to agree with me, or at least hear my version of the story, and go, “Yeah, Pete sounds like a jerk.” You know what I mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Mike Robbins
But that’s not going to benefit you and me and our relationship is definitely not going to benefit the team if that’s the way we operate.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when it comes to these conversations, do you have some best practices associated with one’s summoning the emotional fortitude to go there, and, two, some do’s or don’ts for when you’re engaging them?

Mike Robbins
So, yeah, absolutely. The first thing is it’s important to acknowledge that they’re hard and they’re scary for all of us, so to have a little bit of compassion for ourselves and the other person or people involved. The second thing is we do need to get clear about what our intention is, “Why do I want to have this conversation?” Because if what I really want to do is come tell you why you’re wrong and I’m right, it’s probably not going go well. Even if I’m upset, even if I think something went wrong, I need to get to a place of, “My intention is really to clear the air, to connect more deeply with you to resolve a conflict,” some more positive intention.

The third thing is, whenever I have a sweaty palm conversation, and I encourage everyone to do this, is tell the truth. Lower the waterline on the iceberg, as I like to say. Meaning, express a little bit of how you’re actually feeling in the moment, which, for me, is usually some version of, “I don’t really want to have this conversation. I’ve been avoiding this, or I’m scared you’re going to get upset. This is not going to go well.” And I know it’s sort of counterintuitive to be vulnerable in the moment that maybe we have an issue, or a conflict with someone, or maybe we don’t feel super safe with them, but we’re relational creatures. So, the natural human response to vulnerability is empathy, so people tend to respond in kind if we start. Now, is it a guarantee? No. Could they jump on us and use it against us? Yeah, absolutely. But way, way, way more often than not, that’s not what happens. It ultimately gets the person into that place.

And then the final thing is it’s usually important to have some kind…not to be attached to a particular outcome necessarily but have some kind of action that can be taken from the conversation. Even if we agree to disagree, can we talk again about this, or revisit this, or how are we going to address this in the future? Or if we do come to some kind of solution, what are we going to do so it isn’t just this? As a friend of mine likes to always say, “Conversations disappear.” So, some kind of way of forwarding the action after we have that conversation, whether it’s a one-on-one conversation or as group, because there’s nothing worse than I get the courage up to finally come and talk to you about the thing we talked about the thing, “Pete, you’re open.” “Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.” And then nothing happens or nothing changes, especially like if you’re my boss and I’m like, “Well, geez, I’m glad he listened to me but he didn’t really take anything to heart, and now we still have the same issue running over and over again.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yes. Well, then let’s talk about the fourth area, the care about and challenge each other. You made a distinction earlier between kindness and niceness, which feels very applicable here.

Mike Robbins
Very much.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some of the pointers in terms of doing both?

Mike Robbins
Well, so this fourth and final pillar is about caring about and challenging each other simultaneously. And that same pitching coach I had at Stanford used to always say, his philosophy on coaching was, “You got to love them hard so you can push them hard.” And he was talking about it in the context of baseball, but I think that’s true for leaders, managers, that’s true for human beings, for teams. Meaning, “Can we really focus on constantly caring about each other?”

Now, when we’re caring for people, doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re all best friends, that we have the same values, that we like hanging out with each other. That’s a bonus at that. But you can care about people that you don’t even like, that you don’t agree with. You can care about people who bug you. Caring about is about finding value in people, wanting them to do well. And I often say, “Look, even if you’re super selfish and you don’t genuinely care, you’re just interested in your own success, it’s in your best interest to be around other successful people doing well because success is contagious. So, at the very least, can you at least care? I care about the other people on my team. Usually it’s not that hard to do, but then simultaneously, then challenging people, pushing people.

And, usually, when I talk to individuals about this or I talk to leaders or teams, most individuals, myself included, like I’m stronger on the care side than I am on the challenge side. Some people are stronger on the challenge side. I mean, it’s easier for them to push, push, push, but, like, oh, it’s harder for them to just naturally care about people. The tendency we have if we go, “Oh, I’m a pretty caring person but I have a hard time challenging people. Maybe I shouldn’t care so much.” No, no, keep caring as much as you do, just challenge yourself to push people a little harder, hold people accountable, have a healthy high standard.

And if you’re someone who really pushes people and challenges people, but you realize, “Oh, sometimes I’m a little harsh about it,” you don’t have to necessarily lower your standards unless your standard is perfection, by the way, which is people always fail. But what you want to do is then raise your ability to care about people. And some simple ways to do that are just looking for things that we find that we value and appreciate about people, and letting them know. Thinking if it were someone’s last day you are able going to get to work with them, what would you want to thank them for? What would you miss about them?

Again, looking at people as the full nature of being human. One of the things I do think is beautiful about this really challenging time in the pandemic, we are getting to know people. Even though we don’t get to see each other and spend time together, we’re Zooming into people’s lives and into people’s homes, and we’re seeing their dogs and their kids and their apartments and houses, and they’re sitting in their flipflops and shorts, and maybe they put on a nice shirt for the Zoom call or whatever. But it’s kind of equalizing in a way. Whether you’re the CEO of the company, or you’re an intern, or you’re anywhere in between, it’s like everybody’s got a life and a house and a family and friends and stuff they’re dealing with, so, in some ways, I think it’s both more challenging but in some ways also easier, if you will, to get in touch with other people’s humanity even in this weird virtual world we find ourselves in.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really like that prompt there for the caring in terms of, “If it were the last day, what would you miss about them? What do you really value about them?” And so then, it’s just that easy, huh? You just let them know, “Hey, I really appreciate that you did this. I really love the way you do that.”

Mike Robbins
Well, you know, it is and it isn’t. I mean, here’s what’s funny about it. Look, my very first book that came out like 13 years ago, it’s called Focus on the Good Stuff, it’s all about appreciation. And I’ve been studying appreciation and gratitude for years. And what I do know about appreciation of other humans, it’s super valuable. We all want it and crave it. When one human being expresses appreciation for another human being, it raises the serotonin level in both people’s brains. If we do it collectively in a group, it actually raises our serotonin level, which lowers our stress level and increases our happiness and fulfillment. But it also increases our oxytocin if we do it in a group, which physiologically binds us to each other.

However, all of that said, most of us are terrible at receiving appreciation from other human beings. We’re just awkward. We don’t know what to do. We don’t know what to say. We either give a compliment right back, or we somehow discount what they say or blow it off. As simple as this is, and I swear this is like so basic, but I’ve literally seen this enhance the culture of teams fundamentally, is that we learn how to receive appreciation from other people more graciously. We simply say thank you and shut our mouths. Because part of why we don’t express appreciation as much as we could, and should, is because it’s not psychologically safe to do. It’s almost socially awkward to do.

But when you create an environment on your team where we can express, now we’re not doing it manipulatively, we’re not doing it inauthentically just to be nice, we’re doing it genuinely, what happens is people start to really feel valued and cared about. And when you create that sense of caring, what becomes available is the challenge.

Again, I say this all the time to people, “Think of the people who you will allow to give you feedback, meaning you’ll take it. And you may not always like it or agree with it, you may not even want it, but you’ll consider it. Why do you take their feedback? Because they’re super smart? Maybe. Because they’re an expert? Maybe. Because they’re your boss or your spouse? Okay, maybe. But it’s not their role, or their intelligence, or their resume. It’s because you know they appreciate you. They value you.”

You could give me a piece of feedback, Pete, and some other person. Let’s say you and I know each other well, “And I know Pete’s got my back. He cares about me. He wants me to do well.” Even if your feedback is pretty harsh, I’ll listen to it. Some other person who I either don’t know, I’ll think, “Well, that person thinks I’m an idiot or whatever.” I’m not going to take their feedback even if I really need it because I don’t already feel valued by them. I don’t know that they care about me.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Yeah. That totally adds up. And love them hard so we can push them hard, yeah. Even if the accuracy is perfect, like, it is deeply insightful, the odds are high that it’ll kind of blow right past you if you don’t trust the other person cares about you.

Mike Robbins
It’s true because, look, relationships and, a lot of ways, teamwork, there is a scientific aspect to it. Data is important. There are lots of different assessments we can do but it’s more of an art than a science. Because, again, a computer could spit out a bunch of feedback for me that I need and all this data and I do all these assessments, I go, “Okay, but what I really need is a human being who cares about me to not only explain it but communicate it in a way that it’s really going to make a difference.”

Think about, again, your life, think about your career, I can think about mine, the pivotal moments along the way where people said things or did things, even if, again, it might’ve been a little bit tough love, and it’s like, “Wow, I really heard that.” It usually wasn’t, again, some piece of data or information as much as it was some communication that came through that touched us. Our mind, our heart, said, “Oh, I need to make a change, or I need to take a risk, or I need to stop doing something, or start doing something, or whatever,” and it’s like we look back in hindsight and we can see those pivotal moments, the challenges in the moment, “Can we be the kind of people that both give and receive that type of feedback and support in a way that’s going to benefit the people around us?”

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

Mike Robbins
Here’s one of the paradoxes of right now: We’re all in this together, yes, and people are having very different experiences. I like the metaphor, “We’re all in the same storm right now but we’re in different boats.” And so, I think both can be true. And what great teams and great leaders and just human beings who are interested in making a difference for other people have the ability to try to connect with an understanding, have empathy for different people’s experiences.

There is something oddly binding or bonding, if you will, about this experience we’re all going through, as challenging as it is, and there’s also a lot of uniqueness and diversity and how people are experiencing it. So, that’s a long way of me saying we need to have as much compassion for ourselves and each other because I know it’s corny and everyone is saying it, but we’re in unprecedented times and nobody was really prepared for this even though now we’ve been in it for five or six months or whatever. We just continue in and kind of make our way through it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Robbins
Well, I’m not just saying it because I used it as a title of one of my books, but I love Oscar Wilde’s quote “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”

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

Mike Robbins
I love the positive psychology research on positives to negatives in terms of feedback, the five to one ratio, which the Gottmans did related to married couples, but I think it makes sense in leadership and teamwork and just all human relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Mike Robbins
The one that just popped into my mind was Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff and It’s All Small Stuff by Richard Carlson that came out in the late ‘90s, and had a huge impact on my life and was one of the main things that got me on the path of doing this kind of work all those years ago.

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

Mike Robbins
A microphone for my podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, you sound great.

Mike Robbins
Well, I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Mike Robbins
Meditation.

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

Mike Robbins
I would say that when we’re going through something difficult, instead of asking ourselves, “Why is this happening to me?” change the word to, to the word for, and ask yourself, “Why is this happening for me?”

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

Mike Robbins
Best place is our website which is Mike-Robbins.com.

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

Mike Robbins
Be kind to yourself. I think we’re often our own worst enemy, and the kinder we are to ourselves, not nice, not pretending like everything is fine and perfect, but kind, genuine self-kindness, self-compassion, there’s almost no way we can overdo that. And when we’re kind to ourselves, we’re just naturally kind to others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mike, this has been a treat. Thank you. And good luck in your adventures.

Mike Robbins
Thanks, man. You too.

600: Scientific Strategies to Make Learning Stick with Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto

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Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto say: "Be an extreme learner. Treat learning like it's a mountain to climb."

Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto share practical insights on how to optimize your learning.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Three simple tactics that drastically improve how we learn
  2. Why you want the learning process to be difficult
  3. How to get into the optimal mental state for learning

About Sanjay and Luke

Sanjay Sarma is the head of Open Learning at MIT. A professor of mechanical engineering by training, he has worked in the fields of energy and transportation; computational geometry; computer assisted design; and has been a pioneer in RFID technology. He has an undergraduate degree from IIT Kanpur as well as advanced degrees from Carnegie Mellon and UC Berkeley.

Luke Yoquinto is a science writer who covers learning and education, as well as aging and demographic change in his role as a researcher at the MIT AgeLab. His work can be found in publications such as The Washington Post, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. He is a graduate of Boston University’s science journalism program.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Sanjay Sarma and Luke Yoquinto Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sanjay, Luke, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Sanjay Sarma
Thanks very much.

Luke Yoquinto
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. So, maybe we’ll just go right off the bat. What’s the big idea behind the book Grasp?

Sanjay Sarma
Well, the big idea is that we, today, in learning, need to focus more on access and more on making content cognitively friendly, and we sort of have it backwards. We make stuff cognitively unfriendly, perhaps not intentionally, and then we struggle with access and inclusion, and we end up sort of weeding people out of the system.

Luke Yoquinto
And, in fact, we could go so far as to say all the things we do to “identify talent” sometimes can step on the cognitive process instead of make learning happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, intriguing. So, can you share an example in terms of some cognitively unfriendly practices that we may be better off without?

Sanjay Sarma
Well, there’s a myriad. I mean, one very simple one is every lecture is 45 minutes, half an hour, an hour, and we bag our finger at a student who seems to lose interest. But, in fact, the way the brain works, you’re really taught to absorb material for more than 10 minutes or so, right there, right off the bat. And then we, for example, keep forgetting as something this learner, it’s their fault. Whereas, forgetting is very central to all of learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. I’m intrigued. So, 10 minutes, already so much I want to dig into. And so, what’s sort of the best practice then? After 10 minutes, is there sort of a break or refresher or a mental pallet cleanser you’d recommend? Or what’s sort of the best practice?

Sanjay Sarma
Well, after 10 minutes, there are so many things you can do, but the first thing is, take a break. But then the other thing you want to do is actually do something called a testing effect. It turns out that if you’ve learned in the last 10 minutes, and if you personalize it a little bit, and say, “Well, now, what did you learn Pete? What is that? What does that promote?” It promotes learning. And then you can start the next chunk. Well, then there’s other stuff. Maybe, Luke, you can talk about that.

Luke Yoquinto
Yeah. The testing effect is sort of a big theme that comes up in the book. There’s something called the effortful retrieval, which is a major boon to long-term remembering. One of the key researchers we talked to for the book are Robert and Elizabeth Bjork, and they have really intriguing set of practices around retrieval and metacognition. And, basically, one of the big ideas is that when you forget an item to be remembered, it’s not just being lost to you. What’s happening is all the competing misconceptions and confusing little ideas around that item are also being forgotten. And then when you re-remember that item, the true memory, without those competing, conflicting, interfering associations comes back, and there’s a much stronger memory.

And so, one thing you can do with the pre-test before your big final exam, for instance, is you can force yourself to have what’s called an effortful retrieval that sort of strips away all these competing memory associations and you get left with a strong long-lasting memory.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, then is that the value in the forgetting there, is that that provides us that opportunity?

Sanjay Sarma
There’s a lot of value in forgetting. There’s value all the way down to the neurons, and all the way up to the things that Luke was talking about. So, the neuron level, what happens is that when you’re about to forget, you get reminded of something, essentially the brain establishes more physical neuronal pathways, which makes the memory firmer. So, that’s one thing. But then if you go up to the higher levels, you get rid of interfering memories, which was what Luke was talking about. So, the integrating memories go away, and you sort of re-establish your memory in a much cleaner way. So, there’s a whole variety of spectrum of benefits to just being able to forget something, and then to re-learn it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’d love to zoom in a little bit in terms of, so you’re playing a big game on a global stage, and when talking about sort of access and all kinds of cool impact there. I think about our listeners, specifically professionals, could you lay out what’s really at stake here for them in terms of if they’re learning optimally or sub-optimally? How significant is that impact?

Sanjay Sarma
Look, 21st century and I like to joke that the 21st century begins in 2021, right? I mean, COVID is this big reset. So, we are going to enter an economy in which learning is central. The half-life of skills is shorter, etc., future work, there’s enough stuff written about it. We are learning animals and we’re going to have to learn for the rest of our lives just to stay abreast. It’s just the way it is.

And so, the ability to learn and to apply these tricks is central. It’s sort of like imagine the way our education system is structured today, it’s sort of like telling someone you can exercise for the first four years of your life and then you’re ready for the rest of your life, as opposed to, you know, going to the gym three times a week. So, learning has got to become that, right? And Luke and I talk about it at some level in the book about how learning is very important.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, I really want to hear, you’ve got a story in the book about a law school in Florida that incorporated some cutting-edge learning strategies, and they saw a dramatic improvement in their bar exam passage rate. Can you share the story?

Luke Yoquinto
So, Pete, talk about the pre-testing effect that we were talking about earlier, that’s sort one-half of these wonderful researchers, the Bjorks, call desirable difficulties and the effortful retrieval that strips away these competing memory associations that lets you form a really long-term memory. The other half is called metacognition which is basically how we think about our own state of knowledge. So, let me just rewind and then we’ll catch it right back up to the law school, FIU Law School in Miami.

Metacognition. So, back in the ‘60s, for instance, researchers thought that what we know about our own thought was sort of a static measure, sort of like an engine oil dip stick, where you just kind of reach and you say, “I’m trying to get a sense of what I know about subject X. Here’s what it is.” But as the Bjorks, especially Robert, showed in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, it’s more like an active measure, it’s more like a speedometer, and how we gauge and how we know, in part, comes from how easy it is to summon that information in the moment.

And that introduces a number of biases. If you have some new fact open in a textbook right in front of you, that can lead you to believe that you’re going to remember that fact come test time. If you are seeing a fact in a true-or-false question, “Is hemoglobin the molecule in red blood cells that delivers oxygen to cells?” you might be able to answer that in a true or false, but then you might not be able to answer a point blank, “What is the molecule?”

And that false sense of knowing, the false sense that your knowledge of a given subject is not going to change, we know that’s not true, right? We know that forgetting happens over a certain curve, it’s called the forgetting curve. It’s one of the most well-known studies or effects in psychology.

And so, when you combine this metacognition stuff with effortful retrieval, you get what’s called desirable difficulties where you have these techniques you can apply while you’re studying that will sort of steel-plate memories for the long term. And one of the things that Louis Schulze, who was the head of sort of reinvigorating this FIU Law School program, did was he just went all in on these, and other really important study techniques, and just instituted a mandatory class for all first year law students at the school to start studying how to study using these techniques.

And so, prior to the beginning of this program, this program started in 2015, it was a respectable middling law school in Florida in terms of bar exam passage rates, kind of bounced around in the middle of the rankings. And they instituted this program where every student is taking this course on how to study as a fresh year law student. And then if you’re sort of in the bottom of your class, it’s mandatory that you continue in these studies in your second year. And then I think there’s another mandatory semester, or effectively mandatory, since everyone takes it because it works so well, in the third year.

But the effect was this program rocketed to the top of its rankings for the state in Florida. Now, it’s always number one and number two in terms of bar passage rates in Florida. And in terms of ultimate bar passage rates, which is the percentage of people who pass the bar within two years of graduation, it’s top 15 in the country. It’s remarkable.

And one of the big takeaways that we found from this story is you have all these students, these law students who, frankly, would’ve flunked out before this. And now with these techniques that are focused on making learning cognitively user-friendly, we’re retaining that talent that would’ve been wasted before.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very encouraging and quite a testament. So, lay it on us, what are some of the most hard-hitting effective techniques that you think professionals should be using when they’re trying to learn new skills or get that flowing from them?

Sanjay Sarma
Well, here are a few. Do it in short sprints. And, actually, if you go to YouTube, go out to something on YouTube, you’ll find that, naturally, without perhaps understanding the sites, just because of our instincts, people have made their videos very short for a few minutes, 5-10 minutes. The second thing is, at the end of the video, apply the testing effect. So, ask yourself questions about the stuff you learned, right?

So, the third is space it out a little bit, wait some time, ask yourself the next day, do you remember it. Ask yourself a month later. I do this all the time. I’ll watch something, and then like a month later, I’ll try and recall. And rather than blame myself if I forget, I go, “Well, that’s an opportunity because now my brain is going to lit up, cleans the whistles a little bit.”

Here’s another one, very strange. Interleave, that’s part of the effort for learning, the desirable difficulties. What that means is switch. So, let’s say you’re learning two similar things and you’re solving problems or something, if you’re trying to answer questions, just answer questions. Answer questions about the first topic, then the second topic, then the first topic, and second topic, because it forces you to reload.

If you continuously answer questions about the first topic, you’re not reloading that information. You’ve got to sort of reload that program. So, do that. Bottom line is this, at some level, there’s an illusion of learning. We think we’re learning. There’s a lot of biases that Luke talked about, you know, stability, foresight, all that stuff. We won’t bore you with the details, but there’s an illusion of learning.

For example, if you read, read material and with a highlighter you just highlight everything, you feel like you learned because you became familiar with it but it’s an illusion. But when you’re actually learning, it feels effortful, and you go, “Oh, my God, I’m not learning because I’m struggling.” But, actually, you might be learning better. That’s a strange sort of optical illusion related to learning.

Luke, why don’t you add to that?

Luke Yoquinto
Yeah, that’s right. This applies not only to egghead kind of stuff. You could use this as an athlete. There’s a classic, classic study of, I think, it’s third graders doing the bean bag toss. The goal is to hit a target with a bean bag from three feet away. You have that experimental group throwing two feet away and four feet away but never three feet away. You have a control group throwing from three feet away.

And the experimental group who have never practiced the three-foot throw, on exam day everybody outperformed the kids who have been practicing at three feet. And you can take that to the driving range. This is a classic example that Bob [14:24] talks about. He’s a passionate golfer. If you’re just hitting the same club over and over again at the driving range, you’re not reloading the cognitive program for how to swing a golf club. You’re just kind of re-running the same program.

So, he recommends pull out the driver, hit a few, then switch, aim at a different distance with a different club, switch to a different club, keep switching, keep switching. And that applies whether you’re studying hard facts, whether you’re practicing the piano. The thing that makes it a difficulty is that, initially, you might be discouraged by the progress you make. And, in fact, you might actually make less progress initially than you otherwise would’ve. But in the long term, you’ll see the benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we’ve had David Epstein on the show talking about range and sharing some similar takeaways there. And so, what’s interesting is any topic or skill naturally has many sorts of subskills or subtopics under it. So, if I wanted to learn direct response copywriting, that’s of interest to me, there’s many subskills associated with it. Well, there’s the consumer research, and then there’s the intriguing headlines, and then there is trying to pull people in deeper over sort of a longer period of time with paragraphs.

And so, following these best practices, the best move would be to do short spurts of maybe 10 minutes of learning, and then do some effortful retrieval, and then maybe shift gears from one subskill or subtopic to another, and then back and forth.

Sanjay Sarma
That’s exactly right. That’s right you put it well, it’s the reloading. Can you reload that and can you reload this, and can reload that? Not load that and then keep doing the same thing, because it’s a reloading that’s the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Sanjay Sarma
And, yeah, you’re describing it right. By the way, the business of breaking down a complex task into subtasks, that’s something good teachers do, that’s what great coaches do. If you’ve noticed, like in tennis, the great coaches are not necessarily great players. Brad Gilbert coached Andre Agassi sometime but he wasn’t a great player, he was a good player. But because he appreciated what a great player was, he was able to sort of break it down, and there’s techniques for that as well, and then you want to do exactly what you described.

Luke Yoquinto
It’s funny how great players don’t always turn out to be great coaches. It’s often a pretty good player that turns out to be a great coach, which is really interesting.

Sanjay Sarma
In fact, it’s called the expert blind spot because you’ve got to be really, really sympathetic to the learner. But the expert has a blind spot, they go, “Why can’t you get that?” “Geez, because you’re an expert and I don’t, and you need to sort of understand what I don’t get.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And as a learner, that just sort of compounds the frustration in terms of it’s like, “I already know I’m not doing this well, and the fact that I’m apparently displeasing you is just making it worse for me.”

Sanjay Sarma
That’s right. That’s why professors exist, by the way, because parents fall into that trap all the time. I can tell you as a parent.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then I’m curious. I know you’ve done some research on learning styles. But I want to know a bit about to what extent is that off base? And how should we think about sort of different modalities in terms of I’m watching a video, or I’m reading something, or I’m listening to something, or I’m trying it out on myself? How do we think about the styles and the best approach?

Sanjay Sarma
So, the problem with a lot of this learning stuff is that there are very subtle findings, and then sometimes people sort of run with them and turn them into something they’re not. So, the whole learning style things, there’s no basis, there’s no proof. It’s never been proven. If anything, it’s discredited as an approach. It’s not like some people learn better by hearing and some people learn better by video or something like that.

There is research into how to mix modalities. Various research. Myer is a professor who did a lot of work on that, so there is research on that. But the deeper concept, the deeper thought here is that this field that Luke and I talk about in this book has been explored in the past but it’s also led to a lot of faddishness which then falls into convenient buckets. And wouldn’t it be great if some people were just visual and we can just bucket them into visual and put them into visual classroom, and just sort of goes and runs amok a little bit?

So, that’s the whole problem with the learning styles argument. But, really, creating an excellent learning environment takes effort, takes thought, and it’s not that simple that you can just say that a person is a visual learner. And that’s sort of what we talk about in the book. It’s pretty nuanced, it’s pretty subtle, and you’ve got to understand it, and understand as much as possible. And also it’s changing fast. Right, Luke?

Luke Yoquinto
That’s right. Yeah, I would say that people take a lot of comfort in the learning style things sometimes, and that comfort that you think is not misplaced. The origin of that came from some of Howard Gardner’s work where he saw people who had different types of strokes, and a few differences have your language skills impacted but not your numbers skills at all. That helped him formulate his idea of multiple intelligences, which is still a really interesting idea, and it suggests that what might be measured in a standard sit-down IQ test or an SAT in no way encompasses your total powers as a learner.

And when we say learning styles isn’t something that we put much stock in, it’s not to say that you should take your SAT score as your sum total value as a learner. SAT scores and IQ tests capture a very narrow window probably of what people are capable of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then this is helpful in terms of figuring out some best practices and some sort of mistaken ideas that may not have as robust research base behind. I just want to make sure, we talked about the phrase effortful retrieval a couple times. I’d love it if we could hit a few examples of that. I’ve heard of the Feynman blank page technique in terms of you’re saying, “Okay, I’m going to teach this to someone new,” or, “I’ve got a blank page. I’m just going to write down how this process works, or my true understanding of it.” What are some of the other approaches to do an effortful retrieval?

Luke Yoquinto
The simple answer, honestly, is if you’re in mid-career and you’re thinking about ways to improve, to be really blunt, there are programs online. MITx is the home team program, and we’re a little biased, will build in little quizzes and games and so forth to sort of force that in between video lectures and things like that. So, there are ways you can force that to happen just by choosing a program or choosing approach for your continuing education.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah. For example, you learn something, a book, you read a chapter, there are questions at the end. No one wants to take on these questions because they involve effort. You just skip over them. Answer the questions. Try it. I know it’s effortful but you learn better. So, that’s the testing effect, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Sanjay Sarma
So, it’s strange. The more tests you take, actually, the better you learn. And these are formative tests as opposed to summative. In other words, you’re taking a friendly test. It’s not like someone is grading you on that. So, that’s one very simple example. The other one we talked about is switch topic, switch topic, etc. So, these are examples. But a lot of the systems out there, sort of do it automatically as Luke was talking about.

Pete Mockaitis
And if you don’t have the advantage of some of those systems, or the games built in, or thoughtful questions at the end of the chapter, are there some self-prompts you might recommend for folks to engage with?

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah, make up a question, for example. Look for ways to break what you just learned, right? Actually, now I’m thinking of this as an academic professor and someone who teaches, and I learn a lot because of my research. There’s always some nagging doubt, and it takes a little bit of introspection to identify that doubt, and you’d rather bury it. But you identify it, you surface it, and you sort of psychoanalyze your doubt. That’s effortful. That actually helps a lot, and that’s something that’s become instinctive for me.

Pete Mockaitis
So, analyze the doubt.

Sanjay Sarma
Don’t bury it. Don’t just whitewash it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great in terms of where might this not work or not apply, or what about this counterexample that doesn’t seem to fit or follow the theory or the principle.

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah, try and apply it, that’s the other one. Try and apply. If you learned something, apply it. Let’s say it’s a management thing. You learned something in management, well, apply it.

Pete Mockaitis
Porter’s five forces. Okay. Sure.

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah, exactly. Porter’s five forces.

Pete Mockaitis
Take a look at the mobile phone industry and put those five forces on there. Okay. That’s good. Well, there’s a lot of conversation right now about, hey, in-person versus remote learning. I’m sure we can talk for hours about that alone and how it impacts children and folks in college. What are some key perspectives that we should bear in mind as professionals in this game?

Sanjay Sarma
Look, the elephant in the room is engagement in remote learning, okay? So, let’s leave that elephant out for the time being, let’s kick it out of the room, and come back to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Sanjay Sarma
It turns out that, if you look at the learning process, what makes learning work? Curiosity. What you talk about. Curiosity is incredible because if you’re curious, the brain releases dopamine, it’s called the dopaminergic circuit, you learn better. Then there’s the actual content presentation. Then there’s all the fun but effortful parts, like Q&A, discussion, arguments, applying it, doing something with it. All that stuff. Projects. Forgetting and relearning it in a different context. You learned it in a different context but you recall it because, in a project, you need to pull out the stuff you learned.

So, just if you look in a classroom right now, what we do in the classroom is we do lectures. And the lecture is the one thing actually you can do online. And even online you can do it asynchronously, which is what these YouTube videos do, like Khan Academy, etc. And the things that actually we couldn’t do online, we sort of don’t do as much of in the classroom, we ignore it. It’s a tragedy actually. The things we should be doing online, we do in the classroom. And the things we could do in the classroom, we sort of don’t do very much of.

Luke Yoquinto
And we’re talking about discussions, we’re talking about hands-on, contextualization of what you learned, right?

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah.

Luke Yoquinto
So, it’s almost as though you have learning as a delivery mechanism where you have lectures that’s introducing knowledge to you for the first time, right? Then you have learning as a steeping mechanism, to steep in the information that you learned after it’s been delivered. And that’s where you’re talking about lab activities, that’s when you’re talking about discussion sessions where the knowledge ping-pongs around the room.

And I think what Sanjay is saying is a really good way to do that initial burst of knowledge is a video lecture. But you really have to do that second part, the ping pong knowledge around the room, and that’s what’s real ideal for in-person learning. And you’ll hear sort of buzzwords like flipped classrooms where you would, for instance, watch your lecture content at home, and then you’re taking part in the discussions, and you’re doing your homework with your teacher at hand to answer questions in the classroom. That’s some of what we’re talking about there.

Sanjay Sarma
And then, so today, during COVID, students are taking stuff remotely. And the problem is what we’ve done is we’ve done something that we shouldn’t be doing which is these lectures where the professors are groaning on, and we put it online. So, of course, students are going to disengage. So, we would say that the right thing to do is use these Zoom to do instructor stuff, get students excited about something, and then use an asynchronous video where they consume the material. Then come back to Zoom and, as best as you can, make up the in-person stuff, discussions, etc. Obviously, you can’t do a chemistry lab over Zoom. You sort of can actually but I wouldn’t recommend it.

So, we sort of have it backwards right now. And, in some ways, the Zoom lecture is exposing the problem and, in fact, when COVID ends, we’re going to go back to the classroom. And what are we going to do? Recreate the Zoom lecture except it runs in the same room. Unfortunately, that’s where we’ll end up, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I want to hit that curiosity point because that is really important. And I guess if you’re not feeling curious, but you got to learn something, how do we stir up some curiosity?

Luke Yoquinto
Yeah, there’s some really interesting work there about that. It’s important, first of all, to think of curiosity, it is a drive state in the brain. The sensation of hunger and the sensation of curiosity are not actually that different. They’re both something that the brain experiences as something you really want. In one case, it’s food. The other case it’s information.

Now, how does the brain determine what information is worth wanting? That’s a really interesting and constantly unfolding question. But there are some very fascinating work being done around this where you have a study, for instance, where people are being presented with trivia questions as a means to trigger curiosity. And then they’ll be presented with a completely unrelated set of information to remember.

And if they are in a curious state due to the trivia questions, they’ll remember that unrelated information better. It’s as though curiosity creates this global state of stickiness for information in the brain, and it’s really, really fascinating. So, one thing we have to really take on actively is how to promote that sense in the classroom, or whether you learn it on your own, you try to promote it for yourself. And there’s a lot of interesting discussion about what actually promotes that feeling. Is it just the impression that something new to know is available? No, that’s probably not it. It’s called neophilia, and if that were true, we would always be curious about what’s down in a scary dark basement. And we’re often not curious at all to find out what that is.

But one really interesting theory that comes up in the book is this idea that we have the sense that the information at hand is something that will modify what we know in a meaningful way. That might be something that would trigger curiosity. And teachers have been doing this for a really long time, like that’s what this Socratic method is kind of about. It’s about framing things as questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about curiosity, I’ll give you some tricks to power curiosity. So, because I have to elicit curiosity in students when I teach, I’ll figure out how to do it to myself. And one technique is, one, wonder about the history. I mean, pick a topic, five forces. How did it happen? Who is Porter? What did he arrive at? What problems did he look at? What are other…? What is a three forces approach that failed because two forces are missing? That’s one technique.

So, you have to sort of figure out what gets you going. Why is it right? Critique it, that’s another one. Why does it work? Let me see if I can break it. So, it’s sort of related to the effortful, but you’ve got to sort of get the juices flowing. And this is equal in saliva for hunger is dopamine.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing how with the Socratic method and these questions about the history or why does it work or where it might not work, it’s like the questions alone are getting some drive going. And I found that…and Bob Cialdini has this in his book Pre-Suasion which I think is excellent, is that if we could start with some mystery, like, “How the heck did this come to be?” or, “That doesn’t seem to make sense. What’s really going on here?” is handy.

But even if you can’t summon it for the thing that you need to learn, it sounds like I can just go ahead and get it from somewhere else, and then shift gears quickly into the thing I need to learn, and that’s helpful too right there.

Sanjay Sarma
That’s what Luke just described, the trigger question. If you’re curious about something else, you’ll quickly learn the thing you, well, one particularly, curious about, you learn better. Preferably not the right approach but…

Luke Yoquinto
It’ll be a longer-lasting memory that’s not going to give the context you need but the memory will last longer so, yeah, it’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Luke Yoquinto
Just another thing is if you’re encountering a new body of information for the first time, something that can be really helpful is just to look it over, examine it, and it’s really confusing and it’s bothersome. Build in enough time to get a night’s sleep and then come back to it. There’s a lot of reorganization of long-term memory that happens overnight, and you’d be surprised what made sense in the morning. And sleep on it, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I know that, we’re talking about learning and technology, we can sort of go overboard when it comes to tools and platforms and software, but I’ve got to ask the pros here. Are there some really cool tools that you think your typical professional can utilize to give their learning a jolt, maybe it’s an app or software, or even just sort of a low-tech technique?

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah, a lot of tools use this stuff. Obviously, the MOOC platforms because they have Q&A built in and most MOOCs have short videos. I’m going to shout out here Quizlet. Quizlet is Andrew Sutherland. He’s an MIT guy. And it’s used by more than 50% of high school students, I believe, in the country now, and it’s flashcards basically. But he’s got built in other things.

But a flashcard works because it forces you to reload. Boom! Reload. Mix it up. Reload. In fact, there’s a version of the flashcard called a Leitner box which is sort of almost like a card game. It forces you to remember the things you’re about to forget. So, there are tools that apply that. And then there are tools that make things more vivid. I mean, for example, it doesn’t happen all the time, but AR/VR, things like that. They make things more vivid, more realistic. If it’s cognitive and motor, then AR/VR is very interesting, very useful.

By the way, very interesting. There’s an entire industry. I’m going to put you on the spot here, Pete, and ask you. Entire industry that is, for almost a hundred years, has been driven by augmented reality, can you guess which one it is? Luke, do you know the answer?

Luke Yoquinto
When was the first flight simulated?

Sanjay Sarma
Exactly. It’s a hundred years. You got it, Luke. Hundred years, right? Because The Link Company, which is an American company, made flight simulators, like the 1930 timeframe. In fact, during World War II, and that’s basically, a simulator is essentially, a flight simulator is actually augmented reality. And during World War II, America was able to produce more pilots. Japan had the planes as well but they couldn’t produce the pilots. Anyway, there’s a range of tools that work on everything from memory, interleaving. Duolingo does it, Rosetta Stone. Rosetta does it. Quizlet does it. It forces you to go through these tricks.

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

Sanjay Sarma
Well, I think the other thing we need to understand is like gaming software. Gaming software sort of uses another part of your brain, sort of joy center, the limbic system, etc. And we haven’t quite figured out how to work that into games, but there’s, in fact, a nice field called Educational Games. It’s not gamification. It’s more where they try and work it into simulation, doing something and learning along the way. That’s another field that’s emerging, and there are some experts at MIT that know this very well, but I think that’ll become important in the years ahead.

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

Luke Yoquinto
Okay. I chose a nerdy one. it’s, “Fear is the mind-killer.” It’s from Dune.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah.

Luke Yoquinto
Any Dune fans in the house? In terms of this book, I joke, but fear is the mind-killer. Anger is another mind-killer. It can really just take away your ability to process information. And, especially, in the current moment, I like to hold onto that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Sanjay Sarma
Mine is the Eisenhower Principle which is “Sometimes it’s easier to solve the bigger problem than the smaller problem,” because when you’re trying to solve a smaller problem, you get caught in the weeds. So, generalize, I’m trying to solve a bigger problem. And if you look at all the blitz scaling, the Dropboxes and Googles of the world, Google didn’t say, “We’ll search academic documents or we’ll just search the whole web,” because in doing that, they get the experiential benefit upside but they can actually take on a problem and just solve it, indexing site NDC’s, etc. and build several farms.

So, I actually truly believe that sometimes it’s easier to solve the bigger problem than the smaller problem. I believe in generalizing.

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

Luke Yoquinto
So, I chose one that’s apropos of our book, which is Consciousness in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene. We don’t know what makes us tick in our heads and what makes consciousness work exactly, but researchers are picking away at the edges, and there’s some really fascinating research being done about just the edges of what’s perceptible and the pathways that takes in the brain, so I would recommend this book, Consciousness in the Brain.

Sanjay Sarma
For me, I was actually going to go for a consciousness book, but now that Luke stole my thunder, I’m going to have to go in a different direction. I’m going to say Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. And why Is that? Because I believe that some of his absurdist humor, just sort of mind-bending lateral thinking stuff is very essential to creativity.

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

Luke Yoquinto
Yeah, they can shoot me an email or get in touch with me on Twitter. My name is Luke Yoquinto, and so my Twitter handle is just that, it’s @lukeyoquinto, and you can shoot me an email too. My Gmail is lyoquinto@gmail.com.

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

Sanjay Sarma
Yeah, my call to action is spend three hours a week learning something new. Learn to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Luke Yoquinto
That’s a good one. And just to pile onto Sanjay, Be an extreme learner. Treat learning like it’s a mountain to climb. It’s a habit of the mind to start doing the ones you do. It can be hard stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Sanjay Sarma
Maybe I’ll leave you with a Dos Equis. You know what a Dos Equis said?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, right. Yeah.

Sanjay Sarma
I’m not recommending the actual beer although it’s pretty good, “Be curious, my friend.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Sanjay, Luke, this has been fun. I wish you all the best.

Luke Yoquinto
Thanks.

Sanjay Sarma
Thank you very much.

Luke Yoquinto
Yeah, thank you.

599: How to Break the Habit of Anxiety Using Curiosity with Dr. Jud Brewer

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Dr. Jud Brewer says: "Fear plus uncertainty equals anxiety."

Dr. Jud Brewer discusses how anxiety leads us to form bad habits—and what we can do to make a change.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How anxiety takes over—and what we can do about it
  2. Three steps to go from anxious to curious
  3. How to put an end to bad habit loops for good

About Dr. Jud

Jud Brewer, MD PhD is a thought leader in the field of habit change and the science of self-mastery. He is the “executive medical director of behavioral health at Sharecare,”, the director of research and innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, and an associate professor at Brown’s Schools of Public Health and Medicine. He is the author of The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Smartphones to Love, Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Dr. Jud Brewer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jud, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Judson Brewer
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. One of my favorite pieces I read in your bio is that you’re a thought leader in the science of self-mastery, and I love self-mastery. So, could you kick us off in maybe sharing a surprising or counterintuitive insight when it comes to human beings and achieving self-mastery?

Judson Brewer
Well, just one of the many is that it’s actually less work than we tend to think it is. And, in fact, the more we push often, the more the world pushes back. So, this idea of what we resist, persists. And that also applies to trying to master ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. Thank you. Much to chew on already. Well, specifically, I want to zoom into mastering ourselves in the realm of anxiety. Ooh, there’s a lot of that going around these days. I guess it’s been on the upward trajectory for years, and then worldwide pandemic and lockdowns certainly kicks it up a notch. So, maybe to get on the same page, do you have a working definition of anxiety that we can kind of tether us and anchor us in this discussion?

Judson Brewer
Yeah, I think I have a very simple one. It’s kind of fear of the future basically or relating to worry. And there’s an official definition but I’m terrible at remembering things. But, basically, it’s like worrying about something with an uncertain outcome or something in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then it sounds like we all do some of that and, to some extent, maybe we need to do some of that, and feel free to correct me if I’m off base here. So, I think most of us would like to have less anxiety. But can you maybe share an inspirational story or case study or something? Like, what’s really possible and realistic in terms of the human condition and our relationship to anxiety? And what would be…what’s optimal really look like? And can we get there?

Judson Brewer
I think we can, and my lab has been studying this for a long time, and we actually have some data to back that up. I’ll give you an example from a patient that I’ve been seeing in my clinic. He was referred to me for anxiety and, in fact, when he walked in the door, I didn’t even need to have him utter a word. He looked pretty anxious.

And when I took his history, he reported that he had actually stopped driving on the highway because he had gotten so freaked out just with having thoughts of getting in a car accident when he was on the highway. So, basically, he had full-blown panic disorder, and it went something like this. He would be on the highway, and he would have this thought that would come into his mind that would say, “Oh, you’re in a speeding bullet,” is the way that he put it. And that thought would lead him to get freaked out and anxious, and then his behavior was that he’d basically stopped driving on the highway, and barely even drove on residential streets.

And the result of that was that he would avoid those situations that led to these anxiety-provoking or these panic-provoking moments. Now, not only did he have panic disorder, but he also had what’s described as generalized anxiety disorder where he was basically anxious all the time. It didn’t have to be just when he was on the highway. So, it’s both panic and generalized anxiety disorder.

So, the idea is, and we can walk through how this works, but just to give you this nugget of this case study, we started having him map out how his mind had learned to become anxious. And over time, he got much better. And I can give you a little bit of a cliffhanger there so we’ll talk about how he did as we walk through this.

But one way to think about this, and how I worked with this patient, was to really understand how our minds work. If we don’t know how our minds work, how can we possibly work with them? And, in fact, we have these very basic learning mechanisms, these survival mechanisms. For example, fear is a really helpful mechanism for our survival. If you step out into the street, and you almost get hit by a car, step back onto the sidewalk, you learn, “Oh, look both ways before crossing the street.” So, that’s really helpful.

And there are actually only three elements that are needed to learn something like this. It’s called reward-based learning. You need a trigger, a behavior, and a result. So, the example with this patient, the trigger was he’d have these thoughts, the behavior was that he would avoid driving on the highway, and the result was that he avoided those panic attacks and those panicky feelings. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And so, in so doing, you kind of learn, “Okay, that’s the way to go is don’t get on the highway.”

Judson Brewer
Exactly. Exactly. The problem is driving tends to be helpful, especially for folks that don’t have good public transportation systems and whatnot, and these things, these learned anxiety behaviors and worry and things like that, can pigeonhole us into not even leaving our house and being very limited in many ways, let alone feeling anxious throughout the day, which isn’t very good.

So, the way to parse this, and the way that I worked with this patient was to help him see the difference between fear-based learning, like this negative reinforcement, which is reward-based learning, is the difference between that and how that can lead to anxiety. And the difference is that fear is a helpful survival mechanism but it can lead to anxiety when we have the absence of information.

So, think of our old brain, the survival brain, as helping us remember stuff, right? It helps us remember where our food is. It helps us remember where danger is so we can avoid it. Now, on top of this old brain, we’ve layered on this new part of the brain literally the neocortex. And the neocortex helps us think and plan for the future but it needs information in order to do that. It takes past instances and scenarios, it takes current information, and it kind of extrapolates into the future.

But if we don’t have that information, it just starts spinning out in these worry thoughts, like, “Oh, this could happen. Oh, no. Or this could happen, this could happen, this could happen,” because that uncertainty, there are a bunch of different scenarios that pop out. And what that leads to is anxiety. So, fear plus uncertainty equals anxiety. Fear by itself isn’t a problem. Uncertainty by itself isn’t a problem. But when you mix those two together, you get anxiety soup.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so now we zoom into the pandemic right here and now. I’m curious, are we doing some fear-based learning on some particular things? You’re also an expert on habits. Are there maybe some bad habits that we might be fear-based learning and reinforcing right now? What are they?

Judson Brewer
Yes. So, we’re certainly seeing this most prominently, I would say, and I pay attention to addictions and things like that because I’m an addiction psychiatrist. Drinking, for example, in society has gone up a lot. People are stress-eating more, they’re anxiety-eating more. Social media use, especially, people getting glued to their newsfeeds has gone up.

And so, here, with all this uncertainty, there’s more anxiety, and with that anxiety as a trigger, people are going to these things like drinking alcohol to make them feel better, or going to their newsfeeds to try to get information because information itself is kind of food for our brain. It helps us plan for the future.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, well, yeah, I could see that could be problematic in terms of if you’re eating more than you need to, then you’ll have the risk of becoming more overweight or obese. If you’re drinking more, there are natural consequences. And then the newsfeed, in terms of like addiction to distraction. Yeah, bad news. So, what should we do?

Judson Brewer
Well, the newsfeed, in particular, is kind of like a casino. So, if you think of reward-based learning, and the most potent form of reward-based learning is called intermittent reinforcement. So, think of a casino, and the casinos have dialed in those formula for their slot machines so that the slot machines only pay out at a certain schedule. And that schedule, you don’t know when it’s going to happen, otherwise we’d all win and the casinos wouldn’t make money.

So, they dial it in so that you don’t know when you’re going to win but you win basically randomly. Well, the same is true when people go on the news right now. They check their newsfeed, nothing new, nothing new, nothing new. And then, suddenly, bam, big news article hits. Dopamine spurts in their brain, and they say, “Oh, wow, I should check the news more often.” So, the news right now is just like a slot machine. I just want to highlight that.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny. I’ve been thinking more and more that I should check the news less often because I guess I’m…call it self-awareness or a good week vacation in the nature, but it’s like it so rarely pays off. I guess what I’m looking for is I’d like some hope, “Hey, we got a treatment. We got a vaccine.” I’d like something rich and interesting to tickle my brain, like, “Hmm, I’ve never thought about that situation or that reality for people. And how about that, I’m quite intrigued and fascinated to dig in and learn more.” And I’m satisfied in the sense that I’ve had a pleasant learning. I very rarely get any of that. When I go to the news it’s sort of like, “Oh, yeah, yeah, COVID is still happening, and, yeah, politics are still happening. Okay, I guess I’m all caught up now.”

Judson Brewer
Yes. Well, you’re actually hinting at what we can do about this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, do tell.

Judson Brewer
Yeah, I think of this as a three-step process. The first is understanding how our minds work, right? As I mentioned earlier, if we don’t know how our minds work, we can’t possibly work with them. So, just like my patient, well, I’ll give you an example. So, the patient that I described earlier, the instruction I sent to him home with was to simply map out habit loops around anxiety. Just start there. What are the triggers? What are the behaviors? And what are the results? And once he could start to map these out, then he could start to work with them.

So, for example, he came back, I think it was two weeks later, and he actually looked much happier than when he first came to see me, and he couldn’t wait to tell me something when he sat down in the chair. And I said, “What’s going on?” And he said, “Oh, I lost 14 pounds.” So, this guy was very, very overweight. And I looked at him kind of puzzled because I was thinking we’re going to talk about anxiety, and he said, “Well, I mapped out these habit loops and I realized anxiety was triggering me to eat, to stress-eat, and that was actually not making me feel any better so I stopped doing it.”

And granted, losing 14 pounds in two weeks is pretty fast, but let’s just say, he had a long way to go, he had a lot of weight to lose. And so, in that case, when he just stopped overeating, he was naturally shedding weight because he was not taking in as many calories as he was burning. Long story short, with his weight, so he was overweight, he was hypertensive because of his obesity, and he also had a fatty liver, and he also had sleep apnea. Within six months, he had lost 100 pounds, and all of those had results. He had normal blood pressure, his liver was back to normal, he didn’t have obstructive sleep apnea anymore.

So, that was the first step, was helping him see what he was doing, what these habits loops were around anxiety. So, that’s first step, map out these habit loops, what’s the trigger was, what’s the behavior was, what’s the results. The second step is to see very, very clearly how rewarding or unrewarding this behavior is. There’s a lot of science, this goes back to the ‘70s, there are these two researchers called Rescorla and Wagner who had this reward value curve where basically what they determined was based on previous rewards, how rewarding a behavior was in the past, you’re more likely to repeat it in the future. If it’s rewarding, you’re going to do it again.

The problem is that we tend to lay down behaviors as habits and we don’t pay attention to the reward value. For example, I work with a lot of people who want to quit smoking. And on average, they start smoking at the age of 13. And, actually, I had a patient who had come to me after 40 years of smoking, so he’d reinforced that habit loop about 300,000 times, and it was just habit for him. So, I told him to start paying attention as he was smoking, to really just notice what it’s like to smoke. And he realizes, smoking actually doesn’t taste very good.

And so, here, it helped him see what the current reward value was for this behavior, not when he was 13 when he was smoking to be cool or rebel or whatever, but right now. And so, that reward value naturally drops. And we’ve actually done studies both with overeating and with smoking, and it takes us few as 10 to 15 times of people actually paying attention when they do these behaviors for that reward value to drop.

Now, that opens the door for what I call the BBO, the bigger, better offer. Our brains are going to look, and say, “Okay, smoking isn’t that great. Overeating isn’t that great. Give me something better.” So, what we have people do is just notice what it’s like to just eat a normal amount of food, or eat healthy food instead of junk food, or not smoke a cigarette, for example. And within these 10 to 15 times, they actually flipped their behavior from overeating to stopping overeating, basically eating a normal amount of food or not eating the junk food because it actually feels better.

And we can even teach them simple things like getting curious about what those sensations in their body feel like that urge them to eat. And that curiosity itself is a more rewarding “behavior,” it’s an internal behavior, than getting caught up in a craving or getting caught up in worry.

I remember working with a patient, we have this app-based mindfulness training for anxiety, actually we did a couple studies where we got close to 60% reduction in these generalized anxiety disorder scales. She talked about when she started to get anxious, just getting curious about that anxiety itself, and that it flipped into, “Oh, curiosity feels better than feeling anxious.” And then it became habitual for her that whenever she notices anxiety starting to come up that she would get curious about it instead, and then the anxiety would go away.

So, that’s really the step two and three once we’ve mapped out these habit loops. Step two is really noticing how unrewarding the old behavior is, which then opens up that gap to find that bigger, better offer. And a bigger, better offer can be awareness itself, curiosity, “Oh, what it’s like when I have an urge to eat? Can I get curious about that? Oh, that curiosity itself feels pretty good.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if we could maybe apply that to some bad habits perhaps that professionals have, maybe they’ve picked it up in the midst of the pandemic, or maybe it’s always been there. So, it sounds like I was starting to do some of that with regard to my news habit, like, “Hmm, it seems like the current reward that it’s offering isn’t that great.”

Judson Brewer
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess we’d do the same if you’re checking emails compulsively like 30 times a day, or if you’re in the social media newsfeed. So, can you sort of walk through that process in those contexts? So, you get curious, you sort of notice what it’s doing for you and what it’s not doing for you. And then how might that play out?

Judson Brewer
Yeah. So, how about this? I’ve been seeing a lot of people comment on how they are really struggling with procrastination right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Judson Brewer
So, I’m guessing this can apply to a lot of folks at their jobs, a lot of professionals. So, whether it’s stress or anxiety as that trigger, or even just seeing or thinking about a project that they need to complete, or even looking at their inbox where they see a bunch of emails from their boss that they haven’t responded to yet, right? So, there’s the trigger. It doesn’t feel good so the behavior is to procrastinate. Maybe they go on social media, maybe they do something else, maybe they go for a snack as a way to avoid that unpleasant feeling of actually doing the work. And then the result is they get a brief relief because they’re not thinking about what they should be doing. So, there’s a habit loop around procrastination.

What we can do is help people map out that habit loop and just kind of articulate what’s happening, see what they actually get from it, “So, how does it feel to procrastinate?” Well, in the moment, it might feel a little bit better but, ultimately, they’re further behind on the project. They might feel guilty for going and eating food when they weren’t hungry, or checking out their social media feed, or looking at cute pictures of puppies on Instagram, or whatever it is. And then they realize, “Oh, this isn’t actually that great.”

And then I have them compare what that procrastination habit feels like to actually turning off their email alerts and their phone, and just taking an hour and just doing a deep dive into work. Nobody has ever said to me, “You know, it feels terrible to be focused, it feels terrible to get work done.” It actually feels very good. So, here, just being able to compare what procrastination feels like compared to being focused, helps people shift from that procrastination habit into getting work done.

Now, notice how this didn’t take any willpower. It really just takes the power of observation, awareness, “Oh, what’s this feel like compared to, you know, what is A feel like compared to B?” And if they can see the results of each of those very clearly, their brain does the work for them through this reward valuation system.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. Sounds easy. I’m guessing it’s not in practice. Quite so easy of an experience because, at least a few times, you’re still going to feel the urge whether it’s smoking, eating, email checking, even after you’ve sort of observed, and say, “Hmm, you know what, this doesn’t pay off so well. The alternative is better,” you’re still feeling the urge. What do you recommend?

Judson Brewer
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. So, this isn’t to say that this is a magic pill or a perfect fix, especially when those urges feel very uncomfortable. Our natural inclination is to do whatever we can that can make that urge go away the fastest. If it’s an urge to smoke a cigarette, we quickly go out for a smoke break. If it’s an urge to check our social media feeds, social media is set up to decrease the barriers to entry so that we will quickly hop on social media. So, that’s really important to understand is that they’ve basically greased the skids to make it very easy for us to perpetuate these old habits.

Now, so you asked, “So, what can we do?” The key is, even afterwards, after we’ve done something, we can still learn from it. I think of this as these retrospective moments where you can still learn from a behavior if the juice is still there, if you can remember what it felt like to do it. So, let’s say that, we can use procrastination, we can use eating, we can use any of these examples, after we’ve procrastinated, as long as we can link up the behavior and the result of the behavior, and we can feel into what that feels like or what it feels like to even recall what it felt like previously, we can still learn from it.

I think it’s important to highlight that reward-based learning isn’t based on the behavior itself. It’s actually based on the result of the behavior. That’s what drives future behavior. So, the trigger isn’t that important, the behavior itself isn’t as important as how rewarding the behavior is. So, if we can link up that behavior result or that cause and effect relationship, and if we can even do that retrospectively, and we can see, “Oh, when I’d procrastinated, it didn’t actually feel that good,” that can help us learn for the future so that the next time we have an urge to procrastinate, we can just start to bring to mind, “Oh, what was it like last time I did this?” It takes a moment of awareness, a moment of reflection. And the more we can do that, the more that opens that gap between habitual reaction and kind of an aware response. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And so then, I guess if we’re trying to establish good habits, it seems like much of that would apply, it’s just that the feeling is a happy positive one. Is there any different suggestion that you’d put forward when it comes to if we’re trying to build up a good habit?

Judson Brewer
The same process applies just as you surmised. One thing I would say is that it’s really important to notice all the nuanced qualities of these good habits. So, for example, I think there’s a societal habit now of divisiveness, of this tribal psychology where it’s so easy to categorize somebody, or get them to categorize themselves as an us-them thing, everything from politicizing, wearing masks, to this and that.

So, we can notice, “What is it like when I feel othered, when somebody says, ‘Oh, you’re wrong, I’m right’?” or when we’re trying to defend a position, for example, “I’m right, you’re wrong.” What does that even feel like as compared to when we’re all working together for a common cause? For example, eradicating a viral infection, just hypothetically speaking. So, here, for these good habits, I think it’s really important to pay attention to what that quality feels like, and my lab is actually studying this right now. We can look at it in simple terms, like, “Does something feel more contracted or closed down versus opened up or expanded?”

So, as a pop quiz, hotshot, let me ask you. What’s it feel like when you are afraid or when you’re anxious? Does it feel more closed down or does it feel more opened up?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s very closed down and it seems like there’s almost only one option.

Judson Brewer
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
This must be the thing that happens now.

Judson Brewer
Yeah, absolutely. And so, it knows us, it focuses us, that’s the survival thing, right? If you’re being chased, your job is to quickly run away as compared to sit back and think about, “What should I do?” So, now compare that to joy. Does joy feel closed down or does it feel opened up?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it feels opened up in the sense that, you know, if I’m really joyful, it’s like, “Oh, I might want to dance or sing or jump on trampoline or give thanks.” There’s many options that feel great.

Judson Brewer
Right. So, there, we can now look at…and my lab has actually done this. If you look at these different categories, so if you look at fear, you look at anger, people tend to categorize these as more closed feelings. If you look at joy, but also look at things like curiosity or connectedness, people report that these feel much more open than these others. Now, if you had to pick, would you rather have something that feels more closed or would you rather have something that feels more open?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, open. Sure.

Judson Brewer
Yeah. So, our brain actually has these already lined up in its natural reward hierarchy. We’d rather do things that feel more open than closed. Now the reason that I bring all this forward is that we can start paying attention to things like, “Well, what’s it like when I’m fighting with somebody on the internet or with a family member? What does that feel like compared to when I’m really listening, like deeply listening, wanting to understand their perspective?” Which ones feel closed? Which ones feels open? And which of those categories actually feels better?

If we simply pay attention to those things, we’ll naturally move toward these “good habits.” I think of connectedness, working together as a good habit. It’s probably the way that we will survive as a species as compared to divisiveness. So, if we look at those and we just pay attention to how does something feel. Does it feel closed versus open? That can actually help lead us in the direction of these good habits simply through paying attention to the results of those behaviors.

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

Judson Brewer
No, I just want to highlight I think of curiosity as a superpower. And I’ll mention this and just kind of bring the circle to a close around the patient that I mentioned at the beginning. So, I talked about how we taught him to pay attention to understand how his mind worked, to notice how unrewarding, for example, stress-eating was, and then what the results of these behaviors were versus different behaviors. He lost 100 pounds.

But, ultimately, over the course of about six months, and I kid you not. I remember walking out of…I was teaching a class at our school of public health at Brown University, which is on South Main Street, and this guy pulls up to the curve in his car and rolls down the window, it’s my patient, and I looked at him kind of confused because this is the guy that was struggling driving anywhere. And he says, “Oh, yeah, I’m an Uber driver now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Judson Brewer
So, here’s an example when somebody really learns how their mind works, they can really learn to master it and move from overeating to losing a bunch of weight, and move from full-on panic to sort of where they can’t drive to literally becoming an Uber driver.

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

Judson Brewer
One immediately that comes to mind is Dorothy Parker, where she says, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

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

Judson Brewer
I’ll give you one favorite study recently, where there was a group at UCLA where they were studying adolescents who were shown their own Instagram feeds since they were measuring their brain activity as they were viewing their own Instagram feeds. And the only manipulation they made in the study was how many likes each picture got, and so they can look at the difference in brain activity between a bunch of likes and a few likes.

Long story short, they found that when adolescents got a bunch of likes to their Instagram pictures that their reward centers in their brain lit up the nucleus accumbens, which is the same network of brain regions that gets activated with every known drug of abuse, alcohol, cocaine, heroin, tobacco, all these. So, Instagram seems to activate these reward centers and, at the same time, they were activating these self-referential networks, this default network, in particular the posterior cingulate cortex.

And so, the study was one of the first that I know of that actually linked reward and basically thinking about ourselves or something to do with ourselves. And so, I thought that was absolutely fascinating. I wrote about it in my book The Craving Mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I don’t want to say anything negative about “influencers” but sometimes I just get a little bit of that impression that you’re really into yourself, and it’s not so appealing. Now, I understand in some ways it’s a business model, and they’ve got sponsors or whatever, and it’s the game and the business they’re in. But sometimes that just seems to kind of come across, and it sounds like there may be some scientific evidence that it could be a real thing.

Judson Brewer
Yes. And I think people can get lost in it just like any addiction basically. Somebody is so lost in their own persona or whatever, especially if they’re receiving a bunch of rewards, monetary or whatever, that it’s hard to step back and get a greater perspective. I would think of YouTube really should be named MeTube because that’s what it’s all about is getting that one video to go viral.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Judson Brewer
In terms of novels, I think my favorite one is The Art of Racing in the Rain.

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

Judson Brewer
Awareness. Does that count as a tool?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yeah. And a favorite habit?

Judson Brewer
Being curious.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, when it comes to the habit of being curious, are there particular go-to questions you ask yourself that spark that up and get it going?

Judson Brewer
There’s a particular mantra I use but don’t ask me how to spell it, which is basically “Hmm…” And I like that because it drops me into my direct experience rather than getting lost in my head.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, what’s so funny is that it’s like mantra I think is the word for it because almost just like if you sing something or you do a little dance, it’s hard to feel all that bad. Like, the action itself produces an emotional response. And I think “Hmm…” falls right in that same category, so thank you for that.

And how about is there a particular nugget you share that you’re really known for, people quote it back to you frequently?

Judson Brewer
The linking this habit loop to reward-based learning is something that people bring back to me pretty frequently. And the emphasis on curiosity as a superpower is something that I hear reverberating a lot in my teachings.

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

Judson Brewer
I have a website, DrJud.com, and also a YouTube channel, same name DrJud.

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

Judson Brewer
I would say challenge yourselves to step out of your comfort zones and really embrace uncertainty so that we can move into growth zones rather than panic zones.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jud, this has been a treat. I wish you all the best.

Judson Brewer
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

598: How to Remember Names, Faces, and Facts like a Memory Champion with Chester Santos

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Chester Santos says: "Anyone is capable of developing a powerful memory with just the right techniques, a little bit of training and practice."

U.S. Memory Champion Chester Santos shares his expert tricks and techniques for improving your memory.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why good memory still matters in the digital age
  2. The three principles to remembering anything
  3. How to remember anyone’s name in four steps 

About Chester

U.S. Memory Champion, Chester Santos – “The International Man of Memory” is the world’s leading memory skills expert and founder of MemorySchool.NET.  His memory building tips have been featured on CNNABCPBSNBCCBSBBC, and the Science Channel. He has been quoted in the NY TimesWall Street JournalSF ChronicleWashington Post, and TIME Magazine. Chester has presented in over 30 countries with speaking credits that include TEDx, Talks at Google, and the International Festival of Brilliant Minds.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, Sponsors!

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Chester Santos Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Chester, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Chester Santos
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I’m really looking forward to talking with you today.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m looking forward to talking to you too. And I’ve been so curious to ask you, first of all, you’re sporting one fedora right now. I understand you have a collection of 25. How did this come to be?

Chester Santos
Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. I just, at one point, went through a rebranding as the International Man of Memory because I give speeches all over the world. And part of that involved hiring a stylist to come up with a look for the International Man of Memory, and the stylist came up with this fedora hat idea that I incorporate into the outfits. And I just started to really love it and I’ve been collecting hats for six plus years at this point.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it looks great. Imagine your vest, listeners can’t tell but I’ll let them know you look great.

Chester Santos
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I have one fedora and, you know what, it was a lot of fun. It drew attention to me which sometimes I like and sometimes I didn’t like. So, I just took it off if I didn’t want it. So, International Man of Memory, that is a good branding, not mystery but memory. So, maybe, can you orient us, first of all, what is a memory grand master? Like, maybe people have heard of a chess grandmaster, but what are these competitions like? How is this life?

Chester Santos
Sure, I’ll get into that. So, what I won was the United States National Memory Championship. It’s an annual competition which has been held in various locations each year. Most recently, it’s now held at MIT, the university, the finals.

Pete Mockaitis
It seems fitting.

Chester Santos
Yeah, the finals is held at MIT. It’s one day of just really hardcore memorization. So, some of the events, one is memorizing a deck of cards, a shuffled deck of 52 playing cards, in the fastest time possible with 100% accuracy. I used to be able to do it back when I was competing in a little under 90 seconds, a minute and a half. Nowadays, some people can do it in even less than 30 seconds. I memorized a 132-digit sequence of computer-generated random digits, forwards and backwards, in 5 minutes. We memorized hundreds of names and faces in just minutes. So, those are some of the events in the United States Memory Championship.

I won it way back in 2008, and since then, I’ve gone into training other people around the world in the subset of techniques that I used to win the US Memory Championship that I feel can also benefit people right away in their career, their personal life, and also they can really help out their kids or grandkids that they might have in school.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you can stop if this is too personal, but I’m always fascinated by, like, competitions where people are like the best in the world, like bodybuilding, Mr. Olympia, or if it’s tennis or football or basketball. So, if I may, just sort of is there an associated prize purse, or what is the size of the prize for the top memory grand master?

Chester Santos
Yeah, good question. So, it varies depending on who they have as the sponsors for that particular year. When I won, unfortunately, there wasn’t a cash prize.

Pete Mockaitis
Aww.

Chester Santos
British Airways was the sponsor so I got business class tickets to represent the United States in the World Memory Championship. And even when there is a cash prize, it hasn’t ever been very high, but what you get more is in terms of, you know, after I won, I was on CNN. Over the years, I’ve been asked to appear on a lot of different TV shows, I get interviewed by newspapers, magazines, and things like that. So, it helps in what I’m doing now as far as it helps me to build my brand, build my name recognition in terms of a memory skills expert. So, it helps out there but in terms of a cash prize, not so much, upfront anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
On the backends. And now you’re here with us in How to be Awesome at Your Job, so we’re delighted. And I want to dig into some of these techniques, which I’m excited about. I understand we’re going to do some demos as well, which is always fun. But maybe, first, if you could sort of contextualize for us, could you paint a picture for why, in this age of Google and computers and smartphones and all this info available kind of outside of our brains, why is it beneficial for professionals to have a great memory?

Chester Santos
Yes. So, you hit on something important. We are in an age of, I sometimes call it, dangerous digital dependency, but definitely digital dependency in which we are outsourcing not only our memory but other mental functions to electronic devices. In terms of memory, specifically I’ll give a couple of quick examples. Phone numbers, we all used to be able to remember the phone numbers of so many friends and family members, easily dial those.

I remember growing up, my parents would give me some emergency numbers that they thought were important for me to know. We all used to be able to do that, but nowadays you give someone even one phone number, and they feel paralyzed. They don’t even think that they can remember.

Pete Mockaitis
“Uh, let me…uh.”

Chester Santos
Yeah, exactly. And it’s getting so bad that some people out there can’t even remember their own phone number. So, it’s a really good example.

Pete Mockaitis
Or their wife, or husband, or mom. Like, if something happened, and your phone got stolen, you could be in a tight spot.

Chester Santos
Exactly. So, it’s really a good example of the “use it or lose it” principle as it applies to memory. Another quick example, navigation. So, you might have an Uber of Lyft driver that’s been driving in a city for five plus years, but if something is wrong with the network connection in that particular area, or something is wrong with the app at that time, it’s happened to me many times over the years, they’ll just need to pull over, they’ll restart their phone maybe ten times until whatever issue is happening will resolve itself. They, a lot of times, haven’t even learned a few basic locations or common landmarks in the city. It’s just a very good example of what happens when you completely turn off your brain and you become 100% dependent on technology. So, that’s a little bit of the negatives, and I think that illustrates a little bit of what I mean by digital dependency.

But what this creates on the job and in the business world is actually a business opportunity to, if you will work on developing your memory skills, even to a small degree, there really is an opportunity now to set yourself apart from others, become much more impressive, and much more memorable to people in business when you do have a really good memory. It’s very noticeable and impressive to people nowadays.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that’s true. It’s funny, I was just chatting with my buddy about a previous podcast guest, Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, who’s just an authentic, genuine, friendly guy everyone just loves. He walked the talk. And one thing that’s impressed me is I have bumped into him in person, I don’t know, four times at different events, and I don’t expect him to remember me because he’s a celebrity in his niche, but he does. And I always sort of like, “Hey, Pat, I’m Pete. I was at your event six years, blah, blah, blah.” He’s like, “Oh, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah.” And so that just makes me like, respect, appreciate him all the more.

And I think I’ve seen the converse in terms of friends talking about other friends, and they say, “I don’t really like him.” I was like, “Why?” It’s like, “Well, I’ve had to introduce myself to him four times,” and so they feel kind of insulted in terms of, “You don’t remember my face, my name, who I am at all, and this is kind of ridiculous at this point.”

Chester Santos
Yes, absolutely. So, remembering names is huge in the business world. I like to quote a lot of times How to Win Friends and Influence People. To this date, it’s still one of the most popular business and personal success-related books ever written. And in that book, it was written that the sweetest sound to a person in any language is the sound of their own name, and also that everyone’s favorite subject is themselves. So, in fact, by remembering people’s names, other things about them, it helps you to build better business, personal relationships.

When you think about the most popular people on the job and in various organizations that you might be involved with, when you think about those people, you’re going to notice that they tend to know everyone and also their names and other things about them. Remembering people’s names and things about them really increases your likability factor in business, and that is going to be a factor in advancement of your career. Unfortunately, in the business world, it isn’t always 100% based on the numbers and on only the job performance. It would be nice if that’s how it actually worked, but, in fact, your likability in the department is a factor.

I won’t say where I used to work, but I had a career in Silicon Valley, and I had seen this happen on the job. It’s not always necessarily the most brilliant engineer that gets the promotion. Maybe that brilliant engineer, for whatever reason, didn’t get along as well in the department with someone else that just had that likability factor, they might get the promotion. So, it is something to keep in mind as far as how things actually work in the real world. And, definitely, if you know everybody, you know their name, you know things about them, you’re going to be more popular, more likable.

Politicians are some of my clients, have been my clients over the years. They’re very clear on how this helps make you more popular and more likable.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into a lot of the specific tactics, and I think names is going to be big. If we’re going to get it, I’d love to hear how we should think about memorizing parts of a presentation, maybe remembering more of what we read, and, hey, whatever else we have time to cover. But, maybe, could you start by sharing sort of what’s the most, I don’t know, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive thing that we should just know about our memories before we dig into the tactics?

Chester Santos
Yes. So, I’m really looking forward to getting into some specific, first, general strategies and then techniques with you today, Pete. Surprising thing about memory that I think people don’t realize is it isn’t the case that you’re just born with a good memory or a bad memory. That’s a very common belief. People think that if they have a bad memory, that they’re just stuck with that, there’s nothing that they can do about it. Really, anyone is capable of developing a very powerful memory. It’s just about learning the right techniques and putting in a little bit of fun, training, and practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m intrigued, I’m game. So, yeah, well, you have some demos in mind, let’s do one. And if it happens to be in the realm of remembering what we read, or names and faces, or presentations, I’d love to steer there if possible.

Chester Santos
Okay. Awesome. So, first, what I’d like to cover, Pete, are three main principles to a powerful memory that will apply no matter what specific memory technique you end up using, and then we’ll start to get into a specific technique and a couple of demos.

So, the three main principles are, one, visualization. So, turn whatever it is that you’re trying to remember somehow into something that you can picture or see in your mind. So, in the case of names, if the name was Mike, sometimes I visualize a microphone to remind me of the name Mike.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m seeing one of those right now.

Chester Santos
Yeah. If the name were, for instance, Alice, sometimes I visualize a white rabbit because that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland, right? Now, I realize that sounds maybe a bit silly or unusual, but, in fact, this can be very powerful and effective. I’d like to get into names in much more detail toward the end after we cover some basics, but what I just wanted to introduce there was this concept of creating a picture in your mind to represent the information.

Pete Mockaitis
And to that point about the picture, so Alice and that rabbit, so that’s kind of personal to you, and that’s probably better, I imagine, because it’s more meaningful, I would speculate. Is there any risk? Like, I guess nobody’s really named Rabbit that I’ve ever met. But do you ever kind get your wires crossed or is that pretty safe, “Hey, Alice is rabbit, and rabbit is Alice, and we’re all good”?

Chester Santos
Knock on wood, I haven’t had any issues yet even at a conference that might have a cocktail hour at the end or something like that. I haven’t slipped up. That really isn’t anything to worry about really. These visuals really are just going to help you to better remember the names. The reason why you want to come up with a visual is because we all tend to be very good at remembering things that we see. I’ll give a quick example here.

Let’s say you go to a party, Pete, and you’re meeting a lot of new people, right? Two weeks after that party is over, you’re talking with one of your friends that was there with you, and your friend describes someone to you from the party, your friend says, “Hey, Pete, you remember that attorney that we met at the party a couple of weeks ago? He’s also a member of the tennis club.” As your friend is going through that description, a lot of times you can picture who they are describing. And, of course, your friend can picture who they’re describing. But a lot of times, neither one of you can manage to remember what the person’s name was, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Or even like a setting, like, “Oh, yeah, we were in the hallway, near the door,” but you don’t remember their name.

Chester Santos
Yeah, really good, there, clarification. It’s true. Sometimes you get even more details, like where they were standing in the party, what they were wearing, but that name you can’t get it. And that is because you didn’t see the name, the name is something much more abstract to your brain. And it is very common for people to be good at remembering faces but not names. And it makes sense because when you are interacting with people in various ways, you do see the face, the face is recorded into your visual memory but not the name. So, that’s why one thing you can do is come up with a visual representation of the name. But the principle, in general, is to come up with something that you can picture in your mind to represent the information.

Now, the second principle that will apply, no matter what information type, is, after you come up with a visual, try to involve as many additional senses as you can, because when you do this, you will be activating more and more areas of your brain, and you will be building more and more connections in your mind to the information, making it easier to retrieve it later on.

So, I was, at one point, on an episode of PBS’ Nova Science, I performed what, at first, seemed like some pretty crazy memory feats. They had me train David Pogue on the show as well. And then after that, they had these brain scientists, neuroscientists, come on and explain to everyone at home, watching at home, “Okay. How in the world did Chester do that? How in the world did David Pogue pull that off with just a little bit of training?” And these brain scientists confirmed that it’s because, with these memory techniques that I’ve mastered over the years, and that we’re going to learn a little bit about during the interview today, what’s happening is we are recruiting extra areas of the brain.

So, areas of the brain that most people would never involve when trying to commit things to memory. With these techniques, we are activating more of the brain to help us, and part of this is learning to utilize additional senses. So, the more senses you involve, the easier it becomes to remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, I’m thinking about with the Alice and the rabbit, I mean, maybe you have the scent of the rabbit as opposed to just, “Oh, there’s a white rabbit.”

Chester Santos
You got it. You are exactly right. So, step one, to come up…

Pete Mockaitis
Or maybe it’s like you can feel the nibbles of the rabbit’s teeth on your finger.

Chester Santos
You got it. So, first, the visual, then involve additional senses, exactly as you just described, and then you are activating more of the brain. You’re more powerfully encoding that into your memory.

Third and final principle, while you are seeing and experiencing this with additional senses, try to make the whole scenario crazy, unusual, extraordinary in some way so that you can take advantage of the psychological aspect to human memory, and that is, all of us, we’re putting forth little to no effort at all, we tend to remember things that catch us by surprise, that are strange, unusual, extraordinary in some way.

Pete, if this actually happened at this moment, if an elephant suddenly crashed into the room that you’re in, and people that are listening to the interview, if an elephant suddenly crashed into the room that they’re in and started spraying water all over the place, if that actually happened right now, you would probably remember it for the rest of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Chester Santos
And always tell that story, “You’re never going to believe this, okay? I was interviewing this memory guy, out of nowhere, an elephant just crashed into the room.” That might be stuck in your mind even 30 plus years later without you putting forth any effort at all to remember it. Whereas, other times, we might spend weeks, months, trying to get really important information into our long-term memory. We find it to be very difficult, right?

Although this isn’t fully understood exactly how this works in the brain, we do realize that there is this psychological aspect to human memory. Realizing it, we can harness that and apply it to things that would be useful to remember. Names and faces, presentations, foreign languages, training material, and so on. There are really practical applications for this. Memory is a fundamental part of learning and the acquisition of knowledge. So, when you improve your ability to remember, it’s going to have a really huge positive impact on many different areas of your career and also in your personal life in terms of your lifelong learning.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. So, okay, it’s visualizable, we bring in the senses, and if you make it somehow extraordinary, unique, kind of wild, or larger than life, those are the principles at work.

Chester Santos
You’ve got it down. So, those are the three main principles. They will apply no matter what specific memory technique you end up using.

I’d like to, now, go into an interactive exercise that you’ll go through, Pete. I’m sorry to put you on the spot here.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s do it. But if I look dumb, we’ll edit it out. That’s how I roll.

Chester Santos
Just do your best, and I think people listening to the interview today will enjoy just giving this a try and see how they do with it.

So, we’re going to apply those three main principles to try to memorize a really long random list of words. The list will be monkey, iron, rope…

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I shouldn’t write this down, right?

Chester Santos
No, don’t write this down. And people following along with the interview, please don’t write this down. Don’t use any electronic device. So, use nothing but your brain and your memory. I know people aren’t used to doing this nowadays, but we’ll just give it our best shot.

So, the word list is going to be monkey, iron, rope, kite, house, paper, shoe, worm, envelope, pencil, river, rock, tree, cheese and dollar. Now…

Pete Mockaitis
That’s long.

Chester Santos
Yeah, it’s a really long list of random words. And when I recite that at my live presentations around the world, people in the audition often look at me as if, “Come on, Chester. There’s no way I’m going to be able to remember that, not unless you give me a lot of time to do it.” But, in fact, Pete, you’ll have this down, your listeners will have this down, perfectly forwards and backwards in just about three minutes. That’s all. Three minutes.

And without any further review, after today, even weeks from now, people will still know this, forwards and backwards. I get people even writing me emails months later telling me they’re wanting to demonstrate to me that they still remember this. How you pull it off, just listen to what I describe to you, see and experience it in your mind as best you can, and just really relax, have fun with it.

So, if people ever went to my website, I guess they’ll find it in the show notes later, they’ll see me on CNN. On CNN, I had to memorize a half deck of cards during the commercial break. I only had about two minutes to do it, and then when they came back live on the air, I had to do that perfectly from memory. There was a lot of pressure on me. If people look at that clip, they’re going to notice that I’m smiling, I’m giggling. I think they maybe thought I was a little bit crazy or nutty when I was on the show, but, really, that’s an important key to this. If everyone is smiling and giggling as they’re going through this exercise, it’s a really good sign that they’re going to remember the words. So, just relax, have fun. You’ll have it down.

The first word was monkey. So, just imagine that you see a monkey in your mind. The monkey is dancing around, making monkey noises, “Hoo, hoo, hoo,” whatever a monkey would sound like. I’m working on my monkey impression, but the point here is to see and hear the monkey, right? The monkey, now, picks up a gigantic iron. So, the monkey is dancing around with this giant iron now. Picture that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, for like steaming clothes.

Chester Santos
You got it. Yeah, something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Chester Santos
Picture that iron like for your clothes. The iron now starts to fall but a rope attaches itself to the iron. Maybe even feel the rope, really interact with it, right? Maybe it feels rough. You look up the rope and you see the other end of the rope is attached to a kite. Maybe it’s flying around, and it’s just out your reach, that kite. The kite you see now crashes into the side of a house, really see it smash into the house. Picture that.

The house is completely covered in paper. It’s completely covered in paper. Out of nowhere, a shoe appears and it starts to walk all over the paper. Maybe it’s messing it up as it’s walking on it, that shoe. It smells pretty badly, so you decide to investigate and see why. You look inside of the shoe and you find a little worm crawling around inside of that shoe. Really see the smelly worm.

The worm now jumps out of the show and into an envelope. Maybe it’s going to mail itself or something. I don’t know, but envelope was next. A pencil appears out of thin air and it starts to write all over that envelope. Maybe it’s addressing it, that pencil. The pencil now jumps into a river, and there’s a huge splash, for some reason, when it hits the river.

The river, you notice, is crashing up against a giant rock. That rock flies out of the river, it crashes into a tree. The tree is growing cheese. You probably haven’t seen a tree like that before. This one is growing cheese. And out of nowhere, a dollar starts to shoot out of the cheese, right? Really see that dollar. That was the entire list. I’m going to run through this again very quickly in about 30 seconds, and your job is to simply replay through the story that you’ve created in your mind.

So, we started off with a monkey. The monkey was dancing around, with what? It was an iron. What attached itself? It was a rope. The other end of the rope was attached to what? It was a kite. The kite crashed into what? It was a house. What was the house covered in? It was…

Pete Mockaitis
Paper.

Chester Santos
Paper. What walked on it? It was a shoe. What was crawling in the shoe? It was a worm. The worm jumped into what? An envelope. What wrote on it? A pencil. The pencil jumped into the river. The river was crashing up against the rock, that flew into a tree. It was growing what? Cheese. And what came out? It was a dollar.

So, now, Pete, I’ll have you give it a try. Take your time. And people that are listening can follow along and see how well they do. Try to recite all of those random words for us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. We’ve got monkey, iron, rope, kite, house, paper, shoe, worm…oh, no, no. Yeah, yeah, shoe, worm, envelope, pencil, river, rock, tree, dollar.

Chester Santos
Tree? After tree?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, tree. Cheese, dollar, yeah.

Chester Santos
You got it, man. Great job there. Excellent job there. Pete, you did so well, in fact, though that I’m going to have you attempt to do that now backwards. Take your time, and people can also see how they do.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’ve got the dollar, cheese, tree, is it a rock?

Chester Santos
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
River, pencil, envelope, worm, shoe, paper, house, kite, rope, iron, monkey.

Chester Santos
Perfect. A hundred percent, man. Great job. Really nice. Nice work there.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sweating a little bit, Chester.

Chester Santos
Yeah, I put you under a bit of pressure there, but great job under pressure. You got 100%, and I’m sure that people listening to the interview today probably got, if not 100%, close to it. That technique that we’ve just covered is called the story method. And the story method is just one of many techniques that memory champions, like myself, use to pull off what, at first, might seem like extraordinary memory feats. But, again, there’s nothing different about my brain compared to everyone else’s. It’s just about using the right technique and putting in a little bit of training and practice.

This doesn’t just apply to random words. It can apply to even very much more complex types of information. And later on, in the interview, I had in mind, we’d take it a step further but if you have any other questions, just let me know before we move onto maybe a little bit, I guess, a level two in terms of memory skill exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. That was fun. And I’ve heard, this probably isn’t the place for this, that with numbers, it’s kind of a matter of each one is assigned a letter, which can, thus, become words, which can, thus, become memorize-able. And, it’s funny, I used this, I don’t know, it might’ve been in my honeymoon or maybe it was earlier, with my wife in terms of, she’s like, “Tell me what my phone number is.” Like, okay, and so I really took my time to break it down using that. And sometimes, to this day, I’m still summoning the ridiculous picture story phrase that gets those numbers there, but it works.

So, yeah, okay. Well, yeah, let’s do another one. And if it happens to help us with reading or presentations or names, I would love it.

Chester Santos
Okay. Cool, yeah. So, you hit on numbers there. And, again, no matter the information type, the three main principles will remain the same that we covered earlier – visualization, additional senses, make it all crazy, unusual, extraordinary. But for something more abstract like numbers, there’s a system you need to learn. It only takes about one hour to learn it, that’s it. That allows you to take something abstract like numbers and turn it into a concrete image.

Once you have an image for the abstract piece of information, you could then build a story, and there are many other techniques that you could use from there. That system has been known by many different names. One is Phonetic Alphabet system. Another is major system, that’s covered. Because it’s going to take a minimum of an hour to learn that by itself, it’s covered in my online memory school, and I think you’ll have the link in the show note, but it’s MemorySchool.net.

So, again, the techniques don’t apply to just random words. We’re going to move onto level two in terms of difficulty. We’re going to learn now how to create mental notecards or mental cue cards. This is a concept that I covered in my talks. Over at Harvard University, I gave seminars for their graduate students. I also covered this in my talk for SAG-AFTRA, the actors foundation, to help actors remember their lines. We’re going to build mental cue cards here.

I want for you to just visualize what I describe to you, that’s all. See and experience it happening, as we did earlier, and then I will explain what we ended up, actually what we built mental notecards for. So, Pete, just try to visualize some giant machines, as best you can, some gigantic machines. These gigantic machines are smashing up a huge pile of gold and silver. A huge pile of gold and silver. Rising up out of the gold and silver – vehicles. Okay? Whatever that looks like to you.

Shooting out of the vehicles – medicine. And exploding out of the medicine – oil. Maybe black petroleum oil would be easiest to visualize, okay? That’s it. I’m going to run through that again, just replay through this little story. So, we had the giant machines were smashing up the gold and silver. What rose up? Vehicles. What shot out of the windows? Medicine. And what exploded out of the medicine? It was oil.

So, first, go ahead and try to give those main items back to me from memory.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Sure thing. So, we started with giant machines that were smashing gold and silver, from which emerged vehicles that had medicine spilling out, and then in the medicine was oil.

Chester Santos
Perfect. So, you got that 100% correct. What you’ve done there, Pete, without realizing it, or maybe you did realize it, I’m not sure, I actually had you there just memorize the top five exports of the UK. So, if you were to look that up right now and see what the top five exports of the UK are, you’ll see listed machinery, precious metals, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and oil. So, you start to see how the image doesn’t need to perfectly match what you’re trying to remember, you’re simply building a mental notecard.

So, can you try to give me now the exports using that little story to guide you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. So, it’s machinery, precious metals, vehicles, pharmaceuticals, and oil.

Chester Santos
You got it. Perfect. So, Pete, it might not seem like much at first but, again, in today’s world where no one is using their memory very much, when you get into a meeting with maybe it’s clients for your company or potential clients, or it’s a meeting with colleagues or your boss, when you get in there and you’ve prepared for that meeting, you have 5, 10, 15 key things committed to memory, what this does is really better demonstrate your knowledge, right? You’re showing that you actually know something, that you actually know your stuff. You’re better demonstrating your expertise. You’re going to be perceived as more of an expert in your field. People are more impressed with you. People will have more confidence in you and your abilities. And, also, when you have a really good memory, again, you become so much more memorable to people in the business world, on the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that. So, I’m eager to get into the names here now and so I went ahead and grabbed the Social Security Administration’s top names over the last hundred years. So, we talked about it being visualizable, and with Alice, you saw a rabbit because that was resonating for you with the story. I’m seeing the top names here. We got James, Mary, John, Patricia. How would I turn some of those into things I can see?

Chester Santos
Well, so my example for…I’d rather actually have people come up with their own image, but my example for John, you can watch that CNN clip, I gave…

Pete Mockaitis
I’m here. Let’s do it.

Chester Santos
Yeah, somehow, I didn’t get in trouble for that. The host, one of the hosts of that show was named John, and, luckily, he wasn’t too upset with me, but I might imagine, you know, a toilet bowl as in going to the John, right? Mary, I might imagine a little lamb because Mary had a little lamb.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Or the Madonna, you know, for a religious perspective.

Chester Santos
James, I might imagine just a famous James. It could be a character from a TV show or movie. It could be simply a friend or a family member that has the same name like your uncle.

Pete Mockaitis
Or Darth Vader.

Chester Santos
It could be that you visualize even just your Uncle James. Patricia, I might think of Patricia Arquette. So, I want to clarify this point a little bit. So, I said come up with a visual. Now, how you come up with that visual can vary. So, it can be a famous person that has the same name, a friend or family member that you’re seeing in your mind that has the same name, or it could be something like a sound alike. So, for the name Jane, I might picture a chain, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Chester Santos
I gave you something more symbolic like a white rabbit for Alice. So, there are various ways as to how the image can remind you of that name, but the best way to describe the concept, in general, is to come up with an image, or series of images, that will some way, anyway, remind you personally of the name, right? And there actually is another step to this.

The next step is to connect that image to something unique about the person’s look. So, if, to you, Jane has really cool-looking hair, you might imagine that chains are going through her hair, clacking together, making a really loud noise. So, how this works in practice is the next time you see her, all you have to do is ask yourself, “Okay, what is noticeable to me about her look?” What you notice, personally, what was noticeable to you before, is very likely will be noticeable to you again. And then the image that you stored there will come right back to you.

So, in this case, the chains might remind you of, again, chain might remind you of Jane. So, that is kind of an overview for how it works. It sounds weird, again, I realize but anyone can become really good at this with a little bit of training and practice, and that’s how I open presentations around the world with naming even hundreds of people in the audience after hearing each name just one time before the presentation starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you said something there, kind of quickly, but it’s important. You hear the name, like you make sure that you get it in the first place, and don’t be shy to ask them to repeat themselves if you need to. Like, if you didn’t hear Jane said Jane, you’re dead in the water.

Chester Santos
Absolutely. Absolutely, Pete. So, let me give you four quick steps that will help you with that because that’s absolutely necessary for this. So, I recommend that you combine that visual-based technique with the following four steps when you’re meeting someone.

Step number one, immediately repeat the name. So, if you’re introduced to someone named Jane, “Nice to meet you, Jane,” or, “Please to meet you, Jane.” That’s it. It seems totally obvious but, as you mentioned, a lot of times we’re not paying that much attention to the name. Our mind might be all over the place. We’re thinking about all sorts of other things.

Pete Mockaitis
“No, I said…” Or you might have gotten it wrong. Like, “No, I said Tane.” “Is it Tane? Oh, okay. I’m glad I clarified with you.”

Chester Santos
Yes. So, repeating the name really gives you the opportunity to clarify the name, as you mentioned, and also make sure that you pay attention for at least one second. That’s the only way you could attempt to repeat the person’s name back to them, right? So, that first step, if you start doing that today, eventually it’s going to become a habit and second nature to you.

Step number two, I recommend that you use the name early on in your interaction with the person. So, simply, “Jane, how do you know Chester?” or, “Jane, how long have you been involved with this organization?” And I want to clarify, I don’t mean use the name over and over again in the conversation to where it starts to seem a little weird. Really, just using it once early on in the interaction will be enough to reinforce the name in your mind.

Step number three, take a few seconds, or less, to think of a connection between the name and, literally, anything at all that you already know. So, Jane, I don’t know, maybe think of Jane Goodall. And, again, as I mentioned, it could be like a character from a TV show or movie. It could be something as simple as you have a friend of family member with that name. Maybe you have an Aunt Jane. And when you’re going through that step, that might also help you come up with your visual, right?

Fourth and final step is to make sure, whenever you leave the meeting, the party, whatever type of function it might be, the conference maybe, make it a point to try and say goodbye to people actually using their name, “I hope to see you again sometime, Jane.” Using the name that last time is going to go a long way toward helping you remember more of those names the next time you see those people. And if at that point you’ve already forgotten the name, I highly recommend that you ask them their name again right then and there because, at that point, they’re less likely, I think, to be offended. At that point, I think they’re more likely to appreciate the fact that you care enough to remember their name for the next time you see them. You’re expressing interest in that person, and they’re really going to appreciate that fact.

So, those four steps, combined with the visuals that I talked about earlier, I think are really going to help you out. You might not be 100%, even I’m not 100%, but if you can remember 80% plus of the people that you’re meeting, this is going to pay huge dividends for you in your career and in your personal life. And in my online school, I actually simulate introducing you to people so that you really develop that skill.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. Well, Chester, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Chester Santos
I think I’ve covered really everything that I had in mind in terms of the main concepts that are always going to be involved when you want to develop a powerful memory no matter what specific technique. We got into a couple of interactive exercises that I think people will enjoy playing around with, and we got into some specific tips on names. Those are some of the most important things that I really wanted to cover that I think people will be able to put to use right away on the job and in their personal lives in terms of lifelong learning. And you can also share what you learned from this interview with your kids or grandkids that might be in school as well.

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

Chester Santos
“You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.” I like that. I like that quote a lot. And that applies to my area because some people, you know, they’re scared off because maybe they’re not…they don’t currently believe that they have a very good memory. But, really, all you have to do is get started in learning these types of techniques and, before you know it, you will have a very powerful memory. But you do just have to get started.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Chester Santos
How to Win Friends and Influence People that I often quote in my presentations. There’s a lot in that book, not just about names and how important memory is in the business world, but really just a lot of business and personal success-related tips in general. So, that’s one of my favorite books, and I do recommend that people check that one out if they haven’t already, How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known for, it resonates, and folks quote it back to you a lot?

Chester Santos
I think what I’d like people most to note about my message, in general, is that anyone is capable of developing a powerful memory with just the right techniques, a little bit of training and practice, this can be fun to do, and it’s going to benefit you in so many ways because, again, memory is a fundamental part to learning and the acquisition of knowledge. So, I guess that’s the main nugget that I want people to keep I mind.

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

Chester Santos
Yeah, if people are interested into diving into memory skills training deeper and really put this to use in their career, personal life, help their kids in school, MemorySchool.net is my main training website. I would visualize a giant net so you remember that it’s .net. And I setup coupon code AWESOME in honor of being on your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Chester Santos
So, the first 50 people to use couple code AWESOME at MemorySchool.net will be able to get started with no enrollment fee whatsoever. So, I hope people will be encouraged to check that out.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s going to be a mad dash to put that in there. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Chester Santos
I want to encourage people to just take action. If this is something that…and not only my area, not just memory skills, but, really, anything that they’re hearing about on your podcast, any particular topic that they find very interesting, I really encourage people to take action on it as soon as possible because, once you do take that action, whether it’s signing up for the Memory School, whatever it might be, once you take the action, you are ten times more likely to actually develop that skill.

Whereas, if you don’t take action right away, it could be that I’m on your show again in a year or two, and people will not have developed the new skills. Again, you really just, as I mentioned in my quote, you really just have to get started in order to eventually become great.

Pete Mockaitis
Chester, this has been a lot of fun. I wish you lots of luck in your memory adventures.

Chester Santos
Thank you so much again, Pete, for having me.

597: How to Turn No Into Yes: Powerful Negotiation Questions with Alex Carter

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Alex Carter says: "Silence is not an imposition. It's actually a gift to the other person. It gives them time to think and it prevents you from selling yourself short."

Columbia law professor Alex Carter shares why it pays to ask for more, both at work and in life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The 4 questions that will help you negotiate better 
  2. How to boost your confidence going into a negotiation 
  3. How to increase your chances of getting a yes from your boss 

About Alex

Alex Carter is Director of the Mediation Clinic at Columbia Law School, where she is also an award-winning professor, and a world-renowned negotiation trainer for the United Nations. She also serves as Executive Director of Stand Up Girls, helping tween girls develop relationships for greater self-esteem and resilience. She has appeared on CBS This Morning, MSNBC’s LIVE Weekend and Hardball, Marketplace, and in The New York Times and Wall Street Journal. She lives in Maplewood, New Jersey, with her husband and daughter.

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Alex Carter Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alex, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Alex Carter
Pete, thanks so much. I’m thrilled to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk negotiation. And I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing one of your coolest negotiating stories.

Alex Carter
Sure. Coolest negotiating stories. How about the first time I ever negotiated my own salary?

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds like a good one. Let’s go.

Alex Carter
So, yes. I’m one of these people who, and some of your listeners may relate, early on in my career, I worked at places that were all lock-step so I never had much to negotiate. Well, fast forward to the first moment in my 30s that I ever negotiated my salary. Went in, power suit on, ready for battle, and to my surprise, they came in slightly above what I was expecting. So, had just enough on the ball to keep my face neutral, said, “Thank you so much. I’ll get back to you.”

Went out and called a senior woman in my field, and I said, “I’m not sure what to do. They came in above.” And she said, “I’m going to tell you what to do, Alex. You’re going to go in there and you’re going to ask for more.” And I said, “I’m going to ask for more?” And she said, “Yes, because when you teach someone how to value you, you teach him how to value all of us, meaning women. And so, if you’re not going to do it for yourself, I want you to go in and do it for the woman who’s coming after you. Do it for the sisterhood.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Alex Carter
And so, that was the moment when I realized that asking for more and negotiating and claiming my value actually was not a selfish act, that in doing that, I could create more seats, not fewer, around the table for people to join me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a beautiful reframe right there in terms of it’s not a zero-sum game. It is benefitting more persons than just you. It’s funny, I think sometimes when we hear about negotiation, we think about the tactics and the power phrases. I’m thinking about Michael Scott in “The Office.”

Alex Carter
Oh, God.

Pete Mockaitis
Trick number 31 or whatever, and it would sound like, “Okay, you did your research, you said you’re going to think about it, and then you just suggested a higher number,” and it sounds like, unless you skipped any juicy details, that there weren’t a lot of secret weapons you’re employing there.

Alex Carter
Well, it’s interesting, Pete, and I’m so glad you brought that up about people thinking it’s all about the secret weapon, the decision tree, or some complicated algorithm that’s going to get you the best result. The truth is, that Ask for More, is in part, it’s my book, it’s in part the story of a woman who learned how to ask for more, but it’s also about the power of questions.

Questions are actually the number one under-utilized weapon in negotiation. When you go into a negotiation and front load your questions, you’re not only going to get more information, you’re going to end up with better deals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s very tempting to dive right in. But, first, I want to touch base on in terms of maybe the why or what’s at stake with negotiating skills. So, I think naturally, if you think, “Hey, yeah, you can have some more money if you negotiate.” But what are maybe some of the other opportunities that we don’t even think about negotiating?

Alex Carter
Yeah, negotiation is about a lot more than money. You know, Pete, in fact, let’s zoom out a bit because a lot of times when people hear the word negotiation, they think of kind of what we started talking about at the beginning of this podcast where it’s a back and forth between two or more people over money. That’s actually not what I teach. I teach that negotiation is steering. It’s any conversation, not just the money conversations, not just the conversations where you’re battling over resources, but any conversation where you’re steering a relationship.

And so, it’s not just about money. It’s often about teaching people how to value you. It’s often about achieving the intangibles in life, those things that make our lives worth living – freedom, advancement, a sense of accomplishment, recognition. Negotiation is all of those. It’s how we create our own story.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That sounds great. So, let’s see about these questions.

Alex Carter
You’re right. All right, let’s get back. So, in fact, the first question that people should be asking in negotiation is actually not when they sit down with somebody else. So, Pete, by the time you and I sit down to negotiate, half of the process is already done, and that’s the part of the process that starts at home with me. So, before I even sit down with somebody, I need to be asking myself questions. And the first question I tell people to ask in every scenario is this, “What’s the problem I want to solve?”

You know, Pete, I found that, whether you’re talking about it in corporate context or in a more entrepreneurial scenario, people want to jump immediately to solutions, “There’s budget allocation, and I’m the leader of my department, and I want to go in immediately and say, ‘This is where my department’s number should be.’ But wait a second, what’s the problem I want to solve?”

“Am I merely looking for X number of dollars here because I’m allocating it to certain projects? Or, in the process of this, am I also trying to raise awareness about what my team did last quarter? Am I also trying to communicate the importance of my department to the company’s overall mission?” Thinking about the problem you want to solve, not only shapes what you ask for but how you ask for it. It is the first stop in any negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’re thinking clearly about the problem that you want to solve and, in so doing, I think that probably reframes any number of things and opens up a lot of possibilities that maybe just weren’t even on top of mind before you went there, so that’s awesome. What’s next?

Alex Carter
Sure. Well, how many questions would you like to do?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand you’ve got ten, so maybe let’s get the rundown preview listing and then dive deeper into a couple.

Alex Carter
Okay. All right. So, let’s talk next. So, you’ve thought about the problem you want to solve, I think the next stop is really thinking about what you need from this negotiation. And when I’m asking people to consider their needs, I ask them to put them into two buckets. So, the first bucket is kind of the low-hanging fruit in most negotiations. It’s what I call the tangibles, right? The things that you can touch, see or count, “So, I need this amount of money. I need this many people for headcount to grow my division.”

The intangibles, though, often complete the picture. Those are the values that we stand for and that really drive our negotiation. So, for example, if I’m the head of the department going in for resources, in addition to saying, “I need X, Y, and Z tangibles,” I might be thinking, “I need acknowledgement from my CEO for what we did for the bottom line last year.” And then that intangible can very often shape how I negotiate. The trick is, Pete, that when you have these intangibles, like, “I need some recognition,” you’ve got to look inward and ask yourself, “What would recognition look like for me here?” In other words, you’ve got to take that and make it concrete so that, then, it’s a basis for you to negotiate from.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, excellent. And so, in terms of we start with a problem, and then, “What it is that I need?” and have that be clear in terms of, you’re right, acknowledgement can take many flavors and formats in terms of, “Is it public? Is it private? Is it just like, ‘Hey, great job,’ one-sentence email that’s good enough? But what do you need?”

Alex Carter
Pete, you joke but I swear to you. So, part of what I do at Columbia Law School is I help people negotiate their way out of large conflicts. So, recognition for one person looks like a seven-figure number. Recognition for somebody else looked like a certificate that he put on his wall, a certificate of appreciation. It truly looks different for every person, and you have to honor what that looks like for you. “Ask for More” is all about tuning out the noise of what other people think you should need, and tuning in to what things like recognition and freedom and respect look like for you.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. And I like that when you talk about freedom, I mean, if we think about sort of a salary compensation picture, it may very well be, it’s like, “Okay, we don’t have that in the budget. Fair enough. I would like some additional vacation days.” And so then, on a dollars per hour or day basis, you might still feel whole with regard to achieving what you wanted to achieve.

Alex Carter
A hundred percent. And you pointed out something really important, which is there’s almost never just one driver in a negotiation. Money is something you can negotiate for. It’s not the only thing you should negotiate for. And if you’ve gone in with a complete list of what you need, “I need freedom, I need appropriate compensation for what I’m doing,” then that gives you the basis to be able to say, “Okay. So, what can we do on the salary? What can we do on the work schedule? What can we do on vacation? And how about mentorship or training possibilities?” In this way, you’re not just myopically zoning in on the money. I want for you to get that and everything else that’s going to satisfy your needs.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s talk a little bit about those emotions here. As I’m imagining, as I’m putting myself in the shoes of a listener that says, “Boy, there’s a context in which I’m starting to ask, I’m asking for more, I’m asking for a lot, for the money, for the work schedule I want, for the vacation I want.” I think this can give rise to some fear in terms of like, “Oh, am I being whiny, or needy, or hard to work with, or asking for too much too soon? Is this even appropriate?” How do we deal with that issue?

Alex Carter
Huge, huge issue. And can I say, Pete, I think this is even more of an issue right now than usual? All the time, people are having this conversation in our heads. It’s not just, “Am I whiny or am I needy?” For a lot of people, it’s “Am I worth it? Do I really believe that I am worth what I am asking for?” That is where negotiation starts. And I have to tell you that fear you were describing is so much more present now. Every day, I get a note from somebody I don’t know asking me, “Can I really negotiate even right now, even when I’m desperate for a job, even when I really need some money coming in the door?”  And the answer is that not only can you, you should.

I want to reframe that conversation in people’s heads. Yes, times are tough right now. On the other hand, isn’t now the time when every dollar of your company’s money should be spent on somebody who’s going to be able to achieve results, and shouldn’t that person be you? Why not you? Managing that internal emotional conversation is key to negotiation success.

And so, for that reason, I ask people to write down their feelings, what I call the F word, before they go in and they negotiate, because it’s in the process of airing those things out, recognizing that you’re feeling them, and persevering through anyway, that you’re going to get to the other side of that mountain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really like it. And I guess the what you’re worth piece, I think there’s a lot of bad places you can look for that, or suboptimal, shall I say, like, “Hey, what you were paid at the last place, or last year, may or may not be a reflective sensible answer to what you’re worth.” I imagine your market research in terms of, “Hey, supply and demand for this position and what they tend to get paid is worth it.” And then I think, for listeners of this show, it’s helpful to just think about, “How committed, motivated, ambitious, dedicated, skillful you are at your job relative to the other people in your office?”

And maybe you’re surrounded by higher performers but it’s often the case, people say, “Wow, a lot of people just aren’t really doing their job that many hours out of the day here. So, hotdog, I’m pretty diligent, so I might be worth two or three times what my peers are getting paid.”

Alex Carter
You know, I’ve counseled thousands of people, most people are underestimating themselves and not overestimating. Research tells people that when you ask for more, your ask should be optimistic, specific, and justifiable. A lot of times we remember that we need to justify our ask but we don’t remember the optimistic part. Take the best-case justifiable scenario and start from there, because, remember, it’s very rare that you’re going to get more than what you ask for.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Alex Carter
So, your ask sets the ceiling.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. So, it’s sort of like the most that’s not absurd, like, “Come on,” so just a bit below that, it’s like, “Well, hey, this is the 98th percentile for this role but, hey, I think I’m a top 10% performer so it just seems sensible that that’s what I want.”

Alex Carter
A 100%, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that a lot. And also, when they say, “Hey, can I ask now even amidst economic uncertainties and COVID and such?” I recall we had the folks from the Paychecks & Balances podcast, great guys, Rich and Marcus, who, on the show, and one of them said, “You know what? I have blanket approval to give a 10% raise to anybody who asks, and almost nobody asks.” It’s like, “Wow!” that was eye-opening. A lot of people making these decisions do have that leeway just built in, no higher authority approval even necessary. Has that been your observation?

Alex Carter
It has. In fact, just in the last two weeks, I’ve negotiated with two separate organizations that initially said, “We have no room to negotiate,” and I asked, and almost immediately got the 10%. Almost immediately. And so, it’s as though the form letter goes out saying, “This is the rate.” But it’s true, people, in fact, here’s the secret, people expect you to negotiate. That’s the truth. People expect you to negotiate even in a pandemic. And you know what’s great when you negotiate during a pandemic? In the process of advocating for yourself, you are showing the company how you will advocate for them. Always, always negotiate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. Okay, so we talked about the fear piece. That’s great. So, being convinced that you’re worth it. And we talked about the first two questions. What’s after that?

Alex Carter
Actually, Pete, we talked about the first three because the third one is about emotions and we kind of got there. After we talk about feelings, the next thing I like for people to do, this is a really, really powerful question, I like people to ask themselves this, “How have I achieved this successfully in the past?”

And here’s the reason, because oftentimes we’re facing a scenario and we’re feeling a bit anxious about negotiating, we forget that we have handled things successfully before. If you’re about to negotiate for yourself, or raise your prices, or ask for a higher salary, remember the last time you advocated for yourself. Write down the strategies you used and see what might be utilized here to make you more successful.

The thing about this question, Pete, is “How have I handled this successfully in the past?” it has two powerful functions in negotiation. Number one, the mere fact of asking yourself this question, there is research to show that if you go in to negotiate, having thought about a prior success, you’re more likely to do better simply by having thought about it. But the second reason to think about a prior success is it’s a data generator. Very often the strategies we’ve used in the past to make ourselves successful will work again in the future.

Now, I want to answer, Pete, a question that I think your listeners may be thinking. Some of them are thinking, “This is great, Alex, if I have a prior success that’s right on point. But what if I’m trying to do something I’ve never done before?” Fine. I’ve never, for example, published a book and promoted a book during a pandemic. First time, okay? But I looked back and I thought, “Okay, what are the elements of this? What do I need to do? How can I boil this down?”

And I thought, “Okay, I need to get a lot of people on board. I need to communicate clearly and powerfully around the message, and create a massive team to support me. When have I done that before? Oh, I ran my husband’s campaign for local office five years ago.” Went back, looked at the strategies I used as his campaign manager, and applied them to my book-promotion campaign. It was incredibly successful.

Sometimes, even a seemingly unrelated prior success is going to be just the thing to give you some strategies to use in your negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent in terms of there are all sorts of carryover in terms of it’s not the bullseye, okay, a book in a pandemic. Sure, that’s one of a kind. But, certainly, skills, experiences that have some relevance and some carryover, zero in on those. And that is great in terms of double barrel. You can bring that up if it comes up, and you feel all the more resolute and convicted about you being worth it for having gone there. So, that’s excellent.

Alex Carter
Yes. And if I can speak to that point, Pete, remember we talked about sort of psyching yourself out, almost giving yourself the no before anybody else can. If you are somebody who has difficulty advocating for yourself, my guess is, if you’re listening to this podcast, that you are great at negotiating on behalf of other people, your department, your friends, your kids. I want you to write down what makes you so successful when you negotiate for other people, and then use it for yourself. Over and over again, I have worked on this exercise with corporate leaders, and they tell me they find it unbelievably helpful in channeling those strengths to go in and ask for more.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it because that just sort of cuts through all of the self-doubt stuff in terms of, “If I am negotiating for Pete Inc. as opposed to me,” then you’re operating a bit differently, so that’s great. I want to get your take on, this might be advanced, but I think it comes up. It’s come up for me and I don’t do a ton of negotiating. When is the right time to think about bringing in an agent or a lawyer? When should you do that versus not do that?

I remember when I was closing on my house, it seems like the lawyers kind of made things more intense and a little kind of harder to get into a win-win. I remember at one point they’re like, “Did they say it was a shakedown? For them to impugn our integrity that way…” it’s like, “Oh, no, that was just me summarizing.” We got some misunderstandings and some intensity, but, at the same time, lawyers and agents are professionals with the skill set that have their use. How do you think about that game?

Alex Carter
So interesting. You know, Pete, I’m a lawyer and yet I think we often get in the way, right? We have a way. And it goes down to how a lot of lawyers are trained. So, again, I have a J.D., I’m a practicing lawyer, but for my first two years of law school before I took the class that I’m now teaching, I basically was a hammer and all I saw were nails, and I was looking for how I could escalate a conflict at any turn.

The truth is, Pete, I do make, now, I do make use sometimes of lawyers and agents. I have literary agents, I have speaking agents, all sorts of people who work with me. The truth is that nobody is going to be a better messenger than you even if you have an agent. I work really hard to steer that relationship and to help use them for the things that they are great at. Some of the industry-specific knowledge, that might be an occasion when I would hire. This is very industry-specific, they’re going to be able to help me fill in all the things that we could negotiate for.

But how we prioritize, and that strategy, that has to come from you. That has to come from the client. And there is no substitute for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And it makes a lot of great sense in terms of if they’ve done many book deals or speaking gigs, it’s like, “Well, they kind of know what people are paying because it can vary wildly. A keynote might sell for 3,000 or might sell for 30,000. And what are the nuances that determine where you go within that massive range?”

Alex Carter
Absolutely. And I have the best in the business both on the literary and the speaking front, and still when I choose an agent, I choose somebody who wants me to partner with them, somebody who can come to the table with their expertise, and I can come to the table and say, “Might we prioritize it this way? Could we say it this way?” And this way, we are working together as partners on the ultimate result.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to zoom in now in terms of, let’s say, there’s not a big high-stakes negotiation per se coming up for a professional, but this is sparking some things for people, like, “You know what? I would like to have more in my job maybe in terms of flexibility, or learning and development, or any number of things that’s kind of outside the big, I don’t know, promotion, raise, cycle, or new job opportunity.” You’re sort of, hey, you’ve been in a job for a while and there are some things you like, any pro tips on broaching that topic with your boss and leadership to maximize the odds they’ll say yes?

Alex Carter
Absolutely. So, this is advice I give normally but I think is especially apt during a pandemic. I would choose your timing carefully. And I mean that from two angles. First, I would consider what’s going on for the other person. What do they have coming down this week? Right now is a time, I think about myself, here it is we’re recording this mid-August, and I’m staring down the barrel at a fall semester. I’m not sure what’s happening with my teaching at Columbia. I think I’m virtual. Not sure what’s happening with my fourth grader.

If somebody came to me the moment that my school released its plan, and ask me for something, I’m not going to have the bandwidth to consider it properly. So, think about what’s going on for them, earnings, whatever it might be, time it from that perspective. I would also think about timing from your perspective. What’s going to be the best timing to increase your leverage? Did you just deliver on something early? Did you just achieve a great result? Your boss says, “Pete, this was an unbelievable job.” That could be a great moment to say, “Thanks so much. I enjoyed working on this. And while I have you, I’d love to get some time on your calendar to talk about my future at the company and where I would love to be in a few years.” So, taking that opportunity at the most propitious timing to setup the conversation.

I would also try to do something where you can see each other’s faces. We’re virtual, and so the temptation is “Do I do it email? Do I do it by phone?” If you’re having an important conversation, body language is data, and I want you to have as much data as possible about what the other person is thinking, so I would do that.

My last tip for asking, especially right now, is to frame it in a particular way. So, when I’m helping people to make their ask for the greatest success, I tell them to execute what I call an I-we. In other words, “Here’s what I’m requesting, and here’s how we all benefit.” In other words, when you have started your negotiation and steered your relationship with your manager, by asking questions, by getting to know them, you have now figured out how to frame what you need in a way that it’s also going to meet their needs, right? “So, if you put me on this project that I’ve been asking for, here’s how I’m going to be able to contribute toward your success,” that type of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s excellent. You know, I’m reminded of Robert Cialdini’s book Pre-suasion there in terms of like the moment, like what happens just before the conversation starts can make a world of difference.

Alex Carter
Huge.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So, I know they’re not secret weapons. It’s not where the action is. Nonetheless, I would love it if you could share with us, what are a few maybe bits of verbiage or scripts, some do’s or don’ts in terms of, “Hey, I hear people say this. Don’t say that,” or, “I don’t hear people say this, and you should say that.”

Alex Carter
Okay. And that’s okay, Pete, I use my weapons for good. I do have a secret weapon, and it’s actually not about saying this or saying that. It’s about the opposite. It’s about shutting up.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Alex Carter
The importance of silence in negotiation. In my book, I teach people three words that I want them to commit to memory and use in every negotiation as a guiding principle. And the three words are “land the plane.” When you make your point, when you ask a question, when you deliver a proposal, deliver it and then land the plane, close your mouth.

Too often, I see people get nervous about the silence, and so they rush in to fill it with a bunch of words that leaves them bidding against themselves or assuming what the other person might say. So, in other words, Pete, what do you need to get this done here today? Would $10,000 do it? No, you don’t know what Pete needed, right? Maybe he needed five, and you overpaid. Maybe he needed mentorship or a path to advancement. In other words, say what you’re going to say and land the plane.

Silence is not an imposition. It’s actually a gift to the other person. It gives them time to think and it prevents you from selling yourself short. Sometimes the less you say the better.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. I imagine in terms of I’ve seen it both ways in terms of me saying more than I should, and others that I’m talking to like they share numbers, like, “You know, if that’s manageable…” they’re just sort of like weakens it after the fact. I mean, I know things are hard right now with the COVID, but as opposed to saying, “$200,000 sounds…” and then they can weigh in on that in terms of like, “Boy, that is just really way more than we have in mind. That’s going to be challenging for us to pull off,” versus, “Okay, I understand what’s at stakes and I’ll see what we can do.”

Alex Carter
And may I say, if they answered you and say, “That’s going to be challenging for us to pull off,” great job. That is great information for you to have. First of all, it means you didn’t sell yourself short. And, second, let’s say you get that, because I think, Pete, sometimes people talk and talk and talk because they’re afraid of getting the no, and so they’re trying to eat the silence up with their words at the negotiation table.

Don’t ever fear the no again because I’m going to give you four words that you can use when you get a no. Are you ready? Here are the words: “What are your concerns?” That’s it. When somebody says, “You know, I think this is going to be hard for us to pull off,” say, “Okay, thanks for letting me know. What are your concerns?” Because, frequently, if you hear somebody’s concerns, you’re going to find a way to address those.

So, have the courage to allow the silence, and know that on the other end of that, if somebody expresses a hesitation, you have a tool you can use in the moment, simply ask their concerns, play their concerns back, summarize them, and then, more often than not, you’re going to know where the target is that you need to hit, and turn that no into a yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re right, because concerns can be any number of things. Like, “That can be challenging,” might mean, “Well, hey, we’re paying someone else for doing almost the same thing 170K, so it seems a little disruptive or more about fairness to pay a new person significantly more to do the same thing.” And I don’t know if this is good or bad, but maybe a solution that could be, “Oh. Well, if it’d make you more comfortable, I’m happy to sign something indicating that I will not disclose my compensation to anybody.” Of course, that’s a whole another controversial issue in terms of information flows and how that impacts different populations. But that’s an example of a solution that might be way easier than you thought. Like, “Oh, it’s not so much that they’re broke, but it’s something completely different.”

Alex Carter
I got to tell you, Pete, marketing my book during a pandemic, I’ve become a specialist in turning no into a yes. When you think about it, one of the things that I lined up was dozens and dozens of in-person speaking engagements, and that was going to be a way for me to get the word out there and for people to buy the book. All of those canceled obviously. And over and over again, I heard people say, “Yeah, we’re canceling this event, and we’re not doing something virtual.”

Every single time I’ve called up and said, “What are your concerns?” And over and over again, people said things like, “Well, we’ve never done it before. We’re not sure how to do something that’s going to be productive over Zoom.” “Great. Would it be helpful if we jumped on and I showed you what I have in mind?” Or, “We’re not sure our employees are going to want it.” “Okay, how might you find that out?” They’re like, “All right, we can do a survey.” It turns out, they really want it.

Over and over again there are concerns that, when we met them, it wasn’t like me getting over on them, Pete. In every case, we produced something that was of mutual value and people actually thanked me afterward. The truth is that even with a no, you can ask people about their concerns, you can preserve the relationship, you can strengthen the relationship, and you can still get what you need out of the deal.

Pete Mockaitis
And the thing I love about that particular phraseology of the question “What are your concerns?” is it’s just very helpful. Like, you’re being of service as opposed to “What’s your problem? What’s the issue, man?” Like, those get after the same information but it doesn’t land nearly as productive as “What are your concerns? I’m trying to help.”

Alex Carter
Yeah, “What’s your problem?” has not gotten me the best results. Yeah, I mostly use that one at home, to be honest.

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

Alex Carter
Yes, I would like people to know, if there’s anybody out there listening who thinks “Negotiation is not for me because I’m not the most aggressive person in the room,” or, “Maybe I’m an introvert,” or, “I’m somebody who prioritizes my relationships,” I want you to know that all of those things can make you a great negotiator. That, really, if you’re somebody who is a good listener, you’re somebody who gains people’s trust, and you’re somebody who prioritizes relationships, all you need are the right questions, and you’re going to be absolutely fantastic, I promise you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s some favorite things. Can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alex Carter
Yes. So, a few years ago I had a student who changed my life. He was a mid-career lawyer, my age, in his early 40s, who came over from India for a year of study at Columbia, and he told me that his life’s motto is “Only do what only you can do.” And I took that onboard. And at that time, Pete, I was supposed to write a textbook. I had gotten an offer from a really prestigious legal corporation to write a textbook, and I thought, “This is what I should do. I’m a law professor.”

But then I thought about that, “Is this what only I can do?” And I thought, “No, it’s not. There are lots of people who can write textbooks. What I think only I can do, what I think I’m called to do, and what I love doing, is taking negotiation concepts from law school and making them accessible to everyday people in their lives.” That is what only I can do. And when I leaned into that, that’s when I started writing what would become “Ask for More.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that quote also just sparks so many things, like “I should be outsourcing.”

Alex Carter
It is. It’s a way to think about managing your time. When I think about the range of tasks I could embark on in a day, is this what only I can do? And if it’s not, somebody else is better served to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m thinking about how my email inbox has gotten out of control, and I think 90% of those messages can be handled by others. I’ve just been a little slow to let go. What about privacy? What about honesty and respect and integrity? But these are navigable issues. And if that’s your mantra, I would have solved this long ago.

Okay. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Alex Carter
Gosh. Well, I think my favorite bit of research is the study done by Professor Leigh Thompson out of the Kellogg School at Northwestern that found 93% of people are not asking the questions they need to get the most out of negotiations. I remember the day I read that study, it hit me and it accorded perfectly with what I see as a mediator and a negotiation trainer. And that was part of what gave me the impetus to go on and teach about the incredible power of open questions.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Alex Carter
I wouldn’t be an author if I weren’t totally in love with my own book, Ask for More: 10 Questions to Negotiate Anything. I would say, other than that, a book that I’ve been reading recently is The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Claim Their Seat at the Table by Minda Harts. Minda is an incredibly powerful woman who speaks directly to women of color in the workplace. And I remember the day I heard her speak, I picked up the book, and it’s had incredible learnings for me even as a white person in the workplace, how I can work together with my sisters of color to create the kind of workplace that we all want to exist.

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

Alex Carter
My favorite tool. My husband would probably say my iPhone. But my number one tool that I use, to be honest, is my eyes. I think you would think that negotiation is all about listening to the words. I find that most of the negotiation is me looking at people and taking in what their faces and their bodies are saying. Most of negotiation is what’s between the words in the things that people are holding back or are not giving themselves permission to say. And so, the more that I can see people, and really see them for who they are, the more effectively I can do my job and help get them to where they want to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, there’s a whole another podcast episode in here, and we’ve done it once with agent Joe Navarro from the FBI on body language. But are there one or two indicators that you found are reliable and show up a lot, “Like, when they do this with their eyes, or their mouth, or their hands, that tends to mean this, and thus, it’s very informative”?

Alex Carter
So, Pete, the biggest tip I can give people is to get to know the person you’re negotiating with and observe what’s called their baseline. So, in other words, Pete, if your default is to kind of sit back in your chair, and then I say something, and, all of a sudden, you lean forward, I know that I’ve just had an impact on you. So, any kind of changes from the baseline are things that I notice.

The other big thing I see is people censor their emotions but it comes out in their body language. Most frequently, I see people telling me yes while they are shaking their head no.

Pete Mockaitis
We can do that for you, Alex.

Alex Carter
Right. People are like, “Yeah, that sounds great,” and you can’t see me, everyone, but I’m shaking my head vigorously back and forth. I see it a shocking number of times. And when I do, I simply say, “You know, Pete, your words are telling me yes, but your face is telling me no. So, let’s talk. What are your concerns?” And, usually, that…I treat everything, Pete, a shake of the head, people repeatedly touching a necklace or a piece of clothing, a tremor, I treat…What’s that?

Pete Mockaitis
The suprasternal notch below the neck.

Alex Carter
The suprasternal notch. The necklace is very often important. I’ve broken through negotiations just based on the necklace. All of that stuff tells you a story and I treat it like communication, and I raise it with people.

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

Alex Carter
I practice yoga for the sanity of myself and the sanity of those people around me. When I practice yoga, it’s a chance for me to be completely present in the moment, and I find that that presence, being there every moment and nowhere else is key to being successful at helping people in negotiation.

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

Alex Carter
Yeah. So, a lot of times people will tell me they’re nervous to hold themselves out as an expert or to ask for more because they’re concerned about if they stand up as an expert, does that leave less for other people? And I want you to know that when you ask for more, you benefit other people. When you ask for more in your job, you make sure that your manager gets your best, most fired-up version every day at work. When you ask for more at home, and ask for what you need, your partner, your kids, your loved ones get the most present and fulfilled person possible. Ignoring who you are and ignoring your needs helps no one. And everybody benefits when you ask for more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love that so much, and I just watched this movie, it’s been around for a while, but we got Paul Rudd and Reese Witherspoon in “How Do You Know?”

Alex Carter
I love Paul Rudd.

Pete Mockaitis
Everything he does is good. And she drops into, Tony Shalhoub plays a psychiatrist, and she’s like, “So, is there like generally anything that you generally tell people that generally works for everyone?” And he said, this is so wise from a movie, from a comedy, he said, “Figure out what you really want and learn how to ask for it.” It’s like, “Huh, that’s some real wisdom from this comedy. Right on.”

Alex Carter
It’s true. And that, in a nutshell, is what I teach. The first part of that is really figuring out what you want, not what somebody else wants for you, what you want, what’s going to make your life worthwhile, and then figuring out how to ask for that thing.

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

Alex Carter
Sure. So, I’d love for people to get in touch on my website which is AlexCarterAsks.com. You can also find me on Instagram @alexandrabcarter, on LinkedIn, and, very reluctantly, on Twitter.

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

Alex Carter
Yes. I want you to try to go out and get a no. I want you to strive for the no before the end of the year because, in doing so, I know you’re going to come back to me and tell me that you got more yeses than you could ever think possible.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alex, this has been a treat. I wish you all the best in all the ways you’re asking for more.

Alex Carter
Pete, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much.