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

May 21
0

572: How Morning Practices Like Savoring and Investing in Calm Boost Productivity with Chris Bailey

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Productivity THOUGHT LEADER(!) Chris Bailey shares how investing in your calm can boost your productivity and how savoring the little things every day can help you start your day right.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How calm provides the greatest return on productivity
  2. Why you shouldn’t feel guilty over being less productive now
  3. How and why to savor

About Chris

Chris Bailey is a productivity expert, and the international bestselling author of Hyperfocus and The Productivity Project—which have been published in seventeen languages. Chris writes about productivity at Alifeofproductivity.com, and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive, without hating the process. To date, he has written hundreds of articles on the subject of productivity, and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, The Huffington Post, Harvard Business Review, GQ, TED, Fortune, Fast Company, and Lifehacker. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Chris Bailey Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome back to the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Chris Bailey
You have me back.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s number three. That’s pretty rare. Far too rare.

Chris Bailey
Wow, really?

Pete Mockaitis
Did you forget one already?

Chris Bailey
Huh, I think I was asleep through one of them and intoxicated. No, I’m kidding. It’s good to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s good to have you back. And, boy, in the meantime, from my stalking of you because I wasn’t invited, you know, not a problem, I see you got married. Hey, congratulations.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, you can see the ring in the video.

Pete Mockaitis
That too.

Chris Bailey
Thank you for the congrats. It’s fun. It’s been fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I just imagined that your wedding was a star-studded event full of productivity giants which is why it was odd that my invitation didn’t come through the mail.

Chris Bailey
You know, my wife and I, we’re pretty cheap. Frugal. Cheap has negative connotations. We’re frugal so we just had like a dinner party.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no kidding.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, because we thought, “Man, we should put this money towards a house or something rather than a wedding.” And so that’s what we did. It’s hard to keep wedding costs down because you order the same service. The first time you tell them you’re having a wedding. The second time, you don’t. The wedding quote is twice as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I noticed that. I was tempted to see, “How can I not lie?” It’s like, “We’re having a family gathering. Families are gathering.”

Chris Bailey
Two families, specifically, gathering and combining. We’ll pay a third of the price for that photographer and that photo booth, it turns out.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, that’s wild because they know they can get you. And so, well, you’re married and I want to get your quick take. So, you’re a productivity thought leader.

Chris Bailey
Oh, no, please don’t say that.

Pete Mockaitis
You lead thoughts. What has been like sort of the marital adjustment in terms of how does it feel different?

Chris Bailey
Well, you know, Pete, life as a thought leader is challenging during the best of times, let alone when you’re trying to introduce thought leadership into a new…oh, man, I feel like such a douche right now. But I don’t know, it’s fun. In a way, nothing has changed but, I guess, legally, pretty much everything has changed. We’re both pretty productive. I think the biggest thing that’s changed lately is how our routines are integrated into one another.

I think pretty much everybody on the planet has the same situation that they’re facing where maybe they work with their loved ones, maybe they’re not newly-weds and so their work situation is becoming more challenging perhaps. And we’re all trying to find a new normal right now amidst the virus shakeup, the great shutdown, the hibernation, whatever you want to call it. We’re all trying to find new routines.

So, we settled into a nice routine of working from home around one another. I have my office which makes things a bit easier for me, but she has her own system of doing focused work in her desk area. So, I don’t know, we’re having fun, we’re dealing with the challenges, and we’re just having a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. Well, so I caught your name in the Washington Post, nice job, thought leader. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, let’s get Chris again,” because, yeah, we’re in a new world for awhile here. And we’ve had a couple people with sort of episodes kind of really particular COVID-focused and then just a smattering of COVID tidbits and some others. But I want to get your take on, alright, so we’re in this environment where there’s a virus raging, there’s some restrictions and limitations. Some folks are really gung-ho, like, “This is going to be my moment to do this stuff,” and other people are saying, “No way. There’s such a mental load. I’m going to do almost nothing.” How do you think about this?

Chris Bailey
I think everybody is different, and that’s a terrible answer that nobody wants to hear, but the fact of the matter is everybody’s situation is different during a time like this. And productivity is so often a process of understanding the constraints inside of which we live and work. And in a situation like this, everybody’s constraints are changing overnight, and we all had different ones to begin with. So, what we’re seeing right now, it’s a word that isn’t mentioned enough, but privilege. Those of us who have cushier jobs where we’re able to work from home, we’re not experiencing the economic brunt of the crisis that’s going on.

Something else is kids. Our lives are structured, we don’t have kids at the time, but our lives are structured around families and daycares and schools, and those kids existing in a system that isn’t our home during the day when we’re trying to work from home. And so, I think a question like this, you know, there are a lot of posts flying around right now, “Oh, make the best of your quarantine time. Don’t gain the quarantine 15. Lose the quarantine…How to stay productive, how to write the great American novel whilst in quarantine.”

These things totally miss the mark. They don’t get the fact that, “Okay, maybe my situation is different from yours, which is different from the situation of a single working mother with three kids, which is different from the situation of a retiree, somebody who lives in an old-age home, whatever.” Everybody’s situation is different.

And so, I think we have to, A, realize that we’re all operating under different constraints, and, B, not feel guilty about how we’re spending our time right now, because the simple truth and the fact of the matter is some of us are struggling, and that’s okay. It’s okay if you find it hard to be productive right now. It’s okay if you find it hard to focus. It’s okay if caffeine is no longer working for you for some reason. It’s okay if you feel a bit anxious. These feelings are universal and we do need coping strategies for these, but we do need to take care of ourselves at the same time.

People talk of the importance of self-care in the normal-est of times because it’s just a topic that we need to hear and practice, but it’s so much more important right now. And so, in a way, I think I’m a bit fed up with people giving too much productivity advice right now, saying that we should make the best of this time while they don’t recognize the fact that everybody is going through something different right now, and maybe that works for them but maybe not for everybody else.

Pete Mockaitis
Yup.

Chris Bailey
Sorry, rant over.

Pete Mockaitis
No, that resonates. It’s absolutely true. We’ve all got a different situation and sometimes it’s a more dramatic change for some than others. I’m still working from home in my home office, which is what I was doing before the pandemic, although there’s different things going on in the family and kid situation. And so, I think that’s a great word right there in terms of it’s okay and it’s normal to be experiencing those sorts of things. So, I’d like to know, that’s one mistake is beating yourself up. Another mistake is providing one-size-fits-all prescriptive advice. What are some of the other don’ts or mistakes you recommend we avoid as we’re trying to stay productive during this time?

Chris Bailey
I think trying to push yourself too hard. It’s something that I’m quickly realizing during a time like this because I’m feeling anxious just like most other people. I have parents who are getting a bit older. I’m connected. My wife has asthma so she’s definitely one of the more vulnerable people in a situation like this.

I think something we need to realize right now is that the path to greater productivity during a time like this is through calm, right? By investing in our calm, we’re able to invest in our sense of productivity at the same time. And the reason for this is our minds are so anxious, they’re so revved up, mine is anxious just like everybody else is. In a time like this, when there’s so much chaos flying around us in our mental and our physical environments, it’s often a settled mind that we need more than almost anything else.

So, the path of productivity is through the lens of calm. And so, if there’s another mistake that we’re making, A, we’re not being kind enough to ourselves, B, we’re trying too hard to be productive, but, C, we’re not investing enough in calm, and there are multiple ways of doing this. One of my favorites that I’ve started to do each and every morning is investing in the analog world. When we’re spending our days inside, we tend to gravitate towards screens. We tend to gravitate to what’s latest and loudest at the expense of slowing down a little bit, and maybe disconnecting a little bit, and being kind to ourselves, and being patient with ourselves, and doing something slow with our time.

So, that’s something that I think is worth getting across. In addition to self-kindness, in addition to taking it easy with your productivity a little bit, invest in calm more than you think you ought to because that’s often…that’s one of the greatest returns on our productivity. And here’s the ruler stick against which we should be measuring our productivity advice today, is, “For every minute we spend on a piece of productivity advice, how much time does that allow us to make back?”

And so, some things, watching Netflix, for every minute you spend watching Netflix, you probably lose about a minute of productivity because that’s the opportunity cost of watching that. Maybe you’re a bit less motivated after the fact and so, you actually lose more time than you spend. But other strategies like planning out our day is a really good example of this. For every minute you spend planning out your day, you make back 5-10 minutes of productivity because of how much more focused you’re able to work.

In an environment as chaotic as the one in which we’re finding ourselves today, calm actually produces a remarkably high return on our time because trying to work with an anxious mind, it’s a struggle to focus, it’s a struggle to pay attention, it’s a struggle to think deeply, and do deep work, and hyper-focus on what’s important each and every day. But it’s calm that provides us with the greatest return. So, maybe that trifecta of ideas might help people out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when it comes to investing in calm, I’d love to hear, I guess there’s many ways you can do that. Let’s rattle them off. So, you’re doing some analog stuff, you’re doing some non-screen stuff, what are these things?

Chris Bailey
I think the analog world is key to spend more time in. And here’s the thing, a lot of people think calm is a passive thing, like, “Oh, I have a few minutes to spare. Let me go on Twitter. Let me check the New York Times. Let me hop on the Washington Post and see what thought leaders are saying about this current pandemic crisis.” But this is our impulse because we gravitate again to what’s latest and loudest, but it’s not necessarily right. And, by the way, we shouldn’t beat ourselves up over that. It’s our natural impulse to gravitate to what’s latest and loudest. But maybe a good way of phrasing this is that we deserve better than we’re giving ourselves.

We deserve like genuine, true relaxation. We don’t deserve Twitter. We deserve more than Twitter. We deserve more than the news. We deserve more than Facebook right now. And so, a good place to start is realizing that calm, acquiring calm, is often an active process. It doesn’t just waff over us. We have to go and seek it out and invest a little bit in it.

And so, I’m kind of an antisocial person. In the best of times, I’m always trying to find excuses not to hang out with people, “Oh, I’d love to grab a drink tonight, Pete, but I have to go to bed early and wake up early the first thing in the morning.” But the truth is, after I spend time with people, I realize, “Oh, there was nothing to be anxious about. And, oh, it took a little bit of energy to get started with a tactic like that, but I was all the more calm for it.” And I think this is something we need to keep in mind right now, is it’s often through actively investing in relaxation strategies that we get the most calm.

And so, anything that allows us to reconnect with the fact that we’re human is a wonderful wellspring of calm. So, meditation, just focusing on our breath, it’s a simple reminder that we’re human, but it’s a beautiful one. Exercise, something we’re probably not getting enough of if we’re in a situation where we can step back a little bit from the current situation and invest in that. Eating good food, proper food that our bodies evolved to thrive in, not processed stuff, that actually elevates our cortisol levels, which is the hormone that our body produces in response to stressful situations. So, simple things like that. Finding something to savor each and every day.

So, I’m drinking a protein shake right now, as you can see, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re savoring it.

Chris Bailey
Savoring the hell out of this thing because it’s this delicious concoction – Vega Protein Shake. Not only are they vegan, if you’re into that, but they also have only one gram of sugar yet they’re chocolate-flavored. They contain a lot of cocoa so I like to savor that. But find one thing to savor each and every day. It’s an active process, and you think, “Man, why don’t I just savor stuff? Why do I have to make a task, a job out of it?” But the truth is you’ll get so much more out of what you’re savoring when you make a deliberate effort to do so.

No cheeseburger will be as delicious as the one you focus on with 100% of your attention because you’re trying to savor the heck out of it. No protein shake will be as delicious and energizing. No conversation will be as engrossing as the one you’re in completely. And so, this is something that we need to find. Engagement is a salve for anxiety, and so when we find things to be engaged with, not only do we become more productive, we also find calm, we also are able to settle down a little bit, become a bit happier, and enjoy the process of doing things.

One other thing that I’ll mention, at the risk of going too long on this answer but I think it’ll be helpful for people, is we walk around so often with a productivity mindset. And so, what I mean by this is we’re always looking to tick boxes, we’re always looking to get things done, and we never really let up with this mindset. So, when we find ourselves with a bit of time during which we can relax, instead of doing something that is genuinely relaxing, we realize, “Oh, we have just a few minutes of time. Let’s vege out.” When, really, intentional relaxation is what we need during which we set aside this productivity mindset when we’re trying to accomplish things.

And when we deliberately set aside this mindset, it abolishes the guilt that we would normally feel that comes along with active relaxation. So, we have this guilt of relaxation that often arises when we do something that allows us to invest in our calm, which is kind of ironic because when calm allows us to become more productive, we shouldn’t feel guilty about how we’re spending our time, and yet we do. And so, do minus productivity mindset. And the savor list, and the things that I was just mentioning, they do help combat this certain mindset because instead of trying to tick a box, we try to enjoy and experience a moment that we’re having.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, there’s a lot of good stuff there. You’re a real thought leader.

Chris Bailey
Sorry, that’s like a loaded suitcase that you now have to unpack.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I dig it. Well, so then let’s talk about, alright, the process of savoring. So, you could savor a conversation, you could savor a glass of wine or a chocolate protein shake, a song, music, a sensation, a massage.

Chris Bailey
What song are you savoring right now?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a fine question. You know, I’ve actually been saving just some select nostalgic silly songs that remind me of happy times and laughter and friendship. So, it might be like Death Cab For Cutie “The Sound of Settling” for example.

Chris Bailey
Oh, that’s a classic tune.

Pete Mockaitis
It brings me back to college and my roommate and just like being silly, and it’s like, “Oh, those are fun times.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, how does one savor?

Chris Bailey
Well, what’s something in your life that you enjoy?

Pete Mockaitis
I enjoy hanging out with my kids.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. So, how do you savor something like that? You bring your full attention to it. That’s it. We savor things automatically when we bring our full attention to them. And, also, when we notice what’s good about the things that we’re paying attention to. And so, this might sound like the corniest thing in the world, but it actually does work. Savoring things in gratitude trains our mind into looking for more opportunities that surround us.

So, I like savoring my morning cup of tea. I have a whole tea process. I’m a fan of Oolong tea and so I have a fancy kettle where I can make the perfect temperature for Oolong. It’s kind of like a green tea. By the way, the reason people don’t like green tea is not that green tea tastes bad. Everybody is like, “Oh, green tea tastes so bitter.” The reason green tea tastes bitter is you’re burning it. Green tea is meant to be steeped at around, I think it’s 80 degrees Celsius boiling water, around 100.

So, that’s step zero, get the tea at the right temperature. But in the morning, I just sit. I have a hanging chair in my living room that I got from Wayfair, and it kind of swings back and forth. And I’ve usually just woken up, so I wake up, I walk over to the kettle, I steep myself a nice cup of tea, and then I bring it over to the hanging chair, and I just simply try to enjoy the taste of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Don’t spill on yourself in the hanging chair.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, try not to sway too much or bump into something in my tired stupor. But a bit of sway never hurt anybody, as the old saying goes, and so I just kind of sway a little bit and enjoy that cup of tea, noticing the flavor. I think another key to savoring is to notice as much as you can, because when something is a desirable experience, the more you notice, the more you’re able to savor. So, notice as much as you can, bring your full attention to something, look for the things that are worth savoring embedded within an experience.

I don’t think there is anything in the world that cannot be savored. And that might sound like an odd statement because there’s a lot of negative things in the world, but savoring is all about a mindset. By God, Pete, there are these twisted people that derive pleasure from pain. If we can derive pleasure from pain, we can learn to savor pretty much anything. That’s not to say that there aren’t genuine challenges. That’s not to say that we should be placing rose-colored glasses over our entire life, neglecting reality, but this is to say that no matter the time, no matter the circumstance, we can always find something to enjoy deeply even.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I buy it. I was just thinking earlier about finding joy, and that I’m going to be proactively seeking it out, and noting it, and celebrating it, and express some gratitude for it, so that aligns much of what I’m thinking.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. And something that people can do right away. Make a list of everything you savor. And you don’t need to think into the future. Look into your past. What experiences have you had that have enveloped you completely that you found just really enjoyable? Was it a conversation with a certain friend that always seems to draw you in? Was it a cup of tea? Was it a favorite sushi meal from a place that you frequent?

Make a list of everything that you savor. Every day pick one. Treat yourself. And by savoring things deliberately, it’s a nice way of finding calm. You don’t even need to do anything hard with this strategy. You don’t need to focus on your breath for half an hour on a meditation cushion, for God’s sake. You just have to do something you enjoy and bring your full attention to it completely. Do it a bit slower so it goes on for longer. It’s nice. It’s just a nice thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so think that’s a great practice to do daily and always. I’d love to hear, if you were to zoom in to the moment in which, all right, some stuff needs to get done pretty soon, and we’re not feeling it. We are not in that groove but we kind of got to get into that groove kind of fast, savoring is a good kind of long-term strategy. What do you recommend for, in the here and now, we got to shake off the funk, how do you do it?

Chris Bailey
Patience is how you do it. We can become engaged with pretty much anything. That’s kind of the point of meditation. You learn to be able to focus on your breath because the idea is the breath is so boring. It’s more boring than watching paint dry, and our mind actively wanders away from it. And so, if we can focus on our breath and become engaged with our breath, we can become engaged with pretty much anything. But we do need to be patient with ourselves as we settle into certain tasks.

So, if you’re working up to something, a big task, say, you’re writing a report that your mind is finding really aversive, warm up to it. Maybe set a timer for 10 minutes and give yourself the choice, either work on that thing or do nothing. Your mind will settle down naturally and you will be able to warm up to something. So, start with that ugly task if you want, but you can also start with smaller tasks ahead of doing that so you don’t need to do that report right away. But maybe just answer a few emails first, maybe start with something that doesn’t require your full attention, and warm up to doing that thing.

Also, pay attention because anxiety, these days, is not consistent. Usually, it ebbs and flows over the course of the day, and there will be times of your day, for me it’s the morning, although I’ve gotten better, kind of managing things as the pandemic has worn on. For me, it’s the morning though, or at least it was at the beginning, where that was my calmest time of the day, and the anxiety would come later on in the day when I would tune in to the press conferences du jour here in Canada.

And so, I would take advantage of that morning calm by doing the focus work, the hyperfocus work, the deep work, that there was a struggle much of the rest of the time. And so, align the difficulty and complexity of the work you’re doing on top of how you’re feeling throughout the day, and that’s one of the biggest piece of advice that I can give, not only it lets become kinder to yourself, but it lets you warm up to more productive tasks, and also it lets you get more productive tasks done as you become more patient with yourself. You’ll probably need a bit of time for certain tasks but do take it.

Also, know how you start the morning. It matters more than almost anything else. So, distraction begets distraction, stimulation begets stimulation, so the more stimulated and distracted we become, the more we want to continue with that level of stimulation. So, what this means though is if you start the morning on a slow note, if you do something that calms you, if you find something to savor, hey, call back to the previous tactic. Find something to savor first thing in the morning. Play with your kids for half an hour, set a timer, whatever you need to do.

If you find something to savor first thing instead of just checking the news, you’ll find that you’ll become calmer automatically, and that it’ll be easier to focus when you delay the time of first check, because once you get caught into the rabbit hole, you want to just keep going. But if you start the day on a calm note, your mind won’t want to escalate how you’re feeling and it’ll be easier to find calm in a situation like that.

So, when you start calm, you stay calm, but do give yourself a bit of time to warm up to certain tasks, overlay the complexity of work to how you’re feeling if you find that how you’re feeling fluctuates quite a bit still.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Chris, tell me, any final thoughts before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Chris Bailey
You deserve better than to distract yourself right now. And this is a lesson that it’s easy advice to give but it’s something that I’m continually re-learning. We need to reflect on how our behaviors these days, more than almost any other day, what emotions they lead us to feel. So, we tend to gravitate to apps like Instagram and other distractions when we’re resisting how we’re feeling in the present moment, almost like an escape hatch in a way.

Mind the escape hatches of your day and pay attention especially to how you feel after you indulge in them because it’s sometimes with a bit of extra work that we find tasks that are slightly more challenging. For me, practicing the piano is more challenging than going on Instagram, but the feeling that I have after a session of playing the piano, after a session of knitting, after taking a bath, the feeling after these strategies, when I compare them to Instagram, or Twitter, or email, or YouTube even, they’re not even close. They produce more calm. They produce more relaxation. They produce less anxiety. They produce more happiness.

Pay attention to how you feel after indulging in the activities that are habits, have always been habits, to these days more than any. And, now, these days, habits aren’t the same as they were before. If you check up on the news first thing in the morning, usually you weren’t depressed the rest of the day, but if you find that you stumble upon a couple of, frankly, depressing stories each morning, it might be a bad way to start the day.

There was one study that was connected, I believe, by Shawn Achor, he’s an author and a happiness researcher, where he exposed participants to just, I think, three or four minutes of negative news the very thing in the morning after people woke up. And when he measured participants’ levels of happiness six to eight hours later, he found that the group that experienced that negative news was 27% less likely to rate themselves as being happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Chris Bailey
Wow, what a reminder that the information we consume matters, and that we need to mind the quality of it these days more than almost any other.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And, now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Chris Bailey
Well, I don’t know where this quote came from. I don’t think I stumbled upon it myself, just something, a thought of mine, but my favorite quote that I think about a lot is “Why do anything if you’re not going to do it right?” I love that, and it speaks to pride of what we do, of our actions, of our work, of what we say, of how we act towards others, and make others feel throughout the day too.

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

Chris Bailey
Oh, I’d find it funny if I did this. This is the third interview and I’ve mentioned three different favorite books.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we want that. Well, actually, keep it coming.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, let’s do “How Not to Die” by Michael Greger. I probably haven’t mentioned this before but it’s one that I’m re-reading. It’s one that I think is worth re-reading every few years. And it’s about the foods that we need to eat in order to live the longest, that are all validated by science. And here’s, again, the golden measurement for any productivity tactic, how much time do you get back. By God, this book might save you 10 or 20 years of your life by extending it by that much, so I can’t think of a better productivity book than that.

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

Chris Bailey
Well, we just bought a drill…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, good choice.

Chris Bailey
…for home reno projects. But this clicky keyboard, this mechanical keyboard I would recommend…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ve seen those.

Chris Bailey
…to almost anyone. This is the… I don’t remember the exact model. Oh, it’s on the bottom here. The Keychron K2 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard. And it’s these beautiful cherry brown switches that are like chocolate to write on, and it’s beautiful. It’s rich. It’s just a wonderful writing experience. I would equate, if you do a lot of writing throughout the day. Have you ever played a piano, Pete, in your life?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah.

Chris Bailey
Yeah. You know, those like really crappy keyboard pianos where you press down and there’s no weight, and you think, “Oh, I’m just flipping a digital switch somewhere in the system, and it’s playing a sound through the speakers.” That’s what a regular keyboard feels like to me after enjoying the experience of a mechanical keyboard. It’s like upgrading from one of those crappy keyboards with no weight behind it to a grand piano. It’s all about the feeling. What you write matters more when you write it on a mechanical keyboard.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. And how about a favorite nugget?

Chris Bailey
Oh, man, probably productivity is the product of our time, attention, and energy. That’s one of them. And, also, the state of our attention determines the state of our lives. Those are probably the top two. There’s probably others. I have to look that up. I’m curious.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, right on.

Chris Bailey
Hey.

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

Chris Bailey
Well, there are a few places. My books are called “Hyperfocus” and “The Productivity Project.” I have a podcast now that I do with my wife called Becoming Better which we have a blast doing. And my website is called A Life of Productivity. There’s no ads, no sponsorships, just hopefully helpful productivity advice and one annoying newsletter popup.

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

Chris Bailey
Notice how different apps make you feel, the ones that you spend time on throughout the day. So, sometimes we’re on Instagram or Snapchat and we kind of scroll over to the wrong side of the app, and we see the selfie camera fire up, we usually don’t have like a huge gleeful expression on our face, like, “Oh, I’m on Instagram. What a wonderful time in my day and in my life.” We usually have kind of a dull stimulated look on our face because we’re not tuned in to how we feel when we’re using technology and when we’re engaged in certain activities.

I would say mind how you feel when you engage in your digital world this week, today even, to start after listening to this podcast. How do you feel after checking Twitter? How do you feel after checking the New York Times or the Washington Post? Mind that and change your behavior based on that. It’s one of the biggest and best weeks that we can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, this has been a treat. I wish you all the best in your life of productivity.

Chris Bailey
Thank you. You, too.

May 18
0

571: How to Crush Self-Doubt and Build Self-Confidence with Dr. Ivan Joseph

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Dr. Ivan Joseph discusses the critical practices that build unshakeable self-confidence.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The fundamental building block of self-confidence
  2. How to control the negative tape in your head
  3. A powerful trick for overcoming impostor syndrome

About Ivan

Dr. Ivan Joseph an award-winning Performance Coach, Sports Psychologist, author and recognized educator and mentor. His TEDx talk on self-confidence – with over 18 million views to date – has been selected by Forbes magazine as one of the 10 Best TED Talks about the Meaning of Life. 

Dr. Joseph travels extensively around the world to speak to organizations and teams about the power of self-confidence in leadership, career, sports and life – and how to build high-performing teams that exceed expectations. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Ivan Joseph Interview Transcript

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

Ivan Joseph
Thanks for having me, Pete. Appreciate it. Looking forward to this conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m looking forward to this conversation as well. And I have to chuckle a little bit. So, your book is called You Got This: Mastering the Skill of Self-Confidence and I couldn’t resist sharing that my mother really hates the phrase “you got this.” And I want to hear if you’ve heard that before.

Ivan Joseph
Yes, indeed. In fact, I’m looking behind you in your bookshelf to see if you have it. I don’t see it back there, so, clearly, your mother has won the day.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve clicked in depth on your virtual version, so. So, yeah, tell me, what’s…I’ll tell you my mom’s take, but what are you hearing in terms of the pushback on the title?

Ivan Joseph
You know, there’s two things. People say it’s really catchy, and they love it. It’s easy and it’s a good affirmation for themselves. And then some folks say, “Oh, man, I wish it wasn’t so contemporary and so pop culture-ish.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, pop culture-ish. Well, I kind of like it. I think the first time I heard the phrase was in a movie or something, I was like, “Ooh, yeah, that resonates.” But I think my mom, it’s the specific context in which someone’s on social media, they’re sharing like a real challenge, like someone has cancer or something, and then people comment, “You got this.” And my mom is like, “That is so inadequate. What they’re going through deserves so much more than a flippant…” That’s kind of her thing.

Ivan Joseph
When we were writing the book, we were vacillating back between You Got This, and The Skill of Self-Confidence. If I had to do it again, I’d probably stick with The Skill of Self-Confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that is your area of expertise. I’m really excited to dig into it. So, self-confidence sounds like a good thing. We’d all love to have it. Could you maybe share some research that reveals how more self-confidence can really translate into actual results for professionals, particularly if you’ve got those examples, as opposed to just feeling good?

Ivan Joseph
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it’d be nice to feel confident, but what does it mean in terms of results and victory?

Ivan Joseph
Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize is let’s start with the definition of self-confidence. So, everybody’s playing and starting at the same place. And so, the definition I use in the research is this genuine belief in your ability to accomplish the task at hand – self-confidence. And I want everybody to know it’s not this magic pill that you just take and you can swallow, and you can just, “Oh, I’m, all of a sudden, self-confident.”

But the research that started looking at this goes way back to some foundational work that talks about optimism and happiness. But the big one that I started that got me in this venue was looking and reading about Angela Duckworth and Grit. And she was studying grit, which is the belief in your ability to accomplish tasks despite setbacks, and she was looking at how people, what they’ve told themselves, how they believed in themselves, how that really influenced their ability to move forward.

And she studied a bunch of military personnel. It was Beast Barracks week during West Point Military Academy. And, you know, the Military Academy, they’re really interested in, “How do people decide that we should make it through candidate training school?” because it’s hell. They don’t get to sleep, they don’t get to eat, there’s noise pollution, all these things, because they’re testing those candidates to make them ready.

And so, they did aptitude tests, they did physical testing, they did all these leadership scores, they did a battery of tests. And when they looked at these tests, they were somewhat predictive of who would be successful. But when Angela Duckworth came to these 13 items to predict grit and resilience, she found those 13 items more reliable than those hundreds of questions combined.

And when I read that, I’m like, “Whoa! Grit is a reliable predictor of performance and your ability to succeed?” And when I started really looking into grit, I studied just the first half of it which was this genuine belief in your ability to accomplish the task at hand. And then there was further research that went into how affirmations played a role in that, which is another word for self-talk, how focus played a role in that, how repetition played a role in that. The research is out there and it’s all saying the same thing. you can’t start with talent. You have to start with this belief in your ability, and only then will the talent get a moment to shine.

Pete Mockaitis
it’s intriguing. You talked about a given task at hand in terms of self-confidence. Then I imagine you may very well have self-confidence in one domain and not at all in another because those are very different tasks, and some you think you’ve got totally covered, and others you feel woefully unprepared for. Is that accurate?

Ivan Joseph
This is really accurate, your concept about, “Is it global?” I want you to think about the first time you had your first job, right? You’ve got it, you’ve mastered that skill, and, all of a sudden, your boss comes in and says, “Here’s your promotion and you’re ready to roll.” And imagine the doubt and the fear. We all hear about impostor syndrome, that now starts to creep in. You are master of your domain, you had it taken care of, you were the queen of your ship, or the king of your castle, whatever it is, the term you want to use, and, all of a sudden now, you’ve got to manage people, or you’ve got to lead this presentation.

And because these tasks are typically novel to you, and you haven’t had the affirmations and the feedback that says, “You got this,” to coin a phrase from the book, then that whole self-spiraling doubt and negativity starts to spiral into you, which affects your performance.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so then if we find ourselves in a space where we’re not so self-confident, and we would like to be, what do we do?

Ivan Joseph
That’s a great question. And I always tell people this story, you heard me earlier in the podcast talk about this magic bullet. When I give a speech about this topic, I say it’s not like you’re at the Las Vegas, and Celine Dion is on stage, and I’m Canadian so I’m going to pick Celine Dion, and she gets food poisoning. And, all of a sudden, the manager comes in and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, we can no longer close out the show. Celine Dion can’t sing her amazing closing song because she’s sick.” And you stand up, Pete, you say, “Yeah, I got this. I’ve watched Titanic a hundred times.” That’s not really confidence. That’s somewhere on the edge of delusional, I’ll say.

When I talk about confidence, the task can’t be novel to you. So, there’s a series of steps to really move towards confidence, and the first one is repetition, repetition, repetition. Gladwell talks about it, there’s a 10,000-hour rule, whatever it is for you to have confidence and genuine belief in your ability. And so, I want you to think about it. For some folks and some listeners out there, about the first time you drove stick shift. You drive stick, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I tried a couple of times then I stopped. It didn’t go very well.

Ivan Joseph
Right. The first time you drive stick on a hill with a car behind you, oh, my God, your heart is racing 100 miles an hour. By the time you’ve driven stick for a year later, a year and a half, whatever it is, that skill is so automatic. And so, the number one thing is, like, find a way to get to your practice, to your repetition.

And if you’re a leader and you’re getting ready to present, present in front of the mirror, present in front of your partner, present in a small group of friends, get the feedback, so by the time you got onto that big stage, you’re no longer scared. So, that would be the first step.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Ivan Joseph
After you get to repetition, for me, the next thing to do is to really control that negative tape that plays in your head. You know that tape, “I wish I was this. I hate myself in this look. Oh, I can’t do this job.” As a sports psychologist and a performance enhancement consultant, I work with a lot of athletes. I’ve been lucky enough to work with Olympians and NBA athletes and the national team of basketball for Canada, and we do a lot of what we call centering or thought-stopping.

The next time you’re watching a professional athlete, watch the different physical cues that they’ll use: pointing, clapping, finger-snapping. Whenever they make a mistake, they don’t dwell on the mistake. The phrase we use is “Live in the moment,” or, “Be in the presence,” right? And what that is about is about being in the moment, meaning forget about the mistake. Stop that negative talk, whatever that negative doubt is. Use a physical cue to bring you to the present and replace it with a positive talk, whatever that might be, “You got this,” “I got the next one,” “I’m ready.” The power of affirmation is really critical.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. So, are you telling us that frequently, when we observe such physical snaps, claps, etc., from athletes, this is exactly what they’re doing?

Ivan Joseph
Oh, 100%. I guarantee it. I remember one time, the first time I noticed it many years ago into my dissertation, there’s a famous soccer player by the name of Thierry Henry, and this is a guy making millions of pounds a year. And he missed a wide-open goal, right? And all he did was point back to the person that passed him the ball, and said, “Nice job. I got the next one.” And you could read it on his lips and see it on TV. You don’t get to be excellent by focusing on all the mistakes and all the inadequacies that you have.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, excellent. Well, so then I like that notion of the physical gesture to kind of just make it really clear, “Hey, we’re stopping that now and we’re transitioning to something else.” So, snaps, claps. What are some other good ones?

Ivan Joseph
You’ll see some athletes that will take a little rubber band and move it from one wrist to the other, sometimes they’ll snap it. You’ll see some folks that will jingle some coins. Watch the next time you’ll see an athlete just take a deep breath in, and that reminds them, “Okay, I got this.” I remember the one time, the very first time I was doing a big speech, and I’d spoken before, but you get paid in a bottle of wine or like a coffee mug. But the very first time I was on stage and it was 4,000 people, and then the night before Maya Angelou was on stage, and this was like the big deal. I was about to be big time, at least as big as C-level celebrities are, or maybe E, or G, or whatever the number is. But I was so nervous. Behind the stage, I had to clap, clap, clap, “You got this. You got this. You got this.” I had to physically remind myself that I was good at what I do, and that was really critical for me to be able to get on stage and speak in front of 4,000 people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent. So, well then what’s next? So, we got the physical indicator or anchor, and then shifting gears from the negative to the positive talk. What’s the next step?

Ivan Joseph
Well, I want to remind folks that the affirmations must be really simple and bite-sized, right? Mine is, “I got this,” “Nobody outworks me,” and, “I can learn anything.” And you asked me about research before, I want to turn your readers to a study from Harvard that talked about how three affirmations a day, if you’re in the problem-solving world, increased your efficiency to solve that problem, something like 26%.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Ivan Joseph
And if you’re in the sales marketing world, your revenue went up 30 some odd percent by using three affirmations a day. And that’s that. What you tell yourself you start to believe and how it translated directly to the output of your work, your production, your ability to solve complex problems. And so, that affirmation and that self-talk moves right into that next thing which is reminding yourself of how good you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, this affirmation stuff, that’s juicy. I love a good study with some numbers behind it. So, we had Hal Elrod who talked about the six morning habits of high performers. He wrote the The Miracle Morning and such on the show earlier. And he gave some great distinctions associated with what makes an affirmation good versus delusional and problematic. So, I’d love to hear your take. So, from the research, what are some of the ingredients or do’s and don’ts for a positive affirmation? What I’m recalling, I think Hal used the example of, “Money flows effortlessly to me. I am a magnet for wealth,” is not so helpful because your brain goes, “No, it doesn’t. I’ve got to hustle and bend over backwards to make things happen.” And so, can you give us some pro tips on making those affirmations effective?

Ivan Joseph
I think it’s a great question. And one of the things I recognized early on is in order to have an affirmation be meaningful and have genuine belief, you have to have genuine control over it. And so, that locus of control for an affirmation is really important and critical. “Nobody outworks me,” so I can control that. “I can learn anything,” I can control that too, right? And so, when you listen to those things, are they within your circle of influence? “I’m the wealthiest guy in the world,” I mean, maybe if I was reading The Secret and I wanted to put that out there, and I wanted to start putting it out there. But the magic, for me, as a sports psychologist, is to always give agency to the people to control their affirmation. So, it has to be something that you can master and you can own.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. Well, then proceed. So, that’s the affirmation side of things. What’s next?

Ivan Joseph
So, then from there, I talk about a letter to yourself. And I think this is a really important piece. We all will feel self-doubt, or it will creep into us when we get a promotion, when we get a new opportunity, or when somebody will criticize us, or be really hard on us, and you have to be able to pull out a letter that you’ve written to yourself at good times.

I remember when I became the Director of Athletics at Ryerson University, it was a university of 40,000 people. I came from Iowa, a university of a thousand people. Oh, my goodness, I’m in charge of millions of dollars, I have to manage people, and I remember that whole impostor syndrome kicking in, and I read this letter to myself.

And my letter goes something like this, “Dear Ivan, thanks for choosing the right person to marry. Nice job on accomplishing your Ph.D. before you hit 40. You’ve launched a business with an amazing partner.” All these things I wanted to brag to myself. It was my own personal brag sheet to remind myself, when I was going in the dumps and going this way, “No, no, no. Let’s remember all these things and all these challenges that you’ve had.” And I pull it out and I needed to read that day in, day out, day in, day out.

Now, a lot of folks out there will say, “Well, a brag sheet, that’s ego, man.” And I want people to recognize this is not a letter to others. That is arrogance, right? This is a letter that you’re writing to yourself. And so, people are like, “Well, how do you define confidence over arrogance and ego?” That’s it. Confidence is what you tell yourself. Arrogance and ego is about what you’re telling others about yourself. And so, it’s important to take this letter, look at yourself in the mirror, take your quiet spot, and engage in this personal reminder of all the amazing things you’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I really like that. You had it in a letter, I have it on my shelf. There is a black Mead spiral notebook. I haven’t looked at it lately, which might be good or I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I haven’t needed it or felt the need.

Ivan Joseph
Well, that’s it, Pete, right? When you get to that next space, wherever your career or your life will take you when you’ll need it, you know where to get it. You found it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. And it really is so handy. And I think I borrowed this from maybe Tony Robbins who talked about if you have a belief, I still see this diagram in my head. I read this when I was a teenager. It’s like if you have a belief, you need to have some supporting legs, like a table, for your brain to be like, “Yeah, okay, that’s true.”

And so, I think this was in college, I was feeling kind of like a loser because in high school I was just like, I don’t know, I was kind of the man, if you will, in terms of, “Oh, I’m valedictorian and homecoming king,” and I was getting lots of praises and affirmations in all kinds of directions, and then in college, I was like rejected from the sketch comedy team, and the business consulting group, and the other business club, and then the other…and I was like, “What is wrong?” And so, I was feeling pretty down about my capabilities.

And then I just sort of thought, “Well, hey, maybe I’ll just make a list of reasons why the belief that I’m capable of rocking and rolling is true.” And I was like, “Holy smokes, this is a pretty long list. Okay, I guess I’ve just had a bad luck streak, and I’m going to keep trying.” And, sure enough, I found some clubs that would take me and a good college career.

Ivan Joseph
I love what you’re saying because you’re doing what we call as self-confident people interpret feedback differently. And what you’re able to do right now is, “I guess I had a bad streak.” After using some skills, instead of like, “My God, I’m a loser. I’ll never do any good.” And then you start to dig yourself what we call, “Lord, the snake’s belly and a wagon rut,” right? You interpreted those failures differently. That is so key. How we interpret setbacks really sets us apart.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. And it’s funny, and it wasn’t immediate. I’d say there’s definitely, I don’t know what the time period was, some weeks or so of just like, “Ooh, I suck.” But, eventually, that turned around. So, now, let’s talk about, Ivan, right now, as we’re recording, the coronavirus is a hot topic everywhere on the news, etc. and I’ve been chatting with a few people who have admitted to really experiencing a healthy dose of depression, anxiety, mental health challenges, that is not so typical for them under normal circumstances but, hey, not getting out, not seeing people, not as easy to get to the gym, or all these sorts of rituals habits, routines, healthy good things they got going on are disrupted, and they’re now kind of reaping what they’ve had to. So, hey, help us here. If listeners are experiencing this right now, how might we apply some of these tools to help shorten the time and the funk?

Ivan Joseph
Well, it’s a great question again, right? And so, one of the things you recognize is that we know that thoughts influence our beliefs which influence our actions. And so, when you’re in a funky space, you know that’s you’re thinking, and then it’s influencing your beliefs, and then how you get to the action part.

And so, one of the things that’s really important is in this whole world that we’re using the term social distancing, and the psychologist in me says, “I don’t know if that’s the right term that we should be thinking about. I think the term should be physical distancing, and we should be engaging with the people that are important to us, who add value to us.”

A lot of times when I talk about the lens of confidence, I talk about getting away from the people who will tear you down, which is the negative people, the people who are giving you negative feedback versus critical feedback. But I think the opposite is also true, which means get close to the people who will build you up.

And so, you know who are you and who those people are, and you can know and you can see what are the tells that are telling you, and you’re going off into a place. And you need to pay attention to your physical tells that say you’re getting to a point of stress, and then you need to put yourself in a place where you can connect with those people. And, in today’s world, it’s going to have to be virtual, but with Zoom, with Microsoft Teams, with FaceTime, with Google Hangouts, there’s a way to infuse yourself and your relationships with positivity to help build you up and to help pass you through these troubling times.

When we say we’re all in this together, nobody does it alone. And sometimes we’re so proud and we’re so afraid to share our vulnerabilities, that’s not what confidence or high-performance life is all about. It’s about recognizing that we are in this together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. Now, you mentioned physical stress tells. Please, flag them right up front. So, some listeners might be like, “Huh, that’s been going on.”

Ivan Joseph
You think about it, right? We don’t recognize we need to always talk about stress. There’s two types of stress. There’s distress and there’s eustress. Eustress is the positive pieces that raise our levels and help us perform better. And distress is the one that overwhelms us, how we react to that stress overwhelms us.

I remember when I was first leading, a stressor for me that I was not ready, the skin on my hand started to peel. I started to get like serious, like bad cotton ball mouth. But there’s also a point where I need to be at the right level of performance anxiety in order to get the best out of me. When the butterflies are in your stomach, when you’re feeling your heart start to raise, I know I’m ready. I’m at my peak game.

Have you ever had a client or a guest on your show where you are like, “Man, I was on. I brought my A-game to this guy,” and thought about how you felt just before that moment?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, you know, it’s funny, just before we spoke, I was feeling a little bit like, “Meh,” my energy level was sort of lower and, yeah, I was just sort thinking, “Well, how would I prefer to feel?” I was like, “Well, I’d like to be fascinated and powerful and curious.” So, yeah, I guess that’s how I feel before a great interview.

Ivan Joseph
Right. I think it’s really important about how we connect with those around us, and not just the energy we give but the energy we draw from those people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, let’s see, so in your book you mentioned five skills, and it sounds like we’ve hit a few of them: positive thought, team building, grit, higher expectations, and focus. Are there any of these that you think we’ve covered too shallowly and we got to give a little bit more love to before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Ivan Joseph
Well, I think the one that we haven’t touched is this ‘higher expectations’ one, and I think this is really key about we talk about it from the Pygmalion Effect is what we call it in the world of leadership or sport in which people will rise through a minimum level of expectations. And I think this is really important for leaders that are out in the field. It’s about, “How do you lead people to be excellent and confident? And how can you influence them?” And one of the ways is about catching them when they’re good because they’ll raise your minimum level of expectations.

And what I mean by that is we know that if you are critical, if you give negative feedback, “Hey, I need this presentation to look like this. Hey, this chart didn’t have what I needed on it. Hey, I need you to do this, this, and this,” that we know that we’ll get the behavior we want. But, typically, it erodes the relationship. Typically, it creates conflict.

If we can, instead, forget about that, the negative things that people are doing, and instead focus on the team member that might be doing it right, meaning, you’re in a meeting, “Hey, folks, thanks for coming on time to this meeting. It helps us get started.” Or somebody presented a report, “Hey, I love how this report was. Notice the font size is the way I want it. I love that the logo is here on the bottom left.” Instead, what happens is you catch people when they’re good. And what we’ve known and what we’ve seen in the research is that improvement exponentially improves over when we catch them when they’re bad.

In the world of psych, we call this the social learning theory, is that people learn through observation. If we can focus on the excellence, now, what happens is instead of us tearing down a player over here who was really sour or bitter or angry because of our feedback, we built up somebody else, and they feel great and aligned to you and really increase their loyalty and their willingness to follow you, and we’ve said somebody else over here is like, “Oh, I better pay attention. I want that same feedback.” And the whole organization rises because you catch them when they’re good.

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

Ivan Joseph
Well, I think the last piece is just to remind people that this is a skill. The skill of self-confidence isn’t about just sitting here and, “Okay, I’ve tried. I wrote this letter, I read it once, it didn’t work.” “Oh, I said my affirmation today, and it didn’t happen.” “Well, I tried praise and it still hasn’t happened.” We have to be willing to persist just like the master of any task in the workplace, and give it an opportunity to grab hold.

And so, for the listeners that are out there, be patient with yourselves, and be patient with the people that you’re leading, because good things will happen if you give it an opportunity to shine, and you will see a cultural shift in the people, and, most importantly, or just as importantly, a cultural shift in yourself in how you approach leading.

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

Ivan Joseph
Well, one of my favorites is an old Apple commercial. I always attribute it to Steve Jobs but I know it’s somebody different, but it was after Steve Jobs had been kicked out of his company and he came back, and they launched this commercial in the Super Bowl, and it was called “Here’s to the crazy ones.” I don’t know if you know. It’s really a poem. “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo.” And I’ll fast-forward to the last line, “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” I love it because it speaks to a higher purpose.

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

Ivan Joseph
Oh, gosh, being a psychologist, I have a whole bunch. But one of them is a study by Jacobson and Rosenthal. Jacobson and Rosenthal studied the Pygmalion Effect in a New York high school, and what they did was they brought some teachers, and then they said to these teachers, “Hey, we developed this late-blooming acquisition test. It’s an amazing test. It will tell of all your students who the best late bloomers are.”

And so, of course, the teachers said, “Yeah,” and so they administered the test. And these students in the back of the class, the very back, the ones you would think would be the dumbest, most bonehead, because that’s what they sit. At least, that’s where I’ve sat but don’t tell anybody. They said, “These students here scored the highest on the late-blooming acquisition test. We’re going to come back at the end of the year and see how our test works.”

So, Jacobson and Rosenthal show up, and sure enough, at the end of the year, the teachers were excited, “Ah, your late-blooming acquisition, this was amazing, it worked. It did everything what it’s supposed to do.” But, as you can imagine, the magic of it was there was no such thing as a late-blooming acquisition test. It was a confederate. It was a ploy. In fact, what happened was the teachers, because they expected more from these students, they called on them more. They didn’t ask, they didn’t take the dog-ate-my-homework as an excuse. They didn’t say, “I don’t know good enough.” They didn’t say, “Okay, you know how you avoid eye contact when you don’t know the answer?”

By those teachers interacting differently with those students, those students exceeded their own expectations and rose to the expectations of the teachers. And this has been a key tool in my leadership toolbox.

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

Ivan Joseph
Oh, well, one of my favorite books, and don’t tell anybody because it’s one of those things. It was Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, hey, we have some more Tony Robbins references here, yeah.

Ivan Joseph
Right. Have you read that one?

Pete Mockaitis
I believe it is on my shelf, yeah. When I was a teenager, Tony Robbins was who I wanted to be. Fun fact, I was a weird kid. But, yeah, what’s something useful from that book that was impactful for you?

Ivan Joseph
You know, at the time I read that book I’d flunked out of school and I hadn’t told my parents. And, for me, what I liked about it was it gave you the ownership and the control. It was about awakening the giant within. Stop blaming everybody else outside, external reasons for why you’re not succeeding. It’s time for you to really take ownership, and you have the ability to control your destiny, where you want to be, who you want to be, and what you want to do. And I remember taking that to heart and really just taking my life right by the scruff of the collar and just deciding I was going to drive where I wanted to be.

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

Ivan Joseph
Well, I’m a big believer in surrounding myself with the right talent. And so, for me, that tool is I’m really careful about who I choose, and I really pay particular attention about who I hire and how I hire. And you always talk about it, it’s like fire fast, hire slow. I don’t think people think enough about building culture, and these other things that when you’re asking the questions around the workplace or in the interview process that will get at, “Who do you want and do they fit?” because that fit is so important. That values alignment is mission critical.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Ivan Joseph
I’m a morning person and I found this out by accident. But one of my favorite habits is getting up early to make sure I align my day up right. That time before anybody gets up is so productive. I’m not part of Sharma’s, 5 AM Club. I’m not that, but I’m probably a 5:30-5:45 club. But the ability to set your day out to really think about what those three big buckets, or four big bucket things are, that’s the way you move your needle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And tell me, is there a particular nugget that you share and you’re known for, people quote it back to you often?

Ivan Joseph
I think it’s about getting away from the people who will tear you down. I think that’s really important because you will start to believe them. And if you can’t be really careful and mindful of who those people are, then you’re setting yourself up for failure, and they will undo all the good work you’re doing for yourself.

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

Ivan Joseph
Well, I would point them to You Got This launching soon as an Amazon website, or an Amazon book but I’d also point them to my website Dr. Ivan Joseph coming soon, so stay tuned. You can find me on Twitter, I guess, @DrIvanJoseph.

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

Ivan Joseph
I think one of the things that I want to remind people is that you’ve got to remember that if you don’t think you can or if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody will. And I want to remind them that they’ve already achieved success, if they’re in a position right now where they’ve done a really nice job, or they’ve been promoted, and so we already know that you’re capable and competent. Just remind yourselves of that and keep reminding of yourselves of that when you go out into that next-level job and opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Ivan, thanks so much for taking this time. And I wish you lots of luck in all your adventures.

Ivan Joseph
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, Pete. I really appreciate it.

May 14
0

570: How to Use Stories to Persuade, and Connect with Others with Shane Snow

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Shane Snow discusses how to make your message more compelling through storytelling.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why storytelling isn’t just for writers
  2. The four elements of the most captivating stories
  3. The surprisingly best way to improve at storytelling

About Shane

Shane Snow is an award-winning journalist, explorer, and entrepreneur, and the author. He speaks globally about innovation and teamwork, has performed comedy on Broadway, and been in the running for the Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism.

 Snow has helped expose gun traffickers, explored abandoned buildings around the world, eaten only ice cream for weeks in the name of science, and taught hundreds of thousands of people to work better through his books, including the #1 business bestseller Dream Teams.

Snow’s writing has appeared in GQ, Fast Company, Wired, The New Yorker, and more. He is also a board member of the media technology company Contently, and the journalism nonprofit The Hatch Institute.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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Shane Snow Interview Transcript

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

Shane Snow
I’m really happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk to you. One of your areas of deep expertise is storytelling. And I want to put you on the spot right up front, and say could you open us up by sharing one of the most compelling short stories you’ve ever heard and then tell us why it’s compelling?

Shane Snow
Oh, wow, one of the most compelling short stories I’ve ever heard. How about I tell the short version of one of the most compelling stories I’ve ever read?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Shane Snow
So, Gene Weingarten is a Washington Post reporter who’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice and one of my favorite writers, and his best story, in my opinion, is the story of The Great Zucchini who is the premiere children’s entertainer in Washington, D.C. If you’re having a birthday party and your kid is under 11, then you invite The Great Zucchini to come and do his clown performance and his magic and tricks. And what the story of The Great Zucchini is that he was the most in-demand, most popular children’s entertainer in all of D.C. If you were a senator, your kid had to have him, and you would fight with the parents at the prep schools to get The Great Zucchini on your kid’s birthday.

And the story though is that The Great Zucchini was so great with kids not because his props were good or his act was particularly good, he was actually really sloppy and his stuff was all old, but he was so great with kids because it turns out that he had an incredibly messed up childhood and could relate to kids in a very deep way.

And what happened is this reporter followed The Great Zucchini around and discovered that in his apartment there is no bed, there’s just like a blanket on the floor, and there is a closet full of envelopes and bills and collectors’ notices and nothing else. And that on the weekends, The Great Zucchini goes to Atlantic City and gambles and blows all of his money and comes home hungover and depressed ready to go and entertain children.

And so, the story actually, which started out as, “Well, how is this guy so great? What are the makings of a great children’s entertainer that you want in birthday parties and that could entertain kids?” turned into a story of how a tragic childhood had created this person who kids love so much but who actually was deeply, deeply hurt and wounded and was having a terrible time himself.

And what the story points to is how, one, we never know what’s going on behind the scenes of someone who appears to be very successful, who we might be jealous of, other clowns hates this guy, by the way, because he was so popular and kids love him, but no one had any idea that this guy slept with a blanket on the floor and blow all his money on gambling and had like terrible anxiety. They just thought that he was really good at what he does and super successful.

And I think the other sort of lesson of this story is what happened afterwards, which is the story came out and The Great Zucchini, I forget his actual name, but he was so worried that the story would come out and it would ruin his career, that people wouldn’t want their kids having contact with him because he was a mess, and actually people kind of showed up for him after this story, and their hearts went out to him, and people helped him get his finances in order. Like, people volunteered to help this guy out basically when he thought that the opposite would happen that people would keep their kids away from him.

So, it speaks to, I think, humanity, how learning his story, and I’m telling this story on purpose because it’s meta, learning the story of this guy, flaws and all, actually caused people to care more about him. So often we worry that when people learn who we really are and our real stories that they won’t care about us because we’re flawed, but it turns out that the opposite is usually true with humans.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we now have to go read it.

Shane Snow
It’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I mean, I’ve got so many follow-ups but we’re not talking about The Great Zucchini, we’re talking about storytelling. But, yeah, you’re right, it’s a great lesson right there in terms of we’re worried about sharing or revealing those things but it can really be warmly received. People can relate to you all the more in terms of, “Yes, I, too, have some stuff that’s messed up. You are like me,” and that’s vulnerable, relatable, and good stuff.

Well, let’s maybe talk a little bit about the why in terms of storytelling, I mean, it’s cool and fun for undercover and investigative journalists and Hollywood types. Can you make the case for why storytelling is a viable skill for your everyday professional?

Shane Snow
Absolutely. There’s a reason why stories work on us, why we get pulled in, and it’s actually built into our brains. The human brain is wired for a story and there’s a couple of reasons. Whether you’re taking the evolutionary biology approach, and saying, “Well, humans evolved to need certain skills that are useful,” or if you’re just looking at the phenomenon that we are pulled in by stories, either way you can come to two conclusions very quickly when you look at how human respond to stories.

One is that stories make us remember information better. So, historically, if you wanted to pass down knowledge to your tribe or to your family, you often did so using stories around the campfire. So, if I give you a statistic and show you a bunch of charts, you’ll remember them a lot worse, retain that information a lot worse than if I tell you a story that illustrates the statistics.

One great study that comes to mind is about research split-testing ads for charities. You can show some people an ad for charity and talk about all of the kids that get leukemia and how few of them survive and how horrible it is, or you can show them a story of a parent talking about their child that has leukemia. And in that kind of a split-test, always the story will get more donations and more percentage of people will donate. The story makes you care in addition to making you remember. So, those are kind of the two functions of storytelling that are built into just how our brains react.

Pete Mockaitis
We had Gret Glyer of DonorSee on the show who kind of does just that in terms of donation to impoverished areas, and you could see as a donor, DonorSee, what impact you’re making. And that was a lesson he learned early on is that the stories did a whole lot more than the statistics. And I think the Bill Gates documentary on Netflix, he says, “Hey, if you talk about like a thousand people dying of something, we should be a thousand times sad, but somehow we just don’t work that way.”

I don’t know if you happen to know the results of these split-tests, but can you give us a sense of order of magnitude to the stories outperform like, “Yeah, 5%, 10% better, they’re getting some statistical significance,” or they’re just like walloping the statistics?

Shane Snow
Yeah, off the top of my head for a particular study, I couldn’t say but it’s like double, like on that order.

Pete Mockaitis
In that ballpark of double. All right. That’s good enough for me.

Shane Snow
Yeah. And so, it gets at the question you’re asking is, “How can stories help us regular people if we’re not making movies or writing articles for newspapers?” And it’s those two things. If you want people to remember what you want them to remember, what you want them to know, you have something to say you want to be memorable, and if you want people to care about what you have to say, then storytelling is an incredibly powerful way to make both of those things happen.

So, if you’re a salesperson, you want people to care about your product, you want them to remember you and the things that it can do for you, if you are trying to build a relationship with someone, personally or professionally, stories, sharing stories, and specifically, stories with certain elements, which I’d love to talk about, will make them remember you and make them want to do business with you or want to form a relationship with you more than any other thing.

You go on a date with someone that you want to impress, talking about how much money you have or spending money on them is going to be less effective in making them want to be close to you than if you share stories about your life and things you care about.

Pete Mockaitis
And how much money you spent on your jet.

Shane Snow
If the story ends with, “And then I bought a jet, and if you want to go on it,” maybe there’s some adventure to that that’s intriguing. But what we do on dates when we get to know people is share stories. What we do around the dinner table when we’re bonding with our families is share the stories of what happened to us, or the stories that we’re watching. We bond around stories that aren’t even about us, and this brings humans together and makes them care about each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds like a lot of good things that I’d like going on both in life and in career. So, yeah, let’s dig into some of those components. What makes a story effective in these ways? I guess you could say we might call a story effective in the sense of it keeps you engaged and interested, so, I mean, that’s part of the game. I’m sure that’s probably part of what you’re going to tell us. But, I guess, I mean effective in the sense of it yields those benefits, it is memorable, it does draw people to be closer to you and form a bond and a respect for you. So, lay it on, what are the key principles?

Shane Snow
Yup. So, we can now actually watch people’s brains when they watch a TV commercial, or listen to an audio book, or have an interaction with their spouse, and we can measure certain effects that indicate whether memory encoding is going on, and whether they are immersed in the experience. Immersion in sort of the crude neuroscience term is like that thing that happens when you’re watching a James Bond movie and suddenly someone coughs, and you realize you’re watching a movie, you have forgotten where you are, you’ve forgotten that you’re sitting on a couch and you have people next to you because you’re so pulled into the movie or the story.

And so, we can actually measure how much of that immersion you have, we can measure the emotional effect that you’re having, and we can actually measure a couple of things, how deep of an emotional experience you’re having, not necessarily, we can’t do a brain scan or monitor your vital signs and tell that you’re sad versus happy necessarily but we can tell that you’re deeply emotionally affected in some direction. And then there are other cues that we can look at to see if you’re affected in a negative or positive way. So, are you crying because you’re happy or are you crying because you’re upset?

And when we look at these signals, while people watch movies, or listen to stories, or talk to each other, tell each other stories, there are some very clear things that achieve memory encoding and basically caring. Oxytocin is the neural chemical that people always talk about with storytelling. It’s the neurochemical that indicates that you care about something. It’s involved in emotion, and social bonding, and including people and excluding people. So, if you can detect that there’s more oxytocin being synthesized in someone’s brain, you can detect that they care when they’re having an empathetic experience one way or another.

So, the things that lead to these are actually pretty basic and they can go pretty deep but there’s four of them that I usually talk about as the biggest ones. Relatability. So, if you can relate to a character or a situation, then your brain perks up. You will encode, or at least start to encode into memory, and start to care. So, if there’s a story about something that you have never heard of and there’s nothing to hook onto, then it’s hard to relate to, then it’s hard to care and it’s hard to remember. But the flipside of that is novelty, that our brains are wired to pay extra attention to new things that could be useful or could be harmful.

So, it’s like the prehistoric version of this would be an object is moving towards you very quickly. Is it a threat or is it something that I can kill and eat? And so, our brains are programmed to pay attention to new things. And so, if something is a story that’s relatable, has characters that you might care about so you can relate to them, or remind you of people you know, or whatever it is, situations that are familiar, and there’s something new about it, then we really get hooked and we start to pay attention, our brains can start to encode memories.

Then you add in what I call fluency, which is basically making it easy to understand what’s going on. The easier something is to understand, the more you’ll encode it and…

Pete Mockaitis
There’s not like a lot of jargon, or quantum physics, or derivative trading financial stuff. Not those.

Shane Snow
Exactly, yeah. After I show the fourth one, I’ll actually tell you about a study that I conducted with one of my writing partners that illustrates these in action right now as it has to do with TV commercials. But the fourth element is I think the most important one for getting people to really care, and that’s tension. So, it’s establishing that there’s a big gap between what you want and what you have, or what is and what could be.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sorry, I knew you were going to say tension, and I thought that you were going to like stringing me out a little bit to build to that.

Shane Snow
I forgot about it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m with you again, thank you.

Shane Snow
Yeah. So, one of the best ways to set up tension is to establish characters want something and it’s going to be really hard to get it, or it seems impossible, or death is on the line. So, with the story of The Great Zucchini, it’s one of my favorites in part because it has all of those things and it’s easier for me to remember because it’s a great story, but it’s like, “Yeah, everyone has been a kid, everyone knows children’s parties, magicians and clowns,” like there’s something that you can kind of like hook on to and be intrigued by, but the novelty and the tension is that this guy is a mess, and, “Should kids be around him? And what’s going to happen to him? And his life is falling apart.” That tension makes you intrigued enough to want to keep going on with the story and find out what it is, even if the ending is not even that exciting. You stick it out to the end because at that point you do care.

So, the study that I recently ran with my co-author for the book The Storytelling Edge and one of my longtime collaborators, we ran a study a few months ago where we looked at campaign ads for Democratic primary contenders. So, whoever it is that’s going up against Donald Trump, what are the ads that they’re showing people and how effective is the storytelling?

And what we found, and this was at the time when everyone had written off Joe Biden that he’s definitely not going to win anymore, everyone had written him off, and we found that despite what people said in the surveys, the pre-survey before you watched these commercials and we interspersed the commercials between like bad television, like CSI, and in between you have these commercial breaks with these political ads, and we asked people, “What do you think of Joe Biden? What do you think of Elizabeth Warren? What do you think of Bernie Sanders? Who are you going to vote for? How left- or right-leaning are you?” all these things.

Even though so many people…Joe Biden did not win the poll essentially in this pre-survey. He overwhelmingly won the good feelings study from a neuroscience level. During his commercial, which was basically…and his approach is pretty consistent, he’s like, “You know, when I was growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania things were hard, but good people, they came together and they helped each other out. My whole life, I’ve been fighting for people. And the time that I ran for Senate and I achieved my dream to help people, but then my wife and son got killed in a car accident. Coming back from that was so hard but I realized that people were up against this sort of thing every day, and I have the opportunity since I’ve been in politics and I know how it works to help with people who have these kinds of problems. So, anyway, I’m on your side, and I’m Uncle Joe Biden. Vote for me.” Like, that’s basically his pitch in this commercial that we did, and that is largely how he presents himself.

And it’s like that story, even if you say you’re not planning on voting for him, that story has all of those elements. It’s like it’s got the relatability right away, like, “I grew up a normal person. There’s real-life problems that we’re all dealing with. Also, here are some things about me that are novel and you never knew necessarily. And things are hard but we’re going to get through it.” And the warmth there, people overwhelmingly just feel positive feelings. And even the people who said they don’t prefer him, their brains are saying that they believe him and care about what he’s saying.

Whereas, Bernie Sanders, among the Democrats who are part of this survey, he was the lead person in the survey beforehand, his ads didn’t have that fluency. First of all, he didn’t narrate his own ads, which I think was a downside already. It wasn’t as relatable and personal. But his ads were like all these clips of the narrator is saying things like, “The working class is getting a bad rap, and the people with all the money and the drug companies that are taking outsized share, and blah, blah, blah. And Bernie is a fighter, and he’s here to help reverse this bad situation,” or whatever it is.

But it’s showing clips of like welders, and taxi drivers, and nurses, and B-roll, and then it has interspersed some of his stories of him getting arrested in the ‘60s in protest for Civil Rights and stuff, which is actually supercool part of his story, but it’s just like this montage of these clips. And you watch people’s brains and it’s like they don’t get it, they’re like, “What am I seeing?” and they’re trying to piece it together and so they don’t remember it, and they don’t feel good. They actually feel kind of negative.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like those some fragrance ads back in the day, they’re just like, “What?” which is all of these things, like, “Something, something, by Calvin Klein.” Like, “What? Okay, I’ll smell good if I use it maybe. What are you saying to me?”

Shane Snow
Yeah. And so, it’s like a wasted opportunity. You’re spending all this money on advertising and people aren’t remembering you because they’re confused. Meanwhile, your competitor who’s not saying anything other than like, “Oh, shucks, I’m a great guy and I really care,” people are coming away from that and being like, “Hell, yeah, this guy cares,” even if what they’re saying in the poll doesn’t match that. And this speaks to with some similar studies with Clinton versus Trump in 2016. It showed that a lot of people, when they watched their ads, they would get very emotionally involved in Trump’s ads and they would kind of tune out in Clinton’s ads, and that makes a big difference. The story, regardless of what you think, how you feel tends to have an outsized impact on the decisions you make.

Research shows that we often decide things, we justify how we feel with logic rather than the other way around. We use logic to then determine how we feel. It’s actually usually the other way around, which is why stories are so powerful because they make us feel. to wrap up the monologue, the ultimate thing that causes people to remember and care is instilling emotion because you remember emotion, and emotion causes you to care one way or another.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so those are the elements that make all the difference. So, then in practice, let’s say I’m trying to make a point, advocate for a view, like, “We should do this, or we should not do this,” inside an organization. And so, I guess, data is going to be a part of it but, from your view, it seems like we’re going to need more than numbers and bar charts to make a compelling memorable emotional case. How would you recommend that we proceed in crafting and delivering a great story?

Shane Snow
Yeah. So, I will say that, ultimately, in problem solving, you want logic to stand on its own. You don’t want actually for your feelings really, to get in the way of making good decisions, so I wouldn’t advocate using storytelling to persuade people and get people to care about something that they shouldn’t do. However, it is really effective at getting attention for something that you believe is right or that should happen.

So, let’s say, to use kind of what you opened up. You have data that shows that a decision should be made, or that a certain thing needs to be raised, but like with the charity studies, you tell people a thousand people are dying and people don’t really register it or it doesn’t motivate them. So, you, finding a story that has those elements that people will hook onto, that has something new and surprising, that’s easy to get through and that has tension built in, and wrapping the data into that story is a great way to get people to remember and care and pay attention to spread whatever it is that you have to say.

So, you’re at work, you’re trying to make the case for something, people aren’t paying attention, it could be because you’re not using a story. When I write in my books, I deliberately use this structure where I will open up a chapter about something important with a story that I leave on a cliffhanger, and then I will get into the research, the data, the science, whatever it is, the medicine, because I know that people will want to know what the end of the story is. So, they slog through and I try to make it more entertaining than just to slog, but they get through the important part and then I wrap up the story, that cliffhanger, with lessons that that data explained.

So, in that way, you’re getting everything but the story is really going to help you remember it, and the story itself is going to help you care enough to get through it. So, I think that is a strategy, generally, whether we’re talking about making sales or making a case for something, I think is generally the framework that I like to use. And you could be obnoxious about this, like everything shouldn’t start with this intense story that ends on a cliffhanger or whatever, but something that’s important that you really do want to sink in, I think that’s an incredible framework.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And, boy, so much of this is clicking into place for me. I’m thinking about, well, one, Bob Cialdini, if you were peeping my shelf, Influence: Science and Practice and Pre-Suasion are some of my favorite all-time books, and that’s one of his things, is, I guess, the tension, you bring up a question that remains unresolved, like, “How could this be?” or, “What’s going to happen? How does it unfold?” And I guess you can use that anytime, like, “Hey, a customer was furious about this situation. They say dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And then you just switch over to, “We’ve gotten 35,000 calls along…” and so you’re going through this, and they’re like, “Well, yeah, but what about the customer?” And then you say, “Hey, ultimately, we’re able to give him what he needed but it took way more effort than it should have, and here’s how it could be easier.”

And, now, what I’m thinking about, the data versus story, I remember, boy, so right now, as we’re recording, coronavirus is a hot topic and, hopefully, in the months and years to follow, as people listen to this, they’d be like, “Oh, I remember that and it’s long gone.” But I remember I encounter a lot of statistics, news, and it’s like, “Okay, that’s happening.” And it’s like, “But, you know, is it really worse than the flu? Is it not worse than the flu?”

And then when I saw like a Facebook post from a friend of mine who said, “Hey, I’ve been doing some shifts as a nurse in the ICU, and I tell you what, when you see a few teens who had no health problems ever fight for their lives on the ventilator,” then it really puts some perspectives, “This is no joke. Stay home even if you’re an extrovert like me.” And I was very persuaded by that and that image because it was relatable, it’s like, “Oh, I’m a younger-ish person without preexisting health problems.” It was relatable because I know this person but it was new in terms of, “Oh, here’s this person who is engaged in this thing, I think, I heard a lot about, but here’s her take in experiencing it up close and personal.” More relatability, it was in the Chicago area, and then tension, “Uh-oh, I hope they make it.” And fluency, it was, well, very digestible bite-sized, it’s just like a Facebook post, maybe five sentences.

So, yeah, what a contrast right there in terms of looking at the tables of how many new infections and hospital admissions and deaths that had been versus, “Here’s someone I know who’s dealing with it head on.”

Shane Snow
Well, you bring up something that I think is an important subtlety is that many a compelling dataset has been just utterly dismissed by a good anecdote. And this is something that is not necessarily good, right? It happens all the time in business. Now, we did the research and it says that most of our customers are unhappy with this, and then the head of customer success is like, “Well, our biggest customer loves it, so your research sucks. Moving on.” So, there’s danger in that. However, within that is something that’s really powerful which is that if we’ve made up our minds about something, a story is much more powerful at helping us to reconsider the way that we think than just being barraged with statistics.

So, it can be used as a tool that can foil us so we need to be wary of that. However, it’s good for us to reassess what we’ve made up our minds up about. So, if we’re like, “Yeah, yeah, I’m young. Coronavirus isn’t going to get me. I’ve read the statistics. I had a lot of texts with friends.” Well, I’ve been that guy. “I mean, like, hey, we’re in our 30s, we’re going to be fine,” until I found out that people in my life might have autoimmune conditions, and they’re not going to be fine. And, suddenly, that individual story makes me rethink, “Well, how dangerous is this?”

And so, I think that’s healthy and it’s important just the change agent that it can be. Often, what we’re trying to do in business and life is get people to change, or get them to change their minds, change their behaviors, and it’s a lot harder to do that if you’re going to argue over stats and studies and this and that, than if you use a story to get people to open the door to changing their minds. And then, once again, we can weave in those studies. But we don’t often consider evidence because we’ve already made up our minds. Stories can help us to be in a place where we will consider new evidence.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s handy. Well, you gave us one particular approach in terms of set up a cliffhanger and then return to it. You’ve also got this CCO pattern. Can you share what is that and how do we do that in our careers?

Shane Snow
So, CCO is kind of the mnemonic for how to systematically tell consistent stories to build a brand, or a reputation, or a movement, or a case for something. And the CCO stands for create, connect, and optimize. So, really, the process of sort of the business of storytelling, when we’re talking about companies or just the business of me using stories to convince you or connect with you, is really you create the story then you get it to people, and then you see how it lands and make tweaks. So, the first time that you tell the story about whatever. Like, I’ve never, in an interview, tell the story of The Great Zucchini even though it’s one of my favorite stories.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel awesome as an interviewer just for what that’s for.

Shane Snow
A lot of people have read it. It’s not even my story. A lot of people have read it but it’s a good example but, probably, the next time I tell someone that story, I’ll probably tell it a little bit differently based on how it went this time, especially if I listened to the episode and I really analyzed how it went and your reactions, and I get feedback from you. But if you’re trying to use storytelling for marketing, say, then you create content, you put it out on Facebook or whatever your channels are, you connect to people, you email to people, you tell people about it, you see how it’s received and then you optimize it.

So, you change the headlines, you focus in on the parts that people really grab onto. This is where analytics really helps. But you figure out what it is that really is working and not working so you can emphasize those things the next time around, whether changing the story and putting it out there again, or just the next story that you’re telling, you can say, “Well, people really do seem to relate to this thing so I’m going to do more of that,” or, “This channel, this place is just really bad. People are not paying attention here so I’m going to try a new avenue for where to get my stories.” And we call this the flywheel because you go through this process over and over again. You create a story, you connect it with people, and then you optimize, do better next time.

And I will say, another subtlety, is this is not about embellishing and lying. This is not what I’m saying. Unless you’re a fiction writer, in which case, awesome, do that. But it’s about figuring out for your audience and for your goal what is the approach and the subset and the emphasis and the channel that is really going to make your story have the best chance of success.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, so then let’s talk about the connect bit there. I guess it sounds like much of it is just, “Hey, just get that in front of some people,” whether they’re in the seat in an auditorium or they are clicking it on their screens. I guess I’d like to get your take on how can we really know what folks want and will connect to? I guess you mentioned analytics so, sure, there’s that. We can look at the clickthrough rate, and the actions, and the cost per acquired customer, etc. And then I guess I’d love your take in terms of whether it’s sort of real-time observation, what should I be looking for from a human space? Or, maybe in advance research in terms of favorite questions to include in interviews or surveys, is how do you really know what’s likely to, you know, connect and resonate with folks?

Shane Snow
Yeah, I guess you can say that there are three ways to plan out your content or your story. You can look at past signals, so that’s where analytics, people always share stories about pumpkins around Halloween time, whatever. You look at the data and just do that, and this is where a lot of this stuff that I talk about with the neuroscience, it’s like, “Data shows that people really connect to emotional stories and you got to get them in the first few seconds with something that they can relate to and all of that.” That can give you guidelines or it can be really specific.

The second thing is you can predict what people might really connect to, and you can make educated guesses, and that can rely on data or pattern recognition, watching people, whatever it is. And then the third is, I think, the important one that a lot of people leave out, which is you can experiment. So, you never know what’s going to become the new best practice because everyone’s doing the best practice, everyone’s doing the thing that everyone is doing so you don’t know what’s going to be the thing that next goes viral or catches cold. You can maybe predict but often that thing, that next big thing, is a surprise, so I think you should reserve some amount of your effort for experimentation.

I like to use the example of comedy. So, for my first book, I spent a week with The Second City in Chicago, the comedy school. Yeah, a lot of great comedians, Stephen Colbert and Tina Fey and really great famous comedians have come from there, their training program. And I spent some time with them, and they do this really interesting club or thing, which is when they’re doing a review, which is like those shows where there’s lots of skits and it’s kind of like well-rehearsed and well-practiced. What they’ll often do is they’ll slip in test material into the reviews.

So, they have the show that they know everyone is going to laugh at, and they know that these things are going to hit, these jokes, these sketches, and then they’re going to put in these two things that they’re just going to see what happens. And if no one laughs, then they’ve collected data that that’s not going to work. If people laugh, then they keep iterating on it. And it’s kind of a version of that create, connect, optimize. The connect part is that people are already there in the theater. I guess that’s why it came to mind because you brought up auditorium. But they’re experimenting not based on what’s worked in the past but based on things that they are throwing out there that might be a killer thing that no one thought about.

So, I think that, with a content strategy, is really important. Don’t just do repeats of what’s worked in the past, and don’t just try to predict, but actually throw some random stuff, some experiments out there, and maybe this is a version of the predicting thing, like you’re using your intuition which is just your pattern recognition to try some things that might work. Sure. Either way I think that that’s really important. And so, you see that the best media companies often do a version of this. They do a lot of looking at people’s behavior and what resonates with them. They use that to kind of predict what will happen next. But then they also experiment with things some percentage of the time.

The analogy in the business world is 3M or Google. They let their engineers spend 20% of their time working on random stuff, whatever they want, in the off chance that one of those things will turn into Gmail, which is where Gmail came from, someone screwing around in their random 20% experimentation time. So, I think that that part is really important.

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

Shane Snow
I would say the most powerful thing you can do, before you even want to get into the nitty-gritty of training in better storytelling is think about stories that you love. And I think movies and TV shows and books are a great place to do this. Think about stories that you love and watch them or read them again, and take notes, and actually break down how the story goes.

I’ve done this a lot as a writer, taking movies that I love, and just like taking notes, which is a really nerdy way to watch a movie, but take notes on how the story goes. Like, what are the scenes? Where is the tension being set up? Just being thoughtful about analyzing stories that you like will help you to build up the muscles of exercising those elements of stories in whatever context you’re doing. If you break down 10 action movies that you love, that can definitely meaningfully impact the way that you tell stories just to get to know people or as a salesperson or whatever, so I would recommend that.

Training stuff is great and I’d love people to check out my site, but actually be a nerd and break down stories that you love and see what the patterns are there. And chances are, those are the kinds of stories that will be more comfortable for you to emulate or use pieces of yourself.

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

Shane Snow
So, lately, my new favorite quote has been “When you know better, you do better.” This is an Oprah and Maya Angelou one. But I think it’s really true, when you know better, you do better. It’s the best excuse for continually learning and for that thing that I mentioned earlier, being willing to reassess what you think and reassess your conclusions because if you know better, then you’re going to do better even if it’s a little bit painful to realize that you’ve been wrong about something.

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

Shane Snow
Most recent favorite study is about kids and trust. So, I’ve been doing a lot of writing around teamwork and innovation, and trust is a really big factor in those things. And I think it also plays into stories can help us to build trust if the stories are empathetic and help you get to know people. But there’s a really interesting study about kids and trust. Basically, researchers put a bunch of kids in a room, and then made it clear that something was wrong, that something was going wrong, and then they would have an adult, authority figure, come in, and tell the kids that everything was fine, and everything was going to be fine. And what they found was that the kids’ stress levels spiked more at the part when they were told things were going to be fine. And they were more stressed out upon realizing that an authority figure and an adult was lying to them or sugarcoating to them than they were about the bad thing.

And I like this study because it does speak to human nature, that kids are perceptive. Adults are perceptive too. I think in, many ways, we should be way more perceptive but we are way worse off when someone tries to sugarcoat the truth, or shade the truth, or push away the bad news, than we are with the bad news. And so, I think I like this study because it gives a little bit more of a reason to be honest and to not try to make things easy on people because, actually, sometimes making things easy on people is actually going to make things harder on them. It creates more stress and it erodes your trust. So, I like that study of late.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Shane Snow
The book I’ve recommended the most to people the last couple of years is called A Book About Love by Jonah Lehrer. It’s about the neuroscience and psychology of love, not just romantic love but friendship and love of self-compassion. And it’s also kind of a redemption story, a story about learning to forgive yourself after you’ve done something wrong. One of the most insightful life-changing books that I’ve read in a long time, I bought it for like 30 people at this point, so A Book About Love.

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

Shane Snow
The tool I use the most is Evernote. I like it for the flexibility of being able to clip stuff from the internet. I like it for helping me to get over FOMO when I might be distracted by an article. It’s similar to Pocket where you have an article up, and you can save it for later rather than having to read it now, so Evernote has a clip where you can do that. Because if I’m working, I’m trying to focus on something, and someone sends me something interesting, or I come across a side tangent, I worry that if I don’t read it now I’m going to miss it, or I’m just going, by having it, get sucked in. But saving it for later, clipping it down, eases that anxiety or that FOMO or curiosity because I know I’ll get to it later, and I can stay focused and not get distracted. So, that’s one that’s really been useful.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Shane Snow
Well, I like to think of, actually, a ritual that I have for my writing. A way for me to get into my own personal flow or zone when I want to write is I have…I’ll show you. The listeners won’t be able to see it. But I have this little coyote figurine that a friend of mine gave.

And what I do is when I’m getting ready to buckle down and write, which is often hard to do, you procrastinate, you do all those things, and you feel blocked, I have a specific routine that I go through, and it culminates with me putting the little coyote on my laptop. And when the coyote is there, then I’m in writing mode. There’s actually some science to this, that superstitious routines and rituals, they’re not magic but they do work because they can help your brain calm down and get into sort of a place of focus. So, when baseball players do like all the crazy moves before they get up to bat, that’s actually helping them to calm down and get into a place where they can focus on their performance. So, I do that with my little ritual with my coffee and my baby coyote figurine.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known for, it’s quoted back to you often?

Shane Snow
Probably the most common quote I see tweeted or people react to is, I think it’s cheesy just because I think a lot of quotes are cheesy, but I think it’s absolutely true, is that “Genius is less about the size of your mind than about how open it is.” So, history shows that really, really smart people are often outperformed or out-clevered by open-minded and flexible people who are willing to do things not just really smart in one direction but are willing to consider lots of options.

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

Shane Snow
Just my website ShaneSnow.com. It has everything: articles, books, training courses, and my social media.

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

Shane Snow
So, relevant to right now, but I think people listen to this after the quarantine is over, there’s a tool that I made. It’s a free tool, it’s called the workstyle quiz. The challenge would be either use this tool or spend a few minutes doing this, which is figure out your unique way of working, and share that with the people you collaborate with most. So, my workstyle quiz asks a bunch of questions that seem small and insignificant but they add up, that when people are more aware of how you work best, including yourself, then people will work better with you.

So, things like, “Do you do your clearest thinking in the morning, in the middle of the day, at night? When and how are you best able to get into a flow when you probably don’t want to be distracted? What’s the best way to get a hold of you in an emergency? What’s the best way to get a hold of you with something that can wait a little bit but is important?” Spelling those out, taking a little quiz, or thinking through those things to spell those out for the people you collaborate with makes a huge difference so that people will contact you, communicate with you in ways that help you to work better because they know it’ll help them to work better.

And, also, if you do make an effort to accommodate people’s different work situations and styles, then that builds trust which will then, hopefully, be reflected on you and help you get your work done too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Shane, this has been a treat. Thank you and good luck in all the stories you’re telling.

Shane Snow
I appreciate it. Thank you.

May 11
0

569: Thriving in the Stress and Uncertainty of a Crisis with Dr. Joshua Klapow

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Dr. Joshua Klapow discusses how to keep your health and wellbeing strong during times of crisis.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about being upset 
  2. How to quickly reboot your fatigued brain
  3. The four pillars of excellent physical and mental health 

About Joshua

Joshua C. Klapow is a licensed clinical psychologist and a performance coach. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Public Health at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and the author of Living SMART: Lifestyle Change Made Simple. Dr. Klapow works extensively with individuals and organizations in the area of performance optimization. His work focuses on leveraging behavioral science strategies to help both individuals and organizations achieve strategic goals. From athletes to executives, from start-ups to multinational companies, Dr. Klapow works with clients nationwide to help bring the power of behavioral science to human performance. Dr. Klapow was named by Yahoo Finance as a Top 20 Entrepreneur to Watch in 2020 and featured in Thrive Global for his approach to performance coaching. He is married with two children in college. He resides in Birmingham, Alabama. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Joshua Klapow Interview Transcript

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

Joshua Klapow
It’s my pleasure, Pete. Good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I understand that you are a doctor and you have the nickname Dr. Disaster. How did this name come about? And can you tell us a story about when you got to make a cool impact in the midst of a difficult time for people?

Joshua Klapow
Okay, yes. First of all, it’s not a marketing ploy or I’ve had…

Pete Mockaitis
Your PR people said, “It’s going to be hot.”

Joshua Klapow
Yeah, that’s right. No, no, no. So, I got this name back during Hurricane Katrina actually. So, I’m a clinical psychologist by training, and one of my areas of interests is disaster mental health, but I’ve also worked most of my academic career in a school of public health, and so a lot of what I was doing there was crisis communication, how to help people, groups of people, during times of disaster or times of crisis, let’s say that.

Well, as we started getting Hurricane Katrina come through, there was interest from the local media and then from the broader national media because I’m down here in the southeast on how do people cope, how do people deal with terrible things that happen. And so, I did a lot of stuff locally and nationally in the media on Hurricane Katrina and coping with death, and rebuilding, etc. Well, as you might imagine, we had more hurricanes. There was Gustav and then there were tornadoes, and pretty much every time, and my kids were young at the time, anytime something bad happened, you’d see me on local TV, or hear me on the local radio.

And one of the media folks at the university where I work with, he just, one day, he said this, he’s like, “Damn! You’re like Dr. Disaster. Everytime something bad happens, there you are.” And, yeah, I said, “God, that’s depressing. That’s terrible. I don’t want to be known as…” He said, “No, no, no. I like it.” And then my kids were very young at the time, “Dad is Dr. Disaster.”

And ever since then, you know, the line is, people say, “We see you on TV sometimes.” I say, “Yeah, pretty much if something bad happens, there’s a decent shot that you’ll see me or hear me somewhere because that is one of the things that I do is help people through crises.” So, yes, I am Dr. Disaster. I wear it as a badge of honor in that I help people. I don’t like the connotation of what it means because it’s almost like, ‘Oh, God, here comes Josh. Something bad is going to happen.’” And I have to remind them, “No, something bad has happened. Here comes Josh to help.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then can you tell us, you’ve seen and helped a lot of people in a lot of disasters. How does this current COVID pandemic crisis situation, how is it similar to other disasters? And how is it unique?

Joshua Klapow
It’s unique in many ways. So, let’s talk about how it’s similar. I use the phrase, “Crisis is in the eye of the beholder.” And what I mean by that is we talk about disasters and crises, and we talk about them almost as if there is a formal definition. And if you think about it, a disaster or a crisis could be a global pandemic. It could be also the breakup of a marriage, or the loss of a job, or your dog dies. Crisis is all relative.

And so, one of the things that is very similar is that we are in a state of crisis from the sense of there’s lots of change, there’s lots of uncertainty, and there are lots of unpleasant things either that have happened, or happening, or likely to happen. And if you think about that, that holds everything from a tornado that’s come through, to a sick pet, to a relationship on the rocks, to a global pandemic. And the reason that that holds true is what remains constant is we’re humans. And the human factor remains constant, how we react to threat, uncertainty, discomfort, discomfort globally, everything from emotional discomfort to physical discomfort. All of those are sort of stress responses that happen to us no matter how big, or how many different people are affected, or if it’s just happening to us.

I think what is so different about this one is, if I really can think about it, it’s two things. One, the global nature of it. What I mean by that is so many people are affected unlike a tornado, or a hurricane, or an earthquake, where even if it’s huge, we can say, “It happened in this city, this town, this country.” That’s number one. So, so many people are in the same situation.

The second thing is while for some people there’s very acute levels of crisis, “My loved one is sick. My loved one…” God forbid it, “…is dying.” For many people, the crisis is both a restriction and a freedom, the unknown, “Will I get sick?” and then underlying that, there are sort of two more pieces of the crisis which is, one, financial for many people, and then, two, a complete change, prolonged change, of how we’re living our lives. This is not the storm that blew through and we’ll rebuild. This, even, and I dare say this, this is a little provocative, even after 9/11. The event happened. It was horrible. There were longer-term effects but it didn’t come on as slowly, rise as slowly, peak and stay for as many people. And that is something, frankly, all of us alive right now, with the exception of a few people who lived through the 1917 Flu Pandemic, none of us have experienced ever.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sets some context. Thank you. So, you say that this anxiety, this experience, it really does impact just kind of the way we think and operate and feel each day. Like, what are some of the telltale signs, like, “Oh, this is actually normal that I’m thinking, feeling, experiencing this, given that we’re in the midst of a crisis situation”?

Joshua Klapow
A lot of people can recognize when they’re under profound stress. They’ll say, “I feel stressed. I feel nervous. I feel anxious. I have a headache. I have a backache. My stomach aches. My stomach hurts. My temper is short,” those kinds of things. But the term that I like to use, Pete, that I think many people feel but they don’t equate it with stress or levels of stress, because for a lot of people it’s not super high levels of stress. It’s just kind of, what I call, it’s not low. It’s moderate. It’s there but we’re able to sort of function. The tornado hasn’t just come right through, it’s, “I still get up every day and I’m doing things.” But people feel discombobulated. That’s my favorite word to use.

Pete Mockaitis
Moderate stress. Discombobulation.

Joshua Klapow
Discombobulation. We like to use down in the South, we like to call it feeling out of sorts. We’re out of sorts. It’s not quite right, “I feel slightly agitated, slightly irritable, out of sync. I may not be sleeping as well but I am sleeping. I feel tired. I feel out of rhythm.” Sometimes a feeling, almost a little bit of jetlag, not a ton of jetlag. I see a lot of people feel like, and I think we’ve all heard this, “What day is it again? Where am I?” It’s that.

And that’s where the discombobulation comes because while there’s peaks and valleys, you know, if you lose a job, then that’s high stress that you can say, “Oh, my God, I know exactly what’s going on.” But let’s say you’ve already lost the job, and maybe you’re managing your books and you’re managing your finances, and it’s kind of okay. It’s not good but it’s okay. Or, let’s say you have a job. What people are feeling is, “I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know how to manage this.” And, particularly in those areas where we’re much more restricted in our movement, this feeling, for a lot of people for the first time in their lives, “I can’t do what I want to do,” which is very…it’s unique for Americans, right? It’s very unique.

And this came out in the early stages. You’ve heard of the whole hoarding of the toilet paper, right? Why are people hoarding toilet paper? “Well, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to go to the grocery store.” There was no place in this country, in the U.S. anyway, that shut down all grocery stores. They limited it. They limited how much you could buy. They limited, in some cases, how many people could go in. But that’s a stressor for our culture. Not being able to go where we want to go whenever we want to go and get whatever we want to get, and it creates this sense of…it’s a very primitive sense of survival. It puts us kind of into that fight or flight, and we’re not even highly quarantined, right?

For a lot us, it’s just, “Stay at home.” It’s not, “You will be arrested if you go out.” And that is very unique to what we’re experiencing right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to, because I think you’re really speaking to something here, and I keep going back and forth on this in terms of there are times in which I’d like, “Hey, well, this isn’t really so bad. I mean, this is the home I like. This is the family I like, my wife and kids. These are people I like, so it ain’t so bad. So, why are you worked up?” And then I think back, “Hey, what about in, I don’t know, war times? Like, the soldiers or those under strict rationing?” I was like, “Have I become soft? Have we all become soft?” Then, I don’t know, it’s sort of like I’m upset with myself for being peeved. It’s like meta upset, and I don’t know, like, “Are we weak? And is that bad?” What do you feel about this, Josh?

Joshua Klapow
I get blasted on this, although with my clients, I think it’s an important one. When I’m talking with my clients, a lot of times this is what comes up. It’s feeling guilty because we feel like we’re under siege. Now, I will say this, if you’ve lost your job and you have no income, and that’s happening at all levels of the socioeconomic spectrum, if you lost your job, “What do I do?” Then you may have a reason to be quite upset, right?

But see, this is the thing. If you’re upset because you can’t go to the grocery store, or you can’t leave, or you have to spend time at home, then you have the right to be upset. Being upset is emotion. It’s an emotion. We have the right to feel what we want to feel. It is what we do with it that has the impact. It has the impact on ourselves and it has the impact on the people around us.

So, for example, if you’re feeling, “God, this really sucks. I’m here at home, I can’t go socialize the way I want to, I can’t go to the restaurants I want. And, yes, I know I shouldn’t feel bad but I do feel bad,” and you kind of get yourself a little bit irritable. And then, as a result, you take that out on your wife and your kids, and you’re mean, and you’re cranky, or maybe you’re in a leadership position, and you’re irritable because of this, and you’re yelling on the conference calls for everybody to work harder. Now, your justified emotion is having a very unjustified impact on everybody else.

This is where managing what you’re feeling is far more critical than whether you’re feeling it or not. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. It’s a great clear distinction, you know, bright red line there. So, then, yeah, how do we do this? How do we manage how we’re feeling? How do we cultivate this mental health amidst the stuff that’s going on up in here?

Joshua Klapow
It ain’t easy, I can tell you that. And I think one thing, people have to carefully open their eyes to where the sources of stress may be coming from. We can all talk about the restriction part, “I’m restricted in money. I’m fearful potentially for my health. Am I going to get sick? Is a loved one going to get sick?” There are sort of the obvious ones. But I’ll tell you, Pete, those are big sources of stress. But where these things start getting exponential is the inner section of work, life, family life relationships.

So, as you said, there are a lot of us now who are either home with family in a way that none of us have ever been home that way before. Or the opposite, we’re isolated. Maybe we’re not with family and we can’t be. We’re by ourselves. Those pieces, particularly the family dynamics, where I’ve seen more relationship issues, and you’ve seen the statistics, high rates of people, particularly in China, but in other areas, filing for divorce or etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I have not yet seen those. So, I thank Josh, bringing fresh info, tell us about that.

Joshua Klapow
Let me tell you, it makes sense. When you’re stuck at home with your partner, whether or not you have kids, and you have to be with them every day, the floodlight is on your relationship. And every crack in that relationship, normal healthy cracks, are going to show. And if you don’t deal with them, and I’m not talking about necessarily going to therapy, but if you don’t deal with the pet peeves and the things that normally you’d be able to skirt by because you’re not spending as much time, it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

Throw in there, for some parents, homeschooling. Throw in there for someone like me, two college kids who are now back at home, who are not happy about it, they love their mom and dad, but they want to be at school, and you get family stress that absolutely rolls on top of all of the other stressors. And what happens? People get tired, stress starts wearing them down, it starts bleeding over into conference calls that they may be taking for work. The work stress starts bleeding over to family, and we got a big stress ball that nobody can point to one thing. And that’s what catches people off guard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. All right. So, I think you’ve very nicely articulated what’s going on here, what we’re dealing with. So, what do we do about it?

Joshua Klapow
Yeah. If you’ve ever been a parent, and you remember when you had a young child, and I’m talking the infant child, the child who was screaming and you’re feeding them every three hours, or even a toddler, one of the things I distinctly remember from not being a parent to being a parent, I used to judge the quality of my time in weeks or months, “This was a great week. It’s a great week. This was a great month.” And I quickly remember, as a parent, that didn’t work, particularly with a young child. It’s like, “Oh, my God, this day sucked. Like, this day was really bad.”

And what I started to realize was I need to think about the quality of my time in smaller increments, “This was a really good hour. This was a good minute. This was a good 10 minutes.” Now, I’m not advocating that, because of COVID-19, we only live and savor the quality of every minute. But what I do mean is you may have a really bad day because of work, because of finances, because of family, but then you may have an awesome day, because, you know what, you got to be on three conference calls and spend some time with your spouse in a way that you never got to. Or maybe you got to do a video conference, and we’re seeing this, reuniting with college friends.

My point is we have got to shift. What we have to do is we have to stop trying to live our life right now as if tomorrow it’s going to go back to the way that it was. That’s what we typically do in crises. What we typically do is we go, “Okay, if I can just ride this sucker out, if I can just ride this out, it’ll be a few days, a few weeks, I’m going to be okay. It’s all going to get back to normal.” I’m not a doomsdayer here. I don’t know how long this is going to be, but I can guarantee you that by next week, even with everything open, or next month, everything is going to be back to normal. And even if it is, that’s probably not the most healthy way to think about it.

What we have to do is look at what’s given to us right here, right now, “What do I have? What do I not have? What am I certain about? What am I not certain about? And how do I maximize that? How do I maximize the fact…? I’m just using things that everybody is doing…  that I can wear shorts all day long now.” And that’s not saying, Pete, to just look on the rosy side of things. What it’s saying is in order to get a grip, you must find the nuggets of goodness in your life because there is a lot of uncertainty and chaos going on.

And if you can cling to those nuggets, what that allows you to do is it allows you to move forward. It allows you to be less stressed, less distressed, sleep better, eat better, etc. And it allows each day to have a little bit of goodness in it, which, frankly, to be honest with you, as humans, that’s about all we need besides food, water, and shelter, in order to make it to the next day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we’re noticing these things, and we’re embracing them, and looking at sort of smaller, shorter time increments. Do you have any other pro tips on how we can go about sort of noticing and appreciating and, I suppose, letting these things pass us right by?

Joshua Klapow
You must recognize that, and I know this is a little broad-brushing because everybody’s situation is slightly different. Your brain is going to go offline frequently during this kind of situation. And let me explain what I mean by that. When you’re home and you’re trying to work in particular, but let’s say you’re home and you didn’t work. You took care of the kids, or even if you have always worked from home, you got all kinds of different things going on right now. There may be people that were at home that weren’t at home before.

You may have never participated on so many video conference calls. You may not have had the dog interrupting you every five seconds. Your brain is going to be distracted in a way that it never has before. One more piece to put in, all the newsfeeds, right? I mean, in my lifetime, I never remember a daily briefing where updates were actually new information. I mean, if you think about it.

Okay, so what that does is our brain can’t attend to the task at hand, and you’re going to feel tired, you’re going to feel inefficient. And so, what I’m encouraging all of my clients to do, and the people that I interact with, about every 45 minutes or so, you may notice yourself feeling fatigue. It’s time to take a break. Not an hour break but what I call the bathroom break. If you’re hydrating properly, you go into the bathroom, you should be going to the bathroom about every hour or up to 90 minutes. And, literally, sometimes I have to remind my clients to put in their schedule to drink water so that they hydrate during the day, because I got people that I work with that will go nine hours on conference calls and never stop.

You have to pace yourself. That means taking a minute to, literally, remind yourself, “Where am I? What am I doing? What is the task at hand?” to take your eyes off the screen and look outside, and it’s not an hour of meditation. It’s a minute to get your brain back, focused to the task at hand. Most of us don’t have to do that that frequently throughout our day. Now, I don’t know that everyone has to. I can tell you it doesn’t hurt. And what I can also tell you is you feel so much more focused because your brain comes back online. It’s a critical stress management tool that most people don’t use and they have to right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that’s dead-on because I’ve just been and many, many times I am, I don’t know, on news, or social media, or something, it’s just like, “What is even happening right now?”

Joshua Klapow
Yes. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like I have to regroup. And part of it, I think, is so helpful is, like, when I have days in which I actually write down the key things of the day, then that’s really helpful to remember, “Oh, yes, this is what I meant to do today, and I’ve kind of forgotten about that and got suck into news or whatever.”

Joshua Klapow
And that’s a great example of you might say to yourself, “God, normally I never forget these things. I don’t have to write them down.” Right now, your brain is more likely to go offline. And I’ll tell you where it has a larger impact. It’s not just for you, it’s for the people that you interact with. So, if you think about it, and this is what I was saying, it can cause relationship problems. It’s like, “Hey, I just told you to make a grocery list.”

Joshua Klapow
Can you imagine how it impacts your home life, your relationship life? And, particularly for work, if you’re working from home, how you interact with colleagues, how you interact with your boss. We have to be much more mindful of what our emotions are doing right now. And I love what you said, although it’s not pleasant. You have to sit back and go, “What? What is going on?” That’s a very normal response. The difference is you have to do that while you’re working, while you’re parenting, while you’re being a husband or a wife or a spouse or a partner. That is going to make you tired at the end of the day.

And that understanding, that and then taking action on that, making sure you’re hydrated, making sure you’re well-nourished, making sure you’re writing yourself reminders, making sure that you call a timeout, and say, “You know what, I don’t have the bandwidth, guys. I don’t have the bandwidth to do all these today.” That kind of communication is critical.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I love these particular bits of sort of in the moment recognizing and good communication with folks. What are some of the habits or recurring practices you recommend that make a world of difference in kind of boosting our overall mental health and resilience, and then, specifically, just providing a large boost of rejuvenation? Like, I guess, where do I get the most bang for my buck when it comes to self-care, Josh? That’s what I want to know.

Joshua Klapow
So, there’s a couple of things and they are things that we all know but that most of us, even those of us who may have done this before, and this is also unique to this particular situation.

So, the number one thing you’ll hear is make sure you’re getting exercise. And everybody is, “Aah, I know the exercise. I know about the exercise.” Let me tell you why exercise is super important. Number one, for a lot of people who’ve exercised regularly in the past, their gyms are closed, right? And so, you’ve got a lot of people who are used to having that metabolic boost in the morning or in the afternoon who aren’t exercising. That throws off your entire metabolic system if you’re an exerciser.

If you’re not an exerciser, the mental fatigue wears on your body. Being strong physically, and I’m not saying start a crazy exercise program, but just getting the blood flowing actually is super important for your immune system, it’s super important to regulate your sleep system. So, that exercise, everybody knows about, even if it’s just for a walk, Pete, is probably one of the best things that you can do. I wish I had another way to say it. You got to get out there and exercise. And if you tell me, “I can’t,” I can show you five gazillion YouTube videos on different ways to exercise. People are finding the most creative ways to exercise that fit their physical needs, their mental health. So, that’s number one. You’ve got to move the body, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to moving the body, I’d love to get your sense. It sounds like you’re emphasizing more so cardiovascular as opposed to strength-resistance training, or anything. Yeah, lay it on us.

Joshua Klapow
Not necessarily. A lot of this depends, A, on your health status, B, on your previous exercise history. So, do not go start running marathons if you never have before. What you’re looking for is physical activity. You want your body moving, you want your muscles stretching, you want your heart rate elevated. Does it have to be an all-out run or trying to do a thousand pushups? No. If you did that before, more power to you, and keep doing it.

I’ll tell you, myself personally, and this has been a big change for me, I was very much into the weightlifting. I went to the gym. I never did anything from home. My gym closed. I went immediately online to go buy weights. You can’t buy weights online. Or if you can buy them, they’re like a thousand dollars now. And so, I was like, “I’m not going to do that.”

I’ve been dabbling in yoga, just dabbling. I’m now doing yoga six days a week. I would’ve never done that before. I’m experimenting. So, one of the things I would also encourage your listeners is if there’s a kind of exercise that you’ve always wondered about, now is your excuse to try something different. So, I think that’s absolutely important. It’s not a particular kind but I don’t want you sitting in a chair for seven hours a day. It’s bad for you. Bad for you.

The other thing that is really important, if at all possible, and I’ll get to the nutrition part in a second, I’ll do that quickly, is get your Vitamin D. Get some daylight. If you’re inside and the weather provides and allows, step outside. The norms have changed, Pete. The norms have changed. It’s okay to hear birds in most companies now in the background chirping while you’re on a conference call. It’s very important that we don’t sit in one room for eight to ten hours a day.

Get outside, get the fresh air even if that’s every hour taking a two-minute break. You need that natural sunlight both for your metabolic purposes, also to regulate your sleep. And if you don’t believe me, try and experiment. Stay in your room, wherever room you’re in, this is assuming you’re not quarantined in a room. Stay in your room for six hours versus get outside every hour for two to three minutes, you’ll feel much better.

The other piece that people neglect is proper hydration and nutrition while they’re at home. We need to drink water. We need to eat good food. If we don’t drink and we don’t pee, and we eat crappy food, we’re going to feel bad. I’m not telling you that you have to become a vegan. I’m not telling you that you have to get completely clean on your health or on your food. But the better you can do, the better you’re going to feel. I can’t tell you how many people right now are saying, “God, I’m snacking. I’m snacking.” Why are you snacking? Because you’re sitting there and you can see the snack cabinet in your own house.

So, these are the kinds of changes. A lot of my clients will say, “I already know that stuff. I already know that.” And my number one comeback is this, “Great. Are you doing it?” “No.” “How do you feel right now?” “Like crap.” “Tell you what, eat a little bit better, make sure you drink a lot of water throughout the day, get your behind outside. Move. And then maybe the last one, too, is…” and this is one that is new, something that I haven’t seen as much. A lot of dysregulated sleep cycles. People are kind of going to bed at strange times because they don’t have as much of a routine. And when your sleep cycle gets off, it messes everything else up. Try to remain as regimented as you can on a sleep cycle. I don’t care if you don’t have to get up the next day till 9:00. Don’t stay up till 2:00 o’clock in the morning just because. The more consistent your sleep, the better you’re going to feel.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s a really nice lineup. Now, when it comes to hydration, how much is enough?

Joshua Klapow
Yeah. So, again, I’m not a medical doctor. I’m a psychologist. But this is the classic, and I have one client who…I was surprised to hear this. This was somebody, she’s an executive, mostly working from home who, literally, would prevent herself from drinking because she was on back-to-back conference calls, and she didn’t want to be late to the conference call. I’m not kidding.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there before. I’ve had those days, yeah.

Joshua Klapow
Well, but that was every day. And it doesn’t take a medical doctor for me to say, “What are you doing? Like, that’s terrible. Don’t do that. You should be going to the bathroom…” again, we all have different health states, etc. Two to three to four times a day to pee and it should be clear relatively, right? And I tell you what, you asked for bang for the buck? Here’s the other reason why I want you to drink water or non-alcoholic beverages. If you’re peeing every 90 minutes to two hours, guess what you can do when you go into the bathroom? You can take that 90-minute to two-hour break to also reset your brain, to take the deep breaths, to come back to a good place. I call it the recalibration bio-break.

And that’s what I said. I said, “Look, if you want to multitask, multitask. Go do your business in the bathroom, and then take one extra minute in that bathroom to reset, to remind yourself, “What day is it? Where am I? What am I going to do?” It’s these little tweaks like this that allow you to carry on, allow you to power forward. What most of us try to do that is wrong is we try to have the good work ethic, “I’m just going to take one more call. I’m just going to do one more recording. I’ll skip this lunch. I’ll skip this water. I’ll power through, and if I do that, then I’ll get to the other side.” Psychologically, physiologically, and behaviorally, that could not be farther from the truth in non-global pandemic times. It is twice as bad in global pandemic times.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. Well, so, not to get too personal with you, Josh, but I’d love to zoom in to that one minute in the bathroom. So, you’ve just urinated, wow, it’s the first time I’ve said this on the show. All right.

Joshua Klapow
I’m a psychologist. You can say anything you want here.

Pete Mockaitis
You just urinated. What happens in the following minute that can be a great reset in the bathroom?

Joshua Klapow
So, as I’d like to say, you take care of your business. And in this day and age, and you can do this on either side. Either before you wash your hands or after you wash your hands, either way is okay because this is going to involve your brain, and you don’t have to touch your face to do this. What I really encourage people to do is close their eyes or not, but to take some deep diaphragmatic breaths. And we all know this, and I’ll show you the example I give you. But this is essentially the (inhales then exhales). Do that three to four times.

Now, I get a lot of grief as a psychologist because, particularly when I do this in any media, they go, “Oh, my God, this is the psychologist and now he’s telling me to deep breathe.” The reason I’m telling you that is, as your stress levels rise, your breath shortens. And one of the ways that we know that you cannot only relax your physiology, your muscles, relax your muscles, heart rate, blood pressure, but if you relax is to slow your breathing down.

And the classic example I give people is when you see a little child, or even an adult who’s kind of panicky, right, you see a little kid, “Huh, huh, huh.” What do we tell people to do besides calm down, which you should never tell people to do? “Take a breath.” We always tell people, “It’s okay. just take a breath. Take a few deep breaths.”

So, if we tell people to do that when they’re panicking, why wouldn’t we do that after we go to the bathroom and we’re a little offline? So, take three deep breaths, have a nice happy thought, and then. Wash your hands and get back out in the warzone. And it’s critical. I have physicians do this before they ever get back in, whether it’s the E.R. or an O.R., I have them do it all the time. I have athletes do it at every timeout.

It’s critical, Pete, that we do it right now because distractions alone will take us offline and we need to be online.

The other reason that it’s important, if you’re not going to do it for you, it changes the way you interact with your spouse or your significant other. It changes the way you interact with your kids, who, many a kids are very discombobulated right now. It also changes the way that you’re going to interact on conference calls, with your coworkers, your boss, and your direct reports. If you’re in a bad place, it’s going to show even if you’re not “freaking out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really resonating. All right. So, that’s it then. There’s the washing of hands, there’s the deep diaphragmatic breaths, there’s the happy thought, then that’s your minute, hey?

Joshua Klapow
It is, yes. Now, here’s what I don’t want you to expect, “One minute is going to last me nine hours.” So, here’s the good and the bad of it. The bad is It’s not going to last all day long one set of diaphragmatic breathing and your happy thought. But here’s a nice thing. It takes a minute to reset.

Again, I’ll share another thing that I do. Before I ever go on air, before I ever take a client call, before I ever switch from one conference call to the next, I make sure I got at least a minute. I’m a high-energy guy. I get going a lot. I reset. And most of us, Pete, don’t do that because we think that that couldn’t have an impact. It’s not a magic pill but it’s what our bodies and our minds need to stay on track in addition to all the other things that we talked about.

And I mentioned it in passing but it is equally important. Own up to your limits right now. Stop. Do not wear yourself out as a badge of honor because it does nobody any good. Work hard but if you’re driving yourself into the ground because you think that’s great, what I’m going to tell you is that by the time you’ve driven yourself just short of being into the ground, you’re no good for anybody. You didn’t do good work at the end. I always talk about, “Come to your limit, don’t go past your limit.” Come to your limit and then back off. You have to right now.

There is this expectation, “I must be a super parent, super spouse. I got to show my boss that I’m doing everything, and I got to be great and have fun and exercise and all that kind of stuff.” I wish I had a better word. It’s crap. We’re human. We’re not machines. And, particularly right now, nobody is firing on all cylinders. Anybody who tells you they’re totally dialed in, totally focused, not worried about anything, is either not human, or they’re lying, or in denial, or in a lot of denial.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thanks for laying it out there. Now, can you share some of your favorite things. Let’s start with a favorite quote.

Joshua Klapow
It’s from Pema Chodron, who’s a very famous author, Buddhist monk, New Yorker, an ex-nurse actually before she became a monk. And the quote is, “Feel the feelings and drop the story.” I love this because it’s kind of what I was saying as we first started talking.

You’re going to feel in your day all kinds of things. What makes them have an impact is the label, the interpretation, or the story that we associate with those emotions.

Right now, we have to feel the feelings and not have so much interpretation of them tied to them because there’s going to be so many feelings coming and going.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Joshua Klapow
So, I like that one. It’s a good one to live. It’s a good one to live by right now.

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

Joshua Klapow
Okay, this is going to go very opposite what I just said. It doesn’t contradict it. What made me become a psychologist was the work of B.F. Skinner.

The reason that I loved this was that it shows me, not just that we work only for reward, but that our behavior is predictable, is lawful, is on average. There is rhyme and reason to why we do what we do.

And what that tells me is that if something is not going right, or if something is going right, we can figure it out. We can figure out how to make you feel better, how to make you do something different.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Joshua Klapow
I’ve got two quickly. I’m a sports fanatic. And a wonderful book by one of the most coveted international women’s soccer players, Abby Wambach, Wolfpack. It’s a short read.

Related to that book, not from the writing, is Brene Brown’s Rising Strong. She’s written so many great books. Daring Greatly is one that most people know. Rising Strong, for me, resonated because it was, look, if you’re going to live in this life, you’re going to get your butt kicked. You’re going to get your butt kicked if you’re going to live, and you’re going to fall down.

And you’ve got to figure out, not just how to be tough, because being tough is not about it. It’s about, you use the word self-care, how to get yourself back up on your feet physically, mentally, socially, and spiritually so that you can be strong in the world, which is different than just being tough and guarded and defensive. And Brene Brown’s book Rising Strong really teaches readers how to do that. So, between the two, between having your pack and learning how to rise strong, and then with that quote from Pema Chodron, it’s a good way to live.

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

Joshua Klapow
I’m a less-is-more guy. My family is they’re Slack and Asana and they got this organizer and that organizer. And my tool is my calendar. It’s an electronic calendar.
The reason that I use just my calendar is if you look at my calendar, you will see my appointments, you will see my professional things on there, you will also see things, my kids love to kid me about this, you will see, “Work out at 5:00 a.m.” I know that I work out at 5:00. I don’t need a reminder to work out. It’s on there every day. My lunch is blocked out from 11:45 to 1:00. Now, do I eat lunch all the time there at that time? No. But it’s on there. My rest breaks are broken out and they’re stated on there. My winddown period, it says, “Wind down for bed with good intentions.” My bedtime is on there.

Now, your listeners may go, “Oh, my God, what’s wrong with this guy?” This is my way of removing excess from my brain. It is structure in my day that I can disregard. I have the freedom to disregard anything there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I think it’s also reassuring in which you can say, “Oh, this is the time of the day in which I’m going to check those things. I need not check them now. There is a designated time in which that’s going to occur,” so you feel all the more free and resilient to just put those aside for the moment.

Joshua Klapow
Yes, I love the way you described that.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Okay. And how about a favorite habit?

Joshua Klapow
Yeah. If it’s just one it is to exercise. The biggest bang for the buck mentally, physically, socially, and spiritually is moving your body because it has all the physical health benefits that we don’t need to go into, that everybody knows about.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a particular nugget you share that you’re known for, people quote it back to you frequently?

Joshua Klapow
You’ve heard the term “don’t work harder, work smarter” and that’s the one that work all the time.

The idea that, “I must work more in order to be successful” versus “As I get better at what I do, whether it’s work, parenting, relationship, it actually gets easier, and I may not have to work as hard.” And that is a beautiful, wonderful, acceptable thing that you get to have by being good at something.

So, my point is it doesn’t have to get harder, whatever it is. It can get easier. You could work less and get the same thing done. The one related to that, and it’s just aside, is this idea of “I have to.”

What I tell people this. You don’t have to. There are only a couple things in this world that you have to do. You have to eat. You have to breathe. You have to drink water. Anything else you don’t have to.

If you make it a choice, then what it allows you to do is bring the power of you to that choice. And that is really important because there are so many things that we do, most of them are our choice even if we tell ourselves that we have to.

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

Joshua Klapow
Social media, Twitter and Instagram. You can follow me at @drjoshk. If you’d like to see my webpage, it’s JoshKlapow.com. And my email, my very public email is askdrjoshk@gmail.com.

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

Joshua Klapow
We’re told all the time to think outside the box if you want to be great at what you do. If you want to be great at what you do before you ever think outside the box, take inventory of what you have inside the box. What do you already know how to do? What are you good at? What are you passionate about? And I’m talking about reading, writing, gardening, art.

Don’t spend all of your time trying to be awesome at your job by thinking so far out of who you are that you forget the gifts that you bring to the table automatically. It’s okay to think broadly but don’t lose the gifts or the skills that you have nurtured and matured when you’re trying to be awesome because those are your foundation that will allow you to be awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Josh, thanks so much for sharing these good words. It’s been a treat. I wish you all the best for yourself and your clients, and the disasters are manageable and workable in your lives.
Joshua Klapow
Thank you, Pete. I appreciate the opportunity to share this with you and with your listeners. And to everybody, exercise every day and please wash your hands.

May 07
0

568: Minimizing Tasks While Maximizing Results with Laura Stack

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Laura Stack says: "The more you take care of yourself, the greater your energy level will be to focus on other people and your work."

Productivity expert Laura Stack shares best–and worst–practices for prioritizing your tasks.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The six steps to optimizing your workflow
  2. The five productivity personality archetypes
  3. How to work from home effectively

About Laura

Laura Stack is a noted expert in employee and team productivity, she’s also best known by her moniker, “The Productivity Pro.” She is also an award-winning keynote speaker and a bestselling author of eight books. She is the President and CEO of The Productivity Pro, Inc., a boutique consulting firm helping leaders increase workplace performance in high-stress environments. 

Laura has been featured in the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur and Forbes magazine. She is a high-content Certified Speaking Professional (CSP), who educates, entertains, and motivates professionals to deliver bottom-line results. 

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you Sponsors!

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Laura Stack Interview Transcript

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

Laura Stack
Thanks, Pete. Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat with you. You are known as The Productivity Pro, and we love talking to productivity pros.

Laura Stack
Okay. Good.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re going to fit right in here. And I want to kick it off by hearing, what is, maybe, your nerdiest productivity practice? Is there anything that’s sort of a guilty pleasure for you in the realm of productivity, whether it’s apps or…?

Laura Stack
Oh, my. You’re going to make me start by telling all my secrets. Well, let’s see. I grew up in a military family. My family is a retired colonel, so I was raised on the Air Force Academy with the old adage of, “The colonel jumps,” and you say, “How high?” And so, he came in for inspection when we did our chores and so my favorite productivity guilty pleasure is I make my bed every day. Yes, I do.

With everything, pillows, European Shams, big pillows, throw pillows. I just think it sets you up for success for the day. It feels good. It helps you feel like things are in order and you’ve already accomplished a goal before your day even begins. So, I would suggest everybody make your bed. That’s what I learned from the colonel.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued that you called it a guilty pleasure. In a way, it seems like it’s the most opposite of guilty because I think if I didn’t do it…

Laura Stack
Most people don’t. Most people don’t make their bed. They just leave it like it is or they will likely toss things up. I have it neat, orderly pulled, pinned corners. I mean, I make sure that, and it’s maybe a little OCD but just not having anything on the bed when you approach your evening rituals and routines to go to bed, and undoing the bed, it’s oddly comforting just in the sense that it makes you kind of wind down and gives your brain a signal that it is now time to relax. So, there’s just something in the routine of beginning and the end of the day that helps you start and end your day well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s totally true. And it’s a nice reminder, I think, at the end of the day, it’s like, “Hey, well, I accomplished that and it’s a very welcoming sight to go on in there.”

Laura Stack
Exactly, yeah. And not just rumpled sheets that you just got out of. You just feel like it’s just one continuous getting into bed, getting out of bed. Ah, I like rituals with beginning and end. It just feels good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we’re going to dig into some of your productivity wisdom, and I want to get a touch of your hot takes on how that fits into this coronavirus, working-from-home type context. But maybe before we get into the tools, and the tactics, and the strategies, the nitty-gritty, could you maybe frame it up for us, how do you define productivity and why does being more productive matter?

Laura Stack
Well, for me, productivity is all about value-creation, so I don’t look at it as, “How many things did you get checked off your list during the day? How many hours did you sit there? How much running around and how busy you were?” But the value that you created in the time that you spent, so it literally is a ratio, if it could be measured, which is easier to do in manufacturing because you can count widgets, sales, you can have quotas. It’s a little bit harder when you’re looking at office jobs, leadership roles, HR, so we’d like to look at the impact, or the result, or the value, or the profitability, or however your job is measured.

So, I like to think of it as achieving maximum results in minimum time. So, whatever that ratio would be, would be the most effective. So, if you have 10 things to do, I know, wouldn’t that be great? If you had that 10 things to do and you did nine of them, but left the one that was the most important, or would have the most impact on your business or your job or your team, that would not be a productive day even though you got nine of the 10 things done. I’d much prefer you get three things done if one of them includes one of those high-value activities.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s kind of fun about that flexible definition of productivity and creating value and achieving the goal is, I guess, there are times, maybe it’s a vacation or just sort of season of life in which the value you’re going for is refreshment and rejuvenation and rest.

Laura Stack
That’s right. That’s why it depends how you measure it because there are times where the most productive thing you can do is take care of yourself, or relax, or be with…spend time with a child, or go on vacation. And so, those times of “goofing off” certainly are not at all very valuable. So, productivity can be measured in every aspect of our lives. You could even be productive at the gym. I mean, it’s easy to waste an hour at the gym, just lull around, wander, hardly work, don’t sweat, talk to your friends, a couple half-hearted leg lifts. I mean, I can kill an hour at the gym but it certainly wasn’t a very productive use of my time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, so you got a number of books, and the title I love the most is “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do.” Boy, I can relate to that.

Laura Stack
Yes, very popular. Everyone loves that title. My first book was titled “Leave the Office Earlier” so that is probably the only title that ever beat “What To Do When There’s Too Much To Do.” It makes people say, “Yup, that’s me. I need that book.” So, yeah, that’s a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so the subtitle there is to, “Reduce Tasks, Increase Results, and Save 90 Minutes a Day.” Can you maybe walk through, yeah, how does one do exactly that?

Laura Stack
Well, I mean, there’s a lot that goes into that, and of course we won’t be able to go into every aspect in this time together. But, essentially, saving 90 minutes a day, what I want people to really focus on is, let’s say, I am working 65 hours a week. I mean, I am just exhausted, all this COVID stuff, I’m in my home office all the time, and I’m putting in extra hours. Whereas, other people right now are slow, almost some of them bored, I have heard, and trying to fill eight hours a day.

So, for some people, that definition means if you’re working a ton of hours, “How can I be more efficient? How can I systematize? How can I automate? How can I streamline, delegate, eliminate?” So, the goal there would be to, “If I can save an hour a day, maybe I can get it down to 60 hours a week, so that would be a great outcome, and so now I get out of the office a little bit earlier.” So, maybe that’s your goal, versus other people who are clocking their 40 hours, maybe they actually want to accomplish greater results than they’re doing now in the same amount of time.

So, for some people, it means actually reducing the number of hours they’re working, and for other people it could mean increasing the value that they produce in the time that they’re working. And so, every person will approach that question just a little bit differently. But, ultimately, that’s the whole goal of the concept of what to do when there’s too much to do. And I break it down into six different steps, and I’m not sure how much of that you want to go through in our time together just in terms of what I call the productivity workflow formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I would love to spend a minute or two on each of these steps so we can get oriented and think about things the way you do.

Laura Stack
Okay. Great. Yeah, so I look at work coming in as a constant flow. So, if you can picture it as a circle with arrows, sadly, the workflow never stops, correct? So, it just continues to come in. So, first, we have to figure out, step one is, “What do we need to do?” You have to determine what to do. So, how do you get your arms around the world of all of your to-dos?

And for many people, that’s a challenge because they have some things written on a sticky note, they have some things that somebody texted them, and they’ve got their email, and they’ve got calls and voicemails, plus, now they have social media, and I’ve got an inbox here, and an inbox there. Many people feel very disjointed with many of their inputs living in several different places, and they don’t really have one system, one way that they can get their arms around everything so that they can even determine what to do. So, that’s the first step is getting that piece organized.

And then after that, you’ve got to figure out, “When am I going to do it?” And so, there is a prioritization, there’s a scheduling, there’s a “What can I realistically fit in? And what is going to get done and when?” So, that’s step two. And then step three is, “How do we actually focus?” Well, we know what to do, we’ve got a little block of time, and we sit down to work on it, and “krrrk” our attention is all over the place. So, I really believe that concentration is a long-lost art, especially when many of us are trying to work at home, it becomes even more challenging.

And then step four is we have to find the information that we need to do the work, and that’s where, if people have overflowing inboxes, poor filing methods, and they can’t put their hands on what they want when they want it, they get stuck on that step. And then the last piece of the loop, and there are six steps, but the fifth step in the loop is to close the loop. So, it’s actually getting work done, turning things in, being efficient, actually trying to maximize how efficiently they can do work. I’ve had people in my office actually watching me work, and so there are systems pieces that you can use to tighten up your efficiency.

And then the last step is managing your own capacity. So, if you got a really bad night, sleepless night because you didn’t make your bed maybe, no, I’m kidding, you’ve got a bad night’s sleep, you’re not going to feel like being energetic and productive. You’re going to want to put your head on the desk and take a nap.

And so, self-care becomes a critically important component of managing one’s productivity. So, that’s kind of the foundation on which everything is based. Without those proper self-care habits, you will not have the energy that you need to devote to your work, to your family, to your loved ones, etc. So, that, in a nutshell, Pete, is the productivity workflow formula.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. I dig it. Well, let’s dig, in particular, to steps two and three, the prioritization and then scheduling, and then the three, the focused concentration bit. So, when it comes to prioritization, I mean, I’m a big believer in the 80/20 Rule and, indeed, some things truly are 16 times as important as others. But how do you go about thinking, asking the questions, making the calls in terms of, “Ah, yes, this is, in fact, way more important than that”? How do you get there?

Laura Stack
Well, I think we all intuitively know what is more important than what. The problem that I see with the way that people prioritize is their tendency to select tasks incorrectly, and there’s a lack of awareness about what people choose to do next. It doesn’t really matter what system you use to prioritize. I mean, I use Microsoft Outlook Tasks because I like being able to drag a task up and down in the tasks list and re-prioritizing very quickly and just accomplishing things in order of importance.

It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to use Tasks. Some people use paper list with the top three sticky note. They put on a sticky note the top three things they need to do in a day. Other people use an app, Todoist. There are so many different methodologies that people use to track their priorities. What I like to look at, instead, is your typical pattern in how you’re going about, creatively procrastinating about not doing those priorities.

So, there are five main kind of priority personality archetypes that I see. The first type of person picks things based upon what they feel like working on. So, you know that there’s this really important thing that you need to do, but people who have this personality tend to pick things based on what’s fun, or easy, or quick because they like that shot of dopamine they get when they check something off a list, and it gives them this real sense of accomplishment, right? So, they’re busy, busy bees. These people just check stuff off because they love that, but they are purposely leaving the thing that is the most important, and they leave the office each day, going, “Ugh, I did it again. I still didn’t get to that really important project.” And, of course, they could but it is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The next type of person does things based on how they appear. So, in accounting, we call this FIFO, right, first-in first-out. So, this type of person is a reactive person. They react to things as they come in. They get a text, they answer it. They get an email, they answer it. They get a call, they answer it, right? So, they are pretty much letting other people control their schedules, which other people are really good at doing, and they’re not proactive instead.

The third type of person prioritizes based on who’s yelling loudest. This type of person does not have good boundaries. They don’t have good verbal skills around letting people know what the expectations are, what they can do, what they can’t, what they will do, what they won’t. And they allow that old adage “The squeaky wheel gets the grease” and people have their number, and they know they are too nice, and so they end up doing things that are not the most important priority.

The fourth type of person tends to do things as they think of them. So, this type of person kind of talks to themselves constantly. And as they think of things, “Ooh, I need to call Pete about that call next week. Ooh, I’m going to get on and talk to Pete.” And they just make the call. So, as they think of things, they just do it regardless of whether or not it’s the most important thing, and it tends to be because they’re afraid they’re going to forget if they don’t do it, even though they know it’s not necessarily a high priority right then.

And then the last person does things by the order of the sticky note. And so, this type of person has a very random approach. It could look like they have ADHD when you look at them. They have, like, 17 browser tabs open, and seven half-started emails, and four Excel spreadsheets, and two Word documents, and it’s just like, “What are you working on?” And they’re like, “I don’t know,” they just got stuff everywhere. They’ve got papers lined up in a certain order, “Ooh, here’s that business card. I should call this guy.” It’s just all over. So, just a different, disorganized type of approach.

So, those, Pete, are the five patterns of people that I see, and they’re kind of quasi-prioritization methods. So, we really need to think about our patterns, have awareness around them to be able to say, “I’m doing it. I’m doing it. Oh, my gosh, I’m doing it.” Catch yourself doing it, stop yourself from doing that, and really work on what I call triage. It’s just like in a hospital when a patient shows up. They don’t necessarily get treated first in the ER, right? I mean, you could sit there for four hours because other people come in with issues that are more urgent and more critical than yours. And it doesn’t matter if you say, “Well, I was here first,” right? It doesn’t matter, “This patient has a higher need so there’s more value if we treat this patient.”

So, if you think of your office like an emergency room and prioritize, it sounds bad, based on which patient would die first, that’s really the way to look at things. Because if you don’t do this step today, right, this step three days from now is going to be behind, and so we really have to look at what’s going to cause suffering in our lives and work on it that way. As humans, we like to do, emotionally, what we like. And that, by and large, is a really bad way to prioritize, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, this is so excellent in that, you know, most people, myself included when I tackle this issue, it’s sort of like, “Okay. Well, here are the paradigms by which you might assess important tasks that are worthy of high priority. So, maybe it’s the result that you’re after divided by the effort required, like the hours, and maybe it’s profit per hour, or maybe it’s like the one thing question.”

Laura Stack
Yeah, it could be, and it depends on your job, yeah, how that could be measured.

Pete Mockaitis
But in practice, when the rubber meets the road, day in, day out, you know, you might know that, but if you don’t know that, I guess, that’s the first step. Have those conversations with your boss and take a moment, take a breath, do some thinking about what really, really, really matters. But then, in your day-to-day reality, you got to watch out and play defense in terms of these tendencies none of which are conducive to doing what actually matters.

Laura Stack
Yeah. And that assumes, of course, that you have had a conversation with your manager because, if not, you are guessing at best, and you’re going to choose things based on emotion, which is generally not a good way to make decisions. So, assuming you’ve had those conversations, you have to understand, I call it PROI, personal return on investment, “What is my personal return on my investment of time in doing this activity for my results, my value as an employee?”

So, if your company is pumping all these resources into you, you have to look at, “Is what I’m doing, right now, the highest and best use of my time that has the greatest personal return on my investment of time right now?” I mean, when the rubber hits the road, everybody has all these fancy systems, and they’re all trying to 1, 2, 3, A, B, C. It’s like, oh, my gosh, just really looking at if you had to just put everything aside. And a lot of people are experiencing this. Projects that were pet projects, all of a sudden, there is no time for that, and we are focused on critical work. And when it all gets stripped away, that’s the stuff that we need to really be doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, could you share, then…so that’s the prioritization bit in terms of not falling for five suboptimal approaches that we often fall for in terms of prioritizing and scheduling. Well, how do we maintain that focused concentration piece?

Laura Stack
Well, I look at…it depends on the environment, it depends on what your goal is. And if you are a person who needs, in my case, I like silence to focus, whereas my 18-year old son has music going when he’s working on homework. And I personally can’t understand how someone can listen to music because it makes me, in my head, sing along and do the lyrics and all that. But he really just gets in the zone, and he’s able to hone in on his work when he’s got that outside music going.

And so, part of focus is kind of looking at you personally, what are the things that are distracting to you, because you may not find the music distracting? So, I look at kind of four different categories, having each person analyze this for themselves. I use the acronym TYPE for types of distractions that prevent us from focusing.

One is technology, the T. So, having your cell phone, not just on vibrate where “boop boop” it goes off on the desk, and you have this obsessive-compulsive desire to check it. We have this insatiable curiosity. We have to know, “Ooh, what is it?” But if you’ve got your email notifications going off, your phone going off, apps, notifications, different beeps and buzzes and whistles, it’s not a wonder we can’t focus and get an article written for a half hour, or whatever it is that we’re trying to do.

So, we have to create kind of a bubble around ourselves. Forward the phone, turn the phone on stun, you know. It needs to be off not just on buzz or vibrate. I have all my notifications turned off in my email. If you go into your options, the default in Outlook, for example, is that every time you get one email, you get four alerts. It plays a sound, puts an envelope in the system tray, you get an alert, a pop-up alert, and it has the cursor spin. Really? We need four alerts for one email?

So, if you go in and turn those off, at first it kind of freaks most people out because, well, they can actually focus for more than six minutes if they keep their inbox minimized, and they’re not checking them as they’re coming in. But then, better yet, you can set a rule that says, “Hey, every time I get an email from this person,” maybe it’s your manager, or someone in your team, or an important client, “then I want you to play a sound.” So, you begin to use technology to help you determine what’s important and not be distracted by the rest.

The Y is yourself. You’re distracted. Are you doing it to yourself? So, people who follow trails on the internet, or, “Ooh, I wonder what this is?” and click there, and now they’re looking at this, and, “Oh, here’s a video. Let me watch this,” right? We, sometimes, are our own worst enemies because we just go down a huge trail of distraction. And so, keeping yourself focused, if you have to put your dog away because you’re going to play with your dog. You’ve got to close the browser while you’re doing this because you’re going to be tempted to click on Facebook. I mean, whatever it is for you, you have to use a lot of self-discipline in that area.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let me hear a bit more about that. So, self-discipline, you know, kind of put it away, close it. What are some other approaches to prevent yourself from running wild?

Laura Stack
Yeah. My dad, the colonel, he used to say, “Discipline is doing what you know you need to do even if you don’t feel like it.” And so, figuring out how to train yourself to do the task that you dread because those are the ones you naturally are going to procrastinate on. And we can find all kinds of things suddenly to do, “Oh, I need to go throw on a little lingerie,” when we’re faced with a task that we don’t feel like working on, but that we know we need to focus on.

And so, it could be doing a leading task, it could say, “Okay, I’m just going to start this for five minutes. And if I don’t feel like doing it in five minutes, I’m going to make a cup of tea and I’m going to come back and try it again for another five minutes.” So, sometimes some people just need to get a little momentum to get that self-motivation and get off that hump. Maybe it’s a little reward. Some people’s discipline gets better if they know there’s kind of a light at the end of the tunnel. Instead of calling your best friend, you’d say to yourself, “Once I complete this task and focus on X, then I will call my best friend,” or whatever is rewarding to you. It might be a quick walk around the block, “Maybe I’ll eat this piece of dark chocolate,” whatever it is that will help you be more disciplined.

So, discipline still is being able to do something after the feeling of excitement when you first created the task has passed. Now, it’s like, “Okay, that was fun being creative. Now, I actually need to get the work done.” So, those are a few important things in discipline.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s great if you could just get real honest with yourself in terms of, “What’s happening is I don’t want to do this thing and, thusly, I’m tempted to do these other things. Hey, it just seems to be…” As oppose to…because I think it’s so… I’ve done it. It’s so possible to deceive yourself, like, “That laundry really needs to get done now, Laura.”

Laura Stack
Especially at home. We can find all kinds of things to do. And having structure and treating your workday as if you’re in the office, I think, is really important for discipline. I have worked from home for 28 years, and I never show up in my “office” in my robe and slippers. It just doesn’t make me feel sharp. I’m not on top of my game. It makes me feel lazy. And so, it just depends on the person. Whereas, other people go, “Gosh, Laura, that’s not me at all. When I work from home, and I stay in my robe all day, you should see me go.”

So, you do have to kind of understand your personality, your style, your nature, and work with that too, sometimes it’s not discipline. It could be energy level. Maybe you’re not a morning person, so people think, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m lazy. I lack motivation. I just can’t get going.” Well, maybe it’s because you’re not a morning person, and you are trying to do the wrong task at the wrong time. That’s not a matter of discipline at all. It’s a matter of energy management. Maybe you’re better at 2:00 o’clock in the afternoon. Or some people get a rush of energy at 7:00 p.m. So, maybe adjusting your schedule to work around some of those constraints will help you a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s see. So, there’s TYPE, and we get the technology, we got the yourself. And how about the PE?

Laura Stack
And P is people. I mean, you could be so much more productive if it weren’t for all these people, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Laura Stack
So, I have kids, like many of us do, and they knew from a very young age, they’re grown now, our youngest is 18. But they knew from a very young age, if mom had, I call them cube guards, like they use in the airport when they’re cleaning a restroom, those tapes that they pull across, I had one of those installed in my hallway to my office. So, if the tape was pulled, even when they were five and six years old, my boys knew, “Don’t come into mom’s office because she’s on a call or she’s concentrating.” We always told them, “Someone better be bleeding if you come through the cube guard, through the tape.”

So, you have to really talk with the people in your family so that they understand, “Hey, this is work.  I’m working. Like, I’m not at home.” Yes, we have more flexibility, I think. And, certainly, if we have young children who are being homeschooled and things like that, we have very different constraints that we’re dealing with. But, by and large, we have to set limits with people in our lives. My mother always just guilty of…she’s retired, right? So, it’s 1:00 o’clock in the afternoon, “I’ll just call Laura.” So, it took some time to not hurt her feelings but explained, “Listen, I want to talk with you,” and, “Can we talk in the evenings because I’m working? This is not a good use of my time.”

I, personally, don’t want to be back in my office working at night. Now, maybe other people like it that way. They like being able to blur the boundaries, and they would rather have some personal time with a loved one in the middle of the day, and then do some work at night. Is it right, wrong, good, bad? No. It’s just different, and so you have to look at the people. And when we’re back in traditional offices, a lot of that have to do with coworkers who just drop in, “Hey, got a minute?” And so, letting them know, “Hey, can I call you at 2:00? Or, can you send me a meeting request? Can you get me on my calendar so I can give that some thought?” Being able to kind of push back in a way that says yes to the person but no to the interruption so that we can stay focused on those things that are critically important.

And then the last one is the environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about the environment.

Laura Stack
Well, I work in a home office, and so I have a dog, so if I am working, and a postal, UPS comes to the door and rings the bell, my dog is going to set off barking, and I’ve got to go get the dog, take care of the package. Boom! I just had an interruption. So, we have a sign underneath our ring doorbell, strangely, that says, “Do not ring please.”

And so, when they don’t ring the bell, my dog doesn’t bark, and I’m not interrupting my flow, my concentration. I can go get that package whenever. In other words, we allow things in the environment to dictate our schedules, and we react to things as they happen. So, we have to just notice in our environments, just look around, listen, smell, see, figure out those things that are really drawing your attention, and see if you can proactively put some things in place to keep that from happening again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s excellent. And I think packages are ideal there in terms of, “Do we need a knock at the door or a ring at the doorbell? Or, can we just make that instruction clear to drop it, leave it, it’s okay, UPS My Choice, whatever.”

Laura Stack
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Inform them, “Well, this is what’s up.”

Laura Stack
Yeah, I can get five packages a day, literally. So, if I’m, one at a time, going to the door to stop my dog from having a meltdown and get a package five times versus when my day is over, one time, I’m going to get five packages. That is a far better use of my time, and it allows me to keep my focus. So, you have to look at every time your attention got pulled in another direction, “What was it? What was that cause?”

I have beautiful Bay windows in my office. I don’t even face that way, Pete. I face the wall, and the windows are actually to my back because people walk by, I’m daydreaming, beautiful sunny weather here in Denver, and I get distracted. My mom says I have OSS. She calls that “Ooh, shiny” syndrome. So, I have to really set myself up so that all of those external stimulus aren’t grabbing my brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. Well, Laura, we’re covering a lot of good stuff, having a lot of fun. Maybe we’ll just rapid fire, can you give us, perhaps, your top one or two best practices and worst practices for folks finding themselves in a work-from-home situation for the first time?

Laura Stack
Yeah, I think structure is really key. If you have never worked from home, some people aren’t prepared for it. It can be lonely. It can be mentally boring because you don’t have all the same activity, and you find yourself, “Huh. Wow, I didn’t have that commute so I have some extra time here.” So, I would, first of all, resist the urge to cram more in, right? In other words, if you left the house at 7:00 to start work at 8:00, still start work at 8:00. Don’t let that time creep kind of make your day from eight hours into 10 hours. That’s very easy to do in a home office.

So, I would then say set some boundaries because it’s very easy to let your work life blur into your personal life, because now you’re in an office that might be your bedroom, or the dining room, or the kitchen. And so, we have to try to put a little bit of structure in so that we can know when we’re working so that we can stay focused and when we’re not. And when we’re not working, we don’t want to be, “Oh, I’ll just do a couple more emails,” and, boom, here we are back at work again. So, as much as possible, I would try to keep some routine and some structure.

I’m looking forward to beauty salons being open again, for example, so I can go get my nails done and my hair. But, you know, I never do those things during the day. I treat my office like it’s any other workplace even though I’m at home, and I go do those things when I’m off work, on my lunch hour, or on the weekends just like anybody else would do. So, I think trying to create a little bit of routine around that is helpful.

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

Laura Stack
Well, one of my favorites is Drucker, Peter Drucker, who wrote “The Effective Executive,” which, if you have not read it yet, it is just an evergreen book. I’ve read it probably 30 times when I was working on my MBA many, many years ago. But he said, “There’s nothing so useless as doing with great efficiency that which should not be done at all.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you.

Laura Stack
That’s one of my favorites.

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

Laura Stack
Well, I am always looking at “How can we create greater value?” And I think that by looking at “What is more valuable?” but flipside to that, to me, is getting into groups with your team and with your boss, and asking the opposite question, which is kind of a qualitative study that anybody can do in the workplace to say, “What are the things that we’re doing around here that don’t add value, that waste our time?” And you got to have a little bit of thick skin if you decide you want to do this type of research internally because people are going to tell you, they’ll let you know. And looking at, “What are some processes that we put into place maybe three years ago that aren’t necessary? What is a document that we create that nobody even looks at?”

I have a newsletter that I used to do monthly, and it took me a day to write the newsletter. It was a 2500-word article, I did links, I did polls, I did research. I mean, it was a really great newsletter. And one year, I got the flu here in Denver and couldn’t do the newsletter, and told my team, “I’m sorry, we’re just not going to be able to do it this month. And I know you’re going to hear it from people. Everybody is going to complain that we haven’t done the newsletter.” I got three people who even noticed that it didn’t come out.

And in asking people, they said, “You know what, it just is so long. It takes so much time for me to go through it, and you’re a productivity company.” I’m like, “Oh, right. So, maybe we just need a paragraph.” So, I switched from one day a month to 20 minutes a week. Engagement shot up. Readership shot up. So, don’t keep doing the things the way that you have been doing them. If you’re doing it the same way two years later, it probably needs to be revamped. So, those are my favorite kind of studies to do and lead with – workplace teams because they yield usually some pretty dramatic results.

Pete Mockaitis
And beyond “The Effective Executive,” any other favorite books you’d highlight?

Laura Stack
Well, I would recommend reading non-business books. I like to read classics. I have a collection of books from the Easton Press, which I spent…well, there’s a hundred of them, and you buy them one a month, and so it took me a very long time to complete the collection. But they’re all leather bound, and it was what they wrote it on, the top 100 books. So, “Gulliver’s Travel,” and Charles Dickens, and “Pride and Prejudice.” And so, I think it’s really important for us to kind of expand outside of the typical business book that we really read. And read other things that aren’t in your field that really expands your creativity and field of thinking.

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

Laura Stack
Well, I told you I love Microsoft Outlook, so that is my favorite tool to organize tasks. But I have a really nifty text-replacement utility that I like that’s called ShortKeys. So, basically, you code pieces of texts that you type all the time. Like, ST prints out my street name in any application, on the web, in a Word document. So, I actually type very quickly because a lot of the words that I use all the time I use as ShortKeys, so it really helps you fly and never retype the same thing twice.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate, and folks quote back to you often?

Laura Stack
Oh, I always use creating maximum results in minimum time, that’s productivity. What is your personal return on your investment of time in doing certain activities? There are certain philosophies that I have, I guess, around that productivity workflow formula that a lot of people use.

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

Laura Stack
Well, they’re welcome to connect with me on Facebook, LinkedIn, wherever, but my website is TheProductivityPro.com.

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

Laura Stack
Well, I would just remind everyone to really watch their own energy level. If you’re not eating well, sleeping well, exercising, taking care of yourself, a lot of people think that when they’re busy and they don’t have time, that that is one of the things that gets cut. And I think that’s exactly the wrong approach because the better you feel and the more you take care of yourself, the greater your energy level will be to focus on other people and your works.

So, really resist that tendency to just be a bump on a log. Sometimes the last thing we feel like doing when we come home from work is some exercise, but, gosh, a quick few walks around the block will give you so much more energy that you need going into that evening to go into your second shift of home life and getting some of those things done.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, thanks so much. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck in all your productive adventures.

Laura Stack
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I appreciate the offer.