Energy Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, welcome back.

Scott Mautz
It is so nice to be back. It’s so nice to try to be awesome on an awesome podcast that has awesome in the title. I’m grateful for it all.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you’re awesome at it, which is why you’re back for a third time. You got it going on.

Scott Mautz
Right on. Yeah, you take what you can get.

Pete Mockaitis
Your latest piece here is called The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors. That sounds handy. Although, Scott, some might ask, “Isn’t this for kids? Don’t kids learn this stuff? Aren’t we done with that when we’re like nine?”

Scott Mautz
Maybe they don’t. It all depends on your kid. Well, if you start with a definition of it, Pete, and then let’s get into your question here, the title obviously is The Mentally Strong Leader, which presumes that it’s about mental strength. Mental strength is the ability to regulate your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors productively, no matter what. For us adults, it’s how we manage internally so we can lead better externally.

And to your question now, I think as adults, we intuitively understand that if you want to succeed and be a good parent, and a good leader, and good in life, you have to be able to regulate your emotions, and your thoughts, and your behaviors. But here’s where the rub comes in for kids, guess what? It’s really, really hard to do that as a parent, and even as children.

You layer on how hard it is to grow up in this world, it becomes even harder. So, yeah, mental strength is something we all know we need to succeed. But, man, Pete, it is really, really hard to do. It’s why I wrote the book “The Mentally Strong Leader” to provide that help.

Scott Mautz
I was kind of teasing a little bit about the kids because we had Mawi Asgedom on, who wrote a cool series of books called the “Inner Heroes Universe,” which has like action-hero comic book folks doing stuff and teaching lessons about this for kids, but we had them on because it absolutely is applicable for grown-ups, as we’re called.

And it’s funny, I’ve noticed in my own inner life, sometimes it’s quite easy to manage emotions and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the frustration rolls off the back and sometimes the frustration eats at me, and it’s not even, I think, necessarily, about the strength of the frustration itself.

Scott Mautz
That’s a really important point you’re bringing up, which is it doesn’t even have to do with the strength of the frustration itself. It’s just really, really hard to manage our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors.

And I have found that the key to doing this is you really have to build the proper habits to help you become mentally stronger, so you could train your brain for achievement, which I’ll get into later, but train your brain in general to have the kind of outcome that you want. And habit-building science teaches us that if you want to build a habit, a habit is essentially, Pete, repetitions, right? It’s systems and frameworks that you put in place.

And in The Mentally Strong Leader, I’ve built in over 50 plus systems and frameworks to help you with that difficulty you’re talking about. It helps you build, take that first small step to building a new habit to becoming mentally stronger. It helps you figure out what to do in moments of weakness when you can feel your frustration leaking out, even if it’s not a huge frustration.

Because of that, it’s why, you know, the subtitle of “The Mentally Strong Leader” is “Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Your Thoughts, and Behaviors” because of the very nature of what you’re talking about, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could maybe kick us off with an inspiring story of someone who was able to really see some powerful upgrades that made an impact for them by pursuing some of this stuff.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, it’s interesting, Pete. I bet if I had, you know, I don’t even know, if I had 500 people to ask to share a mental strength story, they would all share stories, they would all boil around six core mental muscles, and I’m going to pick a story within the context of that for you. But the six core mental muscles that make up mental strength are fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision-making, the ability to make a decision, to be decisive and make a high-quality decision, goal focus, the ability to stay focused on your goals, and even what I call messaging, the ability to stay positive-minded with your messaging even in the face of supreme negativity.

It’s those six mental muscles that make up mental strength. So, I have collected so many stories from so many people, but I’ll share one quick story that focuses on the fortitude muscle, because most often, Pete, when people think of mental strength, one of the things they might think of first is, “Oh, that’s got to be fortitude. That’s got to be resilience.”

And one woman that I interviewed for The Mentally Strong Leader was a business leader at a packaged goods company, and she would not give in to the demands of a particularly big retail customer. They wanted better service, they wanted lower prices, they wanted differentiated packaging. If she gave up all that to the big customer, it would mean a short-term sales gain and that would be great, but a substantial decrease in profitability over the long term.

And so, through a series of kind of really intense meetings, the retailer called her bluff, and said, “Okay, you’re not going to meet my demands and, fine, you’re out of distribution, and I won’t share the company, I won’t share the retailer for many reasons.” But they said, “You’re done.” And Sharon stuck to her guns, and she said, “All right.”

She got tremendous pressure to get that customer back to grow business aggressively, to get them back and to say, “Hey, make amends. Say you made a mistake.” And she just wouldn’t do it. It meant a 15% catastrophic drop in sales. And I remember she told me this story, Pete. You could see the tears forming in her eyes that it wasn’t an easy choice, and the pressure she was receiving from her chain of command to reverse the decision was brutal, but she refused to play the victim.

She held tight, and she really started to exercise her fortitude muscle. She reframed the loss as a huge sales opportunity to grow with other smaller customers that were more strategic for them, “Hey, forget this big customer,” Sharon told everybody, “Forget them. We are going to get that back and more by operating with people that are more strategically aligned with us.” And so, she kept reframing the opportunity over and over again. She would have tough conversation after tough conversation. She would really attack things with a problem-solving spirit, and despite everybody pounding on her, “Get this big customer back.” She used her fortitude muscle.

And some of the tools that I teach in the book The Mentally Strong Leader to do that, to really, at the end of the day, grow her business even faster than she did without that big retail customer, and she never went back to them. Now I just happen to talk to her a few months ago, and the business is stronger than it’s ever been and more profitable, and had a lot to do with her and her fortitude muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful, and I like that story on so many dimensions because it’s not life or death. You said a 15% drop in sales. And it’s funny, depending on your point of view, you might gasp, “Oh, dear.” Well, the other hand is like, “All right. Well, no one’s bankrupt.” It sounds like there aren’t brutal layoffs harming everybody. But, as a business owner, if I were to get a 15% drop in sales, I would be quite troubled by it, and she persisted.

So, it’s not catastrophic, and yet it does feel very uncomfortable, particularly when you’ve got folks piling on you from all sides, and you can sort of see it in the numbers right there. And it takes some real faith, in terms of it’s like, “Yes, right now, we are making far less revenue. That’s just very clear. However, I believe there’s something that we can do that will be even better.” And so, it’s like, “Well, hope you’re right.” That’s an unpleasant spot to be in.

Okay. Well, so then tell us, you said there’s six big mental muscles here. Can you maybe give us a quick definition of each of the six?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, sure. Okay. So, of course, we have the fortitude muscle. And I think, Pete, fortitude is probably the one that most people could most easily define for themselves. It’s our ability to push through challenges onward to achievement. In the face of adversity, you don’t let it get you down. You keep pressing forward. Fortitude, that’s the most obvious, biggest mental muscle that people first mention.

The second is confidence, which is probably exactly what you think it is, with one exception. Confidence is, the definition of it, is not the absence of doubt. It’s your ability to monitor your relationship with doubt, because we all have a relationship with doubt.

The boldness muscle is probably exactly what you think it is. Boldness paves a direct pathway to growth and it forces us to push our thinking, to get out of grooves, to press past discomfort. And boldness is a huge part of mental strength, as is messaging. Now as a leader, as I often like to say, people are always taking cues from you, Pete. You live in a fish bowl. People always wrap it on the glass to see what you’re going to do next, especially in times of adversity and negativity.

The messaging muscle is all about, as a leader, staying positive, even in the face of negativity. Staying engaged, even when your brain is elsewhere, so that you send the right positive message to the troops, and that they take energy from that message rather than the alternative. There are two more mental muscles.

Decision-making, and I think the best way to explain this is to say that emotion and bias and undisciplined thinking are all enemies of good decision-making. And self-regulation skills, like mental strength, are really required to be decisive and to make high-quality decisions. So decision-making is a huge part of mental strength.

Another mental muscle is goal focus, meaning the ability to really set aside wayward thoughts, emotions, and anything distracting you from the goal at hand, and getting back to focusing on what’s going to make the biggest difference in moving things forward towards your goal. So, there you have it: fortitude, confidence, boldness, messaging, goal focus, and decision-making; the six mental muscles of mental strength that also equate to the highest level of achievement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about our relationship with doubt, shall we?

Scott Mautz
We shall. I have a tool in the book called the doubt continuum, Pete. And I’m getting tremendous feedback on this tool already, and then I’m going to talk another tool afterwards on confidence, but it’s helpful. I want your listeners and your viewers to think about this thing that I call the doubt continuum. It’s a tool in the confidence chapter of The Mentally Strong Leader.

Think about the continuum with two ends, and on either end are danger zones. On one end of the doubt continuum is overconfidence. You’re blowing through red light signals. You operate in a vacuum. You don’t think you need help from anybody. You just keep doing your own thing. You’re operating in an echo chamber. That’s not good. That’s the opposite of self-doubt. You’re way too confident.

The other side of the scale is also a danger zone, which is where you’re paralyzed by fear. Doubt has overcome you to the point where inaction sets in, and fear takes over, and you have a hard time making a move of any kind. In the middle on this continuum are two areas where you want to be. Either perfectly confident, where you have the right balance between gut and data to inform your decision-making, between experience and just taking a risk and going for it.

Or, also in the middle is where you learn to embrace healthy doubt. This is where you learn to park those doubts that you have in the backdrop. You don’t let them overcome, and maybe this is the most important thing here about this, Pete, is that embracing healthy doubt means knowing that you don’t have the answers to everything. That you’re going to learn along the way, you’re going to find out more as you go, and you believe in your ability to do that, to figure things out as you go.

So, the doubt continuum is really about self-awareness, getting you to understand, “Am I either letting fear take over or am I too confident? How do I sit in the middle, and either be perfectly confident or embrace and work with doubt in a way that’s productive and healthy?” Does that continuum make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is very good, really good. And I think about that overconfidence reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I really resonate with, which is from former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, Robert Rubin, who said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” And I think that those people are in that overconfidence zone and it’s dangerous because, this is one of my, I don’t know if you call it pet peeve, or one of my things lately, I’m sort of astounded by the confidence at which people say certain things.

It’s like, “Do you have a crystal ball that predicts the future? Have you ever been wrong or experienced the emotion of surprise before? Because I am amazed that you are so sure that it’s going to work out just the way you predict.”

Scott Mautz
Pete, isn’t it why we have a hard time even agreeing on the facts in today’s society, right? It’s because of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Because we’re very confident about our own facts.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Or our theories, we think they’re facts, but they’re really hypotheses, perhaps we should say. And so, I think that’s really great, a really great tool right there to know that a lot of us are operating in a danger zone.

So, the doubt continuum is really handy in terms of, if you are super confident all the time, you are, in fact, in a danger zone. And if you’re avoiding something, that is a variety of fear paralysis that has you. So, help us out, Scott, if we find ourselves in one of the extremes of the continuum, what should we do about it?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, there’s another tool that kind of goes along with this. It’s a kind of partner to help you on the confidence front. So, if you’re on either side of the scale, you’re obviously trying to get to a place where you can embrace healthy doubt. You can’t do that until you have greater self-acceptance, Pete. So, there’s a really powerful tool that’s a partner to this in The Mentally Strong Leader to help you build your confidence, that I call the self-acceptance scale.

Now, I want you to think about a different scale, Pete. On one side of this scale, visually, picture this, you have this term called self-acceptance. It’s nirvana, right? This is the highest form of self-regulation where you’re not allowing unpleasant thoughts and emotions and behaviors to be unproductive in your life. You’re regulating yourself in a place where you accept all that is true about you. You’re in a place of self-acceptance. That’s where you want to be on the spectrum, on the self-acceptance scale.

Now, on the far right of this scale, and we’re going to talk the in-between in a second. On the far right is the opposite of that, which is what I call imposter syndrome. This is where you’re not accepting your skills and your accomplishments. You downplay them. You question how you got to where you are. It’s the lowest level of self-regulation because you’re allowing unproductive emotions and thoughts and behaviors make you question. You’re allowing them to question who you are.

Now, in between, there are degradations of self-acceptance that happen along the way. And the point of this scale, Pete, is to help people increase their self-awareness of, “What happens when I’m in a space of self-acceptance? How do I start to erode myself over time all the way to the point where I can be as bad as imposter syndrome?” And it starts with self-awareness, knowing the points on the scale.

The first point to the right on the scale of self-acceptance, that first degradation in confidence, is approval seeking. When you start to chase the approval of others, when you start to chase approval instead of authenticity, being the authentic you. That’s the first sign that you’re not really accepting yourself. You need others to tell you that what you’re doing is okay.

The next degradation is when you start to compare to others. Sometimes hear that, the only comparison that matters is to who you were yesterday, and whether or not you’re getting better each and every day. And, yes, of course, Pete, some comparison is good. I’m sure you compare yourself to other podcast hosts and say, “Oh, he or she is doing this, and I could do that to be even better.” And that’s good.

The comparison I’m talking about that’s painful is irrelevant comparisons. Like on social media, when we compare ourselves to some model version of some other person, when we compare our blooper reel to everyone else’s highlight reel, and it starts to really gnaw at our confidence, when we assume that that person in social media got to where they are because of circumstances that were perfect for them, or because of how skilled they are, and I’m not there because of all the bad things about me.

Then the next degradation is negative inner chatter that kicks in. We start to beat ourselves up, forgetting that sometimes the enemy is the internal me. One last degradation, and then I want to get your reaction to all this. One farther point over on the scale is when we actually stop and say and believe, Pete, “I’m not enough.”

And I want your listeners to hear this, and if you’re viewing this for any clip, I want you to look in the camera when I say this. You are enough and you don’t have to take on everything by yourself. And so, the self-acceptance scale helps you to understand and raises your awareness of all the ways our self-acceptance degrades over time. The more aware you are of these, the more equipped you are to resist each and every one of them. And you’re better suited to be self-accepting, you’re better suited to overcome doubt, you’ll be more confident. That’s a lot. Does it make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, Scott, I love this in that we’re talking about self-acceptance, and we talked about a scale. When you said degradations, I think, “Oh, I think he meant gradations.” But, you know, it is a degradation. It is the degree to which it has been degraded. And it is also a gradation in terms of, “Where along the scale are you on that journey?”

So, first of all, and it’s funny, and, for me, personally, it’s kind of volatile, you know? Like, there are some days where, boom, total self-acceptance, awesome. And then other days where, yeah, I do. I do want approval or winning or beating in competing and comparisons. And so, it’s intriguing how, and I don’t know what’s behind it. It’s just like not enough sleep or what is behind the volatility. So, I’ll ask you that first. What are some of the drivers that make it such that, on some of these things, we have good days versus bad days? Like, what are the variables, the X factors behind the scenes?

Scott Mautz
A lot of what my research has shown me on this front, Pete, is, first of all, a lot of it has to do with the human story. First of all, the fact that every day won’t be consistent. Always playing in the background, is this some level of self-doubt. And people are always surprised when I say confidence is not the absence of doubt. It isn’t. I could tell you. I’ve interviewed, I can’t even count the amount of people I’ve interviewed for The Mentally Strong Leader.

And I could tell you, even the most confident executives that I talked to will not tell you that they never experienced doubt. It’s there. It’s how you manage it. So, this human experience means doubt is always parked in the backdrop. So, it’s natural for it to surface in multiple ways over time, and we forget that. We think the human experience needs to be the absence of doubt, that Pete Mockaitis never has a bad day, that he’s always fully self-confident.

But if that was true in your mind, Pete, I would say you’re probably lying to yourself because the human experience is not that. It is to experience the peaks and the valleys. Now you layer on top of that the environment that we’re exposed to every day, the social pressures that we’re facing, the fact that we have a hard time even agreeing on what the facts are anymore, the fact that there’s more distractions in our universe than there have ever been, the fact that there’s more social tension around the planet, and a lot of more and more things to worry about.

It all adds to this quiet addition to doubt about other things that makes it only natural, Pete, that you’re going to have those kinds of days that are ups and downs. You just need the habits and the systems and their frameworks to help you better self-regulate them, not to eliminate them. Mental strength is not about making emotions disappear. It’s not about necessarily minimizing your emotions. It’s about better managing your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that, not minimizing, but managing. And so, to that end of volatility, it’s funny, with that message of “You are enough,” sometimes if I hear that, I go “Yeah, right on. Thank you.” And other times, my response is “Enough for what?” So, lay it on us, Scott, what do you mean by “You are enough”?

Scott Mautz
When I say that, it’s more of a self-evaluative term. I’m not saying “You are enough to be an Olympic gold athlete, Pete,” “You are enough to be the best podcaster on the planet, Pete,” “You are enough to be the best partner to anyone in life, Pete.” I’m not saying any of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like this. Keep it coming.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Am I approval seeking right now?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you’re going to cut all the rest of that out and just play this part over and over and over again. What I’m really saying here, Pete, is “You are not a complete human being, but where you are in your journey is 100% okay.” And I don’t want to go so far as to say it’s exactly where you should be right now, because only you know that.

But what I’m saying, you know, when I say you are enough is to understand that you’re an imperfect being, and that’s okay, and that you don’t have to be everything to everyone all the time. It’s okay to focus on the you-universe, Y-O-U-universe, and not the universe all the time. That’s okay. Where you are in your development is right where you should be as a human being, perhaps. At least we can allow that, you know, of ourselves, and not to think about you are enough compared to any other external standard.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So, then help us out, if we are having one of those days where self-acceptance, we are not too high on the scale, what do we do about it?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, a good tool, I think, is the way that manifests itself a lot, Pete, is really the middle of the scale where we beat ourselves up with negative inner chatter. And whether it’s you’re seeking approval, you’re comparing yourself, you’re saying you’re not enough, or you’re just outright beating yourself up over and over again, which, by the way, I teach this stuff, Pete, and I still do the opposite of that sometimes.

There’s another tool in the book, that I call taking a self-compassion break, and it’s really, really important and it’s also really, really simple to do. Here’s how you work. When you catch yourself in that moment where you’re beating yourself up, first, you got to get better at catching yourself. And I don’t know how good you are at this, Pete. I’m still working on it. There are days where I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been beating myself up for like the last five minutes, and I don’t even realize I’m doing it.”

So, you have to get better at that, and I don’t know what letter grade you would give yourself on that. I’d give myself only a B. I’m working on it. I’m getting better at it. In the moment though that you realize that, there’s kind of three steps you take. First of all, stop beating yourself up for beating yourself up. If you catch yourself doing it, accept it, acknowledge it, quickly move to step two, which is, in that moment, to talk to yourself like a friend in need.

And I’m sure this isn’t the first time your listeners have heard this advice, but it’s really powerful to consider. I’ll give you an example before we go to the third step, Pete. Let’s say you and I are chatting, right? We’re old friends, you know, this is my third time on the show, and I start telling you about a podcast I was on that I didn’t feel like I was good on, right? And I’m clearly looking for compassion with you. We’re old friends, right?

So, I start telling you, “Pete, man, I got off this podcast. There were some points I really wanted to make. I didn’t feel like I articulated them well. I forgot to say this other thing. I feel like I came across like an idiot when I was trying to bring value,” on and on and on. After five minutes, you know I’m looking for compassion.

After five minutes, Pete, would you do this? Would you interrupt me and say, “You know, Scott, I’ve heard enough and I’ve come to a conclusion, that you’re a complete loser”? Would you talk to me like that when I’m clearly in need? I don’t think you would. So, it begs the question, “Why would you talk to yourself that way ever?” It’s not productive.

Pete Mockaitis
What you’re surfacing here for me now is sometimes I can be too quick to jump to solutions in terms of like, “Well, you know, Scott, what happened one time is I actually had a guest who thought they did a bad job and they said, ‘Hey, Pete, I don’t think I did a good job. Can we do a do-over?’ And I said, ‘Hey, thanks for asking. Sure, we can.'” So, anyway, there I am, I’m sort of, you’re looking for compassion, and instead I’m offering you problem-solving. But I think the funny thing is I can do that to my own self as well.

Scott Mautz
Absolutely. And oftentimes, that problem-solving thing is something that I do, Pete, and I have others that will tell me, “Hey, dude, I’m not looking for you to solve this. I’m just looking for you to listen.” And sometimes we’ll interrupt with that because it’s easier for us because we feel uncomfortable in what they’re sharing with us, and we want to make it easier for us, when all they really want is just to feel heard, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Mautz
And so, in that moment, it takes you to the third step in this, which is to remember the 90/10 rule, and it’s based on an article I wrote that went crazy viral a few years back. And the 90/10 rule is simply this, Pete, this is the third step in the self-compassion break. It’s to remember the ratio for how you should value yourself on any given day, which is to say it should be based 90% on self-worth, 10% on assigned worth.

How you value yourself should be based 90% on self-worth, self-appreciation, self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, 10% on assigned worth, what others think of you, that occasional slice of external validation that we all need. The problem arises, Pete, when, in our minds, in our formula, that 10% external validation rises to 90%, 100% of who we are, and people say, “Well, Scott, shouldn’t you be teaching the 100-0 rule, though, that 100% of how you value yourself is based on what you think?”

And I think that’s a nice theory, Pete. I don’t think that’s the way it works in life. We all need that 10% occasional slice of external validation. But the problem is when that 10% goes to 100% of how you value yourself. The problem arises when you start chasing approval instead of authenticity. The problem arises when you begin focusing on winning love rather than giving love.

And when you remember that 90/10 rule, it really helps to round out and think like, “You know what? I’m going to stop that negative inner chatter because it’s not servicing me in the way that I need to. I need to get back to a place of 90% self-worth, self-appreciation, self-acceptance, and self-love.” And I have been told many times, Pete, that it’s a very powerful tool, a very powerful process for helping folks that need to get past that negative inner chatter.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting is, as I think about my own negative inner chatter, it’s almost never super intense, super dark stuff, although I’ve come to learn that it’s actually quite common in the human condition. It’s just like, “You’re such a worthless, stupid loser.” It’s very sad that there’s a lot of inner chatter like that that happens. And if that’s any listener, I recommend you take a look at that and work on it, because it can be really transformational.

I’m thinking about Peter Attia’s book, Outlive, a very powerful section about emotional health, in which he shared some of his practices there that I found touching. But my negative self-talk is more like, “Ugh, I’m just not up for all of the stuff I got to handle today. It’s too much for me today.” And I don’t quite know what’s the optimal self-response to that.

Because sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete! We can do this! Come on! Let’s do some Rocky music! Let’s do some, I don’t know, Tony Robbins power moves! Come on! Let’s get after it!” Sometimes that works, the psych up, and then sometimes like, “Oh, well, maybe let’s just take a nap.” And sometimes that works, and sometimes neither of those work, but I want to hear the Scott Mautz approach.

Scott Mautz
What if I told you, if you change one word, one word in your thinking process, it could make a world of difference?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. Lay it on me.

Scott Mautz
And I’ve proven this to work, and it’s very specifically for exactly what you’re talking about, Pete. One of the most common forms of negative inner chatter is like, “Oh, my God, my duties, they’re getting me down. There’s so much to do. I am not in the mood to do all this stuff today. I understand my job is this, and I get it.” Ready for this, Pete? Try this trick. I promise you it really works. I do it. I do this all the time.

I think, “Okay, Scott, I don’t have to do this. I get to do this.” And the one-word reframe is incredible, and I’ll give you an example. Part of my life is to travel around the world as a speaker, an author, a trainer, a work-shopper. And I was in the airport not so long ago, on a layover, and travel is the one part about what I do that I just cannot stand, and I was feeling really down, Pete. I was in Denver Airport, and the flight was delayed. It was going to be a five-hour flight. I was already in a grumpy mood, people were being people the way they can be in airports when flights are delayed, and I didn’t feel like getting on the plane. I just wasn’t in the mood for this.

And I remember thinking, “Wait a minute, Scott. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go get on a plane. You get to do this.” By me getting on a plane, that would mean very shortly, within two hours of landing, I would be able to be on a stage in front of, in this case, you know, thousands of people, sharing insight, sharing something that I had learned, and it happened to be a talk about mental strength from the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

And it can really help, Pete, if you just stop to say, “It’s about understanding the privilege and what you still get to do.” And it puts the thinking, “I get to do this” versus “I have to do this,” flips it very quickly to the things that you can appreciate about what you’re doing, and bring you back to the purpose of why you’re doing it to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, that’s good stuff. Well, there’s a whole lot of goodies in your book, and I like how you’re just surfacing the tools everyone tells you they love the most. So, Scott, can you give us one more dealer’s choice, whatever you’re feeling?

Scott Mautz
There’s one other tool that I want to share that, I don’t know, may or may not surprise you. It’s not about any one of the six mental muscles per se, but it’s an overall tool, which is the Mental Strength Self-Assessment that is a part of the book The Mentally Strong Leader, and it is a 50-question questionnaire that you take. It takes you about 15 minutes of quiet self-reflection and introspection. And when you’re done with that test, and I have worked with data scientists to build the test to make sure it correlates as tightly as it can with mental strength.

When you’re done with the test, it gives you an overall mental strength score, and then you’ll find out which tier do you score in for mental strength. There are four different tiers, all the way from novice, you’re just learning about the idea of mental strength and building, all the way up to you’re a beacon of mental strength, other people draw from you because of your mental strength, and then there’s the in-betweens.

Besides the mental strength score, it also gives you a score for each mental muscle, so you’ll know, “Oh, wow, my fortitude isn’t quite what I thought. My boldness isn’t where I want it to be. My decision-making needs to be stronger.” And then you can build accordingly your own customized mental strengths training program, which is important because when you go to the gym, Pete, you don’t go to the gym to work every muscle all the time. It would be a 19-hour workout every day. Wednesday is leg day. Thursday is, I don’t know, arm day. Friday is back day, whatever it is.

With understanding what muscles you need to work on, you can choose over time where to pull the levers and where you want to level up in your mental strength. And the mental strength self-assessment can help you to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, to take that, how do we proceed?

Scott Mautz
A couple of things, of course. Obviously, you can get the book The Mentally Strong Leader which you can find at ScottMautz.com, but I also put together for your listeners a gift. If they go to ScottMautz.com/mentallystronggift, you can download the Mental Strength Self-Assessment for free. It’s actually a 60-page PDF that not only includes the assessment with all 50 questions, it also has prompts in there to help you get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader. So, if they go to ScottMautz.com/mentallystronggift, you can get your hands on the Mental Strength Self-Questionnaire to help get you primed up to get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Free stuff. We love it.

Scott Mautz
Free stuff is a good thing.

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

Scott Mautz
Yeah, I really believe in this thought of chase authenticity, not approval. I find that to be very, very important to me. And I also like the quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

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

Scott Mautz
Well, very quickly, I did a study for The Mentally Strong Leader. It took me quite a while to complete, but I asked over 3,000 executives a single question, “Thinking of the highest-achieving organizations you’ve ever been a part of, that achieved the most, that overcame the most obstacles, how would you describe that leader?”

When I asked that question, time after time, between 90% to 91% of people described the same leader, a mentally strong leader that has fortitude, confidence, boldness.

And while they might not use the term mentally strong, Pete, when I say, “Oh, wow, so you’re describing these same six mental muscles that they’re flexing. Would this word describe them?” When I put mentally strong in front of them, you could see the eyes lighting up. Even when I hide the term and I say, “Okay, pick a word out of this list that describes the person you just described to me,” they find the words mentally strong, and they circle it, and it tells me that that research really helped me to see, like, I’m really onto something that mental strength may be the leadership superpower of our time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Scott Mautz
Oh, my favorite book is, I’m not going to give you a business book. I just finished reading Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I’m a big fan of the fantasy genre. So, I just read that and I love it. And it’s a close match with the all-time classic The Hobbit, which makes me officially a nerd, I think, Pete.

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

Scott Mautz
My favorite tool is called Unsplash. It’s a great website that you can find free images to use, whether it’s on your website, whether it’s in your presentations or whatever. They just ask that you assign credit to the photographer. So, it’s a very win-win thing. Everybody wins by using the tool Unsplash.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Scott Mautz
My favorite habit is using the self-acceptance scale and really working hard on reminding myself to stop seeking approval of other people, and working on the habit over and over of revisiting that scale to remind myself “I fall into the trap of comparing to others and I need to stop doing that and stop seeking approval.”

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

Scott Mautz
ScottMautz.com. You can learn about my keynotes, my books, my workshops, and all the things I do there at that site, ScottMautz.com.

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

Scott Mautz
Yeah, just to remember that don’t be intimidated by the concept of becoming mentally stronger. The opposite of mentally strong is not mentally weak. We all have a baseline that we work from. And if you can take the mental strength self-assessment, understand where you stand, figure out where you want to level up, and use the tools, use the habits in The Mentally Strong Leader, you too can be mentally strong starting immediately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, thank you. I wish you many strong days.

Scott Mautz
Stay strong, as I like to say, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Stella, welcome.

Stella Grizont
Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom associated with work happiness. Could you tell us any particularly extra surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about work happiness with all of your coaching and putting together your book here?

Stella Grizont
Well, in the book, I did a lot of research, and one of the things that’s really just stuck with me was around how much social support matters. And when we’re in a state of fight or flight, and we’re feeling stressed, just having a friend or someone we know who cares about us by our side can literally change our perception of reality. It can change how we feel about the challenge ahead. It transforms how we estimate how hard something is.

There was a study done where researchers took two groups of participants at the base of a hill, and one group got to stand with a friend by their side and another group was standing on their own. And they were asked, “How steep is this hill? How steep is the slant of this hill?” And those with a friend by their side estimated the steepness to be less.

So, when you’re asking about how we perceive the challenge ahead, or what do we think about a really difficult situation, the presence of a friend can actually change how we perceive what’s up ahead. And so, that’s just really oriented me to, especially as an introvert, to make sure that I’m supplementing. We supplement with vitamins but we have to make sure we’re really supplementing with people that we care about and feel connected to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really intriguing, the notion of how difficult we estimate a thing to be is variable. And I’ve seen that in my own world in terms of if I’m feeling kind of stressed about a thing, it’s like, “Oh, this is probably going to take two hours.” It’s like, “Okay, no, it took half an hour, but I was just freaking out.”

Stella Grizont
Our emotions really determine the reality that we experience. They can influence the reality that we experience. They’re both like information about what’s happening, but then they also influence how we perceive what’s happening, so it’s a two-way street. And if we know that, we can actually, and one of the skills I teach in my book, is, “How do you manage your mind and mood so that you can see more, so that you can be more, so that you can be more in control?”

And if we know this about ourselves, we can make more conscious choices about what moods we’re cultivating and how we respond to our own emotions so that we can set ourselves up to flourish and have more ease and think more clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
I definitely want to talk about managing moods. And maybe, first of all, if there’s anyone who’s perhaps skeptical about that that’s even possible, like, “Moods just kind of fall upon us. Can one even manage them?” could you maybe give us an inspiring story of someone who managed their mood and used some of these other skills to really see a cool transformation?

Stella Grizont
Whenever I give a talk we go through some evidence-based techniques, and within 30 seconds, participants are like, “Oh, my shoulders are relaxing,” or “I feel lighter,” or “I feel more relaxed,” and it doesn’t take much for us to change our minds and moods. Our emotions are in motion, and that’s a good thing, that they’re never constant, because they’re datapoints about our surroundings. And sometimes we can’t control our initial response, even though we’d really love to, but we can control our response to our response once we notice that emotion.

So, I had a client who was dealing with a manager who was a bully. I mean, he would yell inappropriately, use inappropriate language. It was very inappropriate, and she found herself crying all the time, and she had never been in that position before. She was a people manager, very successful, but this guy was not only inappropriate, but really getting to her, and she felt like she couldn’t hold it together in his presence.

And so, we practiced, she went through “The Work Happiness Method,” which is now a book, but it’s also a coaching program, and we really worked on some techniques to help her attune to who she wanted to show up as, and just simple techniques, practicing breath work, getting clear on her vision of who she wanted to be, remembering her sense of control, preparing for that difficult conversation. So, there are so many things that we can do that are simple and instant. I mean, if you want, we can get through some, we can do some right now for folks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess what I’m curious to hear is, so she did those things and then what happened on the other side?

Stella Grizont
So, we prepared for a difficult conversation, and the most difficult part of a difficult conversation is your preparation beforehand. That’s what I call your approach, that’s another skill that we cover in the book, because your energy is everything in a difficult conversation. Our moods are contagious. Our emotions are contagious for a number of reasons. We have mirror neurons, so when a baby’s smiling, we can’t help but smile. But when someone’s also really angry and frustrated, we find ourselves clenching up and feeling like something’s off.

And so, we’re just able to catch each other’s moods. So, if you’re going to go into a difficult conversation, the number one thing you can control is your energy beforehand. And so, we made sure that she was in a good place, that she felt confident going in, that she felt neutral, that she even had empathy for this really horrible leader, and she was able to actually express that she would no longer be able to work in these conditions.

If they were going to be able to work together and have a positive working relationship, they needed to re-examine how they communicated. And she ended up staying at that organization and actually getting a lot of the things that she needed, including additional support and headcount, including more travel that she wanted. So, it really was transformational for her.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really beautiful. I think a lot of times, if we are encountering someone who’s toxic and very problematic, we can conclude, “Well, that person is just a jerk and this is a hopeless situation. There’s nothing I can do. I just got to look for the exit.” And yet, here you are when you share, in some cases, very clearly, “These conditions are not working for me and they’ll need to change or I’ll need to exit,” then good things can happen. Folks can have a transformation.

I’m curious, on the receiving end there, how was the manager responding to that information? Like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea,” or was it like, “Yeah, I have some problems, I’ve been working on them. Thank you for being clear with me. This is a wake-up call.” How does one receive that without just flipping out and making it worse?

Stella Grizont
I don’t think there was an apology, but there was, the things that she had requested, he responded to. So, she had asked for, if he was feeling frustrated, for him to talk about it sooner rather than later, for him to be able to write things out, for him to give her additional support, for them to do more planning together so he wasn’t so surprised. So, he actually changed his behavior.

But in this case, what was more important for her was actually her demonstrating to herself that she could have this conversation. That was the growth for her. And so, there’s always growth opportunities in really challenging moments. And for her, it was witnessing herself be powerful in a very, very challenging moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Stella, this is inspiring stuff. So, we are not victims to our moods. We are not even victims to terrible bosses or toxic environments. There’s a lot of power that we could summon and make happen. So, I want to dig into some of these particular tools in a moment. But first could you give us, from all your research, what’s kind of the state of work happiness these days? 

Stella Grizont
So, generally, we know that about three-quarters of employees are not engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah, the Gallup stuff.

Stella Grizont
The Gallup stuff, right. So, we all know that we’re very disengaged, but just as a background, the U.S. has dropped in terms of happiness levels. According to the 2024 World Happiness Report, the U.S. fell eight places from 15th place to 23rd place.

Pete Mockaitis
In one year?

Stella Grizont
In one year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, bummer.

Stella Grizont
But you know what? To be honest, 15th isn’t that great either for being one of the most wealthy nations, a democracy. And it’s been pretty flat. And I think the reason why the U.S. has not been in a great place, and it’s gotten even worse, is because we’re lonely and we’re isolated. Not just because, you know, we started off our conversation about how much social support matters. Well, relationships are the number one predictor of our happiness, the number one predictor of our happiness, above and beyond how healthy we are, how much money we earn, how successful we are, how confident we are.

And so, in the United States, we tend to prioritize our work over our connections. We move cross-country for our jobs and so we end up dislodging our social connections, our familial connections, and then we’re also working from home now, and we’re not getting just interaction. And what researchers have found is that, just like we need a diverse diet of, like, veggies and proteins and grains, we also need a diverse social diet.

So, it’s not just about staying connected to people who we have strong social ties with, we also need a lot of weak social ties, like saying hello to the postal worker, saying hello to the security guard, having a nice chit-chat with the person who’s making you coffee, or the Uber driver. We need interactions because they signal to our nervous system that we’re safe.

And, again, that’s what also signals what we’re up against, and that can create a veil over how we perceive anything, whether it’s if someone says, “Hey, can we talk about X, Y, and Z?” and you perceive that as a threat, or as, “Oh, let’s just explore.” So, our nervous system is constantly on patrol for threat, and if we feel lonely, then our body is in a stressed-out state and we’re more likely to perceive everything as a threat and feel quite unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so social stuff is big. That’s come up a couple times already. Within your work, The Work Happiness Method, any pro tips on dealing with that in the context of work careers?

Stella Grizont
Well, one, this actually wasn’t in the book, but this is one of my favorite tools to share, just a very practical tool. When someone comes to you with good news, it’s so important for us to respond with celebration. So, this is the easiest hack for building quality relationships. So, researchers found that there’s four main ways that we respond to good news. One response is active-destructive.

So, let’s say my husband tells me he got a promotion, I could say, “Oh, you got a promotion. This means you’re going to be working late. You’re never going to be home. I’m going to have to do more bedtime with the kids.” So, I’m actively destroying his high. That’s the worst way we can respond is when we just like pummel the goodness.

Then a little bit better but still horrible is passive-destructive, and that’s where someone says, my husband says he had a raise or a promotion, and I would say, “What do you want for dinner?” So, I just ignore his good news and I jump into something else. Slightly better is passive-constructive, and that’s where he says, “Oh, my God, I got a promotion, I got a raise,” and then I would say, “That’s nice. So, what should we eat?” So, I acknowledged it but not really.

And the most optimal way we want to respond to someone else’s good news is with our presence, our attention, our curiosity. We want to actively build up and savor the good news. And so, that would sound like, “Oh, my God, tell me all about it. That’s so exciting. I know you worked so hard. How are you feeling about it? Tell me all the details.” So, we’re having them reconstruct the event, re-savor the event. We’re adding to it.

And so, the reason why we want to do this is because it signals to the other person that we are a safe person for them to go to when they are ready to celebrate. We all have had good news in our life and have all made conscious decisions about, “Ooh, I don’t want to tell this person because they’re just going to make me feel like crap afterwards. They’re not a safe person for me to go to.”

And so, what researchers have found is that the relationships we go to when we have good news actually matter more than when we have bad news. So how we respond to people in good times actually matters more than how we respond in bad times when it comes to cultivating a strong relationship. So, just celebrate. Be a better celebrator.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I love it. And I’m reminded we had a conversation with B.J. Fogg, and we were talking more about habits. But he said that celebration is absolutely such a top important thing associated with creation of habits, and now also for relationships. So, good stuff. And I think, is this the Gottman Research, these four response approaches? It sounds a little familiar.

Stella Grizont
This is actually from Shelly Gable, and she discovered these four responses to good news.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I’m wondering, I don’t know if it was Shelly Gable or John Gottman or whom, but I think that the data was pretty striking that having a minimal acknowledgement was like almost as bad as being actively destructive, like it was pretty shocking how, “Hey, great job,” and a quick move on is nearly as devastating as just being totally mean.

Stella Grizont
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, as humans, we crave a sense of meaning and purpose. And we don’t have to climb a mountaintop to feel on purpose. We don’t have to do grand gestures to be on purpose. We want to contribute to something bigger. And why do we want to contribute to something bigger? Because we want to matter somehow, and mattering can be experienced by just feeling someone else’s presence and care, and giving that presence and care.

And so, we’re just beautifully interlocked to matter to each other. It’s the bedrock of our wellbeing and of our success. So, if we just help someone else matter, and also feel that we matter to someone else, it can catapult our success. It can catapult our wellbeing and our happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Stella, we’ve got some good stuff on relationships. You have, in fact, eight essential skills in your Work Happiness Method. Could you give us maybe the quick four-minute bird’s-eye overview of what are these eight essential skills?

Stella Grizont
Sure. So, the first one is resilience, and that’s how to manage your mind and mood because we have to start there. The second is having a clear vision of what success means to you, so it’s clarity, and knowing who you want to be, who are you when you are most alive. Most of us define success backwards. We, first, pick really sexy goals, and we think of all the things we want to achieve.

The problem with that is that, and I’m sure many of your listeners have experienced this, you can achieve all the things and still be left feeling empty, burnt out, lonely, or completely confused about who you are. And so, what we want to do is reverse engineer and first identify, “How do I want to feel and be at work?” and then choose goals that support that. And so, the second chapter and the second skill is all about figuring out who you want to be.

After we figure that out and we develop your vision, then we build the skill around purpose, and that’s about making decisions that support your being, the person you defined in your vision. It’s about knowing how to make decisions with confidence so that you can feel on purpose every day. Now, once we know how to manage your mind and mood, we have your vision, we have your values, now it’s time for you to set your boundaries, and that’s what the next chapter is about, and that’s the next important inner skill.

And boundaries are less about saying no, but they’re actually more about saying yes to what matters, yes to your vision, yes to your values. So, I walk people through, very practically, “Where do you set boundaries? How do you set them? And also, how do you have compassion for yourself if it’s really freaking hard for you to do it?” Because I am a recovering people-pleaser, and I think folks who are people-pleasers are the ones who really have a hard time with boundaries.

And it’s important to understand that people, we talk about people-pleasing so casually, but actually for many folks, it’s actually a trauma response. And so, it’s very important to understand the psychology behind why we struggle with boundaries because it will help set you free. So, once we know what our boundaries are, and we create greater ease for us to be who we want to be, then we talk about, “Well, how do you be who you want to be in times of uncertainty?” And that’s through the inner skill of play.

Playfulness is an inherent capability that we have as humans, and it helps us navigate uncertainty and flourish through it so we don’t stay stuck. And then once we learn how to be more playful, especially in hard and uncertain times, the next inner skill is about discovery, and that’s about exploring. Now that we can have a play mindset in the face of uncertainty, how do we figure out what’s next?

So, whether you’re just, you know, doing okay and you just don’t know what’s next, whether or not there’s lots of uncertainty and change in your organization, maybe there’s some kind of health scare or change within your family, like, “How do you explore what’s next in a way that will set you up to flourish?”

And then it’s inevitable that we have to talk to people when it comes to just navigating the world, and so I have a chapter on approach, which is about, “How do you have those difficult conversations? And how do you set yourself up for transformation instead of confrontation?” And then the final inner skill that I cover is called refocus, and that’s about, “How do you return to yourself when things get off track? When things don’t go your way, how do you settle with the universe? And how do you make sense out of hard times?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. So, we’ve had some good chats about relationship bits. When it comes to managing mood, are there any top tactics that are really just transformational here?

Stella Grizont
One of my favorite tools to give my clients is called the complaint vacation. So, we often find ourselves complaining aloud or even in our heads, and complaining is not just noticing what’s wrong, it’s the additional suffering about what’s wrong. So, it’s not just saying, “It’s really hot outside today.” It’s, “Oh, it’s so hot. Oh, my God, I’m so tired of this weather.” So, it’s the grievance, it’s the suffering. That’s a choice.

And so, if there’s something that you find yourself complaining about pretty regularly, just give yourself permission for the next week to take a vacation from that because I think we all are tired of our own complaining. I like to couple a complaint vacation with gratitude. So, it’s not just noticing what’s wrong but it’s paying extra special attention to what is right. And it’s not just listing off what’s right, but it’s what’s uniquely right today.

So, it’s not just that I’m grateful for my family, but I’m so grateful for the snuggles I had with my three-year-old before he went to daycare. So it’s getting really, really specific. And then, finally, you know, I think one of the things when it comes to managing our mind and mood is people think that being happy is just about like noticing what’s good, but actually I think one of the keys and skills to being happy is knowing how to be unhappy, and how to actually be with your negative emotions.

And so, one of the simplest things you can do when you notice you’re feeling off and you’re not in the mood that you’d like to be is just to be curious about that mood, and first just label that emotion. Like, if you’re feeling off, take a moment and be like, “Okay, what’s this about?” Get curious, “What is this? Is this frustration? Is this disappointment? Is this anger? Is this loneliness?” Give it a name.

Because when we give it a name, we’re actually shifting the brain activity from our amygdala, the fight-or-flight center, to our prefrontal cortex, which is the big-picture thinking, that’s the planning, that’s the executive function, and so we’re able to actually help ourselves. Because once we label, then we’re like, “Oh, I’m just feeling really frustrated that that report didn’t go out on time. Maybe I should talk about processes with my team so that we can prevent that moving forward.”

So, we start to help ourselves. Metabolize the emotion faster. So just by labeling the emotion and being with it and being curious about it, not trying to push it away, you can actually help yourself be happier in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. I like that notion of what’s uniquely good about this today in terms of getting that brain kind of tuned into that stuff and noticing what’s really special about that. That’s really cool. When one does a complaint vacation, I can see how we can catch ourselves in not verbalizing complaints, yet still, quite possibly internally in our own mind’s ear, rattle off plenty of complaints. How do you think about approaching that?

Stella Grizont
Yeah, I love that question. And this is the thing with when we complain, this is just something I’ve noticed, is that we’ve usually skipped over the step of acknowledging our emotion. We’ve actually bypassed our own emotion, and now we’re in an instant place of suffering. So, there’s probably a space before that, before we get really like annoyed or flustered, or we’re suffering or we’re complaining, that we skipped over.

And so, just acknowledging your emotions can actually help you be with the event without having extra layers of suffering about it.

So, if you find yourself in a complaining loop, you want to pause and, again, be curious, and be like, “What’s really going on for me here?” Because it’s probably not the thing. There’s some emotion that wants attention. And if we just get quiet enough to notice it, that’s actually the first step of having some self-compassion, and then we might say to ourselves, “Wow, of course I’m feeling really upset. It’s hot and it’s uncomfortable and I can’t do my work. And that makes it really hard.”

And then the next step of self-compassion is just being gentle with yourself like you would a friend. Like, “Yeah, of course, Stella.” Like validating your emotions. And then you want to remind yourself that you’re human, just like everyone else, and, yeah, being really sweaty is going to make anyone grumpy, and just be kind and compassionate. And that can actually transform the complaining, and that can really slow down the volume of that complaining and then to notice what’s good if you can. And that’s what I hope for everyone who reads the book or whoever I work with, is to realize their power over their experience. And the power is first realizing, “I am complaining,” or, “I’m noticing myself complaining,” and then to notice that you have choices. That’s the power. So, if you are noticing you’re complaining, you’re already in a good place. You’re already winning because you’re at least observing it.

Pete Mockaitis
To note, the particular emotion, and not jump through it. I’m reminded of Dr. Trevor Kashey. We’ve got to get him on the show. He has a framework that is STFU, which is sort of a joke in and of itself, which is like stimulus, thought, feeling, urge. And these are four separate things. Like, what you want to run and go do, the urge is different than the thought that you’re having, or the feeling you’re having, or the thing itself that’s present.

And I find that’s kind of helpful to you stop and march through that, and say, “Oh, okay,” we’re going to have a moment where we could just go ahead and feel that thing and let that flow through for a moment, and that’s all right, and maybe even helpful in just letting it pass instead of just telling a big old story and perpetuating it.

Stella Grizont
Yes. If we could slow down just a little bit, like in general as humans, and touch base with ourselves, we realize our power, we metabolize our emotions better, and we make better choices. So, I think a lot, we could all benefit with slowing down.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m curious now with regard to the boundaries. Any favorite words, phrases, scripts you might suggest, because we could feel maybe uncomfortable in establishing a boundary? It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to upset them,” or “I make them think I’m unmotivated or lazy or not a team player,” etc. Any magical turns of phrase you might suggest for folks?

Stella Grizont
Absolutely. So, as I shared before, I’m a recovering people-pleaser, and this is a lifelong practice. All of these tools, they’re all part of building a skillset, and you have to keep at it, or we just get stronger and better. And so, if you’re an auto-yes kind of person and someone’s like, “Hey, can you join this committee?” or “Hey, can you do this by 5:00?” or “Hey, we’d love your help,” if you find yourself automatically saying yes right away, one thing you can do is just delay.

So, you would say, “Hey, thanks so much for considering me for this. Can I get back to you in an hour, in a day, next week? Can I get back to you? Thanks so much. Can I get back to you?” This will buy you time to make a more conscious decision and decide, “Is this a yes for me? Is this a no?” Or, “Do I have questions? What’s driving the timing? Why me? Why are we doing this?”

So, oftentimes, again, it’s about slowing things down so that you can make more conscious decisions. So, I would just ask for some time, “Let me look at my schedule. I want to give you my best. I haven’t had a chance to assess what I have going on this week.” And people are happy to give you time.

When it comes to boundaries, it’s really about microdosing. I call it microdosing. So baby, baby, baby, baby steps. Because what you’re doing is you’re retraining your nervous system to feel safe even when maybe people aren’t totally pleased. So, we need to train ourselves to feel safe. And so, one microdose, one little baby step you can take is just to say, “Let me get back to you.”

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

Stella Grizont
Writing this book took me over nine years, and it was something I really wrestled with. And there were many times where it felt like I was pushing and I wasn’t going anywhere. And I talk about this inner skill of refocusing, which sometimes requires us to stay down when we’re down. It sometimes requires us to listen and learn from when things don’t go our way.

And I just want to offer some words of encouragement for folks who feel like they’re hitting a wall. And in the book, I talk about, well, maybe it’s not so much of a setback, but a setup for something better, and to really question, “How is this serving me? What growth is this setting me up for? What is this signaling?”

Really asking some bigger questions so that you can get to transform through that really hard time. Because I truly believe it’s all of service, just like that client who was dealing with the bully, like she got to step up and really regain her power, and that was a gift that her boss gave her even though he was an a-hole.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Yeah, well it’s done, a setup, instead of a setback. Cool. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Stella Grizont
So the founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, I hope I’m saying that right, he said, “It’s not that I don’t get off-center, it’s that I return to center so quickly no one ever notices.” And so that’s the thing with all these inner skills, we’re going to mess up. The work is not to be perfect. The work is in returning to ourselves a little faster, a little bit more gracefully each time.

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

Stella Grizont
So, in 2006, there was this eye-tracking study done by Wadlinger and Isaacowitz, where they took two groups of participants, and they induced one group of participants into a positive mood by just showing them pictures, puppies, babies. And then another, they took another group and induced them into a negative mood, and then they put eye-tracking goggles on them, and they asked them to look at an image on a screen.

And the people who were in a negative mood, their eyes tended to stay on one particular area of the screen and just hover there, focus. And then those who were in a positive mood, their eyes tended to go around the periphery of the screen and then scatter within. So, they literally took in the big picture. They saw more. The people who are in a negative mood kind of had tunnel vision. So, again, it just shows the impact of our emotions on how we see the world, and how important it is for us to manage our minds and moods so that we can see more.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Stella Grizont
This is a book by Mark Nepo, and it’s Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred.

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

Stella Grizont
At the end of the day, and this is a tool I share in my book, I ask myself what I call accountability questions, which are questions to reflect on three values I’m looking to amplify in my life. So, they’re open-ended and they’re “How did I support my well-being today, because my vitality is important?” “How did I express love to the people I care about?” And the third one I move around a lot, but it’s actually now it’s going to be about play, but it’s, “How did I have fun today?”

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

Stella Grizont
Well, people really love this exercise that I have that’s called the Vision Generator, and that’s what you do in Chapter 2. People can, if they don’t want to buy the book, which I’d love them to, or do the course, you can get it for free at VisionGenerator.com. And what people often love is the ease and the hand-holding to really go deep and reflect on what one really, really, really wants, and so they really love that exercise because that really sets them free. And to realize that there’s infinite ways to feel more satisfied at work and in your life, even if the circumstances are what they are and they’re not perfect.

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

Stella Grizont
They can go to my website, StellaGrizont.com. And I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn.

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

Stella Grizont
I would start with the Vision Generator. So, if you want to be awesome at your job, you have to know what’s important, how you want to show up, and knowing your vision is so critical because it organizes your values, the steps that you take, and the behaviors you engage in. And so, that’s vision generator, and they can get that at VisionGenerator.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Stella, this has been a treat. I wish you much work happiness.

Stella Grizont
Thank you so much, Pete. Thank you for having me.

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

Hamza Khan
Pete, thank you for having me. Truly honored.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about some of your insights on burnout and more, but, first, you have many cool work accomplishments in your career. And one that stuck out for me is the time you did a movie marathon at your desk at work. Can you tell us the tale here?

Hamza Khan
Oh, man, I was quiet quitting before it became a thing, apparently. Wow, where do we begin? First of all, I’m just a little bit starstruck because you interviewed very recently on this podcast one of my heroes, Dr. Christina Maslach.

Pete Mockaitis
I was going to say she’s on my mind when we talk about burnout.

Hamza Khan
I listened to that episode three times.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Cool.

Hamza Khan
And the first time, I was like, “I cannot believe I’m listening to Dr. Christina Maslach. She’s going off right now on the upstream factors, which influence burnout. But, oh, my goodness, I’m going to be on this very podcast very soon.” And then I went back to it for a third time to just take notes and transcribe it, but thank you for providing the transcription, and you just saved me a lot of time. So, that was fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, yeah. Thank you.

Hamza Khan
Okay, so the quiet quitting. Really interesting. If you listened to that episode, I think, at the time of this release, it might be maybe ten episodes out. I think it’s number 823, if I’m not mistaken, Pete, which, by the way, congratulations on nearly a thousand episodes of this podcast. That is remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Hamza Khan
I was very disengaged at this workplace, quite frankly. I was working at an organization that I just accepted a job with soon after graduation, or, actually, just before. I was petrified that I wasn’t going to find a job, graduating in 2008, into the middle of a recession, so I said yes. First job that was offered to me, I’m like, “I’m taking this. Let’s do it.”

And I joined this company, and I realized it was very imbalanced in the sense that there was a lot of people that were benefitting from the labor of a very small group of people, of which I was a member of. It was a very heavy marketing organization. Even though it was a tech company with two developers, it was very marketing heavy.

And I realized about a year into it that this company was shady, to say the least. They had some Ponzi scheme-like elements to it. And this was an organization in which the optics were rewarded, so you were rewarded for appearing to be productive, showing up early, speaking up in meetings even if you had nothing valuable to say, if you seemed busy, and if you were staying late. And I just increasingly became disengaged, disillusioned by the organization.

And all of the things that Dr. Christina Maslach talked about in her episode, Pete, were present in my working experience there. There was a lack of fairness, there was inconsistent or missing values, there was a lack of control, an unsustainable workload, insufficient reward, to say the least, and a lack of…or poor/toxic community. So, all of those things gradually wore me down and, by the end, I was like, “Hey, what would happen if I just played the game, if I just pretended to be productive over here, if I just leaned into the optics, could this happen?”

And I talked about this in my first TEDx Talk, Stop Managing, Start Leading. For, I think, two weeks, I would show up on time, I would say hello to my boss, wish me good morning, and I’d sit there for eight hours a day, and just marathon movies. And I did them all. I did “Rush Hour,” “The Lord of the Rings.” I did Harry Potters at the time, Godfathers, extended editions of course, and I would leave shortly after 5:30, and my boss would be like, “Hey, good job, buddy. You did an amazing job today.” I’m like, “Oh, all right, man. If you say so, sir, no problem.” And I quit at the end of that marathon. I was like, “Yeah, this is ridiculous.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I had several follow-ups when I watched your TEDx Talk, and that was one of them. I was like, “Just how long did this marathon persist?” And so, two weeks, like ten business days, 80-ish hours, so, yeah, extended editions would probably be a good 25 plus films here.

Hamza Khan
Yeah, man, I also had to pop into Reddit and just had to leave my thoughts as well. Make sure they understood.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. The world needs to hear what Hamza thought about these movies on Reddit.

Hamza Khan
One thing I will say, the only sort of – what’s the word I’m looking for over here – movies that are part of, like, franchises or trilogies that actually improved over time, “The Lord of the Rings” I would say, and, surprisingly, “The Planet of the Apes,” which wasn’t out at that time, but those were the only movies that actually get better and don’t actually experience any quality loss, in my personal opinion.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, so I was also going to ask, so you mentioned Ponzi scheme vibes, and maybe I already know the answer to this question. To what extent did you feel guilty, like you were stealing from the company? And it sounds like you thought they were shady and you’re on your way out, so, yeah.

Hamza Khan
Yeah, I definitely wouldn’t have engaged in that behavior were the circumstances of…I don’t know how much I can say over here because I did sign an NDA but, to be fair, I think people can look this up. You can go on my LinkedIn and put the timelines together and figure out what organization I was with, and you could Google them and find out which one is no longer in existence. And I think there’s one that’s going to stand out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Hamza Khan
So, this organization, once I clued into the fact that they were engaging in fraudulent behavior, that’s when I was like, “Oh, wow, you guys are unethical, and I would contend, engaging in some criminal behavior,” so I didn’t feel bad about it at that point. That’s when I realized that, “Hey, we’re being abused.” When I say we, me and my coworkers were being abused in this workplace. That was very much using the Theory X style of management, assuming the worst in employees, and treating us in this pretty antisocial way, behaving in some very antisocial ways, relying on some very dominant behaviors.

And so, once I clued into that, I was like, “Ah, yeah.” I knew I was going to leave but just for my own edification, I wanted to see what would’ve happened if I played the game. And, of course, it worked out in those two weeks, and I was like, “Yeah, this is ridiculous.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is kind of fun, that experiment. And I have sort of daydreamed about, I don’t know, interviewing for jobs and being just flagrantly honest and see how that goes, or, if it’s like a lucid dream or fantasy or experiment, to see what happens. And so there, you saw it happened, they said, “Great job,” and that persisted. Who knows how long it could go on had you not exited?

So, that is an amusing opening picture of what can happen when you’re in burnout. And so, Dr. Christina Maslach did share a lot of excellent insights in terms of the fundamental guiding principle causes of burnout. So, please, yes, if folks have not heard that, and you’re interested in the topic, she is maybe the luminary on the topic at Episode 832.

But, Hamza, you’ve got some good stuff here which is fresh and interesting. In particular, you walked through a very resonant 12 stages of burnout, and then a six-step DRAGON method, which I think is supremely practical and very worthwhile. So, I’d love it if we could dig into these particulars and if you could maybe, first, start us off by sharing something you found kind of surprising or novel as you did your own burnout research.

Hamza Khan
Wow, I just want to clarify for the listeners, I sound like an awful employee.

Pete Mockaitis
The worst two weeks of your career, I mean, you had some experiment.

Hamza Khan
The worst two weeks of my career. I did not repeat that experiment ever again. You can ask my bosses. Even during that time, I was a delight to work with. I hope that that is something that all of my employers would say and have said in most cases. And you can go on my LinkedIn, you can see my accomplishments. I’m not a slacker, I promise. I work very hard. I apply myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Message received.

Hamza Khan
Because I would be listening to this, and being like, “Holy, this guy is terrible.” Okay, but I did burn out. And so, this happened when I was highly engaged. Fast-forward to a couple of years later, I’m in an environment in which all of those upstream factors that Dr. Christina Maslach described are working in my favor. My workload is manageable, things are fair, the values are clear, there is a healthy community, so on and so forth, and yet I burned out.

And I burned out in a scenario where, in hindsight, on paper, I shouldn’t have burned out because this was a place where I was very well compensated and we had the best of benefits possible. I mean, if you wanted to, you could get a massage every single day there if you wanted. So, in terms of the things that should’ve prevented burnout and promoted optimal mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing, those were at play, and yet I still experienced burnout.

And I realized so much of the reason why that happened is because I had internalized some greater fears. I think any given day, people don’t feel like they’re perfect enough, efficient enough, progressive enough, satisfied enough, innovative enough, whatever the case may be, and they engage in patterns of overwork that, inevitably, extinguish the fires of productivity, and that’s what happened for me.

I subjected myself to persistent chronic stress that left me feeling depleted. I was ineffective, I was negative, I was cynical, and there was a distance between me and the work that I was doing. And so, when this happened, I was very perplexed. Well, first of all, it was very isolating. I felt like I was alone in this. I really needed to understand what had happened to me.

And, at that time, I was using the term burnout quite casually, even flippantly, I was like, “Oh, I’m burning out. I’m burning the candle on both ends.” I didn’t really understand what it was. At the time, I even remember that my understanding of burnout was related to an XBOX game that was popular at the time, “Burnout Paradise” or something.

And then when I delved deeper into this, I realized, “Wow, I was quite lucky to have experienced this and emerged on the other side of it with my health intact,” because that is not the case for so many people. For instance, burnout, ooh, I get chills when I think about this, people are dying every single day because of this.

Just today alone in China, approximately 3,000 people will die from working too hard. And this is not just people working in difficult labor-intensive jobs, blue-collar work. This is knowledge workers just like us dying every single day around the world, not just in China, dying every single day around the world from overwork. So, I felt very lucky in this sort of me-search that gradually became research, and then we-search.

I discovered the 12 stages of burnout, a model proposed by some of Dr. Christina Maslach’s contemporaries, some of the pioneering researchers, Dr. Herbert Freudenberger and Dr. Gail North, respectively. They demonstrated a linear progression of burnout. It starts with the compulsion to prove one’s self, which I imagine a lot of people feel in the work that they do. They feel like they need to prove themselves, which then naturally leads to working harder, stage two.

And then stage three is neglecting needs. And then stage four is displacement of conflicts, and that’s when it becomes tricky for me. That’s usually my tell that I’m burning out. Whenever I become short with clients, whenever I become short with my family, with my friends, that’s when I clue into the realization that I might be on this path to full-blown physical, emotional, and mental exhaustion. And that’s the last stage of burnout, stage 12 is there’s nothing there. You’re a husk, essentially.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, when it comes to the working harder and neglecting needs, let’s zero in on what are some particular sorts of needs that are easy to kind of push to the wayside when you’re working harder that can start to sneak up and spiral?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, this is a good one, right? Let’s go into some specific examples. You should try, to the best of your ability, to eat three meals if possible, and eat them around the same time. It’s optimal for metabolism, for energy maintenance and sleep, a whole host of other benefits, but it starts with you just saying, one day, “Oh, you know what, I can’t do breakfast today,” or breakfast starts to happen at lunch, or you just breeze through lunch, or you’re working while eating and you’re not chewing your food in the same way, so just disrupting your eating habits. That’s one thing that you can neglect.

Another thing that you can neglect is fitness, skipping going to the gym, or whatever other recreational or fitness activity that you engage in, pushing that to the side. Not sleeping consistently, not waking up at the same time every single day. So, eating, sleeping, family, friends, whatever you need to refill your energy buckets, you start neglecting those, I would say that’s what happens around stage two, stage three, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
Yup, got you. Okay. The friends, the exercise, the eating, the sleeping, yeah, okay. And so then, the displacement of conflicts, you say you’re being short with people, so you’re displacing that you’re feeling conflicted about what’s up at work on over to other people around you.

Hamza Khan
It’s just avoidance behavior. You just sweep that conversation underneath the rug, below the rug, or you need to have a difficult conversation with your boss, and you think, “Maybe I’ll have it tomorrow. Maybe next week,” and then next week becomes next month, and next month becomes never.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that makes sense because if you don’t feel like you’ve got much in the tank, it’s like, “Oh, that’s too hard. That’s just beyond me.” And I guess I find in my own self that it’s not only sort of difficult emotional conflict conversations, but it’s all kinds of hard projects or things, like taking a hard look at the subscriptions that you’ve signed up for over the last two years and see which ones really needed to go a while ago, and feeling the, I don’t know, maybe guilt, shame, regret, silliness of not having cleaned up some of these messes where they’re hiding in your life earlier, whether they’re difficult conversations or difficult, let’s say, looking at the mirror, peering into the messes that you’ve made sorts of things.

Hamza Khan
That’s a very, very relevant example that you gave over there. So, last year, I was flirting with burnout, 2022, I think on record was one of the most difficult years of my life just in terms of the sheer frequency of stressors and the intensity of stressors. And I remember when I de-loaded my priorities, and we’ll go into the DRAGON method in a bit maybe and talk about ways that we can recover and beat burnout, recover from or beat burnout.

I remember thinking to myself, at the start of the year, like, “Hey, I need to cancel this NBA League Pass subscription that I have.” And an entire year went past, 2022, where I just had this subscription running in the background, and in December I’m like…

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, I might use this soon someday-ish perhaps, maybe.”

Hamza Khan
I was like, “Hey, Adam Silver, you’re welcome, man. I just made a 12-month donation to you and your organization. I didn’t use it at all.” So, yeah, this happens, right? You just avoid, you push away, because you don’t want to deal with it, it’s difficult, and there’s one more stressor that’s going to maybe push you over the edge that you parry.

But I think it was JRR Tolkien who said something to the effect of, “Shortcuts now result in roadblocks later.” And I think about that a lot with stage four. Avoidance of these difficult conversations will ultimately resurface at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve covered the first third of this dozen. Now, let’s hit it with number five, revision of values.

Hamza Khan
Revision of values. So, this is rewriting your own code, the things that are important to you, your sense of purpose, and the things you reward, tolerate, and punish, enter into a state of flux. Work at this point becomes really your only focus. Then, I think, next, we go into stage six, denial of emerging problems. People are starting to notice things are off about you but you dismiss them, you say, “It’s not a me problem; it’s a you problem.”

Stage seven is withdrawal. All of the stress and, especially, all of the social pressure that you’re now feeling, it just becomes overwhelming, it becomes a topic of conversation whenever you meet your friends, whenever you sit down with your family or your spouse. They’re pointing out that something is off, and you say, “It’s easy for me to just not deal with this,” so you retreat. You become isolated, you become even antisocial.

And then eight, we have odd behavioral changes. You undergo obvious behavioral changes that are now significantly concerning friends and family. Stage nine is depersonalization. You fail to see yourself as valuable. You start to antagonize other people. You start to blame people for things that are going wrong in your life.

Stage 10 is inner emptiness. This is loneliness. It’s an extreme sign of burnout. And then stage 11 is depression. It’s like a forced introversion. And then stage 12, full-blown burnout syndrome. This is when you experience physical, mental, and emotional collapse at this stage. And, frankly, I think some stage six onwards, it’s imperative that you seek out professional help.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, this collapse, can you paint a picture for what that might look, sound, feel like?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, I talked about this, I did another TED Talk in 2015, I believe, titled “The Burnout Gamble,” and I went into some detail about it. If I do that topic again, I would definitely just be more present with what was happening. So, I experienced this in 2014, the December of 2014. I had worked that year from January all the way until beginning of December.

I was putting in the nine-nine-six, and nine-nine-seven work weeks. I was just working 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. six days a week, and some weeks 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. seven days a week, a style of working that was very popular in the tech sector and was popularized in, I think, it was Alibaba. Jack Ma of Alibaba really just talked about this and extolled its virtues.

Anyway, didn’t take a break, didn’t really have weekends, no vacations, and it was working in the beginning for me. I was being rewarded, I was being promoted, given more responsibilities, and – what’s that saying – the hardest worker gets the bigger shovel. And so, I was just grinding myself down, wearing myself out.

And then in December of 2014, I’m ready to take this epic trip around the world. I’d booked my flights, I’d reserved hotels, Airbnbs, intracity travel. And the day I was supposed to leave on that trip, that grand adventure around the world where I was going to flame out like a phoenix and recover from the ashes of all of this overwork, I got cold feet. And it happened minutes before I was supposed to call the Uber to go to the airport.

My knees buckled, my chest clamped, my breathing became shallower, my temperature skyrocketed, I panicked, and I blacked out. I think my body just said, “Enough is enough. Hamza, you’ve subjected us to too much over here. We’re shutting you down.” And it was just such a surreal feeling because I was, when I awoke, there’s barely minutes left until the flight was supposed to take off.

And in my delirium, I thought that I could still book it into the airport, rush the tarmac, state my case, and hop on the flight, and everything would be okay. But I was paralyzed. I just couldn’t stand up. And the flight left without me. And what happened, instead, is I became sicker than I had ever been in my life, and this is coming from somebody that caught COVID, and this is the OG strand of COVID, too, pre-vaccine.

I threw up, I became nauseous, and, essentially, for the next month, I was alone at home, bedridden, completely bewildered. My mental health was a wreck. I could barely get up out of bed, one of the lowest points in my life. There was just nothing there. I just became a complete shell. And when I talked to doctors about what had happened, they all said that I had burned out, but I had, based on what I told them had happened on the eve of that trip, they said I experienced the symptoms of very traditional panic attack, complete system failure which led me to fall as deathly ill as I had become at that point.

That’s what it looked like for me, and I imagine all the people have gone through similar…who’ve gone through the full 12 stages of burnout, who’ve made it all the way to burnout syndrome, they’ve experienced something similar to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s heavy, and thank you for sharing that experience. I’m thinking that’s certainly dramatic and memorable. I’m thinking back to a conversation I had with another guest, Carey Nieuwhof, and he says, “I don’t have a diagnosis on this but from chatting with people, I think many people suffer from a low-grade burnout.” And he would define it as you’re still able to show up and do the things as opposed to being bedridden, but there’s not much feeling or joy or emotion or life inside you.

And I thought that that was powerful because it rings true to me, is that I’ve seen burnout take kind of these two routes. One is like, “That’s enough. Done. Out.” And then, I’m just sort of like, I was like in a quiet desperation going through the motions. What’s your take on that?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, geez. I never want to go back to that level of burnout that I experienced, full-blown burnout. And the two routes that you mentioned are really interesting. I don’t think I’ve publicly spoken about this but last year, 2022, I definitely was on the burnout cycle. I was in a cycle of burnout but I didn’t make it all the way to stage 12.

And so, there’s a part of me, like an inner defense mechanism that made me maybe reluctant to share my burnout story in the first place, that’s like, “Don’t admit that you experienced burnout because that will undermine your message. It’s like how can you be an expert on burnout? How did you write this book? Are you speaking on burnout but you’re going through it as well?”

But the truth is even if you’re on stage one of the burnout cycle, you’re still technically experiencing burnout. It’s just to a lesser degree than somebody might be experiencing if they’re at stage 12. And the fact remains that you’re still going through the motions, you’re still experiencing, on this continuum of burnout, effects, the thing that the World Health Organization ascribe three dimensions to: feelings of exhaustion and energy depletion, increased distance from your jobs, and negativism and cynicism about your work.

And that can happen at stage one, it can happen at stage 12. It certainly happens at stage 12. So, even if you’re experiencing chronic stress that has not been successfully managed but you’re still effective, you’re still productive, you’re still getting things done, you might be tempted to think and say that you’re not going through burnout, but the truth is you are. And acknowledging that you are is the first step, in my opinion, towards recovering from burnout, to dealing with it constructively.

Pete Mockaitis
And as we look at the 12 stages overall, one that’s striking a chord with me right now, and I don’t think I noticed it at the time, is I was working a lot and I wasn’t really pleased with it, but I thought, “Well, hey, man, that’s the nature of the game. Some projects are tougher than others and some seasons are trickier.”

And then I found myself frequently checking my bank account balances and stock holdings, which was weird because I didn’t do that before. And it was like, “Ah, man, I’m working a lot and now I’m tired.” I was like, “But, you know what, I’m making a lot of money.” It’s like, “Look at that. That’s pretty impressive. Look at that. Did you imagine a couple of years ago that…?” And then I remember even reflecting on myself in that moment, thinking, “Yeah, but when did you care about that?”

Hamza Khan
Yeah, yeah, I’m right there with you. That’s busy work, right? Like, you’re just doing things to give you the illusion that work is being done, that progress is being made. I’m right there with you. And I would actually start to obsess about whenever money was leaving my accounts because that was a stressor for me too.

So, Stevan E. Hobfoll, a researcher, has proposed this theory, the conservation of resources theory, which states that people experience psychological stress, which is a big contributor to burnout, psychological stress in three scenarios: when there’s a net loss of resources, when there’s the threat of a loss of resources, or when there’s insufficient reward following an investment of resources.

So, when I was going through burnout, just like you, Pete, I would obsess, I would check my bank account every single day, and I was like, “Ah, in case of movement, things are okay.” And I’m like, “What am I doing? This is not moving the needle on anything. I’m just trying to fill my time over here.” I’m just trying to give myself some optical illusion that progress is being made, or at least I’m not regressing, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think I also remember thinking about how, like, we’re working a lot and that, somehow, meant that we were really tough and hardcore and awesome like Navy Seals or something, and a 9-to-5 worker was weak or lazy or something. And so, that’s kind of gross too in terms of stoking…

Hamza Khan
A toxic hustle culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s stoking a toxic…and it’s inside my own mind too. A toxic, I don’t know what the word is, othering or being contemptuous of like normal.

Hamza Khan
A disassociation almost.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it’s like it is weird in terms of the revision of values. It’s like, “Who I am is different, and that’s not pretty.” So, that resonates as a real step that pops up there, I didn’t care about being a super hardcore dude capable of working a lot or having a fat bank balance. But in a world in which I was working too much, that was the consolation I had available to me, and that’s what I clung to.

Hamza Khan
I can relate so much to that. So much of our identity, it sounds like, and just hearing that, was tied up in being productive. It’s how we made meaning in the world. It’s something that we did to inflate our egos and to feel valuable, to feel wanted in the world. And when that wasn’t true for me in 2014, when I burned out, it was an ego death.

It was like a, “Holy smokes, what’s going on? Who am I?” moment. “If I can’t be effective in the workplace, if I’ve now signaled to all of my colleagues and to my partners and to my leaders that I can’t manage myself well enough to be effective in the workplace, then maybe I’m not who I think I am.” So, there was a significant period of depression that followed that burnout, and it’s taken me years to recover from that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s talk recovery. There’s a six-step DRAGON method you mentioned, D-R-A-G-O-N. Yup, that’s six letters, or six steps. It’s an acronym. Lay it on us, Hamza.

Hamza Khan
Look, I got to be honest with you. It was not dragon when I put it together. It was like D-R-A-G-X or G-L-M, and I was like, “Ah, I got to find a synonym for this X and L word, and let’s just make it dragon,” so it worked out. But I think the idea is still salient because the way I was behaving in 2014, and prior to, was very much like a phoenix. I had this false belief that I could just continue to burn bright and burn out, and then recover from the ashes every single time.

And I think a fantastical mythical creature that has better relationship with fire, that isn’t beholden to fire, is the dragon, very much in control of it. It’s calm, it’s powerful, and it’s resilient, so I’ve leaned into that metaphor.

Pete Mockaitis
Look at you, smart work with that dragon, fire breathing, controlling it.

Hamza Khan
Thank you, sir. There we go. There we go. So, better to behave like a dragon than a phoenix. Now, I was very inspired by Dr. Christina Maslach’s work so I want to preface by saying this. What I’m sharing, this DRAGON method, it assumes that there is a good fit with you and the organization, and it assumes that the upstream factors are non-existent. Because if the upstream factors are in play, then this DRAGON method, it’s going to be very difficult for you to implement.

And I’ll take it a step further. I’ve heard this verbatim from some clients throughout the years, like you can’t yoga your way, you can’t journal your way out of burnout, if you’re dealing with a toxic leader, or you’re grossly underpaid at your workplace, or if there’s no mission, vision, values, principles, purpose. So, these are very much designed with the individual in mind, and it’s what I used to emerge from burnout and to keep burnout at bay.

So, the first step is to de-load priorities. Identify the sources of stress in your life, and diminish them, and reduce them down to something that’s manageable, to create the time and space, essentially, to recover. That’s step number one. The second step is to reconfigure focus because it’s one of the things that we lose sight of when we’re going through burnout. We lose our north star. We lose our sense of purpose. To reconnect with why you’re doing what you’re doing, the transcendent reason for your being in the world of work.

Then stage three is to assemble boundaries against the very things that caused you to experience undue stress and burnout in the first place, to get better at saying no, essentially. Then we go, once we’re past the recovery stage, D-R-A, then we go into the inoculation stage. This is how to prevent yourself from burning out.

So, the first part of that is G, gain mastery of stress, separate good stress from bad stress, and understand that it’s better to then go into the next stage, O, be a high-performer and not an overachiever. So, overcome overachievement. And then the final stage, perhaps the most important stage in terms of inoculating yourself against burnout, is to nurture resilience. And a big part of that is about developing better self-awareness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. De-load priorities, reconfigure focus, assemble boundaries, gain mastery of stress, overcome overachievement, and nurture resilience.

Hamza Khan
Bingo.

Pete Mockaitis
So, could you share a couple of your favorite tactics or huge bang-for-the-buck types of initiatives or interventions that fall within each of these six that are some of your faves?

Hamza Khan
Okay. Wow. I’m going to give you a couple ones that I have been relying on extensively over the last year and a half. So, the one that I’ve gone pro at is assembling boundaries, and a big part of this is learning how to say no, and doling out respectful no’s. You could do it like Oprah, that’s one way to do it. You could just make your default response, to everything that takes you out of balance, no. Like, no to birthdays, no to Zoom meetings, no to coffee dates, all of that.

But I think you’ll quickly learn that you’re going to lose friends and exhaust a lot of social capital. But one way that you can dole out no’s is respectful. You can acknowledge their request. You can say, “Thank you so much for thinking of me for this opportunity.” Then you can clearly state why you can’t do it. So, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, thank you so much for thinking of me to be on the podcast. Unfortunately, I can’t do it because for the next three months, I’m busy with…” whatever. Clearly state why I can’t do it.

Then I can offer an alternative, and that’s the master stroke. Instead of leaving you hanging, I should say, “Hey, what if we circle back in about six months? Or, instead of me, I think somebody else would be a better fit for this podcast on this topic.” In this way, you don’t feel like I’ve left you high and dry. It actually builds social capital between us because I’m looking out for you. I’m looking to solve your problem, looking to help you out in that situation. So, that’s one way to do it. Doling out respectful no’s, that has been very helpful to me.

Another strategy, ooh, I love this one a lot, it’s the five D method. This is especially important whenever you’re dealing with triaging any of your inboxes. I use this with my inbox every single day. Before I decide to do something, I run it through another set of D options. The first one is defer. If I can do this at a later date, great, push it aside. Diminish, reduce the scope of it. Delegate, if you have the ability to give it somebody else, and if it’s unnecessary, if it’s not relevant, just delete it.

And then whatever is left over, then do that. And I promise you, if you run your inbox through that filter of defer, diminish, delegate, delete, and then do, you will overcome that hesitation to start something. I mean, what’s that saying? There’s only way to eat an elephant; one bite at a time, which is a ridiculous adage when you think about it because you shouldn’t eat elephants, unless you’re a dragon, of course. That’s a different story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yes.

Hamza Khan
But the point remains that our reluctance to start something is proportional to the size of it. And so, when we’re staring down an inbox of 200, 300 emails, the five D method comes in handy. And the last one I want to give you over here, I could give you so much, but one that I’m using quite regularly is the dash method.

Decide, essentially, how work is going to end before you start work, in this way you activate what’s known as Parkinson’s Law, this productivity principle which states that work expands so as to fill the time allocated for its completion. Well, if you don’t have these constraints in place, if you’re not simulating these constraints, you’re probably like, if you’re like me, like a procrastinator, you’re going to wait until the very last minute to start it, and it’s probably not going to get…or at the very least, it won’t be very good.

And there’s a couple of dashes that you can use; there’s time-based dashes. So, let’s look at it in the context of this podcast. We have an hour allocated for the recording of this, so we’re either going to reach the full 60 minutes or we’re going to end before then. So, that’s a time-based dash. You and I both know how this recording is going to end.

There’s also an energy-based dash, whenever either of us loses energy in the tank to continue, that’s another way we can end this. There’s a unit-based dash, we can go through all of the questions that, Pete, you’ve designed, so that’s one way to end this podcast. There’s time, energy, unit. There’s feeling-based as well. So, Pete, whenever you feel like we’ve got a good episode in the can, we can wrap this up.

And there’s also results-based. We’d be trying to hit a certain metric for the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast, and then you might feel confident that we’ve reached that metric. And so, what you can do is you can establish one of these dashes as a way to end work before it begins, or you can combine some of these dashes and decide to end work when one of these dashes has been reached. So, that’s another strategy that I would recommend that falls within the DRAGON method.

Pete Mockaitis
And within the gain mastery of stress step, any favorite tools there?

Hamza Khan
Okay, so when it comes to gaining mastery of stress, this is one that was challenging for me last year, when I was flirting with burnout, and it was taking regular breaks. And I know this seems really pedestrian. There are probably some listeners who are just rolling their eyes, being like, “Seriously? Just taking breaks? How important is that?”

It is essential. It should be non-negotiable. It’s not a nice to have in a very busy work day. It’s actually essential to you doing your best work. And so, put them in your calendar, hardcode them. I now have breaks built into my calendar. For example, I’ve really slow mornings, and I color-code them as well to be green. And green signals to me that this is going to be something that’s going to be replenishing.

Lunch, non-negotiables, in there at the same time every single day. Weekends blocked off. Some evenings, date nights with my partner, all blocked off. So, scheduling these breaks and structuring them is essential. And if you have the ability to take regular vacations if you can, and when you are taking these vacations, I think, plan them in such a way where you can actually go dark and disconnect completely from the very things that might be causing regular stress.

So, within overcome overachievement, or, sorry, gain mastery of stress, I would say, in that step, take breaks, and, if not, be warned that you could break in the process.

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

Hamza Khan
Wow, no, you’ve really asked some questions here that have given me reason to step back and just appreciate all of the wisdom that has been accumulated through mentors, through different researchers, and Dr. Christina Maslach being one of them, that helped me get through the stress of last year. I think had this conversation happened in 2014, you’d be speaking to a very different Hamza that would be on the brink of full-blown burnout.

So, I’m just very grateful that I have the ability now to pay it forward to people who might be experiencing any stage on that 12 stage of burnout model, and, hopefully, it’ll compel you to separate run-of-the-mill everyday stress from what might be something that will lead to debilitating consequences for you. And, hopefully, you can say that.

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

Hamza Khan
It’s by Martha Graham, considered to be one of the pioneers of ballet in the United States.

She wrote, “There is a vitality, a lifeforce, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there’s only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly to keep the channel open.”

And, Pete, I sometimes find myself just staring at this quote, and really meditating on it because, as somebody that’s very critical of their work, as somebody who easily becomes disheartened with the results or lack thereof, I tend to fall into the trap of just comparing myself and competing unnecessarily. And so, when I read this, whenever I feel down about my work and my output, I’m like, “Hey, there’s a thing that’s working over here. Just keep the channel open. It’s okay.”

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

Hamza Khan
I’ve got a lot but the one that has my attention these days is The Dark Triad of Personality Traits, specifically within leadership. Very interesting research. And as a nice companion to that, you can look at the D Factor of Personality. Fascinating, especially if you’re studying destructive leadership and how that might be impacting such things as employee engagement, burnout, turnover, and the works.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s tempting for me to jump all over that. So, what are the three things, just the minimum?

Hamza Khan
Yeah, okay. So, The Dark Triad of Personality Traits: subclinical levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. And they fall within the other model, which is the D Factor Personality, the inverse of the OCEAN Big Five Traits. This is essentially, and I hope I can get this right, it is the relentless pursuit of maximizing one’s individual utility while provoking, neglecting, or accepting the disutility of others. In other words, selfish behavior. And that is what is at the root of destructive leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it seems to check out, having done none of that research, that sounds about accurate. And how about a favorite book?

Hamza Khan
One that I’m reading right now. Man, I cannot say enough good things about it, Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America. My goodness, it’s about something that happened in 1886 but it’s reading to me as though it was written for this moment in time, 2023, and all of the tension and the levels of disengagement and burnout that are happening in the workplace.

Clearly, to me and many others, there’s something fundamentally wrong about the world of work today, and I think this book offers a very timely warning for if we don’t correct the things that are going wrong in the modern workplace, then we face some kind of upheaval that is going to be uncomfortable for everyone.

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

Hamza Khan
If I had to pick of the current suite of tools that I’m using at the moment, Asana, the task management system.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Hamza Khan
A favorite habit is waking up at the same time every single day, even on weekends.

Pete Mockaitis
And what time is that?

Hamza Khan
It ranges between 5:00 and 5:30.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Hamza Khan
Never the same time on the dot. I’m always surprised whenever it spills over beyond 5:30.

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

Hamza Khan
Two in particular. One is “Stop Managing, Start Leading,” and the other one is “Burn bright, not out.”

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

Hamza Khan
HamzaK.com. You can find all of my links, my social links, links to my podcast, newsletter, all of that at HamzaK.com.

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

Hamza Khan
Don’t resist change. Don’t resist chaos and the uncertainty of the future of work. Embrace it. Understand that change is the ability to triumph through adversity. To overcome adversity is something that makes us uniquely human. It’s the closest thing that we have to a superpower. So, always be changing, and, at the very least, change before change is required, especially before it’s too late.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Hamza, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and little burnout.

Hamza Khan
Thank you, sir. Thank you. And likewise.