Tag

Energy Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

1050: How to Shift Your Mood and Keep Your Cool with Dr. Ethan Kross

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Ethan Kross shares simple, science-backed tools for managing your emotions.

You’ll Learn

  1. When avoidance is actually helpful
  2. Effortless strategies for quickly shifting your mood
  3. The emotional regulation framework used by the Navy SEALs 

About Ethan

Ethan Kross, PhD, author of the national bestseller Chatter, is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.

Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed about his research on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.

Resources Mentioned

Ethan Kross Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, welcome back!

Ethan Kross
Hey, thanks for having me, Pete. Always great to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I loved our first conversation about your book Chatter. And now we’re talking about your book Shift. Tell us, what made you think that this book needed to exist in the world?

Ethan Kross
Well, the recognition really came from just talking to people about my first book, which you just mentioned, Chatter. So that book really dealt with, “What do you do when you get stuck in a negative thought loop that you just can’t get out of, worrying and ruminating?” I would give talks about that topic, and the audience would be incredibly receptive to the tools that I would share with them.

But then they’d have loads of other questions about their emotional lives, beginning with, “What is an emotion in the first place? Why do we have them? What do they do for us? Are the bad ones good, or can they help us in some way? And what about if it’s just a momentary increase in emotion that I want to regulate, not necessarily a thought loop?”

And the way I think about the experience I had, it was like I had just given a talk on how to combat heart disease, but people had questions about inflammation, cancer, diabetes, and all sorts of other chronic ailments. And so, it really motivated me to dig into what we know about this messy emotional world that we live in and what we could do to manage our responses to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made. So, you’ve been researching this kind of thing for quite a while at Michigan. Is there insight you share with audiences that make people go, “Whoa”?

Ethan Kross
First off, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to managing our emotions. People routinely ask me, “What’s the one thing you should do if you are experiencing…?” fill-in-the-blank, A, B, C, D, or E, anger, anxiety, envy, you name it. I can’t answer that question because what I know from the science is that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Ethan, if I may, whenever I’m talking to the AI robots, they tell me deep breathing is the answer to calm down.

Ethan Kross
Well, deep breathing can be useful for some people in some situations, but so can a boatload of other strategies. We recently published these studies that looked at how people managed their COVID anxiety during the pandemic. We tracked people for several days over the course of a few weeks, and every day we asked them to tell us, “What did you do today to manage your anxiety about the pandemic?” And we also had people rate their anxiety.

And what we found was there were lots of things people could do to feel better about what they were going through. But, on average, people use between three and four different tools each day. Not one, not just deep breathing. Between three and four, some people use a lot more, some people use a little bit less.

But what we also found, Pete, was that the tools that worked for one person on one day were remarkably different than the tools that worked for someone else on the same day. The tools that worked for one person on one day were sometimes different from the tools that worked for them the next day.

So, I think of all of this now a lot like how I think about physical fitness. A lot of us share the same goal to be physically fit, to be physically healthy. But how we get there can be quite, quite different. If I just look in my immediate social circles. What I do is different from each and every one of those other people in my group, right? We may all like to lift little weights, but I like to do some high intensity stuff, and sometimes I’ll do yoga. Another friend might throw in some Pilates or a different regimen. There are different ways to achieve our goal, and that is true of being emotionally fit as well. So, that’s one thing I want everyone to know. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Another aha, there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. So, we often think, you know, if we’re feeling anxious or sad or anger, there’s something wrong with us. These are emotions we want to rid ourselves of. In fact, we evolved the capacity to experience those emotions because they’re often functional as long as we experience them not too intensely or not too long.

Anger alerts us to the fact that our view of what’s right and wrong has just been challenged and there’s something we could do to fix the situation. Anxiety tells us that there’s a looming uncertain threat on the horizon. Maybe we should pay attention to it. Now, clearly, for so many of us, so much of the time, those otherwise adaptive negative emotional responses become harmful because we can’t turn them off, and that’s where the science of shifting that I talk about in my book comes into play.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, this is good, and there was an author, I think it was Susan David, who wrote a book, and she had a cute little abbreviation about emotions, it’s, “What the funct?” That’s spelled F-U-N-C-T, like, “What is the function of this emotion?”

And I found that to be a much more helpful question when I’m having conversations with myself than “Why are you here anger?” because it’s almost like it creates defensiveness. It’s like if you screwed up something at work, it’s like, “Why don’t I have this document yet?” It’s like, “Ugh!” It almost, like, sparks defensiveness, and you can give some, “Well, I’m angry because of all these things!” And sure enough, then we’re really reinforcing that anger.

And what I’d like to do is sort of quickly understand and move past it to be more effective in whatever context I am. So, I think that’s great to note that they’re not bad things to be fixed but they have a function within them.

Ethan Kross
That’s right. And so, what I like to tell people is that if you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you. It means you’re operating the way you’re supposed to operate. But, these tools that we possess, these emotional tools that we have, they’re unwieldy tools, right, as you just described, and we don’t get a user’s manual for how to manage them.

And that’s really what I try to do in this book, is provide folks with a science-based blueprint for how to understand how to turn the volume on their emotions, up or down, shorten or lengthen how long they last, or even jump from one emotion to another. And there are lots of things you could do there. And interestingly, Pete, there’s also, there are a lot of myths about how we should shift that are actually wrong.

So, maybe we could go into some of those myths because those are often fun and they’re helpful ways to introduce some of the tools. Myth number one, avoidance is always bad. So, we often hear that you should never avoid your problems, face them head-on. This was a lesson that was drilled into me from a young age.

It’s absolutely true that chronically avoiding your problems doesn’t tend to work out very well for people. So just suppressing, denying, drowning yourself in substances that may provide you with some temporary but not long-lasting relief. These are things that many people do. They’ve been shown to be harmful, but we have over-generalized from that observation to assume that all forms of avoidance are harmful. They are not.

Pete, have you ever had an aggravating interaction in person or an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes.

Ethan Kross
And you’re smiling already, so I’ll take that as yes. And the temptation existed to respond right away but you combated it. You took time away. You distracted maybe for a couple hours, maybe for a few days, and you came back to the experience and found that it was a lot easier for you to work through it rationally. Does that resonate with you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. “The Lincoln Letters,” right, that’s a historical legend, which I think is true. Lincoln was angry, he wrote some letters, and he put them in his desk and just kept them there.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So that’s a way of being strategic with your attention, right? You don’t have to choose between approaching or avoiding, as we often describe it. You can approach your problems and then take some time away and then come back to them. You could do that repeatedly. And research shows that being flexible in that regard can be quite helpful. So, avoidance is not always useful. Attention is a powerful tool. You want to be flexible with how you wield it.

Let’s talk about being in the moment. We often hear that the goal should be to always be in the moment. Now it’s absolutely true that being in the moment can be helpful when we get stuck in a negative future or past. But there are also ways to travel in time in your mind to help you deal with the problems you’re experiencing, and these are easy, powerful tools that we all possess.

So, I call this mental time travel. Rather than say in the moment, I could transport myself into the future 10 years from now and think to myself, “How am I going to feel about this thing that’s really bugging me right now 10 years from now?” What that does is it highlights something I know at my core to be true, that whatever I’m experiencing as time goes on, it will eventually fade in its intensity.

The reason I know that to be true is the same reason why you know it to be true, and so many of our listeners do as well. We’ve experienced millions of emotional reactions over the course of our lives, and most of them follow the same time course, the same what we call temporal trajectory. Our emotions get triggered, and then as time goes on, they eventually fade.

Now we lose sight of that when we’re struggling, when all we could think about is how awful and consuming our circumstances are. But jumping into the mental time travel machine into the future, it makes it clear that what we’re going through is impermanent. That gives us hope, which turns the volume on our emotional responses down. So that’s mental time travel into the future.

You can also go into the past. I do this a lot, too. I opened the book with a story of my grandmother who narrowly escaped being slaughtered along with the rest of her family during the Holocaust. She lived homeless in Poland for years before she escaped to the States and built a new life. When things feel really bad for me, I jump into my mental time travel machine. I spend some time with her in the frozen Polish woods.

I don’t have to spend a lot of time, just a little bit, and it powerfully makes clear that what I’m going through pales in comparison to what she endured, and that broadens my perspective quite well. So, myth number two, you should always be in the moment. No, you shouldn’t. First of all, if your goal is to always be in the moment, good luck. I don’t think it’s actually possible. The brain evolved to travel in time.

Traveling in time is something we do in our minds, helps us plan for the future, learn from the past. What we all, I think, want to be doing is focusing on “How can we be better mental time travelers?” And that means sometimes recalibrating in the moment, but also traveling strategically in our minds into the future and past, depending on what our goals are. So that’s another myth.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to dig into that notion of, it’s a mental travel, time travel to the past, think about being in the frozen woods of Poland, and that gives you some perspective that your current problems aren’t so bad. I’m curious, is there a way to do that poorly?

For example, I think some might say that if we are quick to imagine much greater troubles elsewhere and dismiss the feelings we have about our current state or situation, that might be, I guess, “invalidating” of the emotion and potentially counterproductive. How do you think about that?

Ethan Kross
I don’t think so. Here’s why. It’s a misnomer to think that you apply these tools, and all of a sudden, a real difficult spot in your life turns into a birthday party with cupcakes and soda and warm cups of tea and pizza, right? That’s just not the way emotion regulation works. So, what ends up happening is, instead, as you get these shifts, these down regulatory shifts in amplitude or duration.

Amplitude meaning how intense the emotional response is or how long it lasts. You’re making it feel more controllable, and so you’re not just saying, “Oh, this is nothing and doesn’t mean anything at all.” I think that’s probably pretty rare, that a kind of traveling into the past and thinking about, “Well, you know, things could be worse.” I don’t think it just turns it off.

Having said that, Pete, I always recognize that there are instances that defy the norms. And so, is it possible that that could happen? Sure, absolutely. And in a minority of cases, like, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that that never does occur. But here’s the good news, that if you find yourself trying mental time travel into the past in this way, and it’s leading to the kinds of outcomes that you’re suggesting, don’t use that tool anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s easy. Sure.

Ethan Kross
Use a different one. And that’s an ace in the hole on the one hand but it’s the truth on the other. Like, I don’t respond well to burpees. Are you familiar with burpees?

I hate burpees. It doesn’t mean they don’t make me feel good. Guess what? I don’t do them. They benefit a lot of people. They don’t really benefit me. And there’s a whole boatload of physical exercises like that. I don’t do dips. It’s too hard on my shoulder. And we could go down the list. I’ll spare you my injuries and idiosyncrasies. But the same is true when it comes to managing our emotions and these tools that I’m talking about.

Some people benefit enormously from what we call expressive writing. Sitting down with a problem and just journaling about it for 15 to 20 minutes for one to three days. Just let yourself go. Talk about your deepest thoughts and feelings. Take it wherever you want. Connect it to your past, your future, whatever you want to do.

Research on that shows that that’s a really useful tool. And, in fact, in that COVID study that we ran, that I mentioned earlier, that was the most predictive of anxiety reductions of all the tools we looked about. But guess what? It was also the least frequently used tool out of the 18 or so that we administered, probably because it’s hard to do. Like, sitting down for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes? We all feel like we don’t.

I say this because you have agency in how you decide to assemble the tools that you apply to your life. And again, I think that should be a breath of fresh air because so many people I meet, they say things to me like, “Oh, I tried mindfulness. I tried meditating. I tried diaphragmatic breathing. It didn’t work for me. It works for everyone else. What’s wrong with me?” Again, nothing wrong with you. We know that there are these person strategy fits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the way you used that term phrase there, assemble the tools. Because sometimes there may be some assembly required. And I’ve been thinking, like lately, some tools I’ve been leaning on a lot, which are new and yet super handy, is that we had a guest, boy, back in the day, Michael Kerr, talked about putting together a humor first aid kit.

And I have diligently followed his advice and even used like a flash card application to assemble mine. And so, I’ve got, like, over a hundred things that I just thought were laugh out loud funny in the moment that I’ve captured, and then I just review them. And then it’s like, “Oh, I remember that time at that trade in Cancun, the trader did this thing, and it was so funny.” And so, it’s great to just have like 10 rapid-fire jokes, it’s like, “Oh, I’m in a better mood.” And there it is.

Ethan Kross
It’s so funny you bring that up. One of the things that we often talk about social media, how it’s bringing about society’s demise, and there clearly are some ways of interacting with social media that are harmful, but I like to remind people that sometimes it can be beneficial from a mood regulatory point of view. We don’t talk about that as much.

And your example makes me think about how I sometimes engage with social media to help improve my mood. Before bed, I will often watch these ridiculously silly short reels, and they bring me such emotional delight. I just find these pranks and other kinds of things, and I’ll laugh at them, and you know, they’re short, and then I’ll send them to some of my buddies, and they’ll send me back the teary-eyed emojis, they’re laughing, and then we both write back that our partners are elbowing us to stop laughing because we’re making too much noise and they don’t understand our humor.

And so, that little exercise of watching a funny video is both instantly elevating my positive affect. It’s also enhancing social connections. A simple thing you could do. So, let’s talk about simplicity for a second, though, because I think that’s another myth we can address. We often think that managing our emotions is hard, you know, “Pull up your sleeves. Get ready for the battle.” Sometimes it is, no question about it. But it isn’t always hard.

There are lots of tools that exist that are relatively effortless to implement. So expressive writing would not be an example of an effortless tool. That’s a pretty effortful tool, right? You’ve got to sit down, 15-20 minutes, you’ve got to write hard. But there are lots of things that you could do that are pretty easy. I’ll just kind of spit off a few. Spit off. Spit out. Mention. Mention a few sounds a lot more appetizing than spit off.

Music. I’ve been listening to music since I’m five years old. I’m guessing you’ve been listening to music for a while, too. Why do you listen to it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s fun. It sets the vibe or the mood.

Ethan Kross
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of I got young kids, like, “Let’s have a dance party,” or it’s like, “Are we are we feeling silly? Are we feeling like cue the Rocky theme to spark the motivation, or ‘Eye of the Tiger?” It’s like a movie, that we’re going to score this thing for the emotion or vibe we’re looking for.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So, close to 100% of people, when asked, “Why do you listen to music?” they answer that question by saying, “I like the way it makes me feel.” But if you then look at the percentage of people who, when they’re struggling, reach for music as a tool, it’s only between 10% and 30%. percent. So, music is an example of one way of harnessing your senses to shift your emotions.

All of our senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, hearing, I’ve probably left a few out, those are some of the major ones. Part of the way your senses work is through emotion. So, the senses refer to the different apparatus we possess to take in information about the world around us. Part of the reason we’re taking in that information is so we understand how to navigate the world, and a key part of navigating the world involves understanding what’s safe, what’s not, what should we approach, what should we avoid.

So, your senses are intertwined deeply with your emotions. Again, you know this to be true, like we all do, right? Sounds can elicit emotional responses. Scents, you’ve got a multibillion-dollar industry that deals with just spritzing yourself with scents to change the way you feel about yourself and change the way that other people feel about you. It’s called perfume and cologne, right? Hotels pipe scents into their ventilation system to change the way their patrons make them feel.

Pete Mockaitis
And cars.

Ethan Kross
Food, restaurants, cars. Cars do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m working on that delivery.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, little spritz. I mean, it’s wild. For me, it’s wild. I don’t want to assume that everyone thinks it. I find it amazing. I look at the world through this filter now of our senses managing our emotions. Like, restaurants, why do we pay all this money to eat? This is an emotional experience. It’s not like we’re just lining up for an IV drip. We could get away with just an IV drip, right? Like, getting all the nutrients we want from somewhat no flavor bypassing senses.

Pete Mockaitis
Oatmeal and multivitamins and protein shakes, and move on.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, but even those are spiked with senses. Instead, we spend sometimes hundreds of dollars on these fancy meals. It’s all about an emotional experience. Touch. When a touch is registered from someone who we accept the touch from, that can be an amazingly pleasant experience. We caress our children, our partners. Some people even do it themselves when they’re showing, like they self-soothe, they kind of rub their face, right, when they’re trying to feel better about stuff.

So those are just some examples of very, very simple things you could do to get momentary shifts in emotion, and there are many, many others like it. So, all right.

Let’s talk about one more myth having to do with other people. Other people can be an amazing resource in our emotional lives when it comes to shifting, but they can also be a liability. And one of the things that we often hear from those around us and our broader culture, I think, is sending us in the wrong direction when it comes to how to engage with other people, when it comes to our emotional lives. And this is directly relevant to the work experience.

We often hear that when you’re struggling you should find someone to vent your emotions, to just get it out, let it go. Express it, don’t keep it inside. What we know about this is that venting your emotions can be useful for strengthening bonds between people. Good to know someone is willing to listen to me, take the time to listen and care.

Problem is if all you do is vent, you leave that conversation, you feel good about the person you just connected with, but all the problems are still there because you haven’t actually worked through it. They’re not just still there, they’re even more activated because you’ve just spent all this time rehearsing the awfulness of the situation.

So, if venting isn’t the solution, what is? It’s a two-step process. Find someone to talk to about your problems and spend some time initially getting it out. They do need to listen and learn so that they can help you. Empathy is good. But once they have a sense of what you’re going through, and once you feel heard, then, ideally, talk to someone who can help you put your experience in perspective, someone who can help you work through the problem. Other people are in an ideal position to help you do that because the problem isn’t happening to them. So be wary about venting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff and a lot of places we can go. I want to check out what you said with regard in your book. It was a powerful sentence. Well, I wish I could quote it directly. Maybe you can. You said something, like, “We cannot control what triggers our emotions, but we can control the trajectory of them,” in terms of like the intensity and how long we’re there.

So, one, I think that’s a heck of a statement because, one, if there were a way, you would know about it, like you of all people, having studied this for so long, so intensively. So, I think that’s kind of telling, in and of itself, that to be realistic about what is, in fact, possible for us as a species. Could you elaborate on that?

Ethan Kross
You ever had the experience–where do you live, Pete? What city or town?

Pete Mockaitis
I live near Nashville.

Ethan Kross
Near Nashville, okay. You ever, on a muggy summer day, walk down the street and just catch a whiff of someone who doesn’t smell very good and experience an emotional reaction?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay, yeah.

Ethan Kross
Okay. Yeah, me too. That reaction was out of your control. You happened to encounter something in the world, it activated your senses, in turn, activated an emotional response. We experience emotional reactions like that all the time. We see things, we hear things, we think about things that just pop up in our head. We don’t know why the thoughts pop up in our head, but they elicit emotions. We don’t often have control over those different experiences. They just happen.

However, once those emotions are triggered, then that’s our playground, then we can get in there and alter the trajectory of those emotional responses, right? Like, you catch a whiff of that stinky person, maybe you could choose to inhale more deeply. That might perpetuate the response. You might close your nose, pull your shirt up over it. You might start thinking about how selfish is it for this person to carry them in this way.

Or maybe you might think otherwise, “Well, you know, maybe they’re not aware. Maybe they don’t believe in wearing deodorant.” Lots of ways you could think about the situation to alter the trajectory of that response. And so, this is a chapter in the book, and the setup for it is, several years ago when I was doing research as I do now, I came across an article that said that 40% of adolescents sampled in this study did not believe they could control their emotions.

That statistic just floored me because if you don’t think you can control your emotions, why would you do anything to actually try, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do to get healthier, to get more physically fit. Why am I going to go to the gym and do these painful things,” right? It just doesn’t make sense. You need to be motivated in order to use these different tools.

And, of course, I’m a director of a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. I’ve dedicated my life to understanding how people can control their emotions. And so, when you dig into it, what I’ve learned is that those 40% of students were right if they’re thinking about the trigger of our emotions. We can’t always control the trigger. We don’t have control over all the factors that could activate an emotional response.

What we can control is the trajectory of those emotional responses. And I think just knowing that can be really empowering, too, because it means that if you do find yourself experiencing a dark thought that you’re ashamed of, recognize that that’s not always under your control, but how you engage with that thought is.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds, is it accurate to say, in your informed, researched view, that no matter what you do, smelling a stinky person is going to trigger an emotional response, just period, even if you’re like trained with exposure to lots of stink for weeks at a time, you’re still going to have a degree of emotion trigger problem?

Ethan Kross
Well, no, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ethan Kross
Not. No, no, no. You can certainly train, be trained, or train yourself to become immune to certain kinds of provocations. This is often referred to as stress inoculation therapy. Stress inoculation is often utilized in various military trainings, where the idea is, “Okay, put people under stress, under relatively controlled conditions so that they’re used to it, so that when they find themselves in those situations in everyday life, they don’t respond with this huge reaction.”

You, I’m sure, just as I, like we’ve experienced many things the first time around. They were tremendously distressful, but then you realize you get through them. There are things you could do, and they’re not so bad later. Sometimes you don’t even register anything at all. So, certainly, if we have our eye on a particular kind of situation that provokes us, we can train for it, so to speak, to either reduce in its intensity or get rid of it altogether.

That said, you can’t train for every situation in life, and some situations are likely going to always trigger an emotional response. Certain kinds of, I would argue, sensory events. Pain as an example.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, we always have control over, or influence, over the trajectory of the intensity and the length to which we are experiencing an emotion that is triggered, and we may, in certain circumstances, be able to train for, inoculate against certain triggers doing a thing. And so, I’m thinking that hypnosis is one interesting kind of intervention if people have phobias or kind of reactions to things.

There seems to be some good science supporting that, “Oh, okay, with a hypnosis intervention for some people who are hypnotizable, they are not so triggered after kind of going through that.” And then also, you mentioned like a training or inoculation. Let me just make an example. Let’s say I, and it’s true, I feel pretty irritated when I’m interrupted, whether in speaking conversationally.

As well as just sort of, like, you’re doing a thing. It’s like, I’m doing a thing, and then there’s an interruption, like a knock on the door. It’s like, I am kind of flustered by such things. And so, that’s just kind of in there, kind of like involuntary.

I remember there was a time, someone knocked on my door, I was in a podcast interview, I actually gasped, like, “Huh!”

And so, if there’s a thing in us, like we find there’s a trigger that we know is not helpful, and here, for me, it’s being interrupted, I’d like to feel more adaptable and less inclined to being flustered upon interruption, what’s my playbook?

Ethan Kross
Well, that gets to the final chapter of the book, and it’s about “How do you go from knowledge to action?” And what I do in that final chapter is I give you a framework for identifying situations you want to target to minimize the emotional impact they have on you. It’s called W.O.O.P, and here’s how it works.

So W.O.O.P. is an acronym. W is wish. What’s your goal? State your goal. Maybe for you it’s to not be perturbed every time you’re disturbed. The first O, that’s an outcome. Okay, well, what’s the outcome that will come about if you are successful in accomplishing this goal? “Well, I’ll be more emotionally healthy and maybe I’ll have better interpersonal relationships.” The point of that first O, focusing on the outcome, is to really energize you, to put in the motivation to achieve this goal.

Now let’s get to the second O, which is obstacle, “What are the personal obstacles that may stand in the way of me achieving this goal? Well, I just have this automatic reaction when someone disturbs me. I just, I can’t take it. It affects me to my core.” Okay, now we at least know what the problem is. Let’s get to the final element of this framework, the P, which is the plan, but it’s not any plan. It’s called an if-then plan.

If I’m disturbed and I find myself going to that dark, dark place that Pete goes to when he’s disturbed, then, and then you plug in what you’re going to do. And what you’re going to do is use one of the 20 or 30 shifters you’ve just learned about, and maybe a combination of them to stay calm in that moment, to broaden your perspective, so that you can achieve your goal.

If we were actually training for you to achieve this goal, I would have you write those different elements down, maybe once, maybe twice, and have you read them over a few times. Research shows that this framework is incredibly useful for allowing people to achieve all sorts of goals because what it does is it systematically targets each of the impediments of goal pursuit and it nips them in the bud from the start.

This framework has been applied with older adults to help them with emotional and health goals. It’s also been applied to kids as young as first graders who are trying to improve the way they achieve. This also happens to be a framework that is mightily similar to what one of the most successful organizations in the world uses before complex engagements, i.e. the Navy SEALs.

The Navy SEALs do something very, very similar when they’re planning a mission, “What’s our goal? If we achieve this goal, what is going to happen? What are the obstacles that might stand in the way? And then for every obstacle, we’re going to come up with three to five different specific plans, so we’re virtually never caught off guard.”

Now, we can’t plan for everything, and the good news is that if you are caught off guard, you still have knowledge of these other tools we’ve been talking about to fill in the blanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Ethan, tell me, any final shifter you want to make sure to get out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ethan Kross
You know, I think we covered a lot. We covered senses, we covered attention, we covered some perspective-taking, we covered people. Physical environments, get a healthy dose of nature, put some pictures of loved ones around your office to give you an emotional boost when you need it. Yeah, I think we’ve covered a bunch of it. We’ll leave a little bit more for people to discover.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, now can you share a favorite quote?

Ethan Kross
“This too shall pass.”

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

Ethan Kross
The study I talk about in chapter one, which tracked newborns and through adulthood, they’re still being tracked, and found that the ability to manage one’s emotions in childhood predicts all sorts of great things later in life. But even more importantly, that capacity is not fixed. It’s malleable. You can get better or worse at managing your emotions, which I love that finding because it really speaks to the agentic side of what we’re talking about, that your destiny is really in your own hands.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ethan Kross
I’ll give you two. One is pretty common, “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. And, in a different direction when it comes to fiction, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite Ethan original nugget or soundbite that people are vibing with?

Ethan Kross
If you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you, there is everything right with you.

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

Ethan Kross
www.EthanKross.com.

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

Ethan Kross
Learn about the tools that are out there for managing your emotions. Leading other people, I think, starts with leading yourself. The tools that I talk about, decades of research, hard work went into identifying them, but the take-homes are really, really simple and straightforward. So, learn about those tools, practice them to find the tools, the combinations that work best for you, and share them with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Ethan, thank you.

Ethan Kross
Thank you so much. Always a pleasure, Pete.

995: Going From Overwhelmed to Unstoppable by Resetting your Mindset with Penny Zenker

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Penny Zenker shares her secret for enhanced productivity, peak performance, and unstoppable focus: the Reset Moment.

You’ll Learn

  1. How distractions lead to burnout
  2. The sneaky secret behind your zapped energy levels 
  3. Why productivity shouldn’t be your focus 

About Penny

Penny Zenker (AKA “The Focusologist”) is a sought-after speaker, bestselling author, and former C-Suite executive of a global top-five research company. Over the past three decades, she has built and sold multiple multimillion-dollar companies—including an award-winning tech firm she founded. 

Today, Penny helps leaders prioritize what’s most important, so they can achieve seemingly impossible goals -even in times of rapid change and growth. Penny has shared her expertise with industry giants like Deloitte, Pfizer, SAP, Samsung, and NASA, and been featured by NBC News, ESPN, FORBES, INC., and many more. 

She has written two best-selling books: The Reset Mindset and The Productivity Zone to help people stop their tug of war with time. Her popular TEDx talk, The Energy of Thought has surpassed one-million views worldwide. And her podcast, Take Back Time, ranks in the top 2% worldwide, reflecting her commitment to helping others regain control of their focus and achieve peak performance. 

Resources Mentioned

Penny Zenker Interview Transcript

Penny Zenker
It’s so good to be here. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited as well. I think you’re the first Focusologist that we’ve had on the show.

Penny Zenker
I can guarantee it since I made it up.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Yeah, the lawyers would have pursued them rigorously if anyone else came…” Well, that’s a really cool title. Tell us, where does that come from?

Penny Zenker
Well, it comes from, it’s as much for me as it is for everyone else, so, firstly, it comes from reminding me that the practice of controlling and directing our focus towards more meaningful results is a daily practice. An ologist is someone who practices and goes deep into the practice. So, it’s for me and my health and well-being, as well as for my success, but I realize we are in a focus crisis, so I really have it as well as a mission to help others to also make that a daily practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we’re going to dig into some of these practices, absolutely, because focusing better is a key thing listeners have asked for, and, yeah, there’s a real need for that, certainly. Could you share with us, what is the state of this crisis you mentioned?

Penny Zenker
Well, I think most people would agree. I’ve done a lot of research of my own, but there’s also a multitude of statistics out there, like, we tap, touch, swipe, and scroll on our phones 3,000 times a day. That’s incredible. And people go to bed with their phones. They go to the bathroom with their phones. And what my research has shown me, as I’ve done a lot of research to kind of give people a distraction profile, and the highest level is a time zombie. And I’m happy to share that link. It’s a free quiz that people can take just to get some perspective.

And we’re finding that people are just two rungs below a time zombie. If there’s six different possible profiles, people are at the second and the third to the highest is what we’re looking.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you mean, like, that’s the average or median level of…?

Penny Zenker
Yeah, that most people define themselves after they go through this as squirrels, meaning that they’re distracted by this, that, and everything, that they’re having a really hard time staying attentive and focusing on what matters most. And it’s not just our phones. It’s also all of the fast pace of we’ve got to be, stay up with AI and we’ve got so many different things going on, challenges in the workplace with toxicity or burnout, too much being given to us at any one time, or just the state of social affairs in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, well, can you tell us then, what is the possibility, if we’ve truly mastered our focus, and what are we missing out on? If this is just sort of our normal, like this is water, this is air, this is just sort of what is, what’s really possible for us in a world where we have gained true mastery of this?

Penny Zenker
Well, I think the first thing is not to accept this distraction as our new normal, is we have to take back control of the things that we actually can control, and that’s what I’m on a mission to do for myself. But what’s possible is this distraction is causing a lot of mental health issues. They’re showing links to the level of distraction that we have with the level of anxiety, with the loneliness epidemic that they talk about, and other mental health issues.

So, we would see a lift in our mental health, we’d be able to have deeper, more meaningful relationships, we’d be able to experience more joy in the work that we do, and in the time that we spend because we’d be spending it more on the things that matter most and things that give us energy, versus things that take our energy away, or splinter our energy into lots of different directions. So, we would just be happier and be more fulfilled if we would take back our focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us, Penny, just how harmful is this distractedness, smartphone stuff? Is it a boogeyman? Is it just sort of a minor point? Or is it transformational?

Penny Zenker

Well, I think it’s transformational, and I think it’s also, if we look at a particular study that was done in 2018 from the Journal of Behavioral Science, at that point in time, and that was a long time ago, they said that people who use their smartphones for more than five hours a day are twice as likely to experience symptoms of anxiety and depression compared to those who use it more frequently. And I can tell you that if we were to look at how many hours per day, if we’d looked up that study, we would see a very significant number of people using their phones more than five hours a day.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Yeah, this reminds me, I think it was a South Park episode about this, where people think the answer is more smartphone and it’s exactly the opposite that gets the job done. So, that’s a comedy show, but so we got some hard science there. And then tell us, what have you seen in terms of clients who have instituted some good practices and constraints around this stuff? What do they pull off in terms of being more awesome at their jobs?

Penny Zenker

Well, when they start to schedule themselves more effectively, well, let me put it this way first. The first thing that I have people do, and this kind of ties into some of the things I have in my new book, The Reset Mindset is I have them take reset moments, because stress is shown to compound, and so this stops stress from compounding, and stress can also come from distraction.

So, when people take these reset moments, they’re able to reflect more clearly on what’s working and what’s not working. They’re able to take time to schedule their day out so that their day is focused on the things that matter most. So, when they’re making time for these reset moments, and including what they’re going to do and how they’re going to use their phones, and when they’re going to block out those distractions, they’re finding, not just within themselves, that they’re more productive.

I have one CEO that I’ve worked with who said that he’s easily two times more productive because he now has these blocks where he’s not distracted because he has these practices of what I call gatekeepers, that he puts away his phone, and he directs and protects his time, and so, therefore, he’s able to get so much more done, and so much more of the right things because he’s really more intentional about it.

And not only that, but he says that his team is showing that they’re much more effective. They’re able to resolve problems quicker than they were in the past, and they’re able to be more creative in the solutions that they come up with, and so he’s really, really happy. Every time we meet, he says, “I’ve had yet another month that’s the best recorded month of revenue and profitability that we’ve ever experienced.” So, he’s been really seeing that in the bottom line.

Pete Mockaitis

Fantastic. Okay. So that sounds handy and wise. I’m curious, as you put together your book, The Reset Mindset and the revised edition here, any particularly surprising discoveries that made you go, “Wow, I didn’t expect to find that”?

Penny Zenker

I mean, I think that it’s the surprises that I’m hearing are about how I didn’t expect the language to be as sticky for people as it is, and really simplify their access to it. So, these words of reset moments is something that people are saying that now they’ve become sort of these professional noticers.

And they’re seeing these opportunities everywhere to take these reset moments, which I didn’t expect it to be as sticky and as impactful in the way that it is on a day-to-day basis and how people are putting it into practice, talking about it with each other, using it as a language within the organization. So those are some things that I didn’t expect.

And I think also what’s interesting is I didn’t expect this to be the book. I actually started writing a different book, and I started writing the book that was Living the 80/20 Rule, because, for me, that was one of the ways that we can block out those distractors and those things that are less important and focus on what really matters, is asking ourselves, “What’s the 20% that gives us 80% of the difference?”

And in every area, “How do I approach this conversation so that I’m focused on the most important thing? I don’t fight to be right. I remember that the most important thing is the relationship, so how can I interact with it?” So how could we sort of implement this 80/20 Rule in every area of our life? And as I started to dig in and write more about it, I realized that that’s just one of many practices that help us to reset, to rethink, to redirect our focus and reprioritize, to recharge ourselves, to help us to let go of the things that are less important.

And so, it became, “Oh, that’s a reset practice. So, what does that enable us to do? What is the overarching thinking practice that happens, the way of thinking?” And that’s where this reset practice was born in these reset moments. So that was a big surprise for me as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes. Well, I love the 80/20 Rule so much, and we had Perry Marshall on the show once talking about it, and I have found that often in the case in my own work and initiatives, like, sure enough, some things truly are 16 times as impactful as other things on a per hour basis of effort, so that’s huge. So, then your surprising discovery was that the reset moments are what enable folks to better deploy their energies into that vital few 20% of goodness? Is that right?

Penny Zenker

Yes, yes, exactly. Well said. Well said.

It also was an interesting discovery that that reset moment can be as little as 60 seconds to reset our brain that enables us to stop that compounding stress as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is exciting juicy stuff then. So, let’s kind of unpack the mechanism a little bit. So, we have compounding stress, and that is diminishing us. Can you maybe paint a picture of how that unfolds in practice perhaps over the course of a day?

Penny Zenker

Well, I think as much as I can go through an example, I think everybody can relate to that when they look at their own day. So, you start your day and the first diminishment happens when you hit the snooze button because you thought you were going to get up and you had plans to go to the gym, or to do something that was important, but you stayed up a little bit late and you feel tired, and so, therefore, you hit the snooze button.

There’s a small diminish that starts right there because we let go of something that we set the night before that was important to us, that now we’re putting, we’re procrastinating, or we’re going to say, “We’re not going to go to the gym today.” So, it’s all these times that we say we’re going to do something and then we don’t, that diminishes us in some ways, and it creates stress because we kind of, internally, it affects us when we say, “I’m going to do something,” and then we don’t follow through. It affects our confidence and our ability to follow through with things on a consistent basis.

And then we get a call that the meeting that we were supposed to have tomorrow was moved up to today, and now we need to prepare for that meeting because we don’t have that presentation prepared yet. So now everything gets thrown to the wind about what you might have planned for the day, and so these stresses, they build up as things change. We’re not as flexible or adaptable as we’d like to be, and so those stresses can come in a lot of different forms.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so I get your point in terms of, like, the unexpected curveballs or disruptions, like sudden abrupt shifts of stuff are all forms of stressors, as is what you said is just not following through on our intentions creates a stress within us. And that’s really an intriguing perspective because, in some ways, it’s like we feel stressed and in need of additional rest in that world of, “I woke up and I hit the snooze button because I want to rest more.” You’re suggesting that extra rest is not going to diminish our stress as much as being true to our prior intention will bust stress. Is that accurate?

Penny Zenker

Yeah, I mean, sleep is important, and if you feel like you’re not getting enough sleep then you should decide the night before that you’re going to have a regular bedtime, for instance, and follow that so that you get enough sleep. But if you set an intention to do something, it’s kind of like how people, they set a New Year’s resolution, and the first couple of days they go to the gym and they feel good about it, but then they fall off and they don’t end up going, and they stop going. They feel bad about that. They feel bad that they set an intention and a goal and it affects people emotionally, even when you don’t realize it.

I think they call it cognitive dissidence when you’re failing to follow through on your commitments. It can create that. It’s sort of like this internal mental discomfort that we experience. It can impact our self-esteem. These impacts are like, they might not make sense to you. You might say, “Well, why should that do that?” It’s just that we’re emotional beings, and it does, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so then let’s hear about this mechanism a bit more. So, we had a number of disruptions. Maybe we didn’t follow through with an intention, something got shifted around on us, some unexpected stuff, some disappointments, some bad news. Okay, so we’ve got a number of things, stuff went down that is contributing to our stress, and it’s compounded over the course of a day.

So then, tell us if, that’s the state, does that mean we are then less able to, I don’t know, 3:00 p.m., 4:00 p.m. able to tackle a bit of vital few 80/20, a big work as a result of having been zapped by this compounded stress? Can you expand upon that principle?

Penny Zenker

Yeah, think about also the decision fatigue by the time you’re at 4:00 p.m., you’ve had all these competing priorities and things that had to change, and decisions that needed to be made. So, it’s kind of like, by the time the afternoon gets around, if you’ve done nothing to address the stressors that have been around for the day, you had to work through lunch.

All of these decisions that you made that weren’t supporting your energy, it’s like having a cup that’s full of water, like a Dixie Cup, but then you take it and you poke holes in it, you continue to poke holes in it with each time that you’re experiencing some stress, or a decision that needs to be made, or can’t follow through with something, all of these different things, they cause leaks in our energy and in our ability to forge forward and make good decisions.

And so, that’s why we need to take these little resets. It might even be just a difficult discussion that took place. Maybe a customer called and was dissatisfied in how I dealt with that, but I might’ve felt a little bit attacked and taken that personally. It’s those little moments, when you can take those reset moments throughout the day that can make all the difference to revitalize you.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, then if I am not revitalized – unvitalized, what’s the opposite of it – so, if I’m drained, zapped from that stuff, and I said, “Okay, 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. that’s the time I had scheduled to work on this super critical initiative. I even put it on my calendar, like, Pete’s guest said I’m supposed to but I’ve got that stress buildup,” when the moment comes to execute, I am less able to do so, is what I’m gathering from what you’ve shared here.

Penny Zenker

Well, even if you push it off, because if it’s not urgent, but it’s the 20% because it’s moving and creating impact, but maybe it’s really not critical that you do it today so you push it off and you push it off, and you get caught up in these false urgencies, or just in this state of overwhelm. So, the first thing that I would say is, is you always place the most important things first thing in the morning, and do those 20% items first, and then everything else can follow. Then you know that you’ve done the thing that has the greatest impact and you’ve done that first. You don’t wait until the end of the day because the likelihood is you’re not going to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah.

Penny Zenker

You’re smiling. Why are you smiling? Has that happened to you?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m smiling because it’s funny, you’re catching me in a good groove because I’ve observed the same phenomenon, Penny. And so, lately, I’ve had a nice little streak of within seconds of being aware that I am awake, I tell my phone, I’ve got a shortcut, I say “Marky Mark” and then it launches the Hallow app and Mark Wahlberg is praying the Rosary with me within seconds of waking up.

Now I’m not fully there with it yet, right, but it happens, and I like that it’s happening with perfect consistency. And so, I’m smiling because I am witnessing this principle in real time at the extreme. It’s, like, in the first seconds of consciousness, I trigger this, and, sure enough, it works with perfect consistency, and it’s like you’re gambling. The later something is scheduled in the day, the higher the probability of it, oopsie, accidentally, somehow perhaps not happening, even with the greatest of intentions and the most motivated and pure.

It’s like, “It’s on my calendar. This is really important to me. I really mean it. This is for real-sies, serious, no take-sies-back-sies,” and yet somehow, it’s like the forces of our environment and people and relationships somehow can manage to shove that off of there. In a way, it’s humbling in terms of our agency as humans, it’s like, “Shouldn’t I just be able to have the self-control or discipline to really hold firm to this 3:00 p.m. whatever appointment?”

And I’m learning “Kind of” is the answer, it’s like our capability here is somewhat limited, unless we’re just, like, brutal, like, “No, honey, I’m sorry that you feel sick and are vomiting everywhere, and are in no condition to take care of the kids, but I have an appointment with myself at 3:00 p.m. to think of some big-picture new product and services that I’m going to launch, so deal with it,” right? Like, I just can’t do that, and maybe that’s for the best as a human in the world with relationships that matter to me.

Penny Zenker

Well, absolutely. I mean, I think everybody is the same if their significant other needs them, they’re going to push it. But it’s not even just for that, that we’re pushing it. We’re pushing it for everything else. So, first, if you have a practice that you put into your calendar space to think, you’re already ahead of 90% of the people who don’t, who don’t plan that strategic thinking time. So, right there, that’s a reset moment to schedule in those moments to rethink and reconnect to what’s most important.

But if you do have the time, the best time to do it is in the morning. And there are some studies that also, and I don’t have the specifics in front of me, but I remember that you’re going to have fewer distractions in the morning because you’re just getting up, but they talk about some new science around flow. The best time of flow, because of the hormones that are activated from sleep that is in the morning, so you have the best concentration and you haven’t started to put holes in that cup, so your energy is full and you’re able to give better quality concentration in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, these mindset resets, we’ve got some, a few of them are popping up already in terms of try to do it in the morning, really schedule it in, that time to think. And then lay out on us, some additional ones. You said some can be done in just one minute to diffuse some of the effect of compounding stress that’s showing up for us.

Penny Zenker

So, Thrive Global, for instance, is working with different types of companies to embed these reset moments into the workflow. For instance, Synchrony is a company that handles credit cards, and so they work with their support team, who typically, when somebody’s picking up the phone and answering these support calls, are people calling to tell you how great you are? No. They’re calling to complain and say, “This is happening and this is happening.”

So, these people, you talked about “How does our energy, how do we get drained?” It’s they’re constantly listening to people who are unhappy, and they’re taking it in. So, this reset practice was brought into them and embedded into their workflow, that in between each call, there’s a 60-second app that’s launched with a breathing, simple breathing exercise that’s done, that walks them through that, and then will launch the next call.

And so, what they found through this is that the people who are the agents who are answering the phone, they’re much calmer in the next call because they’re not stacking those calls, and that negativity, they’re able to release it in that 60 seconds. So, they’re able to be more attentive. They’re able to handle the calls much quicker, and they, themselves, are happier. They feel happier and do a better job in bringing their best self. They’re more creative in their solutions.

And so, that’s the impact that it can have when you’re taking these reset moments, whether it’s to energize, or whether it’s to rethink things so that you’re working on the right thing. It just helps you to do your best work and be happier. And who doesn’t want that?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I love that. So, one minute of breathing. Well, Penny, you’re talking to a guy who pays for the Breathwrk app, so I’m going to ask you for the details. I imagine any number of slow, deep diaphragmatic breathing done for one minute will be great. But is there some magic prescription or formula you recommend for what goes down in that one minute of breathing?

Penny Zenker

No, I mean, their app is just a simple guided breathing app. So, “Take a deep breath in. Hold it.” You could do, the military uses the box breathing, which is four in, hold, four out, hold. So, you could do something like that. You could do, like, there’s a – I forget what they call it – like through your one nostril at a time, breathing in and out. Any type of focus on your breathing in that way will be incredibly grounding. So, I think if you’re not doing it to doing it, pick any one of the methods that are out there, find an app. I don’t know, what do you use? Do you use Wim Hof or any of those types of breathing?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’ve played with a lot of them, and Wim Hof is fun, although that’ll get you fired up. I mean, I don’t know if you want to do that in between customer service calls, maybe before battle.

Penny Zenker

Or holding your breath, that’s one part of his method is to hold your breath or to breathe in and out very quickly, so through your nose. When we breathe out through our nose, it’s activating the parasympathetic, which is helping us to calm the nervous system.

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly. So, okay, so simple breathing. That’s great. What else do you recommend for these resets?

Penny Zenker

Also, in that 60 seconds, our senses are our fastest way to our nervous system. So, it could also be just to get some essential oils, and maybe have a lemon, for instance, because that is energizing, or maybe lavender that is relaxing. And you can just take 60 seconds, taking a breath in of that scent; lighting a candle. It could also be something like taking a picture, and maybe it’s your favorite place to go.

Maybe you’re a beach person, it’s taking 60 seconds to just imagine yourself sitting on the beach and relaxing for that moment, putting yourself somewhere else. So, there’s lots of little techniques that you can use and that’s, if you have more time, great. But you can also do this in 60 seconds. Take off your shoes and feel your feet grounded on the floor.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Or some decadent carpet.

Penny Zenker

Yeah, right? Feeling that fuzzy, nice carpet through your toes.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, 60 seconds of sensory stuff, deep breathing, that’s super. What are some other resets?

Penny Zenker

Well, some other resets are changing the types of questions that we ask. So, if we get caught, a totally different type of reset. Maybe we’re caught in self-doubt or getting lost in sort of a negative story that we might be telling ourselves after maybe an interaction with somebody, or maybe we made a mistake, or we didn’t get the result that we wanted, we didn’t get the job that we wanted, and we have this loop of “Why me?” or, “You’re so stupid” or whatever we may tell ourselves in our stories that are hurting us more than helping us.

We can also take a quick reset practice to change the question, is to say, “Okay, if I…” I use and I talk about in my book a question that I used to ask, like, when my father died in an accident, you know, “Why me? Why him?” And that just takes you down a terrible rabbit hole. And so, I realized over time that I shifted that question, since “Why?” was getting me nowhere, I shifted it to “What does this mean? And what else could this mean?” so that now I’m taking control of the meaning that I’m giving any interaction and choosing the best possible meaning for me to use because that’s going to influence everything.

It’s going to influence my attitude, my expectations, and my priorities, whatever meaning or perspective I choose to take. So just changing our questions, “What else could this mean? How else could I approach this? Who else could I contact?” Those types of things, they open up perspective and can, like I said, can just change and shift our mindset in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And it’s a tricky path when you have charged-up emotion, like in tragedy or extreme stress or difficulty, and then you add an unhelpful question onto that, and that can just start you down a trajectory into some places that are not so good for anybody. And so, a few of those questions certainly, right from the get-go, can start pointing you on to different pathways. So that’s really, really solid. Okay. So, we’ve got a number of these resets. Tell me, Penny, what are the other top practices we should utilize in order to focus truly on what matters most?

Penny Zenker

So, when you say top practices, what kind of context? Let’s get it so that somebody can see where and how they can apply it.

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s say someone is in their career, they want to advance and make a huge impact, and they want to get things fired up in a cool direction, such that they are generating a lot of cool results, folks are taking notice, and their career is energized and off to the races.

Penny Zenker

Okay, awesome. Great context. So, the first thing that I like to do is, “Are they clear of how they want to advance?” so that they know, like, the reset in itself is saying, “Okay, let me step back and make sure that I connect with the goal that I’m looking to achieve. And why do I have that goal?” Like, “I want to rise to the C-suite of this organization.” Okay, awesome. Why do you want that?

Like, get clear on what’s going to be different for you when you get there, so that you’re setting realistic expectations, and then you’re also able to connect to the fuel, because maybe you want to be there because you’re going to be able to really impact a great number of people and improve the leadership in the company, and take the company to new levels, and that company is supporting other individuals. So, whatever gives you the juice and the leverage is going to be really helpful.

And then when you’re stepping back to get some perspective on, “Okay. Well, who could help you to get there? Who are influencers in the organization that could speak for you when you’re not in the room?” You might also look at “What’s holding you back?” and these are all like, when I say, ways of thinking about things, these are resets in the way that you’re asking yourself those questions to challenge yourself to really rethink, a reset is to rethink, and maybe the approach that you’re currently taking to get ahead isn’t structured enough.

Maybe you’re not thinking of those people who could support you or what might be in your way. Have you had a discussion with your boss to find out what might be helpful? Like, what do they see as the next steps for you in getting to that next position? So, there’s conversations that can be had, there’s alliances that can be made, and seeing if there’s anything, like any limiting belief that you have about getting there. Like, do you see yourself as someone in that role? You could even visualize yourself as in that role.

And when you do that and visualize yourself, you might come ask yourself in that moment, when you see yourself four years, five years, three years down the road in that position, and just like really feel yourself in there, sitting in your office, having a conversation. And then ask yourself “What were the three things that made it even easier to get there?”

So, we have a lot of internal wisdom that we often don’t tap into, especially if we feel stressed or pressured, then we’re less intentional. And so, if we can really set up those things ahead of time, then we can be more intentional about how we go about getting to the next level.

Penny Zenker

So, one of the things that I also often talk about that is a lesson that I’ve learned over time, is that productivity isn’t the point. We spend so much time and effort trying to be more productive that sometimes what we don’t realize is that we’re being productive for productive sake. So, in a way, we’re just being busy.

I liken the quote from Confucius, that, “A person who chases two rabbits catches none,” and I changed that quote because I think, inherently, it may give us the wrong message because, when we chase the rabbits, and we get better at chasing the rabbits, we’re actually not accomplishing the goal, which is what? To catch the rabbit, right?

We can get better at the chase, but it doesn’t make us any more likely to catch one rabbit, let alone two. So, if we want to catch the rabbits, then we need to change that quote a little bit and say, “A person who chases rabbits catches none.”

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yes. So, I’m hearing the emphasis. A person who chases rabbits catches none.

Penny Zenker

Not a person who chases two rabbits catches none, but a person who chases rabbits. So, the point isn’t what you might think, which is to chase only one rabbit and not two, and that way you’re more likely to catch it because you’re focused on one rabbit. But, actually, don’t chase at all because that’s not the point. The point is to catch the rabbits. So, build a trap.

But the point is that very often in work, this is what we do, is we get so focused on the task that we miss the entire point. If we’re more adaptable in recognizing and really connecting to what it is we’re looking to achieve, then we may find that spending more time doing that task is not productive, and that maybe we need to revamp the whole process. We have to be thinking about what we’re doing and how it connects to the big picture instead of just focused on the tasks.

Pete Mockaitis

But, yeah, it is easy to get caught up in it because it’s sort of fun. It’s like, “Oh, man, I am running way faster than I used to chasing these rabbits. Like, whew, that one evaded me by much less distance and time than before,” and it can be kind of seductive. Like, “I am cranking through more and more and more outputs over the course of a day. Go, me. I am such a winner. I feel productive.”

And yet, we may not actually be accomplishing the results that we’re after, but rather just getting seduced by the thrill of the chasing instead of just the maybe what sometimes is very simple, easy, boring catching. 

Penny Zenker

And look at it from also what we measure. So, we’re measuring that we get more productive in this chase. We talked earlier about call centers and help desks and things like that. So, if we take a call center and they’re tracking and measuring the amount of time that it takes to go through a call, then that’s what people are going to be focused on, and they’re going to be so focused on making sure that that call is as short as possible, that that’s going to be their focus, and they’re going to improve that and improve that, but they’re not really getting to the root cause of the problem.

And maybe that same problem comes up a hundred times, that if they just solved it at its root the first time and fixed it like that, then they wouldn’t have a hundred more calls. So, we have to be thinking about also what we’re setting as measures for people so that we’re driving the right focus as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, from a broader holistic perspective, your goal is advance a prospect as far as you can, whenever you have the opportunity is the main thing you’re after, as opposed to handle those calls fast.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. Well, Penny, tell me any other critical things we should know before hearing about some of your favorite things?

Penny Zenker

So, the critical thing that, I think, is important for people to know is that this concept is incredibly simple, but also incredibly effective. We talked about the 80/20 Rule before and its compounding impact, and also the ability for reset moments to reduce stress from compounding, but at the same time, it has a positive compounding effect of us getting to our goals faster and more effectively.

The more that we get perspective and focus on the right things, focus on that 20%, we’re leveraging off of that 80/20 Rule and compounding each time we choose and stay in that direction. So, I think that’s really important. And today, with how fast things are changing, that having what I call this reset mindset it’s built one reset moment at a time as it compounds.

It makes us ready for change or challenge or uncertainty. It changes our relationship with how we approach the uncertainty that we might face in the future or the changes or the challenges. So, it’s that, that we just need to be more comfortable, and happy to engage and embrace change as a catalyst and not a constraint.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Penny Zenker

I recently came across this quote from Richard Branson because, as I’m looking for different types of resets and successful people who embody this reset mindset, I love his quote that I recently came across, which is that, “Every success story is a tale of constant adaptation, revision, and change.” 

Pete Mockaitis

And how about a favorite book?

Penny Zenker

Well, I think one of the ones that really influenced my way of thinking is The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Penny Zenker

One of the things that I love and I use every day is a tool called TextExpander.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, our first sponsor.

Penny Zenker

I’m sorry?

Pete Mockaitis

They were our first sponsor, and I use them every day, yeah.

Penny Zenker

Oh, there you go. I love TextExpander. So, I use it all the time. So, it’s basically a way to have little templates and little snippets of text that I can just say #gig, and then a whole proposal will come up that I normally send out, or different types of links that I’m looking to get. If somebody wants my social posts, I just say #social and all my posts are there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Penny Zenker

I think it’s just in my make more reset moments that I hear people saying that back, or what other people have said that they say in the organization, like after I come in and do a talk, that they’re encouraging each other to reset and make more reset moments.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Penny Zenker

They can go to TheResetMindset.net or PennysKeynote.com, and, of course, all the regular social channels. They can just look me up by name, Penny Zenker.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Penny Zenker

I think the final thing that I’d like to bring is one of the principles that I talk about in The Reset Mindset and that’s assume positive intent, something my mom taught me when I was a teenager. And I would say that I think, because relationships are one of the key things that makes us happy in our workplace, and it makes us better leaders. So, I would say that, really, with every interaction, just assume positive intent and really look for the bigger picture of looking for what you’re trying to serve.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Penny, thank you. I wish you much fun and focus.

Penny Zenker

Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

989: Training Your Brain for Maximum Efficiency with Dr. Mithu Storoni

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Mithu Storoni goes behind the science of how focus works to use your brain to its maximum capacity.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to identify and get into the best mental gear for your work
  2. What to do when work gets either boring or overwhelming 
  3. The trick to resetting your brain 

About Mithu

Dr. Mithu Storoni is a University of Cambridge-trained physician, neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon. She advises multinational corporations on mental performance and stress management. She is the author of the forthcoming book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, out on September 17, 2024.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Mithu Storoni Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mithu, welcome.

Mithu Storoni
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited to chat about becoming hyper-efficient. And I’m imagining, well, it’s in London where you are, so it’s been a few hours in the day. Have you hyper-efficiently already taking care of tons of tasks today, Mithu?

Mithu Storoni
I’ve tried to be as hyper-efficient as I can. Every day is a different one. If you have a different kind of day, depending on the kind of day you have, it’s all about tailoring your tasks and fitting them around your own rhythm. So, every day I do different things, and so every day I have a certain different timetable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m so intrigued to hear about that, and I understand that’s one of your core theses here, is we want to align our work with our natural rhythms of our brain as opposed to trying to contort ourselves to what is externally imposed upon us. Is that a fair synopsis?

Mithu Storoni
That’s absolutely fair. And if you want a little bit of background, so I wrote the book when I realized how the way we work today is very much a hangover from the era of assembly lines. So, when we had the Industrial Revolution quite a long time ago, we had assembly lines, we were producing quantities of things, of refrigerators, of cars, of hair dryers. And during that time, the number of items you produced decided how productive you were, and the longer you stayed on the assembly line, the more productive you were, because the more items you assembled.

When we then had the shift into knowledge work, post-Second World War, around the 1950s, where the majority of the work became office work, became sort of what we used to call white-collar, we actually changed the work but we didn’t change the way we did the work. So, our work hours, the way we measured work, continued in pretty much the same way. We still looked at how many hours we were sitting on the seat, we get paid on overtime, productivity is all about targets.

We then had another shift, which is the kind of shift we still have now, where we started producing intangible goods rather than tangible refrigerators. And so, when intangible goods, such as a software solution, such as other solutions, ideas, it created the bottom line, so they become principle. The principle thing you try to make a difference to your company, to your organization, you need to think about the quality, not the quantity.

So, it no longer matters how many software solutions you manufacture, or how many software solutions you think of, or how many ideas you think of, you could have a thousand mediocre ideas, they will be just as unproductive as having one mediocre idea. We now need to shift to thinking extremely well, so producing one exceptional quality solution, exceptionally creative idea, rather than a hundred bad ones.

In order to do that, the brain can no longer sit and work continuously as if it were producing, or assembling its idea parts on an assembly line. How long you sit on your chair and the way you sit influences how well your mind performs. But we have created a template around that, which is a hangover from the past.

Now we have technology doing all the monotonous, the routine, the sort of quantity-heavy jobs aspects of knowledge work, so now we need to be even better at creating ideas, at forming solutions. And in order to do that, we need to change the way we work in a radically different way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. That all seems to check out in terms of the way the world used to work and the way things are working currently. I’m curious, when it comes to us working at our finest to come up with these exceptional ideas and solutions, is there anything really striking or surprising you’ve discovered about what holds us back and what unleashes us to this greatness?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, I approached this subject from my background, which is in neuro-ophthalmology and neuroscience, and I’m very aware of the very, very exciting research field at the moment, looking at the brain’s dynamics. What we know is that the brain is a complex system, it changes state, and there is a network in the brain called the locus coeruleus norepinephrine network, which influences how alert you are, it influences how you pay attention. That’s one angle of the story.

We have uncovered quite a lot of data about this network and how the faster it fires, the more alert, the more sort of wired you become; the slower it fires, the calmer you become. If you take that, I’m diluting it a little bit, but if you take that you add in the cholinergic network, you add in the dopaminergic network, you know, you create the whole map. You realize that when you are performing mental work, knowledge work of any kind, your brain has to be, or your mind has to be, in a certain configuration in order to perform one particular type of task particularly well.

So, for instance, let’s take two examples of knowledge work. Let’s take creative idea generation and let’s take a different kind where you are focusing on something. So, if you imagine an organization, it has lots of teams but it has two sub-teams, one focusing on innovation, the other focusing on implementation. The team focusing on innovation is going to focus on coming up with ideas, original ideas. What do we know about how the brain works or what is optimal for the brain when this happens?

Well, we know that if you make the brain focus on one single target in front of you, such as a computer screen, your brain state is not going to be optimal to come up with those “aha” ideas because of the temporary structure of the brain at the time. Focusing is not conducive to gentle mind-wandering.

It’s not conducive to letting your attention wander and pick up fragments of data, fragments of thoughts wandering in your head, which you then assemble, or to just waiting for aha moments, for moments of insight to spring up inside your head. That’s one angle to it. So, detaching your attention is important. Not focusing is important.

The second angle to it is there is data that the time of day you work influences how well you work when you’re doing creative work. So creative insights, creative idea generation seems to be better first thing in the day and last thing in the day, not in the middle of the morning, and not in the middle or late in the afternoon. So, in order to really, really optimize idea generation, creative idea generation, perhaps working in a slightly different way for this particular sub-team is going to be more suited for their performance.

Similarly, if you take the second sub-team, which is working on logistics implementation, there they need to zone in, converge on ideas. Now if you are converging on ideas, focusing does help. So, their focused attention is going to be absolutely pivotal. We know focused attention, similar in the opposite way to creativity, focused attention, there seem to be some peak hours for that during the day. The middle morning, middle to late morning is one of them. Immediately after lunch is not one of them and later on in the day is a second slot.

When you’re doing focused attention, when you’re paying focused attention or doing work that involves focused attention, you have to, it helps to sit undisturbed, sit in a very, very attentive state of mind and get that work done. So, if you also think about how your mind is, when you’re creative, your mind is sort of very gently, slowly mind-wandering. When you’re focusing, you want to be sharp, you want to really zone in to what’s in front of you.

These two states of mind are very, very different. So, if you put all of that together, it shows you how you need to be in a certain state of mind that you can tell by looking at how well you focus, how well your mind can, or how easy your attention can wander, a particular time of day is also helpful. And the third thing we haven’t talked about is, as soon as you work continuously, and you measure this as time on task when you measure this aspect in psychological experiments, when your brain works continuously on some kind of intense work, it becomes tired.

When it becomes tired, its information-processing pathways inside your head become inefficient. And when they become inefficient, you can actually measurably or you can visibly see the effect that has on mental output. So rather than coming up with lots of original ideas, you’re much more likely to come up with ideas but they’re not going to be original. So how long you work for is a huge factor here, which is why you also have to put in this 90-minute, 90- or 100-minute ultradian rhythm where you work in slots, and even within those segments of work you pace how you work. That’s a very long answer to your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really beautiful and it matches my own experience in terms of the groove, the flow, the rhythms, the vibe of work. And you talked about the creative and innovative side of things versus the implementation side of things, and sometimes I think of this as creating versus destroying. And I don’t know if it’s just my raw kind of attitude, but it’s like, “I’m going to destroy my inbox,” and by that, I mean I’m going to process it with vigorous speed. We’re going to do a three-second sweep per message, a 20-second sweep per message, and we’re going to watch that baby shrink from 200 to 20 in short order, and that’s good, and that’s kind of fun for me.

But sure enough, that does require that I’m not distracted by other things, and my mind isn’t wandering to interesting, fun things to pursue that’s counterproductive to what I’m after, is shrinking this inbox in a hurry and dispatching messages so people would get what they need from me, etc. Which is totally different than the vibe is like, “Oh, this would be kind of cool if we tried this thing. And here’s a fun idea. And, oh, that sort of connects to this thing I’m hearing on a podcast over there.” And so, those are very different vibes. So, tell me, just to make this contrast all the more crisp and clear for us, do you have a name that you apply to each of these modes of brain operation?

Mithu Storoni
I have. So, in my book, I have created a metaphor, which is very helpful, and I describe the mind as being in three states in the specific context of knowledge work. And these are, I call them three gears: one, two and three. And in a very easy way of imagining them is slow, medium and fast. The mind-wandering state, so the seek and destroy that you just described, which is going through your inbox – I love that analogy, I think it’s a great way of describing it, creating and destroying – that state would be right in the middle of gear two, which is the middle zone.

Gear one – is the kind of state of mind you have when you are really daydreamy. So, maybe the first thing in the morning after you’ve woken up after a deep night’s sleep, you haven’t quite reached that sort of sharpness, you haven’t reached for your coffee yet, you are kind of in a slight daydreamy zone, there’s a sunrise in front of you, you’re sort of halfway, halfway, and your mind feels quite slow. Your attention is floating a lot. You don’t have the ability to make it focus. It’s very, very floaty. You think of thoughts, they come, they go.

Gear two is when you can focus. This is the middle zone. As soon as you reach gear two, you’re able to focus. Within gear two, you have a kind of a slow pace and you have a fast pace. The slow pace gear two is when you can both focus and you can let your attention wander alternately however you want. That is optimal for creativity where you can just detach from what you’re doing, let your attention wander a little bit, but soon as you come up with an idea, with an insight, you can quickly zone your attention spotlight on there, focus on it and bring it to fruition. That is gear two, a slow gear two.

And then you have middle gear two, which is what you described as really intense, powerful focus. And then you have, you leave gear two and you go into gear three. And gear three has, correlates with what is sometimes termed sort of a hyperarousal state. So, in gear three, your thoughts are faster, your actions are faster, but you can’t perform analytical difficult thinking and you cannot focus as well.

So, these are the three gears: gear one is where you just wander; gear three where your mind is very fast and you can’t focus; gear two is right in the middle. And in gear two you can navigate by playing with your attention, detaching it, letting it wander around to go into kind of a light, creative gear two or a really deep focused gear two.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say hyperarousal gear three, just to make sure I’m understanding this, I’m thinking about, is this like I’m enraged at a situation? Or what are some of the scenarios or illustrations of hyperarousal?

Mithu Storoni
We are diluting these into single terms, but these are all scales. These all have a range. So, if you look inside the brain, people in a state of hyperarousal, this particular network in the brain is firing very fast, and the faster it fires, the more your physiological arousal increases. But just outside this zone where you can focus, the moment, so let’s just say you’re sitting there, you’re focusing on your email, you’re doing really well, and then a colleague keeps making herself or himself a cup of coffee, and every time they do this, they come and give you one because they’re really kind, and so you inadvertently just keep sipping those espressos while you work, just because they happen to be there.

After one espresso, it’s great, your focus is even better. But after another five, which you don’t realize you’ve had, suddenly, the noise that you heard behind you, the noise of the drilling outside, or the traffic outside, or someone speaking on their phone, suddenly seems really sharp. You couldn’t hear it a minute ago, but after five espressos you suddenly can, and so your threshold for being distracted is suddenly lowered, so you can become easily distracted.

Then, by this time, you haven’t realized you’ve had those five espressos, some more espressos appear and you keep drinking those. And as you drink them, eventually, you reach a point where your focus is completely gone, and you’re simply just reacting to the situation. You’re doing very low-level cognitive stuff, and every sort of small distraction around you is grabbing your attention away.

And as you increase that, you can eventually get into the stage that we do term that falls under the canopy of the banner of rage. But that sort of gear-three state is where you become easily distractible, subtle things become amplified. You become more anxious, more vigilant, so it’s a hyper-vigilant state. And the more, the faster this network fires, the more you go into this state, the more amplified it becomes. So, it’s a scale. This whole thing is a scale. Gear one itself is a scale, gear two is a scale, gear three is a scale, and within those, you’re modulating yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. It’s like we just got one very long continuum. It’s like the entirety of human experience, and we’re segmenting it into three-thirds to make it a little bit more workable to discuss and interact with. So, I guess I’m wondering now, this might be dangerous talking to neuroscience about this, but you mentioned, so we got some choline, some dopamine.

What is the, shall we call them biomarkers, or biochemical things, or heart rate, or brainwave frequency? What’s the stuff going down at our brain-body level within each of these three things in terms of it’s like a little bit in one, a medium amount in two, and a whole lot in three of these fundamental ingredients?

Mithu Storoni
So, very basically, let’s look at norepinephrine. So, norepinephrine, many of you will have heard of it, it’s associated with exercise. We talk about how we’ve got to get that adrenaline pumping or get that norepinephrine. 

And very, very loosely, these three gear states describe or correlate with three ways, patterns of firing of this, of a network in the brain, that is the brain’s headquarter of norepinephrine. So, in a very simple way of saying that, as norepinephrine levels vary in your brain, there’s a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that sits right behind your forehead. The prefrontal cortex is your brain’s seat for focus, attention, any kind of higher-level cognitive work. Analysis, thinking, remembering, working memory, you name it, the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher thinking, okay? This entire region of the brain, prefrontal cortex, it’s absolutely pivotal for knowledge work and it becomes very, very active at middle levels of norepinephrine.

So, when you’re in gear two, it’s the Goldilocks zone of norepinephrine that brings your prefrontal cortex completely online. When you have too much norepinephrine, when you enter gear three, your prefrontal cortex goes partly offline, and this is why being in gear two is ideal and essential for focused work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is cool, and so I’m curious. So, putting it in these terms, I can see that if you’re in gear one, yeah, that’ll bring you to gear two or gear three, the jumping up and down, the smacking your chest, you’re screaming, “Yes, yes, yes.” That’ll do it. Go for it.

Mithu Storoni
I was just going to say, so I think the three gears are a metaphor of three different mental states. But I would not think of it like a racing car. So, when you’re in gear one, it’s simply a description of a different state. So, when you’re in gear one, and you’re in this kind of slow, mind-wandering state, you can’t focus because you are just not sort of awake enough to focus then. Gear two is when there is more norepinephrine, your prefrontal cortex is engaged, you can focus, you can do high-level cognitive work. And gear three is when there is more norepinephrine, you can think faster, but you can’t do high-level cognitive work because your prefrontal cortex is partly offline. Now, when you’re doing any kind of knowledge work, you’re actually shuttling between these three states, in the sense that, for instance, if you are solving a problem, you have to be mainly in a state of focus, all right?

But as soon as you hit a wall, or your mental slate gets crammed with data, you have to briefly move out of that state into gear one to wipe your slate clean and to refresh the angle that you’re taking. So, if you’ve hit a wall, your brain needs to step back and look at the problem from afar, or from a different angle, that’s when you need to briefly foray into gear one to do that, and then you might see something you were missing, you might feel a little bit more refreshed, then you go back into gear two.

So, although your baseline is gear two, you’re going to keep coming back into gear one every now and again to change your mental state in order to overcome a wall or to just refresh your mind. So, it’s not like you are getting into these fast, high-powered, kind of racing track scenarios. It’s very much a way of your brain is mainly in gear two, but gear one is essential. And that’s why gear one is the mental state you have when you take a break.

So, as an example, if you’re focusing on your inbox, in your email inbox and you’re working through it, every time you close your eyes, your brain immediately goes into gear one for a bit. And then when you open your eyes, you’re back into gear two. What I’m describing here is the baseline you’re in for the majority of time.

The whole thing isn’t a flat line, and that’s how the brain is but the overall general state of the brain when you’re in a mode of focus versus when you’re in a mode of gentle daydreaming are very different, and these are the states I describe with gear one, two, and three.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, then I imagine one of the things you want to do in order to accomplish a whole lot of stuff is to just schedule the kinds of activities when things are naturally going to be great for that. If I need to have some brilliant epiphany, aha, eureka moments, well, then let’s schedule some thinking, daydreaming, wandering time in the early morning or late at night, etc. So, there’s kind of working with our schedules and our rhythms and, you know, 90- to 100-minute cycles of stuff. That’s cool. And then, I’m curious, if the situation calls for us to be in a bit of a different gear than we find ourselves in, what do you recommend we do?

Mithu Storoni
So, if I give you a typical day, so just say you are a writer, you are looking for an idea. So, if that’s your job, if that’s your task for the day, what you would do is you’d wake up probably in the morning quite early, and once you’re up in the morning, you would tackle the creative aspect of things there and then. You wouldn’t wait for later in the morning. You’d use the kind of very gentle, relaxed, not quite committed state of mind you have, which would be perfect for that kind of work, that kind of idea generation.

And then once you have your idea, later on in the morning, you’d find you feel a little more alert, you can focus a little bit more and your mind is wandering a lot less. You’re kind of much less in that kind of gentle daydreamy more. There, you sit down, you focus and write or type. And then you continue that pattern as I describe. It changes slightly for the rest of the day.

So, if you’re entering one of those sessions, one of those work sessions, and you’re in the wrong gear, so let’s say you are doing focused work, you’re starting at 9:00 o’clock in the morning, and you are still in that kind of distracted, mind-wandering state of mind. If that’s the case, there are a couple of ways you can use your body’s physiology to make your mind think differently. So, for instance, we know that if you make your body active and alert, your mind becomes active and alert too. Intuitively, you know that to be true.

Physiologically, we know that if you do, for instance, a few sprints before you sit down, when you are feeling a little bit kind of slow and lethargic, that immediately wakes you up. It doesn’t have to be sprints. Any kind of exercise will wake you up. We know that intuitively. And when we say wake you up, it also changes your mental state. You go from feeling lethargic to feeling more alert, much more able to focus.

Conversely, we know that you can also use your body to relax your mind. So, if you are feeling very, very wired, if you’re working in an office where things are very, very, sort of deadlines are very frequent, activity is very fast, everything is very hectic, and you really need to calm down and you need to focus and you need to think about something, in that sort of situation you can use your body, you can use three elements actually, you can use your environment to calm you down.

So, we know that if you bring elements of your environment to be slow, low and soft and dark, your mind also climbs down. So, if you have, for instance, a background music or background sounds which have low frequency beats, sounds which are low pitch, not high pitch, like very slow drum beats or like ocean sounds. There’s a reason why we’re attracted to ocean sounds. So, slow beats, slow rhythms, low frequency, low pitch around you.

So, as an obvious example, if you listen to radio shows or breakfast shows first thing in the morning, people will be speaking very fast at a higher pitch. If you listen to radio shows very late at night, people will be speaking slower with slightly lower pitch, and that is to really match the viewer’s state of mind, but in the morning it’s to really draw the viewer into a more alerting state of mind to wake them up essentially. So, your environment can change in this way.

Colors and intensity of light also have a role to play. There is data that shows that warm, so redder, reddish tones, soft, warm hues are better for creative idea generation, whereas blue light or blue dominant white light, the kind of light you get in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning even in most latitudes, that’s conducive to being focused and alert. So, if you’re doing a night shift and you really, really need to focus, then using light can help you be in the right state of mind.

So light, sound, your physiology, so muscle. When you contract muscle, you feel more alert, but when you release it, you feel more relaxed. Similarly, when you stretch muscle and release it, you feel more relaxed, and we know that people seek this kind of activity, whether PMR, whether yoga, any sort of stretching-relaxation activity also relaxes the mind.

We also have a third thing, which are breathing exercises, and there is now a lot of data to show that if you breathe at a frequency of around five breaths a minute with long exhalations, and Mara Mather, in California, has done amazing work on this with her team, you can also lower this, the gear, of your mind. So, bring your mind back to an optimal state.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is beautiful. So, then I’m thinking then, if we’re in a state where it’s just like, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing anything,” that’s sort of like the sleepy state, and so more arousal would be helpful if what needs to happen is some smart focused work. And if, likewise, it’s like, “I’m freaking out about this thing,” you know, well, then we want to maybe do with some more of the stretching, the slow breathing, the low lights, etc.

Mithu Storoni
Adjust your environment. Modulate your environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me wondering, it’s so funny, I’m thinking about mindfulness meditation stuff, and there are times when it feels so amazingly wonderful, like, “Yes, this is just delightful.” And there are times in which my brain is just furious, which is like, “This is so boring! I can’t stand it!” And so, it seems like, is this kind of the fundamental dynamic at work? Or do you think there are some other dimensions to be considered in this context as well?

Mithu Storoni
So, I’m so happy you brought up the word “boring” because this is really, really important. Now when you’re working on something, when you’re doing knowledge work, you’re working on something, you can, in gear two, you’re in peak focus, you’re engaged, all right? But if what you’re doing is boring, then a little while through, a little while along, 10, 15 minutes, whatever, you suddenly feel your mind wandering and your focus slipping off, slipping away. Not because you’re tired, the work isn’t tiring at all, or let’s imagine the work isn’t tiring at all. You’re just noticing your focus just slip away.

In that sort of scenario, you’re sliding into gear one because you are bored, and there you need more stimulation or a bigger load to get you back into gear two. So, one way is, as you say, you need more stimulation, so maybe change the environment, go to a place that wakes you up. But you can also do it through the work, through the work you’re doing. So, for instance, multitasking gets bad press, but if what you’re doing is boring and you’re sliding into gear one, multitasking can actually keep you in gear two.

Because any form, anything that engages your mind, engages your brain, causes you to put in cognitive effort, will raise you back, will raise your gear. And it’s for the same reason that if you’re working very well, but you have an enormous workload, or you’re getting information you don’t want and you’re being forced to process it while you’re doing the work that you’re doing, you’re having to put in, you’re having to really step on the pedal.

You’re putting in more cognitive effort, and that requires norepinephrine, and there you’re shifting up to gear three to be able to cope. So, actually, you can modulate your gear with the work you are doing. So, if your work is very boring, actually multitasking and doing something in parallel can put you back into the right frame of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, I guess I’m wondering if we don’t have the option of changing the thing that we’re doing, maybe we’re in a meeting and we think it’s boring, I suppose, internally, in our own brains we would maybe make up a game. Or what do you recommend there in terms of if it’s like here we are, we’re in a meeting, we’re supposed to be polite, and not whip out our laptops or phones or something? Any pro-tips there?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you’re in a meeting and you just have to attend the meeting, but not contribute or not take anything away from the meeting, then it’s a great opportunity to get into a creative state of mind, be in gear one, let your mind wander, and just use that as a break. So let your mind wander, let your attention wander, try not to dwell on anything, and just use that as a refresher, as a refresher palette for your mind.

If you have to stay awake during a meeting, and simply stay awake and not necessarily contribute, then doing something while you are in that meeting, so solving a problem with pen and paper discreetly while you’re there is another way of dealing with it. So, you add your workload, you increase your cognitive load to stay in the right state of mind.

So, the bottom line of all of this is really that we all function the best. We don’t just work the best when we do knowledge work. We actually function and we feel the best when we’re in this kind of middle speed, is a good way of imagining it, in this kind of middle speed, Goldilocks speed. And in order for the brain to put itself into that middle speed, you need, the brain needs, first of all, some kind of external stimulation, or the external urge to raise its own gear for some other reason.

So, for instance, if it’s receiving a lot of load the brain is going to work harder to cope with it. If cognitive load is very low, it’s going to get very bored and slip out of gear two. So, if that happens, then you can bring in extra cognitive load or bring in extra stimulation to keep the brain in this middle zone. Your mind, your brain is really an information-processing machine, and its optimal pace of processing that information is gear two. So, you need to give it enough information to keep it there. And if you swing over, if you overshoot, you end up in gear three.

So, if you’re going down from gear three to gear two, another way to look at it is you’re going down from gear three to gear two, then reduce the number of tasks you’re doing, reduce the difficulty of the task you’re doing, remove time pressure, remove uncertainty, and then adjust your environment to make it lower, slower, slower-paced, and then, of course, you can add in these physiological buttons through your muscle relaxation, through your autonomic nervous system.

So, ultimately, your brain, your mind is most efficient when it’s moving ahead at this middle speed of processing information. And the key, the art of being able to navigate yourself and stay in that zone while you’re doing knowledge work is a secret to hyper-efficiency because when you’re in that zone, the kind of work you’ll be doing will be the best you can do.

You can still do a lot of work while you’re bored. You can also do a lot of work while you’re in gear three. You can type hundreds of emails. You can even type them faster. But you won’t be able to solve a difficult differential equation in gear three, or plan a killer chess move in gear three. You’ll be able to play chess, but you’ll probably lose in the first 15 moves.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-second bullet games.

Mithu Storoni
Exactly. Exactly. In gear one, you’re not engaged enough to think, to analyze either. But in gear two, in this middle zone, when your brain is just awake enough, alert enough, but not too wired, that’s when it processes information the fastest, and hence, it does it in the best possible way.

Pete Mockaitis
You said the word “refresh” earlier, and I’m curious, if we’re doing these 90- to 100-minute bouts, a break is just necessary. Do you have any suggestions on what is a supremely, or hyper-efficient, or excellent means of breaking to restore our brains’ capacity and capabilities quickly?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, when you’re thinking of a break, just to give you a little bit of background, we now know through some very elegant forms of brain imaging that when you’re doing intense mental work, something that requires you to pay attention, something like solving math equations, as your brain cells work, they produce byproducts because they have little factories in them, they need energy to work, they break, they use ATP. They produce byproducts.

And as you’re working, these byproducts accumulate and then they get cleaned away. Now there is some evidence, and I mention where this data comes from, in the book, that one reason for fatigue may well be that the rate at which you’re producing these toxic byproducts is faster than your ability to clear them away. And so, when you take a break and you stop the intensity of work, you’re immediately giving your mind, your brain an opportunity to recover. So that’s a bottom line.

Now how should that break be? So, in this context, think of the difference between the brain and muscle. So, if you’re lifting weights in a gym, the moment you stop lifting weights, your muscle relaxes. So, when you stop working your muscle, your muscle rests. But when your mind is working on its office chair, as soon as you move from the office chair and you even go and sit on a beach, your mind has not moved one inch. It carries on working. There is no stop switch on your mind.

And so, the kind of break you take has to be tailored to the state of mind you are in when you were working. So, if your work was just very, very tiring, it wasn’t in any way emotionally draining, emotionally triggering, just very, very tiring, and as soon as you stop, imagine you’re having to read a hundred boring emails that don’t really mean anything, but they’re just, your eyes are glazing over, that sort of state. If that’s the case, then as soon as you take a break, as soon as you stop what you’re doing, your mind will be able to relax.

So, in that sort of scenario, you can break and just do nothing. Just relax, you don’t have to do anything actively. But if your work was, or is, in a situation where you have a lot of emotional tension, you have a deadline you’re working for, you have a problem you really can’t solve you’re still struggling with, the moment your break approaches, you’re very likely to be what I call tired and wired, which means you are tired, you’re physically tired, you’re mentally tired, but your mind is still trying to process that information, so it has stepped on the accelerator, taking you right up to gear three to work through and your gear just won’t slide back.

And, intuitively, your listeners and you will realize what this is because it’s the kind of feeling you have at the end of a day when you’ve just really pushed yourself to keep working beyond when you were tired by having coffee, by carrying on. And so, by the time you get home, you can’t really switch off. You feel tired, but your mind is still buzzing. That’s what I describe as tired and wired.

If that’s the case, and you’re taking a break in the middle of the day, and you’re feeling like that, then for the first few moments of your break, it’s much more helpful to do something really absorbing that distracts you completely from the work you are working on. So, play a game on your phone. Something like Tetris has been shown to be very effective in this sort of context, other games like Tetris. Play a game on your phone or watch a video, watch something immersive, until you momentarily forget the work you were just doing. As soon as you do, stop and then you relax.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, first, we get into the forget zone and then we stop and relax. Is there any way to relax better or should we just chill?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you are in that forget zone, you can relax. I mentioned two kinds of breaks in the book. So, I mentioned a break at the end of 90 minutes when you just need to refuel. I also mentioned a type of break, which I call a kind of a reset break, and this is the kind of break you would take within your work segment. So, if you’re doing a 90-minute block of work and your work is really intense, you would probably need to pause for a little while every 20 minutes or so, if your work is really, really intense.

Or if your work is really, really boring, you will be forced to just kind of take a step back every 20 minutes or so and just be like, “Okay, I need to kind of wire my mind back up to cope with this.” When you’re taking a break in that context, what you’re trying to do during the break is put your mind back into gear one.

So, as an example, imagine you are just watching paint dry, okay, you’re doing some kind of work, which is really, really boring. Your mind, you’re in the right zone when you started that work. But about 10 minutes, 15 minutes into the work, your attention just floats away. You cannot bring it back and everything just gets very slow, lethargic. At that point, take a quick five-minute break and do something to bring you back into that zone. So that can be something physical. Physical is usually the easiest.

So, at that point, doing a quick bout of exercise will put you back in the best kind of mental zone where you can go back to doing that work focusing. So, an applicable real-world scenario of this is anything that requires you to keep monitoring something. So, monitoring a camera, monitoring other machines working, monitoring a system. Every 20 minutes or so, your attention is going to float, melt away, and there you take a very quick break to actually not relax you but to actually excite you back into the right mental zone.

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

Mithu Storoni
Certainly. So, another aspect of work today, as well as these three gears, is the idea of how everything we’ve always used to motivate us in the past are changing because the whole map of knowledge work is drastically changing at the moment. We are having to retrain, we’re having to reskill, we’re having to learn on the job, so there’s a huge amount of change taking place, and so this is a really great time to bring in the idea that has long been known as intrinsic motivation, and kind of repackage it and rework it for our era.

Because right now, we are working and living at a time where your job might not be guaranteed, the goal that you’re working towards might change tomorrow, a new LLM might come about tomorrow, a new version of the existing one might come about tomorrow, and everything you’ve been learning suddenly becomes obsolete the next day.

So, in this sort of landscape, you have to work with a different kind of motivation. So, we have to learn and we have to tailor and curate our jobs. Managers should be curating workflows, workloads, to generate as much as much of this intrinsic motivation as possible. And one way that seems to be a pretty powerful way of deriving it in any context, and intrinsic motivation is notoriously difficult to create, is by this phenomenon called learning progress.

It’s called learning progress mechanism. And one of the researchers behind Pierre-Yves Oudeyer from Paris, who is working with artificial agents, and his team has found how, whenever you’re working, you’re doing any kind of work, it’s really, really important to have physically kind of something that you can really physically, tangibly feel, obvious progress.

So, you have to be making rapid progress in something towards a goal and improving through skill or knowledge yourself in some way as fast as you can, as regularly and as solidly as you can, while you work. If you can engineer an element of this into one what you’re doing, you will have sufficient intrinsic motivation in your work, and that is going to be key in the workplace moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that rings true. That gets me fired up, no doubt. Well said. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mithu Storoni
What I would say is my book was really heavily influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan, who looked at technology and the effect it is having on our brains. One of the quotes that I really love, is that we have had a way of working all this time, where we’ve really been working like a marching soldier. We’ve been moving forward in regular steps in order. We need to change, and we need to now add flair to the way we work because that will help us get into these unique brain states and produce our best.

And he describes that as a transition from a marching soldier to working, spinning like a dancing ballerina. And that is really a metaphor for how our work needs to change in this new AI-assisted age of the knowledge age.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mithu Storoni
So, The Medium is the Message is a great book that really gives you a wonderful overview of technology.

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

Mithu Storoni
So, I have a website, my name, www.MithuStoroni.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Mithu Storoni. I’m also on Twitter/X as @MithuStoroni.

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

Mithu Storoni
Tomorrow, whatever your routine is, just think about this conversation and tailor your day completely differently, adjust it to your routine, and then give us a feedback the day after as to how it went.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Mithu, this is fun. I wish you much hyper-efficiency.

Mithu Storoni
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

980: Building the Habits of Mentally Strong Leaders with Scott Mautz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 Scott Mautz shares powerful strategies to stay confident and in control when negativity strikes.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to wisely managed doubt–and confidence 
  2. The early warning signs of self-acceptance being degraded 
  3. The three-step solution to reset negative chatter 

About Scott

Scott Mautz is a high-octane speaker expert at igniting peak performance and deep employee engagement, motivation, and inspiration. He’s a Procter & Gamble veteran who successfully ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion dollar businesses, an award-winning/best-selling author, faculty at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education, a popular instructor on LinkedIn Learning where his courses have been taken over 1.5 million times, and a frequent national publication and podcast guest.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

  • Jenni KayneUse the code AWESOME15 to get 15% off your order!

Scott Mautz Interview Transcript

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.

974: The Eight Inner Skills to Career Happiness with Stella Grizont

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Stella Grizont shares the simple things everyone can do to feel happier and more fulfilled every day.

You’ll Learn

  1. The master key for overcoming toxic situations
  2. The key response that builds quality relationships
  3. How to set healthy boundaries without feeling guilty 

About Stella

Time Magazine named Stella a leading happiness expert. As a speaker and executive coach, Stella works with leaders who are seeking deeper career fulfillment and with organizations that are dedicated to elevating the well-being and engagement of their employees. Her debut book based on her signature coaching program, The Work Happiness Method: Master the 8 Skills to Career Fulfillment, was an instant USA Today Bestseller.

In the last 17 years, Stella has coached over 1,800 individuals in over 30 countries. Stella was one of the first 150 people in the world to earn a master’s in Applied Positive Psychology (aka the science of happiness) from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, daughter, and son, who continue to teach her what life is all about.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Stella Grizont Interview Transcript

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.