Energy Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome!

Amy Leneker
Thank you for having me. It’s great to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about cheering Monday. And, first, let’s hear about your personal story. You mentioned you’re a recovering workaholic and you have, I don’t know if it’s a record, but a striking number of panic attacks that occurred in a three-month window. Can you tell us a little bit about the story?

Amy Leneker
I did. And thank you for asking because it was a horrible, horrible time of my life. I wish that I could say that my burnout story was because I had an epiphany and decided to do something different, but it wasn’t. It was that my body just shut down, and it’s what you said.

So over the course of a summer and into the early fall, I had over a hundred stress-induced panic attacks and it was horrible. The most terrifying time of my life. And so, through lots of work with my doctor and the medical support, I was able to heal from burnout and definitely don’t ever want to experience that again.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, thank you for sharing. And just so we’re clear, what exactly is a panic attack? And how does it feel as opposed to being kind of stressed out?

Amy Leneker
I am not a medical expert, so this is only from my own experience. I’m sure that there is a valid medical definition of what one is, but for me, what happened was I thought I was having a heart attack. Everything I had read about a heart attack, I’m like, “Oh, this must be it,” because my heart was racing, I was sweating, I had tunnel vision.

It was this moment of almost feeling like you’re out of your body, watching yourself, but like not actually being yourself. So you’re never gonna wonder, “Am I having one or is this just stress?” because there, you’ll know. It is not. It is not your everyday, “I feel a little stressed out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So can you take us into that world, that picture? So this comes from a great deal of stress. What kinds of stresses were you experiencing?

Amy Leneker
Looking back, I had been stressed for as long as I could remember. I had what I thought was my dream job. It was the job I had gone to college for, had gone into huge amounts of student loan debt in order to go to graduate school for. It was the job that I wanted. And looking back, I don’t remember when high amounts of stress weren’t part of my life.

So at the time, we also had two little kids, so there was a lot of trying to figure out how to be a mom and how to work, and how to work and be a mom, at the same time of an incredibly demanding job. And on top of all of that, one of the saddest realizations for me was just how much of the stress was self-induced, how much of those expectations really came from myself, not always from the outside world, but it took me years of reflection to understand the role that I had played.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example of a self-induced expectation that’s just not at all helpful?

Amy Leneker
Yes. So here’s a great one. I thought that I had cracked the code on work-life balance. So here’s what I did. I was leading a large team at the time, huge performance measures, lots of stress, but I left work at a reasonable time every day. I very rarely stayed. I wasn’t “at the office till nine or 10 o’clock at night” person. So I thought I’ve cracked the code.

Because what I would do is I would get to work. I would work at the speed of light all day. I would leave at a decent time, and then I would be home for soccer and homework and baths and all the things. And then once the whole house shut down, that’s when I would log on and do all of my email. That’s when I would do all of my prep for the next day.

So I’m working alone, just me and my labradoodle, until 12, one o’clock in the morning and then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. Week after week, month after month, year after year, thinking that I had cracked the code, thinking like, “I had figured this out.”

I figured out how to be a mom and a career person and not take away from the family. But what I was doing was completely negating myself. I had taken myself out of the equation.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. Okay. Well, that’s a good little warning right there in terms of living just that. It’s like a watch out.

Amy Leneker
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So thinking through your own lived experience and your research process for writing the book and working with clients, what’s something that’s really surprised you in terms of your discoveries about stress?

Amy Leneker
The first one would be that there isn’t just one kind of work stress. There are five. And I didn’t know that. At the height of my burnout, I didn’t understand that there were five kinds of work stress because once you see that, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand that there’s actually five actionable types of stress, then you can look at solutions that really work. So that would probably be my number one.

My second biggest aha was just how much of an intersection there is between stress and joy. We have got lots of great studies on stress at work. We’ve got fewer studies around joy at work. But what I couldn’t find, what I didn’t see was a study about the intersection between the two. How does one impact the other? How does a lack of one impact the other?

So that was my other biggest aha was that there was this research gap that I wanted to fill. What is it that we could understand about how these two seemingly opposite forces can work together and be in support of each other?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you unpack a little bit of that dynamic between stress and joy for us?

Amy Leneker
Yes, so here’s what I found. So we just did this national research study in 2026, so this is brand new data. And what we learned is that 79% of working Americans said, “I need joy in order to do my best work.” That’s a lot, 79%. That number jumps to 89% for executives.

What’s fascinating to me then is when you look at the data, 75% of American workers say that feeling joy helps them cope with work stress. So these are not two independent forces. We spend so much time, especially since the pandemic, so much time talking about stress and burnout, but very little time, very few organizations that I work with are having conversations around joy, even though it’s part of the equation.

People need it in order to do their best work. And 75% of people say, “I need it in order to cope with work stress.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, joy is a good word, and we dig it. And so, I guess I’ve heard multiple definitions of joy. I’m thinking, you know, partially in a Catholic theological context, we could talk about the virtue of joy. But how are you defining it here?

Amy Leneker
Here’s how I define it. So in our research, we found that there were three key drivers of joy. So the way I define joy is the feeling you’re experiencing when you have these three key drivers. So the first one is when there’s meaning and purpose in your work.

The second is when there is mattering in your relationships. So if you and I are on the same team, I matter to you, not just because of the work that I do, not just because I meet my deadlines, but I matter to you because who I am as a person.

And when I did the study, I thought those first two would show up. Meaning made sense to me, mattering made sense to me. The third one was a surprise. I was not expecting the third key driver of joy at work, which was momentum.

When I feel that I am making some type of progress, when I can look back and say, “Things are different because I was here,” those were the three key drivers. So when you have just one of them, you can experience joy.

So if you think about a moment, I hope you’ve had one, I bet you’ve had hundreds, a moment with a coworker where you shared a joke or you laughed or you went and had coffee, you can have joy just from one of those three. But when you have two or when you have all three, then you’ve set yourself up for a perfect storm in the best way for the conditions for joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then, in this definition, that would be distinct from, say, pleasure, like, “I had a really tasty lunch,” or, “I was playing a really fun game.” That’s a different thing here.

Amy Leneker
It is a different thing, and it’s different than happiness, too. And so what I often tell leaders and teams is the words are important. Words matter, definitions matter, and not to get too lost in the semantics. So what I don’t want to do is to go into an organization where they spend the next six hours trying to figure out the difference between happy and joy. So that’s probably not going to be a great ROI for bringing in a consultant for six hours.

But what I want to do with them is I want them to really evaluate those three key drivers. Are they experiencing those? Are they helping to create those for other people? And just as importantly, do they understand the biggest barriers to joy? Because in the majority of teams that I work with, they are completely unaware that they are inadvertently blocking joy for themselves and for everybody around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Well, could you share a story along those lines?

Amy Leneker
Absolutely. So here’s a great one. The fifth one. So if you look at the top five, we found 12, but if you just look at the top five, the fifth leading barrier to joy was when there’s isolation or disconnection. So if in the workplace you feel apart from or separate from, that is a barrier to joy.

And yet in a lot of teams I work with, they don’t really want to talk about whether or not they’re connected as a team. They don’t really want to talk about whether or not someone feels isolated on their team. But we have to because what we know is that when you’re in emotional pain, like this driver or this barrier to joy, that the part of your brain that lights up is the exact same part that lights up when you’re in physical pain.

So when people describe a really hard work situation, they might say things like, “This really is painful,” or, “I’m not sure I can take it,” because their brain is processing that pain in the same place. So if we can understand not just what drives it, but if we understand actually what gets in the way of it, we have a much better chance at creating a culture.

Can I share the number one barrier to joy?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, please.

Amy Leneker
So the number one was an overwhelming workload. So when leaders say, “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to begin,” or if an individual contributor will say, “Gosh, I just wish I had more joy,” what I can say is start with the number one barrier.

If you don’t know where to begin, let’s look at the number one barrier, what is your workload? Do you have a workload that feels sustainable? Because at least we know we can go in with the highest priority and hopefully create some shifts on the margin.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what’s the two, three, and four?

Amy Leneker
Yeah, let’s fill in the middle because we’ve got the two bookends. So the fourth one is when you have technology problems that disrupt your day. The third…Isn’t that funny?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that actually makes me feel better. It’s like, “I am not just an impatient jerk. This is a universal human condition.”

Amy Leneker
I do a conference every year with the CIOs in Washington state. And so when this came up in the data, I went back to the research team and I’m like, “We got to be really certain that this is there because I’m about to tell a conference full of CIOs that they’re the…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re killing everybody’s joy. It’s all your fault.”

Amy Leneker
Exactly. The third leading barrier is when there is sudden change without an explanation. And the second was feeling underappreciated. When I work with leaders and teams, I do an exercise where after I share with them that the second leading barrier to joy is feeling underappreciated, I have them take two minutes and appreciate someone at their workplace.

Send an email, send a text message, whatever it is, it just has to be true appreciation because we all have the ability to do something in less than two minutes about the second leading barrier to joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, that’s really helpful to have that rundown. And I guess, I’m thinking, a sudden change without explanation. I mean, you did the research, so you tell me if this is accurate. For me, at least, I’m thinking sudden change without acceptable explanation.

Because it’s like, there’s a sudden change and the explanation is just like, “Oh, so-and-so wants it this way now.” It’s like, “Well, why didn’t so-and-so mention that a month ago when we started doing this thing, you know?” Or, “So-and-so wants, prefers it to be in a different color,” or whatever.

It’s sort of like… in a way, it’s almost interrelated to feeling underappreciated, “I feel yanked around and disrespected.” It’s like, “Oh, I guess you gave no thought whatsoever to me, the human being, who had to execute this thing. That’s not a great feeling.”

Amy Leneker
I think you’re spot on and I think what you’re describing is backed up not just by research, but what I’m seeing anecdotally in organizations, which is that younger generations have an even stronger desire for the why. That’s what I see. When I go into organizations, younger generations are not tolerating this idea of, “Just do this because we said so.” There’s really this deeper need to understand, “Well, why is that?”

So I think you’re spot on that sometimes it’s not just hearing the change, it’s, “Do I understand the why behind the change?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, if we need joy to do our best work, and joy helps with work stress, is it also true that, I guess that would be the dynamic, is that joy helps with stress and stress impedes joy.

And so you’ve identified some barriers. I guess I’d love to know what are some of the top things that make a world of difference rather quickly in this equation?

Amy Leneker
It’s a great question, because I think the most important thing that we can do, regardless of where you sit in an organization, is to look at the three drivers. So we know that meaning, mattering, momentum, that’s what fosters joy. So are you tuned in to each of those three? Do you have those three? And, unfortunately, there are times where someone will say, “No.”

So here’s an example. We had talked earlier about the five kinds of work stress. And one type of work stress is called system stress. It’s when the very system that you’re a part of makes it hard for you to be successful. Things like inequity, unfairness.

When you’re in a toxic work environment, and I hope you’re not, I hope you never find yourself in one, but if you are in a toxic work environment, the ability to feel joy is pretty small. So recognizing that sometimes this isn’t just a personal issue, this isn’t just, “I need to be more resilient. I need to figure out how to manage my stress better,” it’s actually understanding, “Am I in a workplace with system stress that is actually preventing me from doing that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we recognize it and then, hopefully, if you do you, you try to get out of there, I guess, is what you do. Well, let’s hear these five. So we got system, what are the other four?

Amy Leneker
The first type of work stress is schedule. It’s when there is just not enough time in the day to do everything that you need to do. Even if you work through breaks or lunch or you skip a vacation, there just isn’t enough time. You’ll also see schedule stress when folks are just booked back to back to back all day long. That is schedule stress.

The second type is suspense. When you are waiting for information or you’re waiting for a decision, and while you’re waiting, that ambiguity, that uncertainty causes stress. The third type is social, and this is the stress of people. In an ideal world, the people that you work with help you do your job. They make your work enjoyable, but that isn’t always the case. So the third type is when the relationships at work are making it harder for you.

And then the fourth one is sudden. Sudden stress is when something happens out of the ordinary, something unusual, and it requires you to do something. You’ve got to think about something or make a decision or that last minute fire that you’re putting out. That is sudden stress.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also curious to hear your take on, I don’t know if I would just call it biological stuff, but my stress joy situation is largely impacted by, “Have I slept enough? Have I exercised? Have I eaten enough and not junk in recent times?” How do you think about these in the domain of stress and joy?

Amy Leneker
It’s a huge component of it. So what I think we’ve done that has done a tremendous disservice to employees and to entire organizations is that we have ended up in a place where you’ve got one who blames the other. So what I see is organizations blame employees for everything you just said, “You’re not sleeping well enough. You’re not eating well enough. You’re not taking breaks and walks and all the things.”

And then you have employees blaming organizations saying, “My workload is too high. I can’t be successful here.” So the only way this works is when everybody understands the role that they play. So, yes, individuals have a role. Yes, leaders have a role and organizations have a role.

Where I think we have really missed the boat is that we have turned this into a shame-blame finger-pointing game rather than coming together and saying, “If our goal is to really have a healthy workplace that thrives, what does that look like? And what is everybody responsible for in order to make that happen?”

So long answer to your question, yes, absolutely, those things matter and they’re not enough. So in our research, 25%, this blows my mind every time I say it out loud, 25% of working Americans report feeling bullied at least once a week. And many reported feeling bullied more than once a week.

So if that is your experience, if you’re going to work every week feeling bullied, how much sleep would it take to get over that? How many walking breaks do you need to get over that? So that’s where the shame and blame comes in. And I see this all the time because we do workshops on stress. We do workshops on burnout.

But if I go into an organization with system stress, how helpful is my training? I can tell you all the barriers to joy, but if you’re feeling bullied at work, that resolve is not going to come from you alone. That requires a change outside of just you.

Pete Mockaitis
And that is striking, 25% bullied weekly.

Amy Leneker
Isn’t it? It’s heartbreaking!

Pete Mockaitis
What are common examples of workplace bullying that are very prevalent?

Amy Leneker
So in our research, we were clear not to define it because what was important to us was to understand if people felt bullied using their definition. So I think it varies depending on where you work. I think it varies depending on the level of organization you’re in.

I think the important thing is that, “Do you know what that is where you are? Do you know what’s okay and what’s not okay in your workplace? Do you know what to do if you’re feeling bullied and what happens?” So I think that’s the key piece is, “What do you do? How do you tap into those resources if you believe that’s what’s happening for you?”

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose what I’m driving at is if someone finds, it might be minimizing an incidence of bullying, like, “Ah, it’s kind of annoying. Yeah, I kind of don’t care for it,” as opposed to like, “Well, no, actually, that is straight up hostile, toxic, unacceptable stuff.” Could you give us some examples of things that maybe get minimized yet are very common and deeply problematic?

Amy Leneker
Sure, I am a certified mediator. I specialize in workplace conflict. I have over 10,000 hours of mediation hours. And what I see in those mediations is exactly what you just described. That, very often, one person will say, “I didn’t even know this was a big deal.” And the other person says, “This is causing me so much pain and strain that I’ve now brought in a third party mediator to help us get through it.”

I just did a mediation recently where, I mean, you cannot make this up. It was a comment, a misunderstood comment six months ago that had created so much tension and conflict on this team. So rather than those two being able to talk about, “What did you mean by that comment? What was your intent in that?” it created six months of conflict.

So a lot of it comes down to communication. I see a lot of it around when people believe they’re being treated unfairly. So at work, they are experiencing that, “How other people are being treated doesn’t reflect how I’m being treated,” or even that they believe other people are being treated unfairly. I see that as one.

If I had to name a third one, I think it would probably be around this idea of, “What is a respectful workplace?” And when you’ve got different ideas, different generations, different cultures of what respect looks like. So a great example, I just did a mediation with a team because there was a whole team that was not getting along.

And they were frustrated because they would share ideas and they believed that the manager wasn’t hearing them and they were calling it hostile. They were using these words that create a red flag in my head as a mediator.

And what the leader said was, “I do hear your ideas. I’m just not taking them.” So now we’ve got a different conversation to have. It’s not about whether or not they’re hearing you, it’s whether or not they’re taking the ideas. So if I had to sum it up into one, communication would be the one that I see most often in my workplace mediations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve got an ABC of Joy method. Can you share this with us?

Amy Leneker
Sure. It is so simple, and I share it with leaders and teams all the time. So the first one is just to be aware of it. So to actually start being aware of, “Am I experiencing joy or am I not?” To not let joy be accidental because joy is really different than toxic positivity.

This is not about forcing joy on people. This isn’t about forcing people to feel positive. So just that first moment of, “Am I aware of just how much joy impacts my world of work and how much it ripples to my world outside of work?”

The B, and it almost sounds silly, but the B is actually breath. It is that so many of us move through the workday in a complete state of stress that we are breathing from our chest and not actually from our belly.

And when I’m doing mediations or when I’m doing tough conversations, I always watch how people are breathing. Because if they’re breathing up here, that’s the breath of stress. And so are we able to get that into our diaphragmatic breathing to make that shift?

And then this C is connection. Stress thrives in isolation. Relief comes through connection. Joy is through connection. So when in doubt, are you feeling connected to the workplace? Who do you feel connected to in the workplace? Because they are going to be a shortcut to joy for you.

Pete Mockaitis
And in your appendix, you’ve got the unstressing method. Are those the ABCs or you got more for us?

Amy Leneker
No, the unstressing method is different. So it’s actually what I’m most excited to share with everyone. I often joke, I went on a work trip recently and I shared it with the barista at the airport, with the ride share driver, and then with the person checking me at the hotel. Because when I say, “How are you?” if someone says, “Oh, to be honest? I’m really stressed.” I’m like, “Well, I got something for you.”

So really simple, three steps. Step number one, you’ve got to see your stress differently. So you’ve got to get all your stressors from your head, from your heart onto paper. And it works best if you can use sticky notes. You don’t have to, but it works best if you can put one stressor per sticky note.

Then you see your stress through the lens of, “Is this important to me? And do I have control over it?” And how you answer those questions, then you place your stressor on the unstressing matrix, because there’s four quadrants. So based on how you answer, “Is it important? Do I have control?” you place it on the matrix.

Step two is we sort it. And you sort your stress into those five categories that you and I talked about just a few minutes ago. Which type of stress is it? And sometimes it’s more than one type. Sometimes it’s all five types, but you write down on those numbers one through five, which type of stress it is.

And what I love about step two is you’ve got this really quick visual of, “What’s actually happening for me right now?” If you look and there’s a whole lot of threes, you’ve got some work to do with the people that you’re working with. If you look at your matrix and you’ve got lots of fives, that’s a red flag that you’re feeling system stress. So it gives you this really quick snapshot into what’s been happening behind the scenes.

So then in step three, we solve it. Because wherever your stressor landed on that matrix, there is a next guiding step for you to take. So you don’t have to feel stuck. You don’t have to feel like you’re in analysis paralysis. There is a next guiding thing for you to do wherever that landed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I’d love to work through something here. Let’s say right now I am stressed by the war in Iran. Now that was sudden. I was not expecting that. That just sort of appeared. It is suspenseful. It’s like, “What the heck is going to happen?” It feels unfair. You point the blame anywhere you want, but at least one person did something that wasn’t cool.

And so now it’s completely out of my control. It’s important to me, although not super immediately directly personally, but just in terms of like the wellbeing and flourishing of humanity. And I don’t know, “Are my children going to go to war in years to come?” You know, so there’s that suspense thing.

So, okay, let’s say I have that posted, I’ve put it in the right quadrant, I’ve labeled some of those S category types. Well, now what the heck do I do?

Amy Leneker
The action there is about asking for support that you need because you don’t have control over it. My guess is that you don’t know anyone directly that has control over it. Is that a fair assumption?

Pete Mockaitis
I am not that powerful.

Amy Leneker
Not that powerful. And this example that you gave, I’m hearing it in every workshop that I’m in. Right before this podcast with you, I did a workshop this morning. People are talking about it. This is a huge part of our lives that is completely out of our control and feels wildly important. So that’s quadrant one.

So in quadrant one, it’s about asking for the support that you need, “How do I manage this thing that I have no control over? How am I going to be able to still move forward? How can I still function and be able to do what I need to do while this stressor is here?” And while it’s here for a length of time that we’re not sure of, we don’t know the consequences of it.

So the important thing about understanding when something is in quadrant one is that it frees you up from, “There isn’t an action, a direct action that I need to take, but is there something?” Then you can start to. So what happened just this morning in the workshop was someone said, “Well, but I can write a letter. I can send an email.”

Like, okay, yes. So then you can start to think about, “Are there actions connected to it, even if it’s not directly?” I mean, none of, at least no one I work with has the power to put an end to the stressor, but what are those things that are within our control? So I’m glad you brought up that example. It just came up this morning.

Pete Mockaitis
So then, for asking for support, I suppose some of that support is just kind of me doing things that are helpful for me. But then what is useful support, you and I and our pals can offer to each other in a world where we don’t have the control?

Amy Leneker
I think there is support that we can offer each other through connection, so just by recognizing what you’re going through. And I think sometimes the support needs to come from a professional. You may have really well-intentioned friends, but they may or may not be mental health experts.

So part of quadrant one is recognizing, “Do I need someone who is a professional at this?” Just because you love someone or just because they love you doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re trained to provide support to you on a stressor that’s wildly important to you and outside of your control.

So sometimes that support can come from family or friends or community, and other times it may need to come from someone who’s actually trained in how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot because a therapist or a professional can really get to some custom stuff there because, like, it could be stressing you in completely different ways than it’s stressing me.

Amy Leneker
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, maybe one person is ruminating. Another feels betrayed, lied to. They don’t feel that they could trust anyone anymore, “And it’s just like this other time in life,” you know, it’s bringing back traumatic memories. Others could be binge watching the news to the detriment of their responsibilities. And so there’s different kinds of interventions that happen there. So, I liked that a lot in terms of support can take a lot of different varieties, but it’s the thing to do when it’s important, but out of your control.

Amy Leneker
And I’ll tell you, I work with a lot of leaders. I work with public sector leaders, Fortune 100 leaders. I work with leaders across industries. The most successful leaders I work with, they have coaches, they have therapists, and most of them have both.

So, I mean, most really successful leaders know that, “I’ve got to surround myself with the support that I need to be successful.” And the really good ones have gotten really good at figuring out what that support looks like.

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

Amy Leneker
Here’s what I would offer, that if you’re listening to this, and you are feeling wild amounts of work stress, to know that you are not alone. Over 80% of people are right there with you.

If you’re listening to this and you’re not feeling that way, then I hope that you can go back into work tomorrow with some empathy for people who might be because we are not all having the same experience at the same time. So that’s what I would love to leave before we jump into the next part.

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

Amy Leneker
Anne Lamott says that, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining.”

And I think that is such a beautiful metaphor for stress that we don’t have to go running all over our workplaces looking for people to save, looking for stress to eliminate, that if we can take really good care of ourselves, that that very notion of standing like a lighthouse in our own wellness has a ripple effect on everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Amy Leneker
I’m going to go with Dare to Lead. When I read Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, it felt like these pieces of the leadership puzzle that I had been missing fell into place.

And I was so inspired by that book that I ended up getting trained by her and certified by her to bring Dare to Lead into organizations to help people be courageous. So that book, it changed my life. And it’s not hyperbole to say that. It literally changed my life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Amy Leneker
Is a confetti cannon a tool?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, yeah.

Amy Leneker
Because I keep this puppy on my desk because you never know when a confetti moment is going to hit. So I think this is my favorite tool, that when there’s a celebration, I always try to have a confetti cannon not too far away.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, are confetti cannons, I’ve never owned one or interacted with one personally, are they refillable, reusable?

Amy Leneker
This one is not. There probably are. I bet there are some environmentally safe ones that are. This one isn’t. This is so cute. I just realized, while I was on the call with you, my daughter wrote “Cheers to Monday.” Can you see that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s sweet.

Amy Leneker
That’s so cute because I sent two of these off this week with the book lot so she was really sweet and cleaned the office and then put this. That’s so darling. Super cute.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s 1,140 some interviews, I’ve asked people about a favorite tool, and this is the first time confetti cannon has appeared.

Amy Leneker
Really? I love it! Let’s name the episode that.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so good. And a favorite habit?

Amy Leneker
Whenever I am driving in my car, I call my parents. And it just is such a great way to connect with two people that I love more than anything else in the world.

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

Amy Leneker
I think what I’m hearing back most often now is what I shared with you right at the end about stress, thriving, and isolation, that many times after I give this talk, people will come up and sometimes they’re even crying saying that they didn’t realize that they had been disconnecting from people that they love. They had been isolating from people that they cared about. And so, unfortunately, stress just takes on this spiral. So that’s what I’m hearing right now a lot.

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

Amy Leneker
Oh, thank you. I love that question. AmyLeneker.com is the best way. And I’m also on all the socials and I would love to connect, so reach out. I’d love to stay connected.

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

Amy Leneker
My call to action would be to use the stress ruler today. On a scale of zero to 10, how challenging has your stress been? Ask the people you love that same question and then do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Amy, thank you.

Amy Leneker
Thank you. This was so fun. I loved being here.

Pete Mockaitis
Jen, welcome!

Jen Fisher
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and to hear about hope. Could you share with us, for starters, an extra surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made about hope as you’ve researched it?

Jen Fisher
I would say that hope is not an emotion, which most people think that it is. It’s a cognitive process. It’s not whimsical. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not positive vibes only. As a matter of fact, many, many times hope is hard. And I would also say that hope is a daily practice and, obviously, I believe that hope is a strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so it’s not an emotion, it’s not positive vibes only, you said it’s a cognitive. Well, what is it exactly?

Jen Fisher
So, what the research shows, so C.R. Snyder is kind of the original, if you will, godfather of hope research, and what he and so many others have found about hope and why many of us say that it is a cognitive process and that hope is a strategy, is because real and realistic hope actually requires action. It requires three things from you.

It requires you to identify and set a goal, so to know where you want to go or know where you want to be. It requires, and this is perhaps the most important, that you identify multiple ways or pathways in which you can reach that goal. And so it’s not just one, it’s multiple ways. And then the final thing is that it requires you to understand and to know what your agency is in reaching that goal. And so, what is your ability to actually do something to get from here to there?

And so that’s why it requires action and what makes it a cognitive process and what makes it a strategy is because you actually have to not just think about it, not just put good vibes only out into the world, or say, “I’m going to win the lottery,” but you actually have to do something about it and you have to have the ability to do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so it requires setting a goal, identifying multiple pathways, understanding our capabilities and how this is viable. And so, if I’ve done those things, I’m having an experience as a result of having done so. Is that what we’re calling hope?

Jen Fisher
That’s what we’re calling hope. That is what hope theory says. And I will tell you what hope theory also says. Hope theory and hope does not guarantee success. And that’s why I say hope is hard, right? Because sometimes you do all these things, you have all of this hope, and then things don’t work out the way that you want them to.

But I think what’s really great about hope is, you know those multiple pathways that you identified? If you start down one path and it doesn’t work, well, you’ve already identified other ways in which you can reach your goal so you don’t get stuck.

You kind of say, “Okay, well, that was interesting. It didn’t work. But, look, I have these other ways in which I can potentially reach this goal.” But hope does not guarantee success. Hope will let you down but it is still critically important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if I do those things, I’m having an experience that you call hope, but it’s not an emotion. So I don’t know if you want to get all dictionary or textbook-y, but so then what precisely is hope?

Jen Fisher
Hope is a strategy. It’s a cognitive process. It requires that process in order for it to be hope. When it comes to emotions, hope can spur positive emotions. It can create positive emotions. It can also potentially create negative emotions, but hope itself is not an emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I set a goal, I’d identified multiple pathways, I understand I’ve got capabilities that could get her done, but if I still have a lot of doubt and pessimism and think, “This probably won’t work,” do I have hope?

Jen Fisher
You could, yes. I mean, look, I think those things can coexist. I would say, what makes hope unique is that it requires you to take action. So you could be pessimistic or you could believe that it’s not going to work, but if you’re still taking action towards the goal on the off chance that it could work, then, yeah, you do have hope.

But, look, I think hope can coexist with doubt. Hope can coexist with hopelessness. Hope can coexist with despair. It can coexist with other things that are seemingly its opposite, just like many things. Most things in our life can coexist with other things that are seemingly its opposite, but what hope requires is action.

And so, if you were moving towards that goal, regardless of whether or not you think it’s going to work, you do have some hope that it’s going to work. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be moving, continuing to move towards that goal because what’s the point?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, can you tell us, maybe, what’s the opposite of hope or how prevalent is hope at work?

Jen Fisher
Well, I don’t think that hope at work is very prevalent, and that was the reasoning and the rationale behind my book. I proffer in my book that I actually believe a lot of what we are seeing and talking about and experiencing in the workplace, when it comes to workplace burnout, is actually an epidemic of hopelessness.

And so, hopelessness exists when you don’t believe that tomorrow can be better than today, when you don’t believe that your actions or what you’re doing matters, or when you don’t believe that you are valued in the workplace. And I think that those are experiences that, unfortunately, a lot of people have, which drive workplace hopelessness.

And I think we often look at that as disengagement, we look at that as burnout, but I actually think that it’s hopelessness. It’s people kind of throwing their hands up, and saying, “Well, nothing I do matters,” or, “Nothing here is ever going to change, so why even try?” And in my experience and my conversations with many, many people, that seems to be the sentiment of what is happening.

And so, I think kind of this opposite, if you will, of hope or hopeful workplaces is workplaces that are hopeless or disengaged or there’s just a lot of people, you know, quiet quitting, pick your favorite buzzword about what’s going on in the workplace today, and I think you can link a lot of that back to people are just kind of feeling hopeless.

And that ties to why I say hope is a strategy because, when I talk to leaders, when I talk to anybody who is trying to effect big change or change at all in the workplace through workplace transformations, leadership changes, strategy changes, all of this constant change that’s going on in the workplace, and they say, “Really, Jen? Like, really, you want me to create a hopeful workplace? You think that hope is a strategy?”

And I say, “Yeah, I do, because good luck with your strategy if nobody believes in it, if nobody gets on board, if nobody thinks that your strategy is going to make tomorrow better than today, then you’re not going to achieve your strategy, because you have to be able to bring people along with you.”

And that’s why I’m not saying hope is the only strategy, but I’m saying that hope is a strategy because people need to feel hopeful about where they are and where they’re going in order to really show up and be engaged and innovate and do all the great things that we want people to do in the workplace, but they’re just not feeling it right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if we think about hopelessness then, it sort of sounds like, from that angle or facet, hope seems to be sort of like a set of beliefs. Is that fair to say?

Jen Fisher
Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so in that sense, then if hope is a set of beliefs, then that set of beliefs would certainly be bolstered by doing just those things – set the goal, identifying multiple pathways and understanding your capabilities and how those can flow into making that unfold. Very cool. Well, maybe could you give us a story perhaps of someone who wasn’t feeling so hopeful, but they adopted some of these approaches and saw a turnaround?

Jen Fisher
Well, I think that probably the easiest story would be my own story and why hope has become so important to me, part of my leadership ethos, how I lead, but, quite frankly, how I live my life. And so, if you rewind where I was 10, 11 years ago, I was in a state of complete burnout. And this is before we were talking about burnout and well-being in the workplace in the ways that we are now.

And so, I didn’t know what I was experiencing. I knew I was struggling. I worked in a high-performing organization. I looked around, everyone around me seemed to be doing just fine. So I just kept telling myself, “I’m going to push through. This will eventually go away if I just keep pushing harder, pushing harder, pushing harder.”

Well, that never works. It might work for a period of time, but that never works. And so, ultimately, I ended up completely burnt out to the point where I had to take a leave of absence from work. I had to really focus on getting healthy and well, both mentally and physically. And part of that recovery for me, actually, was seeking out professional help, going to therapy.

And through therapy, that is actually where I was first introduced to hope and hope theory and kind of the processes of generating hope in your life.

And so, the therapist had me do hope theory exercises, many of which I now lay out in one of the chapters, I think it’s chapter 10 in my book. And I spent a lot of time doing that and it was really, you know, kind of, “What’s the next step? What’s the next step?”

And I think that’s also kind of the thing about hope is we tend to think that hope is this big thing that, “Oh, if I just have hope, it’s going to change everything.” Well, hope, it’s not really a fireworks-show moment. It happens in those quiet hours, in those quiet moments, by taking one step forward, and then the next step forward, and then the next step forward.

And that’s what I did, you know? It was kind of each of those little steps that built me back from burnout recovery. And then I learned how to really apply those types of strategies not only into my life, but into my leadership and into my work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I would love it if you could really paint a picture for us, in terms of a scene that’s memorable for you, so we can sort of get a sense for, “Boy, what’s that hopeless Jen look, sound, feel like?” in terms of what you’re doing, what you’re saying to yourself, what you’re experiencing, as opposed to the hope has been restored Jen looking like?

Jen Fisher
So, one of the stories that I tell in the book was really when I was burnt out and kind of the conversation, I talk about it as the conversation that changed everything. And it was a regular check-in conversation with my boss, and I was going down my list, you know, checking things off, giving her all of the updates.

And she put down her pen and paper and looked me straight in the eye and, basically, said to me, “Jen, you’re not okay. And what’s worse is that you’re trying to convince everyone else and yourself that this is what okay looks like.”

And, of course, in that moment, my natural reaction was, “What are you talking about?” you know, the kind of defensiveness, right? And she looked at me and she said, “When was the last time you spent real time with your family without thinking about work?” And I couldn’t give her a good answer.

And then she asked me, “When was the last time you felt joy in your work?” And I couldn’t give her a good answer. And she went on to ask me a handful of additional questions, and I really couldn’t answer any of her questions in that moment or in a way that made me feel good about myself.

And what I will say is she wasn’t judging me. She wasn’t calling me out. She was coming from a place of concern to say, “You’re not okay, and you need to take some time for yourself to get okay.” And as hard as that moment was, perhaps that was the first moment of truth for me. That was the first time that I ever admitted to myself or anyone else that I wasn’t okay, that I was struggling, and that I did need help.

And so, I talk about that as the first moment of hope, because hope requires you to be truthful. It requires you to be honest and to recognize things as they really are. I think a lot of times, when people think about hope being whimsical or wishful thinking, they get that wrong because hope requires you to say like, “Hey, things suck. I’m not okay. I’m in a bad place. What’s going on is horrible.”

Like, recognizing truth and reality of where we really are and then building from there and starting to make that plan, set that goal of, like, “What’s the next step? And what’s the next step?” and create those pathways for yourself.

And so, I would say a hopeful Jen, I mean, there’s tons of stories in the book of just my journey of hope. And I don’t get it always right. I am a person that kind of tends to catastrophize things, and I live with a lot of anxiety.

And one of the things that I talk about in the book, which was really insightful, was a conversation with a friend of mine who knows that I have a lot of anxiety, that I live with anxiety. And she said to me, “This whole hope thing…” she’s like, “…doesn’t that make you more anxious to, like, have so many options, to have multiple pathways?”

And I thought that that was such an insightful question because, typically, people who have a lot of anxiety like concrete things. We like to know the way that it’s going to be so we can stop catastrophizing about all the things that could be. And as I thought about that, I was like, “You know, I think that hope and anxiety are kind of great partners for each other.”

Because what happens to me when I feel stuck or when I’m catastrophizing, I can step back and say kind of like, “What would hope tell me to do?” Well, hope would tell me to understand where I am now, understand how I want to get out of this place, and create those pathways for myself.

And so, instead of staying stuck and staying anxious in a really stuck place, I can identify multiple pathways in which I can get unstuck. And that actually helps my anxiety because it says, “Oh, wait, there’s not just one way and you’re not just stuck here forever. There’s all these other ways in which you can move forward.” So, hopefully, those are kind of helpful illustrations or stories to answer your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s great. Thank you. Yes, and, boy, what a blessing to have had that conversation, to have that leader, because I think the vast majority of professionals and humans would not be so direct in terms of, “Oh, you know, I don’t want to be invasive. It’s not really my place. I don’t want to be, you know?” And so, they, “Hey, Jen, you doing okay?” “Yeah.” “Okay. Just checking.” “Well, no, no, no, no, no.” Moving on as opposed to, “Hmm. Well…”

Jen Fisher
Yeah, because it’s uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. So, I’m curious then in the before times, what do you think are some of the indicators she was picking up on that you were not as consciously aware of?

Jen Fisher
I think one of the things that you just pointed out, right, is that this idea of fine, right? Especially in the workplace when they have conversations with you, “How are you doing?” “Fine.” “How’s your workload?” “Fine.” “How are things at, you know, whatever, home?” “Fine.” So, we kind of build this fortress of fine, and that has become acceptable.

And so why is fine acceptable? When somebody says fine to me, and I probably learned this from her in many unspoken ways, but when I get too many fines right in a row from somebody, that is a signal to dig deeper and be like, “Okay, enough with the fine. Like, how are you, really?” And then it kind of shifts to like, “I’m good. I’m good.” “No, no. Like, I want more than one word. Can you give me six words on like how you’re doing?”

So, I think that that’s kind of what she was picking up on, but certainly, if I reflect back, my emotions were all over the place. I was either really, really high and really happy if things were going really well. If I had a bad conversation or a bad experience or a bad interaction with something, with somebody, my emotions were, like, in the toilet, all the way down.

And so, I was very high or I was very low. There was not really kind of in between, if you will. Certainly, my work product suffered, even though I was working longer hours than ever. The problem is that I was working longer hours than ever and that really affected my work product. I was very reactive. I was also very transactional and task-oriented.

I wasn’t interested in building relationships with my colleagues. I was interested in getting the work done and the metrics associated with those, with getting that work done. And that was uncharacteristic of me. And so, I think, she kind of saw a combination of things. But to your point, there’s not a lot of leaders like that, and so I credit so much of who I am today with her ability to really see me and have the compassion to reach out.

And, of course, at the time, you process that in a whole bunch of different ways. You process it as failure, but I look back on it now and it was one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given to me. And so, I think I tried to emulate and be that leader and be that person for others now.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, yes. Thank you. Well, let’s dig into some of this hope theory strategy tactic stuff. What do you recommend if folks are listening and they say, “Hmm, I’d like some more hope. That sounds nice”? What are some of the top first things to do?

Jen Fisher
I think the first thing that I recommend people do is do a hope audit, kind of understand where you are when it comes to your own hope. Are you struggling with hope? Are you doing great with hope? How’s your team doing? You can do it at an individual level, a team level, an organizational level.

But I think some of the most, kind of powerful, when I talk to people about hope, ways to assess your own hope, but also what I call hope-killers and hope-builders. And this is really in the language that we use in our lives, but especially in our workplaces and especially as managers of other human beings.

The lessons that I’ve learned is hope-killers are when we say things like, “We want you to bring your ideas. We value innovation. We want to do things differently.” And then somebody brings you an idea and you say something like, “No, that’s not how we do that here. That’s not how we do those things here. We don’t do that.” Or, “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” That’s an automatic.

Those types of things, where you’re shutting someone down, is an automatic hope-killer. What I will say about that is, because my goal is to never make anyone feel bad, that I learned these things the hard way and which is why I’m trying to teach others about it. We say these things as leaders and as managers because we believe that we’re being responsible.

We believe that if we tell somebody, “That’s not how we do it here,” or, “We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work,” that we’re being responsible. We’re being helpful. We’re basically telling them, “Don’t waste your time on that. Like, move on to the next thing, or just do it this way, because we know that it’s going to work and we know it’s acceptable.” You think those are time savers.

That’s kind of the path of least resistance, but it’s really a hope-killer for people because people want to come to work and be creative and come up with new solutions. And most organizations tell them that that’s what they value, but when they do it, then they shut it down.

And so instead, say things like, “Well, we’ve never done it that way. What intrigues you, what interests you, or what excites you about doing it that way?” I think about Ted Lasso, you know, “Be curious, not judgmental,” right?

So have your line of questioning when somebody brings you an idea. Instead of shutting it down, get curious about it, ask them questions. You might still say no, but at least you engaged in the conversation with somebody to understand where they’re coming from.

And that’s what helps us feel like we matter and that we are valued by somebody, not that we execute on every single idea that somebody has, but that we listen to them and that we see them. And that’s what actually creates and builds hope in the workplace.

And that kind of behavior, through the language and the way that we communicate with each other, is incredibly contagious when it comes to workplace culture.

Pete Mockaitis
The language, it is contagious in both directions.

Jen Fisher
In both directions, very negative and positive. Absolutely. Probably negative is more contagious, which is why it’s so dangerous, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a top tip right there, say, “Don’t use hope-killing language.” Do you have some superior alternatives for if someone is mentioning something and you really do have some insight that was tried before and it didn’t go well? I imagine you want to share that information and not withhold it, but you also don’t want to kill the enthusiasm. So, any pro tips for communicating that?

Jen Fisher
There’s nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, we tried something similar and it didn’t work out, but I want to hear from you. Like, what’s your approach? What do you think is different this time? What, in your mind, would make this work?”

And so, that opens up the dialogue for them to share with you what they’re thinking. And then you can have a conversation about it, right? Then you can share your own insight of, “When we did do this before and it didn’t work.” And then you might learn something from them. Maybe they aren’t proposing that you do it the exact same way that you did it before. Maybe it just looks like that on the surface.

And if you immediately shut it down and say, “Oh, we’ve done that before,” and move on, then you miss the opportunity to dig a little bit deeper. And I’m not talking about spending four hours, right? This is a 10-, 12-, 15-minute conversation with somebody that just is like, “Tell me a little bit more about why you think that that’s going to work,” or, “What excites you about this idea?” or, “Let’s dig a little bit deeper,” so that you can understand where they’re coming from.

And you can also share insight of like, “Hey, we did something similar. This is how we went about it. This is why it didn’t work, and this is why it didn’t work. What do you think? Why do you think that your approach is different?”

And so, it’s not about, like I said, it’s not about letting everybody come up with all kinds of ideas and just start running with all of them. But it’s more about, “How do you make somebody feel seen and valued in the workplace?” Because those are the top things, you know, feeling like you don’t matter in the workplace or in life, that is the biggest hope-killer of all, right?

Like, not mattering to somebody or not mattering to where you work, people start to disengage. And so, it’s really about seeing somebody and just having a quick conversation to understand where they’re coming from. It’s not always about, “Oh, we’re going to move forward with this idea even though I think it’s a bad one.”

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay. Well, I’d also love to hear some of the other winning bits from this toolkit.

Jen Fisher
I think, something that I like to do, I call hope spotting, right? And so, there’s a lot of negativity in our world. There’s a lot of negativity in our workplaces.

And so, opening up team meetings or starting your own day as an individual, or ending your day as an individual, and actually spotting and calling out and acknowledging instances of hope-building, you know, talking about something that you thought wasn’t going to go well, but it actually went better than you thought.

Like, really identifying the times in your day or in your week where things went well, because we don’t do that. We tend to dwell on what went wrong, who pissed us off, what we didn’t do right, what we didn’t get done. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t, you know, like there are lessons to be learned by mistakes that we’ve made or interactions that we’ve had that didn’t go as well as we wanted it to.

But we spend a lot more time on those things and we beat ourselves up. And so, really carving out a couple of minutes at the end of each day or in the morning, reflecting on the day before, or as you open a meeting, and allow people to spot hope, to say like, “Hey, this happened, and I thought it was great,” or, “I saw Bob showing the new person how to do X, Y, and Z, and that made me feel really good.”

We tend to kind of gloss over those things and we don’t call them out and we don’t acknowledge them. And so, I think that that’s a really important practice that can help people feel hopeful and have positive emotions in the workplace and feel like they’re valued.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I like that a lot in terms of, and that feels distinctly different than, say, a gratitude practice, counting your blessings, like, “Oh, I’ve got a great family. I’ve got a house, you know. I’ve got heat. I’ve got a cozy bed. I’ve got socks that feel great.” Sure. I mean, because we can do those things and those are good and special and shifting the spotlight onto them can be beneficial.

But when you really zero in on, “It went better than you thought it would,” it highlights that same zone of risk and uncertainty where so much of our lives are in these days. It highlights that. And it’s a powerful reminder that, “Yeah, it happens frequently that things work out better than you thought they would.”

So, thusly, perhaps as we’re assessing the probabilities or what’s likely to go down with the next thing, we may just be a bit more balanced in assessing the prognosis of stuff.

Jen Fisher
I love how you summarize that. I think that that was perfect. And that’s why I think hope is a practice, too, right? Because once you start to practice that, that becomes, I wouldn’t say your natural default. Maybe for some people. It’s still not my natural default, but it’s easier for me, right?

Like, I will catch myself going down the path of being like, “Oh, man, I can’t believe I said that,” or, “Oh, that was a really dumb answer.” And when I start to have that negative talk for myself, I’m like, “Wait a minute, what about all the things in the meeting, or the presentation, or the keynote, or the whatever, that went right?”

And so, I start to catch myself more quickly and I don’t follow the negative. And that’s not to say that we don’t screw up. We all screw up, right? Like, yeah, you’re going to say something stupid, you’re going to forget a line, you’re going to make a mistake, whatever it is that your role is, right?

It’s not to say, like those things don’t happen and those things don’t exist. But how do you balance the learning from making mistakes with also recognizing that there’s a lot right that you and others do in the world and calling that out?

Another thing that I really like to do, especially when I’m feeling stuck or, like, when my team is feeling stuck, is talk about possibilities, you know, and kind of do exercises around possibility thinking, right? And so, if I feel really stuck, if I have a problem and I can’t get out of it, or I’m just ruminating on it, asking myself the question of like, “Well, what’s possible here?”

Like, you know, this is kind of that pathways thinking of like, “Where could I go from here? I’m feeling stuck. I don’t want to stay stuck here. So, what are the possibilities here? Like, is this a dead end?” And if it is, kind of accepting that and moving on.

“But if I’m not truly stuck, what are the possibilities and what are the ways in which I can move forward?” And so, that’s kind of a question that I ask myself of like, “Okay, I’m feeling stuck. What are the possibilities here?” And that is a way to generate hope.

Another way, the best way perhaps to cultivate hope is with other people. Hope grows in community. Like many things, hope definitely grows in community, and surrounding yourself with people that support you, and also will hold you accountable when you need to be held accountable is one of the best ways that hope can grow.

And so, when I think about that inside of organizational life, obviously, the best place for that is on your team. But if there’s not people on your team, do you have a friend or two in the organization that you can connect regularly with, because connection is incredibly important for hope?

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

Jen Fisher
No, let’s do it. Like, I’ve talked a lot, but that’s the point, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed, yeah. Can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jen Fisher
So, the cover of my book is a butterfly, and that’s a special symbolism to me, but it’s the perfect symbolism for hope. And so, one of my favorite quotes, “If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jen Fisher
I would say Dr. Edith Egers’ book called The Choice.

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

Jen Fisher
I think one that’s coming up lately is a nugget of we would never put somebody in charge of operations or technology or finance that didn’t have operations, technology, or finance experience, but we continue to put people in charge of humans without any intelligence or knowledge or skill on wellbeing and hope.

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

Jen Fisher
The best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn, but my website is www.Jen-Fisher.com. I also have a Substack newsletter called “Thoughts on Being Well.”

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

Jen Fisher
Make hope your strategy or, at least, make hope part of your strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jen, thank you.

Jen Fisher
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Aditi, welcome!

Aditi Nerurkar
Thanks for having me. It’s such a pleasure to join you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s a pleasure to be chatting. I listened to your entire book and I loved it. And there are so many fun alleys we can go down. But, first, I want to hear your hot take. You are a stress expert, doctor, looked at it closely for many years. Tell us, what is something you understand about stress that you think the vast majority of us just have wrong?

Aditi Nerurkar
I think the biggest misconception about stress is that all stress is bad. When you and I say, “Oh, it’s been a stressful week,” or stressful month, or, for many people, the past five years have been incredibly stressful. We use stress interchangeably with the quality of it being bad or difficult. When, in fact, there are two kinds of stress, there’s good stress and bad stress. And they’re not created equal and they affect your brain and body differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, how do I know what’s good and what’s bad?

Aditi Nerurkar
Good stress moves your life forward. It’s productive. It’s motivating. And it’s actually a driver for everything good in your life because everything good in your life was created because of a little bit of healthy stress. So, what is good, healthy stress? Scientifically, we call it adaptive stress. And this is like rooting for your favorite sports team, planning a beach vacation, falling in love, getting a promotion, a new job or a new home, things that move your life forward. And that is positive. This is good, healthy, productive stress.

But the other kind of stress, bad stress, unhealthy stress, that’s what we talk about, Pete, when we say, “Oh, it’s been a stressful week,” or a year or five years. That, in scientific terms, is called maladaptive stress. It’s dysfunctional and gets in the way of your everyday life. Bad stress is what causes all of the mental and physical health manifestations that you may be familiar with when you say that, you know, when you’re talking about stress, like anxiety, depression, insomnia, brain fog, irritability.

And so, the goal of life is not zero stress. It’s actually biologically impossible to do that. The goal of life is healthy, manageable stress that serves you rather than harms you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s handy there. And I’m thinking about, can I have too much good stress in terms of, “I am having awesome gains at the gym, and awesome opportunities at work, and an awesome newborn?” Somehow all those stress components are good, and yet I might end up in a bad spot. Is that a possibility as well?

Aditi Nerurkar
Good or bad stress is less about the actual event, but more about how it affects you and how you react to that event. So, some people with those three things that you mentioned might be okay, and others may not. I don’t actually think there is such a thing as too much good stress, meaning that when you experience a certain level of stress, we all have a threshold of when stress becomes healthy, productive, and then goes past that threshold to bad.

And when you’re giving me those examples, and it’s happening all at once to someone, you have to think about this idea of the rule of two, which is how your brain responds to change. So, even all of these positive things happening in your life can, in fact, cause you to have a lot of stress, which then veers into the bad unhealthy stress, because even positive experiences in your life can cause a lot of stress.

So, I think when you have a lot of stress in your life, you may think it’s good but, in fact, it’s causing some of the mental and physical health manifestations that bad stress causes.

And so, therefore, it’s less about the thing that is causing you stress and more about your response to it.

Pete Mockaitis
I see, yes. So, our interpretation or frame or reaction, I suppose, do we just know it when we see it in terms of, “I’m stoked and excited and growing,” versus, “Ahh!” and that’s how I know? And so, it sounds like it might be partially just the nature of the thing itself and how it jives with me. And it might partially just be the sheer quantity and my threshold for it.

Aditi Nerurkar
Exactly. It’s the actual event in your life. It is also the intensity that you are experiencing, whatever it is that you’re experiencing, and the frequency, how often is it happening. If you think about your baseline and then when this event is happening, how it makes you feel, is it getting in the way of your everyday functioning? Is it getting in the way of your sleep or your motivation or your day-to-day life? And if it is causing any bad results.

So, a classic example, having a baby, a newborn at home, right? It’s a very wonderful experience in many people’s lives, but it’s also incredibly challenging. And so that one event can be good stress because it’s moving your life forward. A baby is a blessing in the home, but it also brings about a whole host of challenges and mental and physical health manifestations for the parents.

And so, it’s less about the event and more about your experience of it bringing into account. There’s many factors to this. It’s not just like you feel happy and, therefore, it’s good stress, or you feel unhappy and, therefore, it’s bad stress. It’s nuanced and it’s on a spectrum.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, is there means of quantifying, measuring this stuff?

Aditi Nerurkar
A lot of my work, Pete, is focused on this idea that stress, we think of it as this vague nebulous entity, when, in fact, we do really need to think about stress as, you know, I would love one day for stress to be like blood pressure, something that we measure, monitor, and, therefore, can manage. And there is a stress quiz in my book, The Five Resets. You can also take the stress quiz for free on my website, DrAditi.com.

And it’s a way to measure and actually think about how to give yourself a stress number. You’ve got a personalized stress score at the end of the quiz. It’s five questions. And what you want to do when you’re measuring your stress is have a number and then do various strategies to rewire your brain for less stress, which we’ll talk about in this conversation.

And then you want to take that test again, the same test again in four weeks and see, “Is there a difference in your score?” And then four weeks again, “Is there a difference in your score?” Or you take the test every two months because it takes about eight weeks to build a habit for your brain and rewire your brain for less stress.

And so, what you want to do when you’re measuring stress is use the same, we call it a study instrument.Take the same test again and again. That’s one way.

The other way is, if you are thinking about a particular metric in your life, I call it the MOST goal, create some sort of metric in your life, the way to measure, maybe it’s your energy, maybe it’s your sleep, maybe it’s your feeling of being engaged in the world, something that you can tangibly measure every four weeks, every six weeks and see, “Hey, am I making progress in my stress?”

And so, what is your MOST goal? So, when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you often have that inner critic, that berating voice in your head saying, “What’s the matter with me?” You’re like you might not be feeling great. You might be asking yourself that question.

Instead, reframe and ask yourself, “What matters most to me?” And MOST is an acronym, M stands for motivating, O objective, S small enough to virtually guarantee your success, and T timely. Create a MOST goal using that framework. Give yourself a timeframe of two to three months ahead of time. In the next two to three months, you want to achieve this thing. Understand that it takes eight weeks to build a habit, falling off and getting back up is part of habit formation.

And then once you have your MOST goal, you try various strategies and techniques that we’ll talk about today, that can help you get towards your MOST goal. And then there’s that metric that you can use to say, “Oh, you know what? I am getting better sleep. I do have more energy. I feel more engaged with my life,” or whatever it is that you’ve created the MOST goal. And that is one way to really monitor and measure this big, huge, nebulous thing that we call stress.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. And I would also like your quick hot take, since we’re talking measurements, on heart rate variability for all of our wearable enthusiasts. Are you a believer? Is it useful? Is it counterproductive? Should that be a measure you recommend we keep our eye on as we quantify stress?

Aditi Nerurkar
There’s a question mark on heart rate variability. And when I look at a lot of the science on various wearables and different things that you can use, I’m not entirely convinced, though there’s some data that’s compelling and others. I don’t think you can use one particular biometric, like one particular thing that’s saying, “This is my stress response.”

So, I, personally, I don’t really recommend any specific wearables or biometrics, simply because all of my strategies are cost free.

Though, if you feel like you want to use heart rate variability and you have a device and you have the disposable income for the device, that’s great. But personally, I am not convinced yet to recommend that as, like, the gold standard of stress monitoring.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ve got a great turn of a phrase. What is the resilience myth?

Aditi Nerurkar
The resilience myth is that resilient people don’t get burned out. And it’s something that I personally experienced. So, my stress story and my origin story is that I was a stressed patient before I became a doctor with an expertise in stress, and I was desperate for answers and really wanted a sense of change.  And I was living the resilience myth at the time.

And so, often you will hear people say, “I can’t be burned out. I can’t be stressed. I’m resilient.” Or, you hear people say that to you, “Oh, you’re not burned out. You’re resilient. You can’t have burnout. You’re resilient,” and that is the great resilience myth because we know, based on the science, that you, in fact, can be burned out and can experience stress, and also be resilient. They are not mutually exclusive.

Resilience is your innate biological ability to adapt, to recover, and grow in the face of life’s challenges. We all have an innate biological ability to be resilient. It’s part of us. It’s who we are as humans. But the resilience myth often will say that, “Oh, you can’t be burned out and stressed and also resilient.” That has been debunked.

In fact, the reason it has been debunked is because so many of us, again, this is not an individual failing, it’s a societal one, ascribed to the notion of toxic resilience, which is a warped definition of the true definition of resilience. And it’s this idea of mind over matter mindset, productivity at all costs, all systems go all the time.

It’s the Energizer bunny mentality, just keep going.  Or, in the UK, keep calm and carry on. And that is toxic resilience. And when you hear the word resilience, if you bristle, if you have a visceral response, I do when I hear the word resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
“Just be resilient.”

Aditi Nerurkar
“Just be more resilient.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, okay. Just like that, huh?”

Aditi Nerurkar
Or, “You must not be that resilient.” You hear it all the time. The reason you have that visceral response is because what that person is describing is toxic resilience. True resilience honors your boundaries, understands your human limitations, and leans into this idea of self-compassion, also recognizing that your human need for rest and recovery is paramount.

And so, in many ways, you want to lean into this idea of true resilience and reject the performative aspect of toxic resilience. Toxic resilience is a manifestation of hustle culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think it almost feels a little bit like a fixed characteristic the way people describe it, it’s like, “Oh, she’s resilient, he’s not that resilient, you know?” And that gets me fired up because, in my own life, I have seen that my degree of resilience, which I’ll loosely define as the amount of bull crap that could be heaped on me before I freak out, really does fluctuate, and largely based on how well am I able to meet just basic needs.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, I mean, your ability to be resilient fluctuates as does everything. And giving yourself a sense of grace and self-compassion is really important. And it’s also a part of true resilience, knowing your boundaries, knowing your limitations. And if you are continually just on the go, on the move, trying to be productive, trying to achieve, we know that that has its limitations.

So, based on the data, Pete, right now, 70% of people have at least one feature of stress and burnout. Now, of course, that figure varies across industry, but anywhere from 70 to 74% of people are struggling with some, one aspect of stress or burnout.

That’s not to say they’re not resilient. People are resilient. It’s the systems that burn us out: impossible demands of parenting, the expectations of work, and not as not as many resources but lots of time and energy spent to achieve the same or more at work. I mean, we see this all the time. So many examples of toxic resilience.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to dig into that a little bit. We had Dr. Tessa West on the show, sharing some perhaps lesser-known symptoms of stress and a delayed stress response. So, if there’s anyone listening and saying, “Oh, well, I’m fine and I’m resilient, and I don’t think I have any of these burnout things,” can you share perhaps some hidden or overlooked stress symptoms that might surprise folks like, “Oh, wait, that’s stress?”

Aditi Nerurkar
Right. In fact, one particular study, you know, stress and burnout are at unprecedented rates, and particularly when it comes to burnout, Pete, we’re seeing a new picture of burnout.

In one study, 60% of people with burnout had an inability to disconnect from work as their main feature.  So, when you think about classic typical features of burnout – apathy, feeling disengaged, unmotivated – you may not have any of those and say, “I’m not burned out. I don’t have any of those.” But you may be displaying atypical features of burnout, like an inability to disconnect from work.

So, this modern-day burnout is becoming very difficult to identify in ourselves and each other. The reason so many people are experiencing burnout is because of the way the human brain is designed.

The brain is expertly designed to handle short bursts of stress. And when you are feeling a sense of stress, you know, so let’s back up. Under normal circumstances, when you are calm, let’s say back in like 2018, right, like before everything started, the onslaught of stress and the tsunami of stress began with the pandemic and now clearly in the post pandemic era.

Back in 2018, you were living in resilient mode. You were governed by an area called the prefrontal cortex, which is right here. If you put your hand on your forehead, it’s the area right behind your forehead. It governs things like memory, planning, organization, complex problem-solving, strategic thinking. It’s what most of us are masters of. It’s adulting in pop culture terms.

But during periods of stress, your brain isn’t governed by the prefrontal cortex. It’s governed by your amygdala, which is a small almond-shaped structure deep in your brain whose sole purpose is survival and self-preservation. It’s cave person mode. Now, your brain can function for short periods of time in cave person mode.

The challenge is that, over the past several years, probably since 2019, maybe 2020 to today, we are not really coming back to baseline. It’s one onslaught after the other. So we went through the pandemic, then we had a racial reckoning, then we had climate disasters, and various humanitarian crises, and lots of political upheaval.

And there’s so much stuff happening in the world and we can access it all in the palm of our hand using our phones and just one onslaught after the other. By the way, your brain, your amygdala doesn’t know the difference between something happening in your backyard or something happening 5,000 miles away. It triggers your stress response no matter what.

And so, this constant onslaught over the past several years without a return to baseline, that stress response, your flight or flight response, stays on in the background. When it stays on in the background, it increases your risk of developing burnout, and that unhealthy stress, that runaway stress, maladaptive stress is that driver of what’s causing people to feel a sense of burnout.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Thank you. You mentioned the rule of two. What is that?

Aditi Nerurkar
The rule of two is really how your brain makes change possible, Pete. So, think back to New Year’s. You may have had a list of 10 things you want to achieve for this year. And now, several months past New Year’s, you’re probably doing one or maybe zero of those, the New Year’s Resolutions, right?

The reason it’s so difficult to do everything all at once when you’re talking about making changes, even positive change, is because change is a stress on your brain. And so, you could really only manage two small changes at a time if you want those changes to stick. Anything more in your system gets overloaded.

That is why New Year’s Resolutions don’t work. That is why I said, when you gave that question or that example of, like, “Can you have too much good stress?” stress, even if it’s good, if it’s too much, it starts veering towards the negative, unhealthy kind of stress because of the rule of two.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I like that’s really handy and it feels good in terms of it’s the right number. And I don’t think I realized it until I read your book that it feels so right. What is the underlying scientific evidence that says the number is two, not six, not nine?

Aditi Nerurkar
The basis of the rule of two is in science. It is a study done ages ago in the 1960s by two psychiatrists, Doctors Holmes and Rahe. And they did a study of 47 of the most common life conditions that can happen to people, both positive and negative. So, things like falling in love, having a child, graduating, a huge personal accomplishment, all these wonderful positive things.

Equally so, testing people for divorce, bereavement, tragedy, all sorts of things like that. So, they found that, as people move through life and experienced and accrued many active events, so both positive and negative, it had a predilection for worsening stress and worse health outcomes, like a greater likelihood of chronic medical conditions.

And so, the Holmes and Rahe study is the kind of scientific basis for the rule of two. But we, in clinical medicine, have been using the rule of two forever because that is how change happens. You focus on two things at a time.

So, when you go to see your doctor, and if you have a long list of things that you want to focus on, you’ll often hear your doctor say, “Okay, let’s pick two of these that I want you to work on.” And then you work on those and you come back in three months, and then you focus on the next two. And that’s really how your brain works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. We’ve got so much goodness within your five resets and, as you said, they’re science-based, they’re free, they’re actionable, simple. Cool. Cool. So, within that, we got get clear on what matters most, find quiet in a noisy world, sync your brain and your body, come up for air, and bring your best self forward, and then 15 techniques within those.

So, we can’t cover all 15, though that’d be fun. So, I want to share a couple that stuck out to me and then hear your hot take. One was about exercise and the all-or-nothing fallacy of exercise. I thought you nailed that so well, because I’ve fallen for this. And I was even in a UFC gym recently, and I was appalled, because I was listening to you maybe at the same time.

And there’s this giant poster which says, “If you’re not willing to go all the way, you won’t go anywhere.” And I was like, “I think that is exactly the wrong mindset for exercise that has kind of been problematic for me.” Aditi, what’s your hot take here?

Aditi Nerurkar
I agree with you. So often, we have this all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to exercise. Like, either “I have to be ripped and have a six pack and eat a hundred grams of protein, and do all the things, or I should just be a couch potato and do nothing.” And we know that that’s not true. You would never have an all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to sleep, right?

Like, sleep is an intervention that we do every day for our brains and our bodies and our health. And, yeah, some nights you don’t get great sleep. Some nights you sleep really well, but you go to sleep. You’re not like, “Eh, if you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep. What’s the point anyway?” And so, we have this all-or-nothing fallacy when it comes to exercise. And it’s something that we need to really shift away from.

Because often, when it comes to stress, burnout, when it comes to your mental health, it’s not about the physical promise. That’s very aspirational. When you see those taut bellies and all those muscles. Unfortunately, our society has really bulked up, pun intended, the promise of exercise to be a physical promise. When, really, there’s the mental promise of exercise.

I’ve had so many patients who have done wonderfully with their mental health while engaging in some sort of exercise program. And the benefits are the physical aspects. Yeah, it’s a nice by-product, but that’s not why people engage in it.

And so, I wish, you know, we need a rebrand for exercise first. The dreaded E word, and I think when people hear that word, if you’re not a regular exerciser, like it’s cringe worthy. And so, movement, some form of daily movement. So, the science shows that even a five-minute walk every day could make a difference.

And the all-or-nothing fallacy states that, like, “Oh, why bother walking for five minutes? It’s going to do nothing. I’m just going to sit home and I’m not going to exercise.” No, just go out for five minutes and walk. And what will happen is, over time, you’ll want to walk for 10 minutes. Then over time, you’ll say, “Oh, you know what? I want to walk every day for 15 minutes.”

There’s something called your sense of agency, meaning, “Can you do it?” It’s like your belief in yourself that you can actually make change happen. And when you’re feeling a sense of stress and you’re burnt out, it’s like wading through molasses when you’re making a new change. And so, if you were to tell yourself, “You know what, I’m going to just go to the gym.”

You may say to yourself, “I’m going to go to the gym three days a week. Every week, three days a week, this is the class I want to do. It’s going to be an hour.” The barrier to entry to actually do that, going from a sedentary lifestyle, like most people, again, this is not a gap in knowledge or information. We all know that exercise is good for us, but so few people actually engage in regular exercise.

It’s like 25%, I think the statistic is, of those who actually engage. So, this is not about a gap in knowledge or information. It’s about a gap in action. And so, how do you close that gap from where you are to where you want to be? Instead of telling yourself, “I’m going to go to the gym three days a week for an hour,” when you’re a non-exerciser, instead say to yourself, “I’m going to walk for five minutes a day.”

When you’re starting a new habit, it’s more important to do something every day rather than once in a while because you avoid decision fatigue. There was a time that I was a non-exerciser and I had lots of lofty dreams and goals of going to the gym, but then work took over, so I didn’t go that day.

Next day there’s a childcare conflict, you can’t make it. The next day, something happens, there’s an emergency. So, by the end of the week, you’ve gone maybe one time, possibly zero times. Then you feel like a failure. Instead, set the bar low and just say, “I’m going to walk every day for five minutes.” And then once you do that, you are essentially creating a habit. You’re rewiring your brain and you’re creating a habit for movement, for daily movement.

Over time, what happens, when you create a daily habit, is that you feel like, “Oh, I want to do it again tomorrow. I did five minutes. That felt good.” You remember the reward. You remember the mental benefits. You feel them. And so, you want to go again. And then you want to go again. And, over time, you start building daily movement into your life.

And then, once you are like, “Yeah, I created a habit of movement using the rule of two,” then you can start going to the gym and get that six pack that you’ve been looking for.

But often, we are lured by the physical benefits of exercise because we don’t see the mental benefits of exercise, right? Like, it’s normal. Of course, we’re all going to be lured by the physical promise of what exercise can do. But there is so much good data that shows that the mental promise of what daily physical activity can do, because your brain is a muscle just like your biceps, and what’s good for your body is good for your brain.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And you were sharing research that even one or two minutes of moving is helpful on those dimensions.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yes, it’s called ultrashort bursts of exercise. So, if you’re going to go for a walk, just think about what it would feel like to catch a bus. When you’re late for something, you’re trying to catch the bus, how quickly you walk. Yeah, studies show that even just ultrashort bursts of exercise can have a profound effect on your body, on lots of organ systems, decrease your risk of chronic disease, like cancer and stroke and heart disease and diabetes, all sorts of things.

So, a little bit of movement is better than no movement at all. And bringing that into your everyday can make, truly make all the difference for your brain and your body when it comes to stress, burnout, and also the physical benefits of doing that. By the way, there are studies that show that you don’t even have to lose any weight to feel, for exercise to benefit you, for your heart, your lungs, your brain, all these vital organs.

Pete Mockaitis
And sleep apnea, I’ve read those studies. Exercise with no weight change still improves sleep apnea scores.

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, it improves so many things. And so, I think so many of us, and I’m guilty of this as well, like standing on the scale, and you’re exercising every day, and you’re doing all the right things, and you’re like, “How come this, how come that, you know, the scale isn’t budging?” or, “How come I don’t have a six pack yet?”

There are so many invisible benefits to daily movement. Just keep going. Those benefits and those things will come, but you just have to keep going because you’re doing this for your body, for your brain, for your vital organs.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And even if all you’re moving is a pen on a journal, how’s that for segue, Aditi?

Aditi Nerurkar
Beautiful.

Pete Mockaitis
You say there’s some excellent science associated with gratitude and expressive writing practices. Can you share just what are the benefits of doing this and how do I do it?

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, so I love that segue, and so there’s the gratitude practice is very simple. This is not your teenagers’ journal. All it means is that you take a piece of paper, a notebook, and a pen, keep it by your bedside, and at night or first thing in morning, write down five things you’re grateful for and why.

You can put a date on it. This is like 60 seconds, 90 seconds of an exercise. And you want to do this every day. The studies have demonstrated benefits for mood, anxiety, depression, all sorts of things, when you practice daily gratitude. The reason you want to write it down, so one of the first questions I’m asked is like, “Can you type it? Can I just type in my note section?” There’s lots of apps also, right, for gratitude.

Whatever works for you, you do. But based on the science, the reason you want to write versus type is because your brain uses a different neural circuitry when you write than when you type. Like, when you go to the grocery store, and you write all the things that you need on a Post-it but you lose the Post-it, you’re more inclined to remember what was on the list versus when you’re typing something, it’s harder to remember just a different neural circuitry, different way your brain is wired.

And so, try to write down five things you’re grateful for every day. Some days you’ll think of three things. Some days you’ll have 10 things, but just keep writing down five things. If you’re feeling a sense of deep stress and burnout, you may say like, “I don’t really have much to be grateful for.” Well, do you have two arms and two legs? Can you breathe? Is your heart beating? Do you have food in the pantry? Do you have a roof over your head?

These may seem like basic to you but, in fact, there are many people who can’t say this, right? And so, being able to be grateful for things can actually change your brain for less stress through a process called cognitive retraining. It means that same amount of good and bad is happening to you at all times, but when you’re feeling a sense of stress, you start focusing on the negative experiences because when you’re feeling a sense of stress, the amygdala is acting up, the cave person mode, you’re scanning for danger, you’re wondering, “Am I safe? Is everything okay?” It’s self-preservation.

And so, these negative experiences, you’re more primed to notice them and you forget about the positives. And so, when you practice gratitude again and again, through this forum of five things every day and why, what you’re doing is you’re rewiring your brain. You’re training your brain to start focusing on the positive things, and it’s called cognitive retraining. So, you’re shifting that attention away from the negative back to the positive. And that, of course, has an effect on your amygdala, has an effect on your stress response. So that’s gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
And if I may, so if this sort of practice is rewiring our brain in the gratitude direction, can we do the same thing for other emotional states? Like, gratitude practice sounds lofty. It’s, like, what if I wanted a hilarity practice? I’m going to write the most hilarious things that occur today. And in so doing, can I rewire my brain to find the humor in more stuff?

Aditi Nerurkar
Oh, I love that. I don’t know about the research to find humor and what that, you know, I’m sure that that releases all sorts of feel-good chemicals in the brain. We need a study on that. And there might be a study that I’m not aware of, but I love that, to find more humor in life and a sense of levity. We know that that’s so important, you know, a sense of joy and levity.

And so, if you were to write down five funny things that happen to you every day and find the humor in it, that sounds like a great practice. I’m going to try that. I like that. I’m going to look up whether there’s science behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So, we don’t know if it’s been studied, but it would, is it fair to say from your professional opinion in neuroscience, like that seems like the kind of thing that might probably work perhaps.

Aditi Nerurkar
Well, I think it could potentially improve your well-being because laughter, levity, finding joy, that sense of lightheartedness, can be helpful in promoting well-being. And that we know based on the science, but I like this, you know, combining this hilarity practice is absolutely adorable, and I will get right on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate it. The service here is wonderful. Okay, so then expressive writing, what’s that?

Aditi Nerurkar
Expressive writing is a technique coined by a psychologist named James Pennebaker at Vanderbilt, I believe. And so, if there’s something that’s bothering you.

So, if there’s like an event that’s happened in the past or an emotional event that’s currently happening, and you’re trying to work it out and it’s causing you a lot of stress and burnout, it works well for a discrete event or a discrete emotional state, like you’re angry about something, or you’re frustrated, or something’s happening, or you feel like someone wronged you, or there’s some actual thing. And if it’s intangible and you can’t pinpoint it, that’s okay, too.

You want to spend 20 to 25 minutes free-handwriting, again, writing, pen and paper, and you want to set a timer for 20 to 25 minutes and you want to write, and you want to do that for four consecutive days, 20 to 25 minutes. What happens is, on day three, you might notice an uptick in some negative emotions, and then by day four, you kind of work it out.

So, this has been studied, this technique called expressive writing, therapeutic writing, has been studied in countless populations. So, it’s been studied with college students and people who engage in expressive writing have demonstrated a higher GPA. It’s been studied in patients, and there’s been decreased readmission rates at the hospital.

There’s been data on expressive writing being helpful for anxiety and for depression, stress, burnout, bereavement, grief. I mean, the list of studies that have looked into expressive writing for various groups, it is so vast. And so, this is a really great technique to use for yourself when you’re going through something and you’re trying to work it out. And I use it all the time.

When I’m going through a difficult experience or some things going on that I’m trying to, that I have, it has to be something that’s emotionally charged. That’s when it works well. Like, when there’s a lot of emotions around something. And then the other thing to remember, when you do expressive writing is, you write on a piece of paper and then you throw it out. It’s not for anyone else to read.

It’s just you’re getting it out. You’re getting your thoughts out. It’s freehand, 20 to 25 minutes, consecutively for four days. And then you stop.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s as wild as 20 to 25 minutes consecutively for four days. And yet, as I peeked at some of these human random control trials, the impact for just that, like 100 minutes max, was substantial and lasting in follow-ups occurring weeks later.

Aditi Nerurkar
Isn’t it wild? And in some studies, months later? It’s unbelievable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you share with us, what are a prompt or two if folks are like, “Wow, that’s awesome. I want to do that now”? Like, what is the prompt that I should have in mind as I put pen to paper?

Aditi Nerurkar
Think of a particular idea or think about a particular event or a person or something where you feel emotional about, and this is a negative emotion. So, what are you feeling angry about? Who are you feeling angry about? Do you feel like someone wronged you? Do you feel like there was an experience that was traumatic in some capacity or someone causing you a sense of trauma?

Or, it might not even be directly something that happened to you, but we’re in a very charged climate in the state of the world right now. And so, is there something happening in the world that is really bothering you?

So, whatever it may be, sit down, set a timer, 20 to 25 minutes, and just write freehand. And then you rip it up. This is just for you, uninterrupted time, and then you do it for four consecutive days.

And what happens by the end, and I’ve done these many times, for lots of things, personal issues, professional issues. And then it, like, just, I don’t know, the charge that like negative charge and those emotions, it’s just like the volume just comes down, and you work it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Do we think the ripping up is an essential step in terms of the cathartic action or just for giving us license to really go wild? Or, we don’t know?

Aditi Nerurkar
Yeah, I don’t really know. I think the reason I say to rip it up is because ripping something up and throwing it away, it will help you become as true and authentic as you can during the act of writing. So, if you’re writing something, and you’re thinking, “Oh, my God, is anyone going to read this?” or, “I hope no one reads this,” that just makes you more inhibited in your writing.

And what you’re really trying to do is like, you want the writing to feel cathartic. You want to get out your deepest emotions and thoughts and feelings. You might not even know what they are right now. Chances are you don’t. And when you’re doing this practice, it just starts flowing out of you. You don’t even know where it’s coming from. And that’s the point.

And so, the reason you rip it up is simply because you want to be free in that 20 to 25 minutes. And you don’t want to think about like, “Who’s going to read it? And what is it going to mean?” Some people want to save the papers, they’re like, “I want to keep this and I want to know what I went through.” You can, if you wish, and if you feel safe, like psychologically safe, and you want to keep it, but chances are you’ll look back on it, and it really won’t make any sense.

It’s stream of consciousness, so you’re not necessarily like writing an essay. You are freehand writing, thoughts and emotions, expressions, and you’re just writing. You can write sentences. You cannot write sentences. But it’s not about what happens afterwards in terms of like what happens with the tangible paper. The important piece is the actual writing and getting all of that stuff out. It’s excavating all of those emotions, feelings, and thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Aditi, thank you.

Aditi Nerurkar
It was such a pleasure to join you, truly.

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.