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KF #10. Courage Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Jul 11
0

977: What Makes Leaders Bad—and What You Can Do About It–with Dr. Barbara Kellerman

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Dr. Barbara Kellerman explores the roots of bad leadership and offers strategic tips for challenging it.

You’ll Learn

  1. Where leadership training falls short 
  2. The two core components of “bad” leadership 
  3. Four tips for standing up to bad leaders 

About Barbara

Barbara Kellerman was Founding Executive Director of the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School; the Kennedy’s School’s James MacGregor Burns Lecturer in Leadership; and a member of the Harvard faculty for over twenty years. She is currently a Fellow at the Center. 

Kellerman received her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. (in Political Science) degrees from Yale University. She was awarded a Danforth Fellowship and three Fulbright fellowships. Kellerman was cofounder of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and is author and editor of many books. She’s appeared on numerous media outlets and has contributed to the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, and the Harvard Business Review.  

She received the Wilbur M. McFeeley Award from the National Management Association for her pioneering work on leadership and followership, as well as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Leadership Association. From 2015 to 2024 she has been ranked by Global Gurus as among the “World’s Top 30 Management Professionals.” 

Resources Mentioned

Barbara Kellerman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, welcome.

Barbara Kellerman
Well, thank you, Pete. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for asking me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom, and I thought it’d be great if you could maybe kick us off with hearing a tale of maybe the most wild case of bad leadership you have witnessed or heard about through your work and research in the workplace.

Barbara Kellerman
Well, Pete, if you know my work, it goes back on bad leadership, in particular, to a book I wrote or an essay. At first there was an essay I wrote called “Hitler’s Ghost: A Manifesto,” which was me arguing that, what I call the leadership industry, which is my field, all kinds of experts on leadership, whether in corporate leadership or political leadership, mainly corporate leadership, that my colleagues in the leadership industry were not paying any attention to what I call the dark side of leadership, the painful side of leadership, the egregious side of leadership.

But in the book that grew out of that, which came out about 20 years ago, which is called Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, I developed seven different types of bad leadership. Those types of bad leadership are important because they range from the ineffectual, all the way, in awfulness, to evil.

So, it really depends on which type of bad leadership are we talking about. Obviously, if we’re talking about evil leadership, which I define as someone who inflicts pain, literally physical or psychological pain, on his or her followers, that’s obviously a different case in point as somebody who is, dare I say, simply ineffectual.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so I guess I’m interested in terms of, let’s go with evil, in terms of in the workplace, you say, “Whoa, so you think your boss is bad, check it. This is what full-blown bad looks like.”

Barbara Kellerman
So, I would say that the word evil as I define it, and again I developed and identified the types in the book, it very rarely applies to the workplace because it implies a kind of malevolent intent, which I don’t think we find that often in the workplace. In the workplace, I talk more about something called callous leadership, leaders who are thoughtless, mean, or unkind, not thinking carefully about the other, or leaders who are explosive, who lose their tempers too quickly.

Alas, it’s one of the mysteries of the human condition to me because it would seem to me that it would be in the interest of most leaders and managers to keep those who report to them relatively happy as opposed to unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve often wondered, that’s one of my top mysteries of humanity, it’s like even if you are purely self-interested, and truly care not a wit, about your fellow human being, you’re still better off not being a jerk. You adjust, you get farther, you achieve more of your ends if people can tolerate you and, generally, are fine interacting with you.

Barbara Kellerman
I completely agree with you, Pete, but I would say it especially applies to, let’s say, the United States of America in the third decade of the 21st century, when the issue of talent retention, holding on to people that you think are really important to your enterprise, to your mission, to your purpose, that becomes really top of your list of priorities.

So, it is often in one’s self-interest, apart from the graciousness of being decent as opposed to indecent to other people, it is in one’s, as you imply, in one’s self-interest, in the corporate interest, and almost always in the interest of the task that needs to be accomplished to keep people, if not wildly happy, at least from being miserably unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
That checks out. So, with all that said, can you lay it on us, a tale that was particularly shocking in terms of bad leadership at work?

Barbara Kellerman
I think I’m going to take a slightly different example, a man, because he’s so extremely well-known since, even since, though he’s now dead, a man by the name of Jack Welch.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Barbara Kellerman
Who, of course, was one of the legendary corporate leaders of all time, the company, which many of your listeners will know, is General Electric, and it’s an example, I would not exactly call him a bad leader, particularly a prototype of somebody who’s awful, but he was known, very well known, and much admired for being lean and mean. And that, of course, meant letting a lot of people go.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember the nickname Neutron Jack. He would evaporate, make the people disappear, but keep the buildings and equipment.

Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. But I will tell you why I, in particular, think that history has proven him not to be a particularly good leader, even setting aside the point that we’re just making. So, Jack Welch was on the cutting edge of what I referred to earlier as the leadership industry. And you probably know this, Pete, that GE, again, was on the cutting edge of corporate training. They had a campus in Crotonville, New York, and it was well known, again, at the forefront of the leadership industry.

The irony of that, though, and it addresses what I am known for, I dare say, for better and worse, which is a kind of skepticism, if not even cynicism, about the leadership industry, which professes to teach people how to lead wisely and well, and I’m not sure we have an enormous amount of evidence for that. But setting that aside for the moment, the Crotonville campus was an example of something that didn’t work.

Because, as I hardly have to tell you that in recent decades, now it’s somewhat recovered under CEO Larry Culp, but for decades General Electric went from being the icon of American industry to being one of the fall guys of American industry, and Jack Welch’s successor failed absolutely to not only help the company thrive, but he succeeded in plunging it straight downhill.

Pete Mockaitis
And there, what do you believe are some of the particular behaviors that were so destructive and may have led to GE’s demise?

Barbara Kellerman
I don’t know that I would use that language, Pete, that it was particular behaviors, I think it was just a kind of hubris that assumed that, “You know, the way I teach leadership, it’s guaranteed to succeed.” As I suggested a moment ago, we have not a great deal of evidence that the way leadership is taught, whether within organizations, whether within business schools, schools of public administration, our criteria for measurement are rather meager.

We’re dealing here with human beings, not widgets, so it’s hard to measure the success of a leadership program, a leadership course, a leadership institute. And I would say that hubris was the main problem with Jack Welch and his legendary leadership training efforts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, then could you maybe give us some examples of how hubris translates into some of the things they did and said that were problematic?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, again, I want to be careful to distinguish between being bad, or to use the word you just used, “problematic” and not being good enough. In other words, I’m not saying that what was done at Crotonville was bad. I’m saying that the successes that were touted were in scant evidence and are in scant evidence.

And I’ve taught many leadership courses, although I don’t tell people I teach how to lead, I tell them I teach about leadership, which is actually two different things, that when somebody takes a leadership course, whether mine or anybody else’s, and then they’re questioned at the end, or there was a kind of review, “What did you learn? How was it?” typically, the answer is, “This was a great course. I learned so much. It’s amazing. I’m a different person.”

But, in fact, in the real world, we don’t really have brilliantly successful ways of assessing the long-term impact of what most leadership courses, programs, centers, institutes, etc. actually accomplish. So, it’s a quick and easy sell, “Buy my book and you too can learn how to lead,” “Take my course and you too can learn how to lead better than you’re leading now,” “Follow my seven easy steps and you too can succeed,” I would argue that’s not as brilliant to sell and brilliant to buy as people generally like to believe.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then I’m curious, from your perspective, having looked at a lot of things and having a lot of skepticism for a lot of promises, have you seen any bright spots and what makes them bright?

Barbara Kellerman
In a book I wrote called Professionalizing Leadership I argued that leadership learning should, much, much more strongly than it currently does, resemble learning how to be a physician, learning how to be a lawyer, learning how to be a teacher, learning how to be an engineer.

In other words, I argue that we need to take it more seriously, that we need to think more like some of the sages from the past, whether it’s Plato or Confucius or Machiavelli, which is it takes a long time, if not a lifetime, to learn how to lead.

And if you’re going to, again, emulate what the professions do, becoming a doctor, becoming a lawyer, you will realize that what I break down into a three-step process. First, it should be, in my view, leadership education, which is developing an intellectual understanding of what leadership and followership entail. Just like in medical school, one of the first courses that you take is anatomy. They’re not going to let you slice into a human body until you have learned, been educated about the anatomy of the human body.

So, it is with leadership. I believe first step should be leadership education. Second step should be what I call leadership training, which is where you develop the skills required to lead in your particular context. By the way, I’m going to deviate again because I want to stop at context. So, I can be a great leader in one situation but a lousy leader in another. So, I always talk about the importance of context, which is something we can return to if you like, but I’ll go back for a minute just to the three-step process of what I call professionalizing leadership.

Step one, leadership education. Step two, leadership training, learning the skills and talents that are required for your particular job or task in your particular organization, or situation, or circumstance. And step three is what I call leadership development, which is like adult development, which means, again, lifelong learning. You cannot get an MD in 2024 and presume that that medical degree, no matter how great the medical school, will stand you in good stead five, 10, not to speak of 15 and 20 years hence.

If you’re a physician or you’re a lawyer, you must take continuing education courses. You must take courses that keep bringing you up to date on what good medicine and good science entails. And so, it should be with leadership. There is no reason to assume that if I take a leadership course or a leadership training or a leadership program in 2024, there will be nothing new to learn in 2029, not to speak of 2034.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then digging into your book, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers tell me, any particularly striking or surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you made here?

Barbara Kellerman
I would say they’re all surprising and counterintuitive, which is to say that our tendency, and this is the human condition, again, we’re not talking here widgets, we’re talking about human beings, which complicates the situation infinitely. The surprising thing is how passive we are when we have a bad leader or manager.

Now, again, let me go back, because on one level it is not surprising. Sometimes it is costly and sometimes it is risky to take on a superior, let’s say we’re talking in the workplace, to take on a manager or a leader, or whatever language we want to use, and it’s much easier for us to simply, even though we may dislike it or even become stressed out about it, which is not uncommon in the workplace, as I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, sometimes we just decide to put up with it, that it’s easier to put up with it than to try to figure out how to take it on.

The problem with that, as the title “Leadership from Bad to Worse” implies, unless we take on bad leadership, again, however defined, many different ways, relatively early in the process, it’s almost certain to get worse. In other words, bad leaders, probably like bad people more generally, don’t wake up one fine morning and say, “Golly gee, I’ve been bad. I’ve been not nice to my subordinates. I really ought to be a nicer boss. I ought to pay more attention to their well-being. I ought to care more about how they feel on the job. Silly me, I’ve not been behaving very well.”

What that means is that the only way then to get these people to change is in some way to intrude on, interrupt the process. Sometimes that’s an exogenous force, something that happens from the outside. But more often than not, it is unfortunately the subordinates that need to take on the issue and need to think through, “If there’s going to be any change for the positive, how can this be done, tactically and strategically, in a way where I don’t end up cutting my own head off, that is cutting off my nose to spite my face?”

So, I would say the issue of the reluctance to look at bad leadership and try to figure out how to stop it from getting worse, that to me is on one level surprising. Although, again, I hasten to add, on another level, really quite understandable.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Barbara, this is fascinating. So many things are sparking up for me here in my brain. One is the movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” in which he sings the song, “Someone should do something.” You know, it’s that passive sense. It’s like, “I don’t like this. It’s very uncomfortable. It’s risky. I hope something changes.” But often, to your point, it just doesn’t.

I’m thinking, you might get a kick out of this example. We had a senior executive at a, I don’t want to name names here, at a major organization that teaches leadership, Barbara. And there was another…

Barbara Kellerman
We’re going to move on, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
…senior executive who, I guess, went through a startling number of assistants, maybe six, very quickly. And they were getting the recruiters, the headhunters fired up to hire a seventh. And then before they did so, it was a peer, a fellow executive said, “Hey, you know, I’ve noticed, and I want…” And so, he sort of demonstrated how to give this feedback well.

It’s like, “Hey, I want you to understand my intention is only to serve you and to help you out here. I’ve noticed that six people have left, and there’s been a lot of sort of comments or themes associated how your behavior has been perceived as pretty disrespectful and demeaning.” And so, boom, there it is. And sure enough, like, that’s hard to say, and nobody did.

Barbara Kellerman
And you’re talking about peer-to-peer.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, exactly.

Barbara Kellerman
You’re not even talking about subordinates to superior.

Pete Mockaitis
It was peer-to-peer, but that’s what it took. It took someone to sort of shake them up, to provoke the status quo, and sure enough it worked. At first, he was very upset, but then he took the feedback to heart and said, “Okay, I guess I can kind of see your perspective, and I guess I will behave differently.” And they had a good outcome, so that’s really cool.

So, yes, it does take something, and I think often, if there’s not a brave someone somewhere, it will just continue. What’s that famous quote? “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for the good people to do nothing,” Edmund Burke.

Barbara Kellerman
Yeah, that is a famous quote and it’s very much what I believe to be true, although I’m always very careful, Pete, as I suggested a minute ago, to not blame the, you know, I don’t want to blame the victim, I don’t want to blame the subordinate, because often people need and want to hold on to their jobs. Often people are really quite scared of doing that. It is, of course, as your example suggested, easier if it’s a peer as opposed to a subordinate.

But in the book, Leadership from Bad to Worse, I have examples of exactly that, including in the corporate sector, how, unless it is stopped, it almost does get worse. And one other comment on that is it’s much easier to stop it early in the process. When you start noticing somebody is not behaving well, however we want to define that, it is easier to say something, to do something earlier on.

The longer bad is able to take root, rather like a plant, the deeper those roots go and the harder it becomes to uproot them. So, without taking the plant analogy too far, I think you get the point that the longer this goes on, and the more entrenched everybody becomes, the more difficult and, indeed, sometimes often painful it is to upend what’s going wrong, to change it.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And it just makes the conversation itself harder, like, “How long has this been going on? Why didn’t you say anything earlier?” That’s tricky.

Barbara Kellerman
Exactly. By the way, if I can add one other thing here, Pete. I mentioned in passing earlier that my interest in leadership is matched every bit by my interest in followership. So, what do I mean when I use the word follower? As you may know, if you’re in the leadership field, and your listeners will know who are familiar with the leadership literature, that’s a kind of loaded word, follower, because it presumes among other things that followers always follow, which is not actually how I define the word.

Followers, most of us, by the way, generally follow. We are socialized to follow. We’re rewarded by our parents, by our teachers, by our bosses, if we’re good followers, meaning relatively obedient most of the time, again at home, in school, in the workplace. If we disobey too much of the time, that’s not good. But in order to understand the leadership dynamic, the dynamics of power, and the dynamics of authority, and the dynamics of influence, it is impossible to understand them if you focus only on one half of the dyad.

You cannot have a leader without at least one follower, and I have argued now strenuously for several decades that, therefore, the understanding of what happens, let’s say, in the workplace, it is impossible to get it by looking only at the person or persons at or near the top of the hierarchy. It is important, equally important, to understand why everybody else in the workplace is behaving the way they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that makes sense. You mentioned tactically, strategically responding. I definitely want to spend some time on that. But first maybe you could clue us into what are some of the telltale signs we should look out for? Like, what’s truly bad versus something I just kind of don’t like and doesn’t jive with my personal preferences?

Barbara Kellerman
So, the word bad, Pete, is inordinately interesting. So, it’s childlike, right? “You’re being bad,” says a parent to a four-year-old. Conversely, “Oh, what a good little boy,” or, “What a good little girl.” So, when I wrote the book “Bad Leadership,” I wrestled with that, “How do I define bad? What does that mean to be bad? Is there a better word in the English language than bad?”

You earlier used the word, for example, toxic. Well, not all bad leadership is toxic. There’s a lot of bad leadership. Toxic, of course, means poisonous. There’s a lot of bad leadership that is not poisonous. It’s just bad. But it’s not so bad that it is toxic. And I was interested, and I remain interested, in what I call the universe of bad leadership, all kinds of bad. A little bit bad, a lot bad, evil bad, as I said earlier, but not so bad too.

So, I not only developed the seven different types of bad leadership, to which I referred earlier, but I also defined bad, or bad to good, if you will, along two axes. And these axes have stood, dare I say, the test of time. There are two of them. You can think of them as intersecting if you want. So, one axis is from effective leadership, which is, needless to say, good leadership, to ineffective leadership, which is, needless to say, bad leadership. It’s better to be effective than it is to be ineffective.

The other axis, again, very simple, but simple is good when we’re talking about such complicated subjects. The other axis, the second axis, is not effective to ineffective, it is ethical to unethical. So, a leader is presumably better if he or she is ethical than if he or she is unethical. Now, to go to your question, since I’ve defined these as two different axes, one is ethical to unethical, the other one is effective to ineffective, you can even understand intuitively that one can be along a continuum.

So, sometimes, really very ethical, but sometimes, and this is again the human condition, not uncommon. For example, lying. We, generally, think that lying isn’t so great, but lying, we have a higher tolerance for lying now than we did, and most leaders lie a little bit. Some leaders lie a lot, and people don’t seem to mind necessarily. But that’s what I mean about two core components of being bad, being good. One, again, ethical to unethical, the other, again, effective to ineffective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, so then, in a way, that can surface things pretty clearly, like, “Oh, this guy who’s really a jerk and screams and pounds his fists a lot, he’s kind of getting some results in terms of folks hop to and do what he says, and do what he says quickly, and work long hours, and make stuff happen.” So, in a way, that’s effective, at least short term, but it doesn’t feel ethical in terms of dignity and respect and kindness and the golden rule sorts of things.

And so, that’s kind of handy. It’s like, “are we generating results, effective and ineffective? And does this seem to violate the world’s wisdom traditions about the dignity of the human person and treating others the way you want to be treated?” that’s more on the ethical, unethical side of things.

Barbara Kellerman
I cannot support your point enough, Pete. Muddling those two criteria for being bad or good is a big mistake for just the reason that you say. It is really possible. I mean, lots of people didn’t like working for Steve Jobs. He wasn’t adorable. He wasn’t always nice to people who worked for him, but he was, as you say, incredibly effective, brilliantly effective, a genius at being effective as a leader.

By the way, this lesson was taught to me very early in my career as a so-called expert in leadership. When I was giving a talk, I was still a young scholar, and I said something about Hitler being a bad leader, which I thought was self-evident. But I remember to this day, somebody standing up in the audience and objecting to what I said for exactly the reason that you just said.

That person pointed out, and I’ve learned my lesson since then, that, again, I’m not assuming your audience are not experts on German history, but the truth about Adolf Hitler is that between 1933, when he first came to power, and 1939, when the Nazis marched into Poland, he was a brilliantly effective leader.

He was an extremely good leader between ’33 and ’39, if you define good, again to the point that you just made, Pete. If you define good as being effective, he was a good leader between 1933 and 1939. Not ethical, but very, very effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s a handy framework we got there in terms of “What kind of bad am I looking at?” And so, let’s say, we see on either side, “Yup, we got an ineffective leader here,” or, “Yup, we have an unethical leader here,” what are some of the strategic or tactical steps we should take if we find ourselves in that position?

Barbara Kellerman
So, one of the reasons I’m interested in followership is because of what in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a phrase particularly associated with the women’s movement, was called consciousness-raising. Raising our consciousness about the possibilities, in this case, of action. So those of us who are employees, or subordinates, or ordinary people working in a group or large organization, whatever it may be, tend not to be aware of the possibilities that we might actually be able to act in an effective way, be agents of action.

So, if you talk about strategy, it’s one of the reasons I’m so big on followership. It’s one of the reasons I would wish in a perfect world that good followership, how to be a good follower, would be taught every bit as much as how to be a good leader, because ordinary people need to understand their own agency. If we don’t get the fact that we may not have power and we may not have authority, and, by the way, I distinguish, as some of your audience may have picked up, I distinguish among power is one resource, authority is another resource, influence is the third. So, I distinguish among power, authority, and influence.

So ordinary people, that is, workers in a large organization or even in a smaller group, subordinates, whatever you want to call them, may not overtly have much power or overtly have much authority, but that doesn’t mean that they need to think, or that we need to think of ourselves as being without agency. So, consciousness raising about the power, you can call it follower power if you want, that, to me, is step one.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, once we have that awareness, what are some of the best possible moves?

Barbara Kellerman
Well, I’m always leery of putting people in bad situations. Whistleblowing, for example, has rather a romantic note to it, “Oh, my God, so-and-so’s a whistleblower. How great is that? They opened a can of worms at work and it deserved to be opened. Thank goodness somebody had the courage to do that.” In fact, in real life, it’s quite dangerous to be a whistleblower.

There are books on, if you’re going to be a whistleblower, you want to be a whistleblower, you better know the law. You better be sure of the financial resources you have because your agent, your organization, your company might sue you. So be careful. So, step one is to be careful. Step two is, in general, do not act alone if you can possibly help it. Step three is to start at the lowest level of action.

So, to use an example that you used a few moments ago, you said one peer came up to another peer, one boss to another boss, one manager to another manager, and said, “You know, you’ve lost six assistants in the last whatever,” let’s say it’s 12 months. “You might want to take a look at how your assistants are feeling, about being your assistants, about your attitudes and behaviors toward them.”

So again, “How do I do this at the lowest level?” which would be presumably a simple conversation, possibly between the subordinate and the superior, friendly, cordial, trying to raise issues that have perhaps nobody’s raised before, or to do it in a way that the superior can actually hear. Step four, five, and six is, at certain points you have a choice. Are you willing to risk your position, possibly even your job, assess your costs and your benefits. Don’t be dumb, even if you want to upend bad, however defined. Be careful, be aware of your own self-interest. Do you really need the job? Or is your talent sought elsewhere? And are you willing to lose your job over your intervention or over your action?

If you are not, you better assess your risks. You better be careful. But again, if at all possible, do not act alone. Get allies and consider tactically what your various venues are for possibly saying something and doing something. And that could include everything from several of you going to the person who is not acting the way you wish, to going around the person, possibly to a peer, possibly to a superior. So, there are all kinds of ways of doing it, but I never, ever want to make it sound simple, and I never, ever want to put people at risk professionally if, in fact, they can’t afford, literally or figuratively, to be at risk.

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

Barbara Kellerman
Well, I guess the last thing I’ll say, Pete, is that although our conversation has focused on the workplace, the work I do, I think of it as trans-sectoral. It applies as much to the public sector as to the private sector. It applies as much to Western Europe as it does to the United States. And, in fact, what’s interesting about our field, if I can assume you’re in my camp of being interested in these issues of leadership, is that for all the differences between, let’s say, Americans and Argentinians, or Americans even and Canadians, there are profound similarities in the human condition.

In the end, we’re all human beings. We all relate to power and authority and influence in similar ways, and that’s worth bearing in mind as we focus on the differences among us. It is, in this field, perhaps the similarities that are the most striking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Barbara Kellerman
One of the courses I taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and it’s arguably my favorite, is a course called Leadership Literacy. So, there is a great literature on leadership where people have thought about these issues since time immemorial. I earlier mentioned the names of Confucius and Plato, but if you simply go to some of our own, and by that, I mean American founding documents, such as the Federalist Papers.

Men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison. These men thought long and hard about the issues that you and I are surfacing. So, one could do worse than to go back to some of the classics of what I call the great leadership literature, of which I’ve just given you a small sample.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear yourself quoted back to you often?

Barbara Kellerman
I hear that people are happy to have me surface subjects such as bad and follower. Those are the ways, as I said earlier, that I distinguish myself most from my colleagues, and people are relieved to hear a discussion, an honest discussion, of how to tackle bad, again, however bad is defined. People are relieved, eager to hear about their own possibilities for exercising influence even in large organizations.

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

Barbara Kellerman
I’m available on email. I have a website and I am, by the way, a regular blogger. I’m also on LinkedIn, so happy to connect to members of your audience. And I can be found easily, if somebody looks hard enough, and I have many, many books on leadership and followership. They’re mostly available, of course, on Amazon. So, if people are more interested, I’m sure they can find both me and my work.

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

Barbara Kellerman
Become aware of your own potential influence on the people and on the situation within which you find yourself. And becoming contextually conscious, conscious of your own role, it is amazing. It is amazing how that empowers people to act.

Pete Mockaitis
Barbara, thank you. I wish you many pleasant encounters with good leaders.

Barbara Kellerman
Or effective ones with bad leaders, right? Either one or the other. Thanks very much, Pete. Good to talk to you.

Jul 08
0

976: How (and When) to Freely Speak Your Mind with Elaine Lin Hering

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Elaine Lin Hering discusses why to stop censoring yourself at work—and how to strategically do that.

You’ll Learn

  1. The massive costs of keeping quiet
  2. The fundamental question that helps you speak up wisely 
  3. The subtle ways we silence others—and how to stop 

About Elaine

Elaine Lin Hering works with organizations and individuals to build skills in communication, collaboration, and conflict management. She has worked on six continents and facilitated executive education at Harvard, Dartmouth, Tufts, UC Berkeley, and UCLA. She is the former Advanced Training Director for the Harvard Mediation Program and lecturer at Harvard Law School. She is the author of the USA Today Bestselling book Unlearning Silence: How to Speak Your Mind, Unleash Talent, and Live More Fully. 

Resources Mentioned

Elaine Lin Hering Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Elaine, welcome.

Elaine Lin Hering
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad that you’re breaking the silence here on How to be Awesome at Your Job. I’m excited to dig into this wisdom.

Elaine Lin Hering
We have all the secrets ready to go.

Pete Mockaitis
All of them.

Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, no, let me rewind. Some of them, let’s reset expectations accordingly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Some of the secrets. Well, how about you kick us off with one of the secrets, a particularly surprising or counterintuitive or extra fascinating discovery you’ve made while putting together Unlearning Silence.

Elaine Lin Hering
Well, I think that Unlearning Silence actually is the discovery because so often, at work, the advice given us, and that maybe we’ve given to other people, is just speak up.

Pete Mockaitis
Just.

Elaine Lin Hering
Speak up. Just speak up. Speak up more clearly. You need more courage. You need more confidence. You need to be more direct. You need to be less direct. You need to smile more. You need to smile less. The list goes on. And I gave out that advice as someone in leadership development for more than a decade, where I received it.

And I found it wholly unsatisfying, because “Just speak up fails” to consider all the reasons that we don’t speak up, that continue on, things that we’ve learned, which I term the silence we’ve learned, and the ways that other people continue to silence us. So, to me, the insight is, instead of telling people just speak up, we actually need to solve for silence on our teams and in our orgs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds important. Elaine, could you unpack exactly how important and why? Like, what’s really at stake here if we masterfully unlearn silence?

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, if you haven’t come across it already, Google a Time Magazine article on how self-silencing is killing us, it’s focused on women, but basically health is at stake, lives are at stake, which sounds really radical and like too far out there. But if we are not getting our needs met in basic respect, in being able to communicate the things that we think are important, or the insights we have, there’s the value proposition from a work perspective, like less employee engagement, like quiet quitting.

But it also, the messages we internalize about the parts of ourselves that we need to censor, or that we need to leave at home when we go to work, really leads to loneliness and social isolation, as well as internalized messages of self-doubt. So, this whole conversation about imposter syndrome, the “Go fix yourself” is some version of imposter syndrome. And, to me, we’re asking the wrong question.

So, silence is when we’ve learned where and when it is welcome for us to share what we really think, which parts of us are allowed or acceptable, appreciated at work or not, and therefore what parts of ourselves we need to leave out of the equation. And what’s tricky is so many managers at the same time are saying, “Tell me what you really think. We need new innovative ideas.” And you can’t have innovation, and you can’t actually have real collaboration, if people feel silenced, and also many of us learned silence along the way of “bite my tongue,” “you want to be easy to work with.” Be a good team player, so often translates into don’t rock the boat. And so, to me, health is at stake, collaboration is at stake, business impact is at stake, engagement, wellbeing at work and in work life is at stake.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, a whole lot.

Elaine Lin Hering
That’s a lot of doom and gloom right there.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And so, for the health, just to review the mechanism, it’s sort of like if we are doing a lot of the silencing, then we are not having as close of relationships, and we’re feeling lonely, and then we’re missing out on the healthy stress-buffering goodness associated with the relationships, and then that leads to potentially our early demise. Is that kind of like the biochemical pathway we’re looking at?

Elaine Lin Hering
Biochemical pathway in addition to if you feel like you need to edit out parts of yourself, then your nervous system is on chronic high alert. Our nervous system is useful in being on high alert. But high alert is not supposed to be normed. It’s not supposed to be every day. So, cortisol levels, stress, all becomes internalized, and that ends up leaking out in physical manifestation in hives, in hair loss, in loss of sleep, weight gain, etc. in addition to this epidemic of loneliness, of thinking, “It’s just me.” That’s the biochemical addition there.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, it’s intriguing how it sounds like a utopia to just, “Hey, bring your whole self to work, Elaine. Just share.”

Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, it’s such BS.

Pete Mockaitis
“You do you. Just let it roll, and say what’s on your mind anytime.” That feels comfy, that feels free, and yet, in like most utopias, the reality is not so rosy, like meetings would go on forever, you’d say, “Wow, there are a lot of really weird things unfolding, and that was inappropriate, and that was offensive, and my feelings are hurt.”

And so, it’s really a tricky one in terms of my sense is, and you tell me, Elaine, is that we’d be better off if we were less silent and more courageous in putting forward more than we are now, generally speaking. Is that fair to say?

Elaine Lin Hering
So, I’m trained as a lawyer, so let me be as explicit as I can. Unlearning silence does not mean saying everything, everywhere, all the time to everyone. The world is far too noisy and complex for it. So, your point about utopia, we still live in reality. So, chapter three of my book is when silence makes sense. There are some instances where it does not make sense for me to share what I think because I’ve seen what happens to people who really say what they think. Or, I don’t have it in me. I don’t have the bandwidth today.

You don’t know what’s really going on. You don’t know who I’m caretaking at home, the sandwich generation, I’ve got kids, I’ve got parents, and you want to debate me on that strategic direction that’s really going to change in three months anyways. I might just sit there quietly because you know what, it’s all going to change anyways.

So, to me, though, the difference between silence that is additive or strategic, or is damaging and the health impacts that we’re talking about is agency, “Am I choosing, when I stay silent, how much I disclose? Or, do I feel like staying silent is the only option?” And there are a bunch of traps that our brains fall into, like not being able to distinguish between our current manager and current work situation, and our last manager and last work situation.

We all have baggage that we walk into a relationship with of, “If my first manager shot me a look or told me that my work product was crap, I am likely to be more tentative going forward in pushing back.” I have that datapoint that says, “Oh, that didn’t go so well. So, how do I avoid negative consequences now?” And so, our brains also trick us into forgetting what is present versus past, over-indexing on short-term costs.

Like, if I give feedback to my manager right now, I have to go have the conversation, I have to feel the sweat in my palms and my heart palpitations, I don’t have time for that. Versus if I don’t say something now, what happens three months, six months from now? So, we over-index on the short-term costs versus the long-term impact.

And, frankly, when it comes to group dynamics, why should I have to take the hit? Because if I say something, I may or may not benefit, but I do have to deal with the cost and the potential cost of the blowback in the moment, versus the policy change benefits everyone who comes after me, maybe, if it comes to fruition. So, that voice silence trade-off is one that our brains calculate all the time, often poorly, and most certainly subconsciously. And my argument is let’s just bring that calculation into the conscious so that we show up more intentionally rather than living on autopilot.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it feels like there is a lot of complexity and consideration, ins, outs, what-have-yous, to deal with here when we’re navigating this. So, Elaine, help us, are there some key guiding lights, principles to simplify this?

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah. When it comes to silencing ourselves, there is this notion that researchers call the “illusory truth effect.” And what that means is, if I have beef, I’m frustrated with one of my colleagues, I’d probably go to talk with another colleague about it, probably go home and talk with whoever I live with about it, might even tell my manager about it. And in repeating that narrative, our brains start to think, “Oh, I’ve actually talked with the actual person about it,” when we haven’t.

So, when we think about silence, there’s just a check of, “Have I actually had the conversation with the person who is concerned by or with whom this issue is of concern?” rather than our brains tricking us into thinking, “Yeah, I’ve had the conversation,” when, really, I’ve had the conversation with everyone else in my life except for that person.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good tip. We may very well fall for that.

Elaine Lin Hering
We may fall for that. Another concept, mitigated speech. You can look at pilot training for this, but, essentially, we as human beings don’t tend to be as clear as we think we are. So, for example, particularly across lines of power and power dynamics, your boss says, “This is what we’re going to do,” and you’re thinking, “That is never going to work. I know that we don’t have the resources for it. We don’t have the budget for it. We don’t have the right skills that’s in place.”

And you might say something like, “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” to which, if you take that question on face value, they could say, “Yeah, of course,” and then end of conversation, and you’re like, “Oh, my boss totally doesn’t get it.” Notice the gap between what you actually said externally versus what you’re thinking, “It’s a horrible idea. It’s not going to work,” to “Do you really think it’s a good idea?”

And so, there’s a whole range of directness that we could leverage to say, “I have concerns about that direction. Here are some of the concerns,” or, “Here’s what I’ve observed of other teams who have gone down that path.” All of those things are more clear in actually communicating, “This is a horrible idea,” than, “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” or, “Have we thought this one through?” And so often we mitigate our speech without actually noticing that we’re doing it. So that’s another way that we silence ourselves or dull the impact and the clarity of our message.

The third idea that I probably should have started with is, fundamentally, do you believe you have a voice? Because so often in the workplace it’s, “I don’t have a voice. I’m a cog in a wheel. I play this project management role. That’s what I get paid to do. And so, my job is to literally channel the thoughts of whoever my leader is, whoever is giving me direction, or that the company has decided the voice of the brand.”

And, over time, it makes us a really good worker, but it dulls our sense of whether I have agency to think for myself. So, that very quick check of, “Do I believe I have a voice? And if not, why?” Notice that. And the reason I’m saying I should have started with that is double loop learning. So, this idea that if you want a result to change, you don’t just look at the behavior. You actually have to go back one more loop to look at the mindset that drives the behavior that then drives the result.

So, if your mindset is, “I don’t have a voice. I don’t have agency,” it changes how you show up at work, versus, “I have unique value-add thoughts of my own,” leads to different behaviors, which leads to different results.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, Elaine, help us unravel this. Let’s say we’re saying, “Okay, there are times when I don’t feel like I have a voice, what do I do about it?”

Elaine Lin Hering
I’m taking a deep breath there because there are so much of it really depends on the context. I don’t know who your manager is, I don’t know what the stakes are, I don’t know if you’re on a work visa here, and so the stakes are all different. The thing I would do is to start with the distinction of, “Do you know what your voice is?” versus how you use it. So, let’s break it down there.

If you are wondering whether you have a voice or what your voice sounds like, because you’ve just been so focused on doing whatever you think your manager would want, or your mother would want, or whoever role model of how you think you should show up would want, I would start by asking two questions. In a meeting, listening to this podcast, engaging with any sort of content, be asking, “What do I think?” not “What does my manager think?” not “What does my brother think?” not “What does my mother think?” but, “What do I think?” And what that does over time is remind you that you actually have unique thoughts of your own.

Second question is, “What do I need?” Because so often silencing is also suppression of our needs, our desires, our wants. And so, “What do I think? What do I need?” reminds you that you actually are an autonomous individual with needs, goals, hopes, concerns of your own. In negotiation theory, we would call those interests. So, that would be my advice on rediscovering or finding your voice. And then begs the question of, “How might you use it? And when might you use it?” which is the more situationally dependent one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love it. It’s so simple, and yet so easy to just fly right past it.

Elaine Lin Hering
Because we’re on autopilot. Yeah, and we’re moving to the next thing and the next thing, and this is how we’re used to operating, and also the advice given us is, “Well, just speak up. You need to have more courage.” So, we’re down this rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to be more courageous versus, to me, speaking up and using your voice is actually a matter of calculation, “Does it make sense? Is it worth it for me to speak up, which the way that other people interact or react to me profoundly matters and impacts whether I want to share what I think and what I feel?”

Pete Mockaitis
It does. And what I find interesting is that question, “What do I think?” can sometimes take a little bit of time to really develop. Because sometimes, “What do I think?” it’s like, “I don’t actually know what I think yet. I don’t have thoughts yet. I just have feelings. I feel a general sense of unease and trepidation about those things you just said, and I don’t even know why yet.”

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah. And, by the way, based on your identities, feelings may not be appropriate for you to have at work. So then comes the suppression of, “Let me not even engage with that sense. Let me just do what the group or the dominant norm seems to want to do here because it’s far easier and not necessarily a better outcome in the short or the long term.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And then I guess, as you sit with it longer, in terms of, “What do I think?” if we only have a feeling, you got to dig into that a little bit. And sometimes it can just be like, “Oh, this kind of reminds me of another situation I had that went poorly. So let me examine to what extent is this really similar versus was there some surface level similarity that’s really not applicable to this that I could just be like, ‘Oh, okay. Well, this is a totally different manager, different situation, different project, different client. So, okay, that’s probably not a thing I need to worry about.’” As opposed to, “Well, no, these similarities really do surface that there is some extra risk here, or there are some difficult things I’m not so sure we’ve all thought through that probably need thinking through before we barrel down this path.”

Elaine Lin Hering
Yes. And, by the way, there’s no time, or it feels like there’s no time at work, because we’re already behind schedule, we’re already behind the eight ball. I love what you said about sometimes it takes some time to even realize what you think because that is a difference in processing style and wiring that most modern corporate workplaces do not account for.

So, what I mean by that is, in organizations, particularly corporate America, it seems like there is one particular style of communication that is held up as effective leadership. It often sounds like three succinct bullet points with no ums, just the right amount of emotion to show that you care, but not too much emotion that you lose credibility, particularly if you present as female.

And so, those of us who are post-processors, and I’ll define that in a minute, are at a distinct disadvantage because we’re not as “quick on our feet.” So, two major styles of processing: real-time processing, where the more we talk it out in the moment, the more clear the idea gets; and post-processors, who are the type of, you know, if you’ve ever been in a meeting, you can’t quite figure out what to say, about 20 minutes after the meeting, you’re like, “That’s what I wanted to say.” Welcome to being a post-processor.

And that, to me, is just a difference in wiring, whereas, many workplaces consider that a weakness, “You need to be quicker on your feet. You need to be able to do the rebuttal. You need to be able to input your insight and expertise now or you’ve missed your shot.” And I want to believe that communication is not a Hamilton musical where you’ve got to shoot your shot, and if you don’t, then life has moved on.

Pete Mockaitis
In rap format, which makes it…

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, and wearing really cool clothes.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Elaine Lin Hering
So much as we could actually design to account for those differences in wiring and that time to figure out what we think. So, in a meeting, for example, you still have your meeting, so the real-time processors can have their conversation. And at the end of the meeting you say, “All right, it seems like this is where we’re headed, but everybody sleep on it. As you post-process, share whatever comes up in your post-processing in a Reply-All on this email thread, or put it in Slack.”

You’re doing a couple things there. One, you’re normalizing that we’re all wired differently, and if we really want to hear the best ideas, not just the loudest or the fastest ideas, then we need to design the way that we communicate to leverage those different styles rather than penalize.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. It also makes me think about how it is even more so a fine idea to share slides or notes or documents or whatever in advance of the meeting so folks already had a chance to ponder, “What do I think about this? What do I need with regard to this?”

All right. So, within the complexity of “Do I speak up or do I stay silent?” could we summarize what are some…because in a way there’s this whole emotional element too, in terms of there may be a rational, optimal thing to do. But I might not even be seeing that clearly because I’m scared of what’s going on.

So maybe, first at the rational level, can you give us the pro speaking up indicators and then the con? “No, maybe stay silent” indicators in terms of what seemed to have the most impact, the biggest punch, and come up the most often as a consideration we should be working through?

Elaine Lin Hering
In terms of the pros, is it worth it to you? Is it worth it to you? Meaning, you care enough about the issue, the stakes seem high enough, “Can you live with yourself?” is probably the anchor I go back to. Can you live with yourself if you don’t say something? And if the answer is I can’t, then that would be pro-say something.

The don’t say something is you’re not yet sure what you think, you don’t have bandwidth, and you are unwilling or unable to stomach the costs of speaking up. Oftentimes, the greatest fear is like, “If I say something, if I give feedback, I’m going to get fired.” And there are some people who say, “Well, that’s a really extreme example. Who gets fired for giving feedback?” And for many of us, we know that it does actually happen. Sometimes it’s not overnight, although I spoke to someone yesterday who was let go for giving her boss feedback.

It doesn’t happen overnight, but do you stop getting the invites to the meetings? Do you stop getting the juicy projects at work? There are real costs, which is what makes it complex, but that takes me back to, “Can you live with yourself if you don’t say something? How much does it really matter to you?” The other way I’d answer the question, and you can decide what you want to keep, Pete, is in Chapter 3 of the book.

The questions that we tend to ask are, “What are the costs of speaking up?” and our brains tend to over-index on the costs, real and perceived, meaning, “If I say something, I’m going to get fired. Maybe that’s what happened at my last job, but that’s actually not the cultural environment that I’m in right now at this current job. So, what are the costs of speaking up?”

And our brains focus on the benefits of staying silent, like, “I don’t have to deal with it right now,” and we tend to assume that, “If I don’t have to deal with it, I haven’t heard about it, maybe it’ll fix itself. Maybe it’s going away.” Spoilers. Doesn’t usually. And so, that begs the third question of, “In light of the costs and benefits, what makes sense for me?” And this is why I really struggle with doing a hard line of, you must speak up in these contexts and don’t speak up in these contexts because I’m not you.

I don’t know what you’re carrying. I don’t know what you’re healing from. I don’t know what you are holding for your family or households. I don’t know what the stakes are for you. And that point, to me, takes us back to agency, of you getting to decide is the difference between silence that is strategic or that, frankly, is oppressive or is damaging.

The place that you’ll notice we didn’t explore, there are, “What are the costs of staying silent? And what are the benefits of using your voice?” And so, I would be looking in those four arenas, rather than focusing just on the costs of speaking up and the benefits of staying silent, also adding to your analysis, “Well, what’s it cost me if I don’t speak up? And what are the potential benefits, even if they’re not guaranteed, of speaking up?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And what’s intriguing with the fear and the notion of over-indexing on the short-term, like, “Oh, this is going to be really uncomfortable,” it can be fascinating how sometimes, if you’re the only one speaking up and providing the contrary opinion, it does happen that folks are annoyed that you spoke, “Hey, you want to get out of this meeting earlier? We were almost all wrapped up. We had close to consensus, and then you just had to throw this thing in here. So that’s kind of annoying.”

And so, it does feel like you lose a little bit of street cred or social capital or whatever in so doing that. And yet, at the same time, it is so case by case, there are some leaders who will just be absolutely delighted, like, “Here, at last, is someone who’s giving me a perspective I’m not hearing elsewhere, things I need to be worried about, making sure I’m not blindsided, giving me a heads up. This one has high potential and a bright future.”

And so, it’s interesting that those, I don’t know if we know what proportion of managers fall into what camp, that’s sort of hard to know, but if you know it, Elaine, drop some stats on us. But I think that might be an example of something we might undervalue or under-index for as we’re assessing this stuff, is you might discover that you have the potential to be differentiated as a super valuable person that your manager loves, loves, loves, and trusts you, and wants to run more and more things by you because they’re not getting that perspective elsewhere.

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, because you’re not just plus one-ing everything else. You actually have a value-add because you’re offering a different perspective. I actually want to do one better because I don’t want to get us to the point where we’re at the end of the meeting and then you have to be contrarian. That cost is too high emotionally, socially, the social threat of speaking up.

So, what I tend to coach leaders to do is instead of leaders…leaders in a very, very well-intentioned way, saying things like, “What do you think?” or don’t even ask the question. It’s, just leaders assume, because they would do it.

Pete Mockaitis
“Sounds like we all love this idea.”

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah, if you have something to say, you’re going to say it, versus using standard questions, “What about this works? What about this doesn’t work? What are the pros? What are the cons? What about this resonates? What concerns do you have?” If those are the questions that we, as a team, use to evaluate an idea, I don’t need someone to muster up the courage to offer a contrarian view or play devil’s advocate because it’s baked into how we’re doing the work, how we’re having the conversation, and it’s just the next agenda item, “Okay, we’ve talked about the pros. What are the cons?”

And that takes the pressure off of everyone, rather than, “Okay, Pete, muster up the courage now, take the risk.” We’re lowering the barriers to engaging in conversation and engaging by adding your perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that sounds like a wise best practice, to just go ahead and do that, when discussing decisions and options and considerations. Any other top do’s and don’ts you’d put forward?

Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, so many. So many. Let me start with the leader. So, we as human beings tend to assume that people, other people are wired like us. It’s just human nature. So, unless we stop and intentionally realize, “Oh, there are some people who are post-processors. Well, I’m a real-time processor? Okay, then what do I do about it?”

The first reason I articulate in the book that leaders end up silencing the people they lead, the people that they genuinely want to thrive and want to unleash their talent, is that they fundamentally underestimate how hard it can be for someone to speak up. If your voice has always been welcome, if your ideas have always been well received, you forget that other people could have different life experiences, and this is just a cognitive awareness of, “Oh, it could be hard for someone not because they’re weak or deficient, but because they’re different than I am.”

And so, the “don’t” is don’t assume everyone is like you. The “do” is figure out what makes it easiest for people to share their thoughts and feelings. Some people are typers. Some people are talkers. Some people communicate best real-time. Some people it is asynchronous. Some people are morning people, evening people. Can you understand what makes it easier for someone to communicate so you, as a a colleague, lower the barriers to people telling you what you really think?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. What else?

Elaine Lin Hering
I’m like, I could just go down the table of contents.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m down.

Elaine Lin Hering
You’re game.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, let’s hear it.

Elaine Lin Hering
Okay. So let me do one more on leaders as a pet peeve, and then I’ll go from the how to speak up perspective. One of the most subtle things that we end up doing that silences other people is, when they finally take the risk to share what we think, what they think, we change the topic, and it’s really subtle, but we change the topic from their concern to my reaction to the situation.

So, example. They come and say, “Hey, Pete, I don’t think we’re going to hit the deadline.” And your reaction is, “What the hell? Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?” It seems like we’re talking about the same thing, the deadline and our inability to hit it, but you’ve actually changed the topic to your own reaction or the process of why they didn’t tell you earlier versus focusing on, “Why do you think we’re not going to hit the deadline?”

In that moment, it’s a subtle shift of topic, but it actually signals to the other person, “Oof, they didn’t really want to hear me. We’re not going to address the thing that I finally mustered up the courage or taken the risk to share.” So, watching out for whether you are staying on the person’s original topic rather than changing the topic in the moment is one way of maintaining the open lines of communication.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really good. This reminds me of land-lording.

Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, no, that’s a whole ball of wax.

Pete Mockaitis
A tenant will tell you that something’s wrong and like your first reaction is like you’re mad, like, “What? How long has this been going on? What’s the problem? Why are you doing this?” And I’ve learned though, I had another friend who had a rental property, and she had this horrific rat situation brewing for months.

And so, she actually did ask politely, “Okay, so how long is this going on? Okay. So, why didn’t you mention that earlier?” They said, “Oh, we didn’t want to burden you or inconvenience you or whatever.” And so, I just sort of installed in my internal habit that, just no matter what you’re feeling, you say, “Thanks for letting me know.” Because I do, I want them to let me know early when there’s one or two rats, before there are dozens of rats or whatever the issue is, whether it’s a physical property or like an intellectual, algorithmic thing we’re doing in a white-collar environment. I want to know, so thank you for letting me know.

Elaine Lin Hering
Yes, and have you been explicit with your team or your renters about your hope and expectation? Or, is that an unspoken norm because that’s how you would prefer the world to work, that’s what you would do? Have we made the rules explicit? Meaning, tell me early, tell me often, come to me right away when there’s one or two rats or even when you see some rat poop. Let’s be really explicit versus the “I didn’t want to burden you. We thought we could fix it by just putting out some traps. You’re so busy.”

There are a thousand reasons why people don’t say things, and from a really well-intentioned perspective, but have we also communicated to them how we would prefer, what we’re inviting in from them, what the operating norms are, and making those explicit rather than implicit, and then getting frustrated when they get violated.

Okay, from a speaking-up perspective. You can find your voice by asking those questions, “What do I think? What do I need?” But then there’s this question of using your voice. And using requires action, and action can feel vulnerable. So, in order to see whether it really is my voice or whether it is worth it to me to say something, I’m going to have to take actions over time to experiment.

And so, I’m a big fan of small experiments. If you’re someone who tends to overthink, spiral and overanalyze, you can get out of that over-analysis by trying something, and I would recommend a low-risk environment. Meaning, if you are just starting to practice the muscle of giving feedback, you wouldn’t necessarily go to your boss right away and tell them everything that you think is wrong with them. Maybe it’s when you are at a coffee shop and the barista gets your order wrong. Do you say something in the moment?

And maybe you don’t really care if it was iced coffee or hot coffee, and maybe you really do, but say that you don’t. That’s actually a great time to practice because, if they don’t respond well, if they’re too busy to change the order, whatever it is, you don’t really care. So, practicing on strangers is a great way to build that muscle of sharing your thoughts.

Another context would be with a group of friends, and this whole debate of, “Okay, what are we going to have for dinner?” Do you practice having an opinion, expressing an opinion at a time that you don’t really care? So, “Hey, what about Thai? What about Thai food?” And they’re like, “No, I really feel like burritos.”

You’re like, “Okay.” But you at least get that datapoint that says, “I expressed a point of view, an opinion, and the world didn’t fall apart,” which, for many of us who hesitate to speak up, to use our voice, we don’t have that dataset that says, “I expressed an opinion, and it was okay. I have that dataset that is glaring in my head of, ‘I said something, and I got cut out of that team.’”

Or, that relationship never recovered. Or, “Maybe I’ve never tried, because in my family of origin, it was whatever dad says goes and no one ever challenged that. I never tested that out.” So, trying things out with strangers where you don’t really care about the relationship or it’s not a long-term relationship, trying it out where the stakes are low of things you don’t really care about, to get different data points that tell you, “It’s okay to express an opinion. It might actually be helpful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s so interesting is as you do that, I think you go really just determine, discern some patterns associated with what kinds of things do I find difficult to say. Just yesterday, I noticed I needed someone to spot me in the gym for a bench-press situation, and I was so nervous to ask someone, which I thought, “This is a fairly normal request. Most of the time I don’t hear it, but it’s not a freakish thing.”

And then it’s really true, but my mom mentioned in a conversation like, “Well, Pete, you really do hate putting people out.” I was like, “I really, really do. You’re right, mom.” And it’s like I’ve seen this real time. And, at the same time, and so I did, I did, I asked for a spot. I was pleased with the bench performance, if anyone’s wondering, and it’s really cool to be able to practice in that environment.

And even if I got a disgusted response, “I have a lot of work I need to do here, and I have to be out of the gym in six minutes. Absolutely not.” Like, that’s the worst it could possibly go. And that’s fine, and I have grown those muscles as a result of having gone there.

Elaine Lin Hering
Yeah. I also want to be really explicit that the framing of “This is what I’m trying on” is important. Because if you’re just trying it on, it’s like trying on clothes before you’re going to buy them, “Does this fit? Does this not fit?” And it may fit in that instance of, “Oh, yeah, that was fine. It was part of the normal course of being at the gym, and I’m still alive.” And you may say, “You know what? I did that.” And it doesn’t feel like me. It doesn’t feel right to me. Great. Try something else.” But the point of an experiment is not to get to a specific outcome. The point of an experiment is to learn something. So, this stance of, “What might I learn in testing a hypothesis I have, in expressing an opinion, in trying something on?”

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

Elaine Lin Hering
I’ll say one last thing, which is, oftentimes, when we are thinking about expressing our points of view, we’re waiting for other people to give us permission, and that is a trap that I find many people falling into, which is why I’m naming it here. You think about school systems and you have to ask to go to the bathroom. At work, you have to submit for time off to take the PTO that is rightfully yours, and so there’s a lot of baked in “I’ve got to ask for permission.”

And in what ways might we be waiting for others to give us permission when we could give ourselves permission to experiment, to share an opinion, to try something on? That is, I’m always looking for, “What can I do, unilaterally, because if I’m waiting for the other people in my life to start showing up in a different way, I’m probably waiting for a really long time? But if I can do something differently myself, then I might be able to get to a different outcome faster.”

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

Elaine Lin Hering
Oh, babble hypothesis of leadership. So, number one in a six-person meeting, two people end up doing 60% of the talking. And more interesting, that leads to the babble hypothesis of leadership, is that people code frequency or quantity of verbal contribution as a sign of leadership or high leadership potential. It has nothing to do with the quality of the contribution, so much as, “How much are you talking?”

And so, the babble hypothesis of leadership, to me, is something for us to guard against, that just because someone’s talking a lot, actually listen for the substance, and that if we want to have healthy workplaces, we need to create space for different models of leadership. This one dominant norm that’s very chatty but maybe, at times, lacking in substance has gotten us to where we are, and the question is “Where are we going from here?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Elaine Lin Hering
I’ll do recency bias. The one in front of me right now is Micro Activism by Omkari Williams, “How to Make a Difference in the World Without A Bullhorn.”

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

Elaine Lin Hering
Turning off email, 5:00 p.m., no longer load work email onto my phone, because there’s got to be some semblance of sanity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Elaine Lin Hering
Leaving my phone. Apparently, I have a complicated relationship with my phone. Leaving my phone in a different room when I sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that’s really resonating with folks that they quote yourself back to you often?

Elaine Lin Hering
“In what ways are you silencing yourself to preserve the comfort of other people?”

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

Elaine Lin Hering
ElaineLinHering.com.

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

Elaine Lin Hering
Try something. Try something. The ruminating, the overthinking, the spiraling, you can get out of that by trying something. Because by trying something, you will learn something. So instead of waiting for the next perfect step, start by taking a step.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Elaine, this has been enriching. I wish you many optimized silences and un-silences.

Elaine Lin Hering
Thanks, Pete. To a life lived fully to you.

Feb 15
0

936: The 8 Super Powers that Unlock Gravitas with Lisa Sun

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Lisa Sun shares her tools for building true, lasting confidence.

You’ll Learn:

 

  1. What gravitas really means
  2. The Six Forces ruining your confidence
  3. How to discover your “confidence language”

About Lisa

Lisa Sun is the founder and CEO of GRAVITAS, a company on a mission to catalyze confidence. GRAVITAS offers innovative size-inclusive apparel, styling solutions, and content designed to make over women from the inside out.

Prior to founding GRAVITAS, Sun spent 11 years at McKinsey & Company, where she advised leading luxury fashion and beauty brands and retailers in the U.S., Asia, Europe, and Latin America on strategic and operational issues. Her first collection was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, People, and the Today Show in the same month.

Sun and GRAVITAS have been featured on CNN and in Forbes, Fast Company, New York Magazine, Elle, Marie Claire, InStyle, and more. GRAVITAS includes among its activities a commitment to AAPI causes and New York City’s Garment District. Often called the “dress whisperer,” Lisa is also a highly sought-after public speaker who likes to impart her hard-won knowledge on gravitas and how to best harness it to other women. 

Resources Mentioned

Lisa Sun Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Lisa, welcome.

Lisa Sun

Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom you’ve captured and put together in your book, Gravitas: The 8 Strengths That Redefine Confidence, because confidence is something our listeners often say, “Yeah, I want more of that,” and I can dig it. So, in your fashion business, you are on a mission to catalyze confidence. I did look that up in the dictionary, it meant what I thought it meant, to, like, accelerate like with a catalyst.

So, just if anyone else was wondering, but could you give us a tale from your own career story in which you had catalyzed some confidence, what went down, and what did you do?

Lisa Sun
So, I was at McKinsey and Co., the management consulting firm for 11 years, and after a year of being there, I had my first annual performance review.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, boy.

Lisa Sun

And the opening line was, “Lisa comes across as young and overly enthusiastic at times. She should seek to have more gravitas.” I think we have all been told at some point in our career to be more confident, essentially, they were saying that. And when I asked my boss, “How do you get gravitas?” she said, “Go buy a new dress, wear big jewelry, and great shoes.”

That is the most offensive piece of feedback you can give to a 23-year-old, making $43,000 a year, size 18-20 to go buy new clothes. And when I asked her why, she said, “Okay, really, it’s not about clothes. Every morning you wake up and you’re the first person you have to look at in the mirror, and you have to like yourself, I can teach you how to be good at this job but I can’t teach you how to like yourself.” So, I put on a dress, it reminds me I can do this job. So, she said, “Dumbo did not need a feather to fly. It reminded him that he could.”

And so, what we have done, and why our mission is to catalyze confidence, is, “How do we, as adults, create reminders every day of our talents and gifts?” And so, that’s really the origin story of my company, of the book, and I know we’re going to dive deeper into what we’ve learned, but I do think that we’ve got to reframe confidence, gravitas, not as a behavior but as a choice and a mindset.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, already you’re dropping actual wisdom on us. Thank you, Lisa. We had a really cool chat with Dr. Srini Pillay back in the day. We’ve got a link in the show notes. And he used a cool term, psychological Halloweenism to mean just that, like, there are ways you can dress up, like in a Halloween costume that impact you psychologically.

And so, for her, it was the dress. Sometimes I put on a blazer jacket, it’s in my office corner, just like, “No, Pete, you’ve got to get serious and be Mr. Executive right now. Let’s put that on.” And it makes an impact. And so, it’s not about the clothes itself but it can be prop that helps get in the right mindset, like Dumbo and his feather.

Lisa Sun

And I think the reason is, and this is really what we dive deep into, is if you look up the word confident in the dictionary, it has nothing to do with bravado, swagger, or performance. If someone tells you be more confident, you’re like, “Oh, I’m going to speak up, I’m going to be assertive, I’m going to stand on the stage.” It’s very behavioral.

If you look it up in the dictionary, it’s an understanding of, appreciation of, and trust in your own talents and abilities. And so, that actually shifts the entire way you think about it. And the reason we, as adults, need reminders is we are born fully self-confident. Ask any five-year-old what they’re the best at in the world, and they’ll tell you right away. You don’t have to have kids but you know this feeling, “I’m the best at soccer,” “I’m the best at hugs,” “I’m the best at everything.” They’ll run off a long list of their accomplishments at five.

But what we found is in your adolescence, between the ages of 8 and 12, there are six forces that hold you back. They actually appear on the ages of 8 and 12, it’s chapter 2 of my book. And so, it’s not our fault that we have an inner critic. Think about your adolescence, it’s all about starting to be doubting yourself, self-consciousness. And when those forces appear, to break out of them, we actually, as adults, have to make a conscious choice, and we have to channel a different mindset.

And reminders, like a dress or a blazer, they remind us to believe in ourselves again. And it’s really, if you were five years old, you don’t need the blazer, but as an adult, because you’ve had setback, disappointment, you’ve experienced fear, insecurity, self-doubt, that’s why we need these little tokens in our life to break ourselves out of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to hear about the six forces soon but, first, let’s just make sure we conclude the thread. So, you had the conversation, it’s not about the clothes, but the clothes can help be a reminder. And what, ultimately, did you do in your McKinsey days to boost that confidence and get superior reviews?

Lisa Sun

Well, to be clear, I wish I could go back in time to give myself this book. I feel like you write the book you most need to read yourself. I wish I could get in the DeLorean and go back to that 23-year-old person. What I did is not what I would tell people to do today. Like, I wish I could go back and tell my 23-year-old-self something quite differently.

Well, parts of it. The one part I would still do is I always say the mentor chooses you; you don’t choose the mentor. Make yourself mentor-able. So, one thing I was really good about was saying, “Hey, what’s one thing I could do differently?” I really think people are bad at giving feedback, and also asking for it. It’s like browsing in a store, “Can I help you? Do you have any feedback for me?” “No, I’m just browsing,” “Oh, no, keep doing what you’re doing. You’re doing well.”

So, one thing I do is I took ownership of it, and I said, “Okay, what’s one thing I could do differently? What’s one thing I could do differently?” And over time, I enlisted a lot of people that have fingerprints on my journey, everyone from McKinsey offered me a speech coach. So, I was one of the few associates that, every Friday, was in front of Judy Marcus, saying, “Let’s practice my presentation.”

But I think what we did over the course of 11 years is we corrected the behavior but I don’t know if I ever fully corrected the mindset. So, to give you an example, someone at a book reading in DC said to me, “I’m going to call BS on this whole thing. I always thought of you as a very confident 20-year-old or 30-year-old.” And I said, “I was faking it. I was performing. I was actually still deeply insecure, overachieving, beating myself up, tons of self-loathing, but I learned how to play the game. I learned how to pretend to be assertive, and outspoken, extroversion, charisma.”

And so, I think that I was able to do it because I played into what the mold asked me to, but it wasn’t enjoyable. I don’t think I really liked myself during the process.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so then, how did you get to the place where you authentically had that internal deep wellspring of true confidence?

Lisa Sun

Well, I left McKinsey in 2011, I took a full year off, and went around the world by myself with my BlackBerry. I don’t know if any of your listeners still miss their BlackBerry. I miss my BlackBerry. That thing never died or cracked. And one of the things that I realized was the fundamental difference between our society and Asian cultures, or even other cultures, is our culture really celebrates extroversion and charisma.

Pete Mockaitis

We’re talking about US business culture?

Lisa Sun

US Western. I would just say Western culture, North American culture. And, for example, Kelly Shue at Yale, she’s a professor, she studied 30,000 employee records, and she found that men were consistently rated highest on promotability but lowest on actual performance and results, and women were the opposite. Women were very good at delivering results and performance but not promotion potential.

And when she double-clicked on promotion potential, it was extroversion, charisma, and outgoingness, like being outgoing. And so, she said, “This explains a huge part of the gender pay gap related to promotion,” which is we’re scoring things that you can see but not actual results. It’s like why Janet Yellen was told in 2013 she didn’t have the gravitas to lead the Federal Reserve.

And Ezra Klein at The Washington Post said, “It’s because the pervasive view of gravitas is not stretched to include her. She’s self-spoken, collaborative. By the way, the most qualified person for the job. Why is it we only label confident people as extroverted?” And so, that was the first unlock, as in my travels, as I was reflecting on this after leaving McKinsey, it really started to make me think that, “Are we talking about confidence in the right way? Are we really helping people be their strongest versions of themselves?”

And so, when I started my own company over a decade ago, I said, “Look, this is not about asking people to fake it to make it. This is about creating products, services, and content that really help people turn the mirror on the inside and see how valuable and strong they are.” Things don’t get easier, we get stronger, and I don’t think we, as adults, acknowledge those strengths actively. We can tell you what we’re working on, our opportunities, our deficits, things that aren’t going well.

But when I ask you and put you on the spot, Pete, and say, “What are you the best at in the world? Tell it to me like a five-year-old,” you’re going to sit down and go, “Huh, I need to think about that question a little bit.”

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, it’s funny, and when you say that, I do need to think about it, and it’s like, “I guess I’d have to combine. If I’m number one in the world, I have to combine like six things that I’m top 1% at so as, probabilistically multiplying them that makes me top dog out of eight billion.” That’s how I’m thinking about it.

Lisa Sun

You can’t benchmark yourself. No, Pete, that’s my whole point. Like, you automatically went to benchmarking it. It’s not measurable. It’s how you feel about yourself. It’s the iceberg model of consciousness. Ten percent of the iceberg is visible. It’s the behavior we can see. Ninety percent is below the water line, and it’s thoughts, values, feelings, wants, needs about ourselves.

So, I can tell you pretty confidently, because I’ve written a book about it, I can tell you now what I’m the best at in the world because, guess what, you’ll never be able to measure it. It’s in my own head, it’s what I think I’m the best at in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, tell us, what is that thing, Lisa?

Lisa Sun

So, I always share two. I’m the world’s best plus one. Please invite me to a party. I will fetch your drinks. I won’t hover.And I’m the world’s best positivity mirror. So, when we spend time together, I will see something in you that you may not even see in yourself, and I will take a moment and I will reflect it back onto you so that you know that I saw you, and I value you, and I heard you.

Pete Mockaitis

And as you’re thinking about this world’s best piece, the focus is not so much that that it is factually, demonstratively, empirically, provably, truthfully correct in, like, a scientific or journalistic sense of the word, but rather that your innermost depths of being are vibing with that as true. Is that accurate?

Lisa Sun

Yup, because mindset drives behavior. Carol Dweck, at Stanford, wrote this great book called Mindset, and she’s proven over and over again that if you can reset your mindset, you can change your behavior. I’ll give you a very clear example that I think some of your listeners will appreciate. I own a women’s wear company. We make $100 to $300 dollar workwear, and I still dress hundreds of women a year, and you can book a 30-minute appointment with me. And, Pete, I’m about to give all your male listeners an insight into what every woman feels. You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. We’ll take it.

Lisa Sun

Every woman comes into a dressing room with the worst self-loathing, the most negative mindset she sets herself up to fail, even before all those six forces that we’re going to dive into, she brings all six forces of her inner critic into that dressing room. She tells me, “I hate my arms. I hate my thighs. I’m going to lose 10 pounds.” Like a mirror inside a dressing room, as soon as she undresses, she doesn’t feel like trying on clothes.

And for 10 minutes out of those 30 minutes, I don’t let her talk about her body or her clothes. I ask her three questions, “What are you most proud of in the last year of your life? If your best friend was standing here, what would they tell me about you? What are you the best at in the world?” And, by the way, no woman wants to answer these questions but I always say, “If we can’t reset the chemistry of this room to a place of positivity, we are going to fail today.”

And so, as she starts answering the questions, I’m like a velvet knife, you don’t feel like it’s happening, I’m starting to dress her, and we start laughing and smiling, and she comes out of the dressing room, all of our mirrors on the outside so you only get to see yourself when you’re fully dress, and she’ll say, “This is a skinny mirror.” I’m like, “Nope, it’s from Bed, Bath & Beyond. Rest in peace, Bed, Bath & Beyond. It’s 1995, I can’t trick you.”

She goes, “What did you do?” I said, “We made a choice that this was going to work. We changed your mindset from a place of negativity to a positive place where you start to tell me all the things you love about your life, and then you let me do the work. I’m a dress whisperer. I get it right on the first time.” And so, I use the dressing room as an analogy of how most of us wake up. Most of us wake up in a deficit mindset, focused on what’s missing in our life, or what the weaknesses are, versus focusing on the abundance we have, the talents we bring, our superpowers.

And if you reset that for yourself every day, by the way, I still, I woke up with all six forces in my head today. I still have to reset it. But if you can do that, that drives the behaviors and outcomes you want in life.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Yeah, I really dig that. It’s associated with needing to do a reset in the morning. And I’ll tell you, what’s been most effective for me is straight up dunking into cold water. It’s like my brain is not capable of having many other thoughts, but they’re like, “Oh, oh, oh, that’s cold.” And then I’m kind of rejuvenated, I was like, “All right.” And so, it’s almost like I wash away that stuff. Now, that is…

Lisa Sun
And maybe that’s your little black dress. That’s your little black dress, right? You don’t need a blazer this morning. You’re just going to dunk yourself in cold water. The thing is as I’m putting on my clothes for the day, and I have to wear gravitas every day, we literally have the word gravitas sewn into the back of the clothing, it’s the clothing label.

And so, that’s literally a ritual for me of I woke up with all six forces focused on the weaknesses in my life, and as I’m dressing, I’m like, “Okay, I’m the gravitas woman. All right.” I validate myself. I tell myself what I’m proud of from the previous day. I really go through this ritual. And I think that’s what we’re trying to help people do is reset their minds before they take on the day.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes, let’s hear about the array of rituals that you’ve seen in your work and discovered are effective for people. So, I mentioned cold water, you’re talking about a great dress, some validation. Show us, what does this look like in practice? And what are some different flavors of it?

Lisa Sun

And maybe I take away from rituals and more about the approach we built, but I always say confidence is not a state of being; it’s a total approach because every single day you’re going to face setback, disappointment, fear, insecurity. And so, it’s really about creating an approach in your life. The three parts of the approach is, one, identify which of the six forces you’re feeling.

And I know we’re going to go into them but I think it’s really important, before you diagnose insecurity or fear, to know what’s driving it. It’s like why you don’t ask kids if they’re sad. You say, “What happened?” You double-click on it. So, I feel like we need to do a better work in having conversations with our inner critic, like, “What is driving me feeling this way?”

The second part is I always say you’ve got to be able to take a self-affirming inventory of your strengths and talents. And in our work, we identified eight superpowers, most of us have two or three. My mom who is my guru has all eight, she’s like, “I take your quiz. I have all eight of them.” So, you can take a free quiz from us and discover what your superpowers are.

But then the third part, and I think this is the really important one, is really believing in those superpowers, connecting them to real-life events, starting to really understand and advocate for your talents, but also decide where you have gaps. A lot of people take our quiz and they’ll say, “Okay, I have three of them but there’s ones I don’t have.” I’m like, “Well, first of all, love the three you have. It’s not like Pokemon. You don’t need to catch them all.”

But of the five you don’t have, what do you want in life, and which of those five do you want to cultivate? So, you take real ownership. As people progress and climb the ladder, they go from having two superpowers to four or more. And we found that in our longitudinal quantitative data over the course of five years.

So, if I step back from it, it’s like diagnose what’s driving insecurity and fear in your life, be able to create a self-affirming inventory of your strengths and talents. And then the third thing is, take ownership of what capabilities you want to grow and advocate for and own over time.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, let’s dig into it, these three pieces of approach in some depth. What are these six forces? And how do we identify them?

Lisa Sun

So, the six forces, the first is called the deficit mindset. This is where you view weakness or what’s missing over your potential and your strengths. The easiest way to diagnose this one is when you look in the mirror, “Do you look for the wrinkles or your beautiful eyes?”

The second one is called shrinking effect. This is where you shortchange yourself or underestimate your own abilities versus others or a standard. The example I use here is this is why people say sorry all the time without actually being sorry because they just think they must be in the wrong. Or, this is why women will only apply for a job if they’re 100% qualified, whereas men will often apply if they’re only 60% qualified, “Ah, that’s good enough.” But if you have shrinking effect, you’re like, “I have to be perfect to sit in that seat.” You shortchange what you’re offering to the world.

The third force is called satisfaction conundrum. This is where you tie your self-worth or happiness to an external marker of success, “I’ll be happy when I lose 10 pounds,” “I’ll be happy when I get that promotion,” “I’ll be happy when I get that car.” The problem is, when you tie your self-worth, it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have goals and ambitions, but when you tie all of your self-worth to a single marker, if you get it, you just chase the next one, “Oh, I lost 10 pounds. I think I could lose five more.” It’s a treadmill.

Or, if you don’t get it, you beat yourself up for not getting it. And so, every time I didn’t make partner at McKinsey, I literally took it out on myself. I had this brass ring that I tied all of my happiness to when I should’ve stepped back and said, “You know what, I’m really creating value, I have a lot going on in my life. This one thing didn’t happen for me. Okay, I need to figure out all the other gifts I bring to the table.”

The fourth we call superhero façade. This is where you go, “Ahh, I got this. Every part of my life is perfect.” Then you try tell the world that you’re a superhero. The problem with that approach is the most successful people in life will say, “You know what, whenever you see me succeeding over here, I promise you I’m failing somewhere else.” And when you can talk about where you’re failing, you invite people to have fingerprints on the journey, and to help you, and make you even more successful. So, the most confident people in the world do not tell you they’re perfect or they’re superheroes. They’ll, in fact, tell you the reverse.

The fifth force is we call setback spiral. This is where a negative moment of criticism, a disappointment, spirals to expound all parts of your life, “So, this person gave me a piece of criticism. That must mean I’m a terrible sister, daughter, friend.” You start to say, “Okay, all parts of my life are off even though this is squarely just in one part of it.”

And the sixth force is systemic bias. This is where there are asymmetrical structures of power at work, where the rules were not created by you or for you. So, it took me twice as long to get to the same markers of leadership as my male colleagues. Well, reflecting back on that, I would say when I joined McKinsey in September of 2000, only 13% of the global partnership were women. There weren’t that many people that looked like me. So, maybe part of this wasn’t me. This was the system wasn’t built to see someone like me yet.

And my favorite article from Harvard Business Review the last four years, written by my two friends, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, is, “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome,” because it implies we’re criminals or unwell, when, in fact, a lot of it was driven by systemic bias, that the roles just weren’t created by us or for us.

But, in total, these six forces allow you to have a vocabulary to say, “Okay, right now, the way I’m feeling, oh, it’s satisfaction conundrum. I’m tying so much of my happiness to this one marker. Okay, Lisa, how do I go fix that now?” But I think it’s really important to diagnose which one you’re feeling. Maybe all six.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yes, that is handy for sure because when you, like a good consultant knows, when you properly segment the problem, you’ll see there are very different solutions, whether it’s a factor one versus factor four. So, tell us, once we zero in on that, what do we do about it?

Lisa Sun

Well, then what you do is, I always say, “Okay, now you’ve had a conversation with your inner critic. You’ve explored why you’re feeling this way, what the worst-case scenario could be, and now you can drown it out with the megaphone of your superpowers,” because when you know your strengths and talents, it changes the solution space. You can focus on what you do have and what you can bring to the table. You have gas in the tank to keep going.

And so, for us, we did launch a quantitative study, and you can take the quiz at MyConfidenceLanguage.com for free, and you can discover, of the eight superpowers you’ve identified, which ones you have, and lean into those. So, I’m happy to walk through those eight and then give you an example of how that changed my life, if that helps, Pete. Do you want to go there?

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s do it. Yes, please, let’s hear it.

Lisa Sun

Okay, so let’s do it. So, the eight superpowers. Leading, “I set direction, I’m in charge, I inspire followership.” Performing, that’s what you and I are doing together right now. We’re on center stage, extroversion, charisma, the exchange of energy between two people. Those two superpowers are the most written about and talked about. Less than 20% of people in America have them.

So, the six that cover 80%, and, by the way, if we let them perform all day, nothing would get done. The other ones are achieving and knowing, “I get things done with a winner’s mindset. I love goals and I love meeting, exceeding them.” It’s being an athlete. Knowing? “I’m the smartest, the most well-researched, most process-oriented person in the room.” You want to build IKEA furniture with someone who has knowing as their superpower.

The best example of this is the three black women from the movie “Hidden Figures.” How do three black women have the gravitas to send a man into space at NASA? They weren’t the leaders. They weren’t the performers. They were the achievers and the knowers. The next two are giving and believing, “I support others. I’m empathetic.” Believing, “I’m optimistic. I see the best in everyone.” The best example of these forms of confidence, Ted Lasso.

Ted Lasso actually says, “I was underestimated my whole life because I’m not a commander, I’m not a leader. I’m here to help everyone become the best versions of themselves. I’m not here to win or lose. I’m here to believe.” And so, that’s a unique form of confidence that is undervalued and underestimated in the workplace.

The last two are creating and self-sustaining. Creating is my number one, “I can believe in things before I see them. I love the future ideas. I create something from nothing.” And self-sustaining, this is the hardest one for most people to get, “I like myself. I don’t need to impress you. I don’t need external validation.” It’s the quality most needed to ask for a raise, a favor, or overcome criticism.

But together, all eight of them, start to create a different inventory for your life. So, for example, my confidence language is creating. I’m the daughter of immigrants, I know what it takes to create something from nothing. Immigrants believe in things before they can see them. Performing, that’s what we’re doing now. Leading, being in charge. And giving.

And so, I know that those are the four I have. By the way, my team has opposite languages because my language doesn’t get anything done. Most of my team is achieving, giving, knowing, believing. They get things done. They stay organized. They keep everyone motivated. And so, you’ve got to have that language.

And the reason why that’s so important, I make women’s workwear, in March of 2020, when the pandemic started, our sales were not zero. They were negative. We had to refund people because we have a 30-day return policy. If you just bought a dress to go to the office from us, you send it back to us. And so, what we did is we did not let those six forces hold us. We didn’t focus on what we didn’t have.

I could’ve spiraled. I could’ve had deficit mindset. What I did is I said, “Team, what are superpowers? What do we have right now that no one else has?” I put on LinkedIn, and this is my performing and creating superpower at work, I said, “The sales of my company were negative.” No superhero façade. “If you need hospital gowns or face masks, we can get them to you. DM me.”

And Uwe Voss, the CEO of HelloFresh, DM’d me and said, “We need 2500 face masks in Newark right away. How can we help?” And so, we pivoted our business for 72 days during the pandemic to making personal protective equipment. And that was only possible because we focused on our superpowers and our strengths, not our deficits and our weaknesses.

My team’s confidence language, they got it done, they organized the spreadsheets, they got people to come in and work. It’s really about focusing on your strengths and having that growth-based mindset instead of deficit mindset.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. Really cool. And so now, I’m thinking here. So, we identify the forces that aren’t working for us so much, as well as identifying our superpower. How does that knowledge then translate into the feeling of, “Alright, in my innermost depths, I’m confident and ready to rock”? How do I make that leap from the knowing to the feeling?

Lisa Sun

Well, so once you’ve discovered your superpowers, I always say you’ve made the unconscious conscious. So, the good news is you now have words attached to your talents. And the quiz is not wrong. A lot of people take our quiz, and they go, “Whoa, I have five out of the eight.” I’m like, “Are you surprised?” They’re like, “Yes.” I said, “You’ve been underestimating or underleveraging yourself your whole life. You’ve got a lot.”

Or, “These are the ones, I don’t have them.” I’m like, “Don’t focus on those. Focus on the ones you have.” To own it though, I always tell people, take a moment you’re really proud of in life, and deconstruct it through the lens of your superpowers. Why did your superpowers drive that outcome? Connect it to a specific memory.

It’s like that movie “Inside Out” from Pixar. Your brain can only remember core memories. I can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday but it has these little core memories that form the basis of your character. So, take one of those core memories and say, “Huh, I have five superpowers. What is it about me that made that happen?” because we’re so focused on looking at the summit that we don’t turn back around to see how much we’ve accomplished.

By doing that, you start to believe in it. It’s one thing to take a quiz, it’s another thing to actually believe in the results. After that, then you can start to say, “Okay, how am I going to advocate for that? How can I show up? How can I make sure I get credit for my talents? And where are the places I want to add to my superpower portfolio?”

So, the example I just shared with you of pivoting my company to making personal protective equipment for 72 days, I can connect that to my four superpowers. I can say, “This is why I got us here. By the way, these are my team’s superpowers and how they contributed.” So, I really believe in my confidence language.

If I tie it back to what I’m the best at in the world, I’m really high on performing. So, that doesn’t surprise you when I tell you I’m the world’s best plus one. When I tell you I’m the world’s best positivity mirror, that’s giving. You can actually start to see all these things come together.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, lovely. Could you share with us another story of someone else who had things come together in terms of they worked through these approaches, and where did they start, what did they discover, and where did they land?

Lisa Sun

So, I’ll give you an example. In chapter one of my book, I talk about a woman named Suzanne, and she is in finance, and she came to me, and she said, “Ugh, my boss just told me I didn’t have gravitas.” And this is one of the funny things I always think, when you tell people to be more confident, it’s anxiety-inducing, it’s ambiguous. I kind of want to say, “Which of these eight superpowers do you want me to embody?”

And I said, “Okay, I know he can’t take the quiz, but which of these eight superpowers is your boss, is your CEO?” And she said, “Okay, he came up through sales. He’s probably performing, he’s leading, and he’s achieving.” “Okay, got it.” I said, “Let’s have you take the quiz,” and she goes, “Oh, my gosh, I’m knowing, achieving, and giving. We overlap on the achievement, like I always had a number, but I’m not extroverted so I don’t have performing. I don’t have leading.”

And she goes, “Huh, so when he says I don’t have gravitas, it means I’m not leading/performing.” And I said, “Okay, but are you getting credit for being giving and knowing?” She goes, “You know what, that’s not in his style.” And I said, “But you take care of everyone, you’re the smartest person driving the process, you’re VP of finance.”

And I said, “It’s actually a double-edged sword. Number one, when you do your weekly check-ins, make sure you’re taking credit for the things that he’s not seeing, the way in which you build relationships, take care of others on the team, the way you built up process, the way you think about numbers. You need to make sure you get credit for being achieving, knowing, and giving.”

“At the same time, you can say to him, ‘Hey, to get to the next level of leadership, I think what you’re saying is I need to work my leading and performing skills.’” And she did that, and she goes, “He said yes. He said, ‘That’s what I mean by gravitas. I need you to speak up more in meetings. I need you to be seen as setting direction more actively, but you’re right, I have not acknowledged that you are the most collaborative and empathetic person in the team.’”

And it’s funny, McKinsey did a report that said women are the reason why companies made it through the pandemic but the ideas of collaboration, empathy, care, they’re not on the traditional HR scorecard because women didn’t write the scorecard to begin with, so how do we give them credit for those things?

And, ultimately, what happened is she got promoted to CFO after two years because she got recognition for the qualities that she brought to the table, but she added superpowers. She actually retook the quiz, and she said, “I have four and a half superpowers now. That is so different than two years ago when I only had three. Thank you so much. I feel stronger that I can advocate for myself in this environment.” But she was promoted to the C-suite in less than two years.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, lovely. Well, Lisa, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lisa Sun

Thank you, Pete. No, I love that this is How to be Awesome at Your Job, and I think being awesome starts with recognizing how powerful you really are.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

My favorite one is my best friend Jane Park, who is the founder of Tokki. She always says, “Life doesn’t get easier. We get stronger.” And what I love about that is it focuses on the fact that there are no regrets, only learnings in life, and that the more we view every single moment of our life as an opportunity to get stronger, the stronger we get.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

I really think Kelly Shue at Yale did a phenomenal job with her study. I’m going to give her a shoutout. It was awesome.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Lisa Sun

My favorite book is Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends & Influence Others. And it’s ironic because he focuses mostly on extroversion and charisma: smile, shake hands, be engaged. And a hundred years ago, that book was formative in terms of changing the way in which we relate to each other.

But the real reason it’s my favorite book, because I think what we’ve done is we’ve expanded it. I hope Dale Carnegie, if he were still alive today, would love the expansion we’ve done on his work about adding more qualities and superpowers to the equation. But when I was 12 years old, I was a freshman in high school, and my parents realized they could not afford the education that I wanted, or they wanted for me.

Let’s be clear. I went to a fancy college. It was $28,000 to go to an Ivy League college in 1996. And so, my dad went around town, and he asked, “How can I help my kid make $28,000 a year to send her to college?” And this is before endowments were releasing financial aid left and right. And the local Toastmasters chapter said, “Hey, the Rotary Club, the Lion’s Club, they have these student-speaking competitions. Your kid could win $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. We will train her to become a public speaker.”

And so, I got to join Toastmasters at the age of 12. And when you join, the founder of the chapter that I joined in California gave me a copy of Dale Carnegie’s book. I still have it. It says 99 cents, and he said, “This is the first book you’re going to read,” because, think about it, a Taiwanese immigrant’s daughter had to learn how to operate in Western culture. And the Toastmasters and Dale Carnegie taught me how to show up that way.

So, I ended up winning $20,000 in speaking money to pay for my first year of college, and then had another scholarship for year two. But that book, I still love that book mostly because of the memory and the way it changed my life so early on.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s beautiful. We had Joe Hart, who’s the CEO of Dale Carnegie Organization currently, on the show, and we stay in touch. So, I will let him know.

Lisa Sun

Will you tell him? I’m obsessed with the book and him. I have a personal connection to Dale Carnegie’s teachings.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And now how about a favorite tool, something that you use to be awesome at your job?

Lisa Sun

So, my favorite tool, I still own a Levenger.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Lisa Sun

Old-school Levenger. I still write out every day my priorities, and I block out time on my calendar to think. So, I still use a Levenger. I’m old school.

Pete Mockaitis

And those who are not in the know, these are those handy notebooks with the disk so that you can remove pages then put them back in, right?

Lisa Sun

Yes

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Lisa Sun

So, I do two things. One is I am a hip-hop dancer, so I dance in a dance class five days a week at Anna Kaiser Studios, and I really love the power of dance. So, that’s one thing that I do. The second thing is once a week, I turn off my phone for eight hours, and it’s usually on a Saturday. And of those eight hours, I will go to a museum. I’m lucky I live in New York City, so I recognize that’s not for everyone, and I will just let my brain turn off for an hour or two just looking at beautiful art or something that I want to learn about.

But I find that, because we’re always in response mode, that we don’t give our brainwaves the chance to amplify and lengthen. And I actually turn off. It’s not like “Do not disturb” because you can still see if text messages are coming in. I literally turn it off for eight hours.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

Oh, the one that I get quoted most often is self-confidence is a choice and a mindset before it becomes a behavior.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

Well, I would say, first, make sure you take the quiz at MyConfidenceLanguage.com. It’s really fun. @lisalsun at Gravitas New York on all social media platforms. And if it’s LinkedIn, I really am responsive on LinkedIn messenger more so than email.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lisa Sun

How to be awesome at your job, I think, starts at recognizing how awesome you are first.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Cool. We got it. All right. Lisa, this has been a lot of fun, and I wish you all the best and much gravitas and confidence in your adventures.

Lisa Sun

Thank you so much, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Feb 08
0

934: Building Confidence by Facing Fears with Michelle Poler

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Michelle Poler shares her epic story and strategies for facing fears head-on.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to instantly flip your fear perspective
  2. Why to dare being disliked
  3. The distinction between being brave versus fearless

About Michelle

As the Founder of Hello Fears, Michelle Poler has created a social movement empowering millions to step outside of their comfort zone and tap into their full potential. She has inspired some of the world’s most influential organizations including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many more. Poler is also the creator of the project 100 Days Without Fear and her work has been featured on CBS, CNN and Buzzfeed, among many others. 

Resources Mentioned

Michelle Poler Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Michelle, welcome.

Michelle Poler

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear so much of your story and your pro tips. Could you kick us off by giving us the whole scoop on the 100 Days Without Fear project?

Michelle Poler

Yeah, where should I start? This is 2015, I moved to New York to do a Master’s in Branding at the School of Visual Arts, and I realized that I was not living life to the fullest, that I was living inside of my comfort zone. And, suddenly, at the Master’s that I was doing, they asked us to do a 100-day project of our choice. And while a lot of the students kind of picked a project that could fit their lifestyle, I adopted my lifestyle to the project when I decided that I was going to go outside of my comfort zone for 100 days in a row. Basically, I faced one fear a day.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, lay it on us, so what was the first fear you tackled? And what was the most dramatic? Can we hear a few tales on the frontlines?

Michelle Poler

So, the first fear was to actually accept this project, to say yes to facing my fears. I spent my entire life living inside of my comfort zone, so it was like 26 years saying no to things that made me uncomfortable, and, suddenly, saying yes to all of them at the same time, so that was really scary, just saying yes to this project, committing to changing my life from one day to the other. So, that was the first fear.

And then I started slowly taking risks, doing things that are outside of my comfort zone, but that are not too risky or dangerous. For example, fear number two was, I think, eating an oyster, something I avoided for a really long time. Fear number three was getting a piercing in my ear. Like, those small things that I avoided for 26 years, and, suddenly, I’m like, “Let’s do this. I’ve been thinking about this for so long, but I didn’t have the courage. Now, I’m going to try it out.”

And then, little by little, I started, like, escalating on the level of, I guess, I don’t know, the fears that I was facing, until the project went viral around day 40. And then, even though I got a lot of love and new followers, and people being very inspired to go after their own fears, I also got criticism, as you could imagine, and people saying things like, “You’re doing things that I do on my day-to-day life.”

I was doing things like getting a Brazilian wax, or driving at night, or flying by myself, eating by myself in a restaurant, doing all these things that I just avoided for a long time. And I was like, “This is my time to step it up,” and that’s when I started facing bigger fears, doing things like skydiving, posing nude for an art class, holding a tarantula or a snake, doing standup comedy, things that people don’t do on their day-to-day.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, there’s so much in there right there, and it’s unfortunate when you hear the haters, or the critiques, because that’s sort of the whole idea, like, “Yeah, they were my fears, not yours.”

Michelle Poler
Yeah, it’s very personal.

Pete Mockaitis

And I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, all us probably have some fears that it seems like “normal people,” or everybody else is just fine with. I’m thinking about maybe there’s some, like, home improvement projects, like, “I don’t know if I really want to get down and dirty with, like, the saw, and the drywall.” And it’s like, “Oh, it’s no problem.”

And so, I think that’s dead-on. It’s sort of unique for each individual, and so maybe there’s an implication right there. It’s like who are you going to share this with? Some folks will support you, and some folks will just do the opposite.

Michelle Poler

That’s why people hide their fears because they’re afraid to be judged, I guess, and say, “Am I the only one afraid of this?” And then that’s why I think the project went viral because I was, I guess, brave enough to be very vocal about my own fears, even though they’re like super simple, some of them, but still scary to me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, could you paint a picture for us for one particular that was pretty hard, and what the scene was like, and what you were feeling, and how it unfolded?

Michelle Poler

Well, so many come to my mind, it’s so hard to choose one. But let’s talk about posing nude in front of an art class…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, let’s.

Michelle Poler

…which was really scary.

Pete Mockaitis

Lay it on us.

Michelle Poler

First of all, I didn’t come up with that fear. A friend of mine suggested that fear. Actually, I only came up with 20 fears. The rest, like all the other 80 fears, people suggested to me, and those that I can relate to, and I was like, “Yes, that is definitely outside of my comfort zone I would tackle.”

So, a friend suggested this, and she’s like, “Why don’t you pose nude for an art class?” And I’m like, “Why did you put that idea in my mind? Now I can’t say no because I’m in this process of facing my fears but I definitely don’t want to do that, but how can I say no to that now?” And so, okay, so I signed up for a class as a model, I talked to, I think it was, like, a school of art in New York, and I thought, I was so self-aware, so self-conscious that I went waxing.

So, I was like, “I don’t want any hair in my body,” and I starved like the entire day because I was like, “I want to look good,” which was a huge mistake, both decisions were big mistakes because when I got to the place, before it was my turn to model, the models that were there, they had, like, curves and a lot of hair.

And that’s when I realized, “What am I doing?” I was only thinking about myself. I was not thinking about the students. And the students need something to draw, they need more hair and curves and all these things, and I was so self-aware that I was removing all of that. And so, at the beginning when I undressed, I went to the room, immediately I turned around, I gave my back to the students because I was so afraid to look at their faces. And then the professor was like, “Okay, Michelle, can you turn around now?” It was like quick 5-minute poses.

So, after five minutes, she was like, “Please turn around,” and I was dying. I was like so embarrassed but, at the same time, I had this really interesting change of thought where I went from thinking about me, and how I look, and how I’m being perceived, to thinking about them and what they need in their class to succeed. And then, at that moment, I started bending myself and finding interesting shapes to give them something to draw. And it was really interesting having that transformative, I guess, thoughts in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And then how did it wrap up?

Michelle Poler

So, they all knew that I was facing a fear, that I don’t normally do this, and they were like really supportive at that point, and then they were clapping and cheering, and they showed me their drawings.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, so there you have it. And so, you have one sort of master key right there, was shifting the focus away from yourself onto others and being of service. That’s pretty cool.

Michelle Poler

I realized no one is judging us in the same way that we judge ourselves. I was judging myself so much, I was the only one judging myself, and that thought, that, I guess, aha moment stays with me every single time that I’m afraid to put myself out there.

Pete Mockaitis

That is powerful. And so, you share that and many other such insights in your book Hello, Fears: Crush Your Comfort Zone and Become Who You’re Meant to Be. Can you lay it on us, what are some of the master principles that you’ve unearthed here?

Michelle Poler

Well, I divided the book into 10 chapters, and they’re all the 10 different fears that stops us from becoming who we’re meant to be from fulfilling our potential. And some of the main aha moments that I share in the book are related to the fear of rejection and failure. Those, at the end of the day, are the biggest fears that hold us back from pursuing what we actually want to go after, and fulfilling our own definition of success.

At the end of the day, it’s not about skydiving or holding tarantulas. It’s about what we tell ourselves in that moment where we’re about to take a risk, a risk that is aligned to our dreams. That’s the most important thing because it’s not about facing any fears, it’s not about facing a hundred fears. I’m not here to tell you to do that. It’s about facing the right fears, the ones that are holding you back from the life that you actually want to live.

And so, one of the things that I share in there is one of the most powerful tools that I have, and that have changed the lives of so many people is that, you know, the typical question that, I don’t know, why on earth we are used to asking ourselves or other people around us when we’re about to face a fear, and it’s, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Have you ever asked yourself that question or somebody else?

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly.

Michelle Poler

That’s a really terrible question. Because when you think about what’s the worst that could happen, immediately your mind goes to the risk, and that’s not helpful when you’re trying to face a fear. And even though I know the intention of the question is to help us understand that we’re not going to die, but we might get rejected, we might get fired, we might be embarrassed. There are other things that might happen if we take certain risks.

So, instead of asking ourselves, “What’s the worst that can happen?” I started asking myself, “What’s the best that can happen?” That question brings your mind to focus on the reward instead of the risks. And that is the main reason why we, in the first place, decide to face a fear because we want something, we desire something, so let’s focus on that instead of the risk that that may bring.

And it’s not that I’m telling you do not consider the risk. We’re human and that is the first thing that we’ll consider anyways, but we forget to consider the reward. And that is why, so often, we stay in our comfort zones. So, next time you’re about to do something scary, something that is worth it but that’s outside of your comfort zone, ask yourself, “What’s the best that can happen?” Try to put yourself, your mind, in that scenario, and that is the one thing that will encourage you to take action.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s handy. Thank you.

And, Michelle, you’ve also got a strategy for, specifically, dealing with impostor syndrome. What’s that?

Michelle Poler

Well, impostor syndrome is the one thing that keeps us from really going after the things that we want to do because we tell ourselves that we don’t deserve that, that we’re not worthy of, and we ask ourselves, “Why me? Why would people listen to me, my message? Who am I to be someone to be heard?”

And I ask people to ask themselves, “Why not me?” That is a question I ask myself before doing this project, and putting it out there, because I was like, “Why would people follow me? Like, why would I talk about fear? Who am I?” And then I’m like, “Why not me? Am I not passionate enough? Am I not creative enough? Am I not intelligent enough? Do I don’t want this enough? I do.” So, it’s about betting on yourself.

And one question, like a different question I always ask myself, and this really also helps with impostor syndrome, is, “What is everybody else doing? And how can I be more me?” I don’t have anything against Google, but people Google too many things, and they Google how to dress up for conferences, how to speak in public, how to do all these things.

And I never Google anything, unless it’s an address or something like that, or a recipe, but before going to Google, I always ask myself, “How would I do this? How would I speak in public? How would I dress for a conference? How would I do an icebreaker?” Like, anything, I always ask myself, “How would I do it?” before I research other people. I actually avoid researching other people because I want to make sure that anything I do comes from me.

If I’m going to do research, I’m going to do it myself, I’m going to do my own research. When we own who we are, and our authentic selves, we are not going to have to deal with the impostor syndrome. The impostor syndrome is when we’re trying to be somebody else to fit in, to be accepted, to be liked. But if you’re just really trying to be yourself because you like who you are, you accept who you are, you give yourself permission to just be you, there will not be any impostor syndrome that can stop you.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s really a fun perspective in terms of if I am not trying to fit into a mold or a role, then the impostor syndrome goes away because the comparison goes away. It’s like, “Oh, I’m not a big shot like these people who are doing these things in this way,” because you didn’t even bring that up in the first place. It’s like, “I’m just going to do how I do…I’m just going to do this thing the way I imagine it ought to be done,” as opposed to trying to fit another set of expectations, which I may very well fail to meet because they’re not mine.

Michelle Poler

That’s why I encourage people, instead of comparing yourself, contrast. I’ve been practicing that for so many years already. Like, since I was little, I didn’t want to be like anybody else. I think this was, I have to thank my mom for this, in that she, in the first place, she called me Michelle because she was like, “I don’t know any Michelle in the world, so then I won’t have any expectations. I just want you to be who you are,” since the beginning, and she was always very curious about who I am, and always listening to me.

And I always felt like I had a voice, and I’m really grateful for that. And that is what I want to encourage people now to see that they have a voice, that it matters, that that’s their own, and that’s all we want. We don’t want a copycat. We don’t want more of what we already know and have. We want real people with real problems, real solutions, real ideas.

Pete Mockaitis

And then, to that end, I suppose as you’re doing you and living your life and approaching things the way you want to, you’re going to get some criticisms, you’re going to have of those haters. What are your favorite approaches for dealing with this kind of stuff that comes your way?

Michelle Poler

The first thing is that it’s so important to understand that we are not here to be liked by everybody, and that is okay. I’d rather be loved by a few than liked by everybody. And the more you want to be liked by everybody, the more generic you will sound, and the less you will connect with people. The more you are daring to be disliked by others, the more true to yourself you’ll be, and the more you’ll connect with the right audience. And, for me, that’s priceless.

And I’ve heard a lot of people that they don’t like me, and they say, “Michelle, I can’t stand you. I can’t stand your voice or how self-confident you are,” because I am very self-confident, and people don’t like that. But then there’s another group of people that really admire that, and that they want to be like this, and they want to learn from me so they buy my programs, and they buy my books, and they listen to my talks. And they actually get really inspired to change their own lives. And, to me, that’s enough.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. Well, so that’s a great perspective, that we’re not trying to be liked by everybody. We’re just loved by a few, and that’s enough. And so, help us, if we’re there intellectually, and we’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. I agree. That checks out,” and yet emotionally we’re not there, how do you recommend we get there?

Michelle Poler

So, I want to ask you something. Do you like everybody? If you have a party at your house, would you like everybody to be there? Or, can you think of a few people that you’re like, “I’d rather not have him in my house. I’d rather not hang out with that person”? And every time, for example, on social media, if I lose followers, I don’t think, “Oh, they don’t like me.” I’m like, “Maybe I don’t even like them either. Like, we’re just not a match, and that’s okay.”

Like I was saying, we’re not here to be liked by everybody, just like you don’t like everybody. It’s okay if people don’t like you. But those people you don’t like, they’re loved by other people, and that’s fine too. I think we’re not supposed to be a match for everybody in anything in life, in love, in jobs, as influencers, as anything, and I’m okay with that.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And then when you’re in the midst of doing something you’re afraid of, do you have any specific mantras, self-talk, pump-up rituals, any tactical things you do when you are about to enter into the fearful place, and you want to make sure that you go forward instead of running away?

Michelle Poler

Yeah, sure. So, like I told you at the beginning of this conversation, I spent my entire life avoiding fear, avoiding discomfort because every single time that I experience that feeling in my body, when you’re about to do something scary and your stomach starts telling you, “Stop it! I don’t want to go that route. Like, it’s not safe.”

I used to interpret that feeling as a sign of my body telling me, “Don’t go that way. It’s dangerous and it’s a sign that you shouldn’t do that.” It’s my intuition trying to protect me. And I realized that that feeling is also growth. That, for me, was a huge realization because I thought, “Oh, my body is protecting me,” and I realized now that my body was protecting me from growth, from opportunity. And growth feels like that. It feels uncomfortable.

So, every time now that I experience that feeling in my body of, “I am uncomfortable. My stomach is telling me not to go that way,” I understand that there’s an opportunity there. And now, instead of avoiding it, I choose that.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, through practice, repetitions, you’ve just made the connection that, “Oh, doing this thing that I’m afraid of is what makes for growth. So, this fear feeling is really just the pre-growth feeling, and that’s that.”

Michelle Poler

Yes, it was over and over again, as I was doing the project, every single day, if you ask me, you haven’t asked me this, but everybody asks me the same question, “What’s the biggest fear that you faced?” And the biggest fear is the one you haven’t faced. It’s so hard for me to tell you and answer for that question now because I already faced them.

Every single day of the project, I thought, “Okay, this was not that bad. Tomorrow I’m going to die. I can’t.” It’s going to be the worst one because I haven’t done it, because the fear is the unknown, but after I did it, every single day would be like, “Okay, that wasn’t that bad. Tomorrow is the worst one.” So, I can’t even think which one was the worst one because after I did all of them, none of them was as bad as what I thought they were going to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a huge lesson right there in terms of, “Hey, take it from Michelle. She’s done this a hundred times, plus a hundred document of times and then more that each time it wasn’t as bad as you feared it would be.” And I’m curious, so that was the experience over and over and over again, “Oh, I’m really scared of this thing. Oh, that wasn’t so bad. I’m really scared of the next thing. Oh, that wasn’t so bad.” So, I’m curious, somewhere along the line after 50 days or 70 days, did you come to think that the next day wasn’t going to be so bad?

Michelle Poler

No.

Pete Mockaitis

No? Okay.

Michelle Poler

And I’m still a fearful person. People think that I’m fearless now, they’re like, “Oh, my fearless friend, you faced so many fears. I want to be fearless like you.” I’m quite the opposite. And, actually, being called fearless is like a disservice to what I actually am. It’s actually the opposite of brave. Fearless is doing the things that don’t scare you.

So, what’s the courage in there? Why would I be proud of being fearless? I’m more proud of being brave. That means that I was definitely afraid every single time that I faced a fear and still I conquered that fear, like I still showed up. And I think that is more powerful, more valuable, more inspiring than being fearless.

Pete Mockaitis

So, now you have the perception, “Oh, this fear feeling equals that I’m about to grow.” So, you know and understand that at a deep level but you still feel the full fear and think it’s going to be terrible before you embark on the thing?

Michelle Poler

Yes, and I try to avoid it at the beginning, I go through the entire process just like the first time because we’re human, and new fears come up every single day, and a fear means that it’s something that you haven’t done before, but, also, it’s really interesting to understand that if you do something and you don’t like it, it’s very fair that you don’t want to do it again, not because you’re afraid but because you don’t like it, generally, because you tried it.

My entire life, I just said, “I don’t like this,” or, “I’m afraid of this,” but I never tried those things. Like, I would say, “I don’t like oysters.” “Have you ever tried an oyster?” “No.” “So, how can you know?” So, it was so important for me to just expose myself to all these fears, try all these things, and now I can tell you with all certainty that I do not rollercoasters. I tried them and I don’t like them, and I don’t want to try them again. But I could if I need to, but I don’t want to, but I tried them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good distinction right there. Okay. So, maybe, Michelle, if we could zoom right into now, today, is there something that you are experiencing fear and avoidance of right now? And how are you talking to yourself or planning to approach it?

Michelle Poler

Well, for the first time in my life, I am experiencing fear of success. When I heard about fear of success years ago, I was like, “That makes no sense. Why would somebody be afraid of reaching their goals? It makes no sense.” But now, as a mom, and understanding how limited time is, I am afraid of success. So, I’m at that point where I’m, like, “Should I grow more? Should I stay where I am?” Like, that is one of the fears I am right now dealing with, and also the fear of having another baby. Like, we are thinking about it but, at the same time, brings a lot of fear because now we know what it is to be parents.

Pete Mockaitis

So, with the fear of success, what are you doing with that?

Michelle Poler
I guess the most important thing is to understand what is your definition of success first. And understanding also that it can change over the years, because my definition of success was to be New York Times’ bestseller, speak as much as possible, like be on the road as much as possible, be on all these shows and surround myself with these people.

And, suddenly, what if my definition of success changed to also have more free time, be more at home, have more quality time with my family? So, it’s understanding that and being at peace with what your definition of success is today, and stop pursuing an old definition of success that you had in the past, or worse yet, pursuing other people’s definition of success.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I guess what I’m thinking here is, with this fear of success, it doesn’t so much seem as much as the others as something that you’re just going to just go do it, but rather maybe it seems like there’s some thinking, some distinguishing, some sorting out, that prioritizing, soul-searching, values to finding clarifying action that’s happening with this fear.

Michelle Poler

I think what’s important here is to identify if you’re not pursuing something because it is no longer part of your definition of success, or is it because of fear? If the answer is fear, then my recommendation is to never make decisions based on fear. If only fear is what’s holding you back, then you definitely have to go for it. Find the best way to do it. If you need therapy, whatever you need, but go for it. Do not allow fear to hold you back.

But if it’s just that your definition of success changed, then that’s something that you have to adapt. So, in this point, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, “Am I not growing because of fear? Or is it because my definition changed in this moment?” And it can always change back in the future but that’s what I’m trying to understand right now. So, it’s a lot about just looking inside and being really honest with yourself, and do not ask other people what the answer is. We love asking other people, “What do you think I should do?” And people don’t know. Only you know. The answer is always inside of you.

Pete Mockaitis

And as you do this self-inquiry, having these conversations with yourself, and you land at…and sometimes it’s really trick to reach that point of clarity, that, “Oh, it’s only fear that’s holding me back,” because a lot of times, fear can masquerade as, or rationalize some things, like, “No, really, there’s a strong chance something terrible will happen if you do that thing.” So, I guess we can call that risk. Do you have some perspective on how you distinguish between this emotion of fear versus valid risks that need to be prudently considered?

Michelle Poler

That’s a really good question. I think it’s like having that honest conversation with yourself. Like, if I’m thinking about it, what I told you about the fear of success, I think it’s more aligned to I actually want to spend more time with my family, I actually want to feel more at peace and less rushed and less things to do, and all of that.

But when I talked about having another baby, that is actually fear, that’s not my definition of success. That is, I know what it takes now to have another baby, and fear is the one thing that’s holding me back but it’s something I want. So, if I determined that fear is the only thing in my way then I’m not going to let it come in the way of something I want.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, now zooming into the workplace in particular, what are some of the top fears you’ve observed people have at work, and how you recommend we tackle them?

Michelle Poler

One of the main fears people have at work is they don’t want to be themselves. They want to be who they’re expected to be. So, I’m at work, I’m expected to behave like this, to talk like this, to send emails like this. And I want to encourage people to be their true selves at all times with whoever, with your boss, with your team, with your in-laws, with anybody. I think that that is the definition of living an authentic life, and people say, “Well, at my work, they wouldn’t like my real self.” Then maybe you’re not at the right job, that’s what I would say.

I think that we only have one life. I’m very mindful about that. And one of my purposes in life is to live life to the fullest, is to really enjoy my life, is to feel that every day counts, and I want to be happy. And there is a huge difference between being comfortable and being happy. And people, without realizing it, they’re pursuing comfort, not happiness. And I feel like it’s one of my missions to make people see this and understand that comfort will not lead to happiness.

And we’re told this since we’re little. Since we’re little, it’s like, “You need to find the right job. You need to have stability. You need to find a partner. You need to have all these things.” And when you check all the boxes, and you ask yourself, “Is this what happiness is about?” If you’re not truly happy, it means that you’re checking other people’s boxes, and you should check your own boxes. That’s what will lead you to your own happiness and not comfort.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And now let’s hear about, at work, folks have a fear of speaking up in a meeting or asking for what they really want and need. Any tips on how we can tackle those in particular?

Michelle Poler

For me, the best strategy is if you really believe that you deserve something, you’re certain about that, you’re not just being entitled, or you want it because somebody else got it, you feel like, “I deserve this. They’re not recognizing me and I have to speak up for myself,” first, you have to do it. If not, you’re betraying yourself and you are rejecting yourself. Because of the fear of rejection that you’re getting, you have that fear, “I don’t want to be rejected. I don’t want to get a no,” you are rejecting yourself. And I think that’s the worst thing that we could do.

So, first of all, encouraging people here to speak up and ask for what they know they deserve. And the strategy I would use, again, is asking myself, “What’s the best that can happen if I do this, if I ask for it?” What if you get a yes? We’re so afraid of getting a no and being judged that we stay where we are. Every time that we choose comfort over growth, we feel like we’re staying where we are but we’re actually moving backwards.

Every single time we’re choosing comfort, we’re moving backwards because the rest of the world is moving forward. And I think it’s also, like, our duty to speak up for ourselves. And if you know you deserve this, you ask for it and you don’t get it, maybe you’re at a place that they don’t appreciate you enough.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michelle Poler

This quote is by Steven Pressfield, and this is the quote that inspired me to put my 100 Day project out there.

So, it says, “Are you born a writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end, the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it. If you were meant to cure cancer, or write a symphony, or crack cold fusion, and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, beautiful. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michelle Poler

Well, I’m a big fan of Brene Brown. All of her research that she’s done about empathy, about language, about vulnerability, anything that is in her books, I’m a huge fan of those. I learned so much from her.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Michelle Poler

I would say The War of Art by Steven Pressfield from the quote that I read. That book is very simple and very life-changing. Well, also, a kids’ book.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure.

Michelle Poler

Can I say a kids’ book that I feel every adult should read. It’s called Maybe by Kobi Yamada.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

Favorite tool, Videoleap. That’s where I edit all my reels. So easy to create a reel and find the perfect music and everything through Videoleap. So, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Michelle Poler

Dancing before any phone call, any important phone call, like with clients, or doing a podcast interview. Before coming to this podcast, I danced by myself in my office. It just gets me in the right mood.

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

Michelle Poler

The question, “What’s the best that can happen?” It’s the one that I get the most quoted on. And if I can share another one, is when you believe in yourself so much, you make others believe in you as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

You can go to my website, MichellePoler.com, or if you want to watch me embarrass myself facing all 100 fears, you can go to 100DaysWithoutFear.com, or follow me on Instagram @hellofears.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

I would say the final challenge would be find the right place for you. Don’t settle. Don’t settle for anything in life, not for a job, not for a partner, not for a city, not for a home, not for a dog. Find what feels right for you.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Michelle, thank you. This was a ton of fun. And I wish you many adventures and fun times crushing more fears.

Michelle Poler

Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Feb 05
0

933: How Building a Habit of Bravery Transforms Everything with Todd Henry

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Todd Henry shares how to build the courage to chase after opportunities amidst uncertainty.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to muster courage in the moment 
  2. The biggest myth that holds us back 
  3. Five steps to feel braver every day 

About Todd

Todd Henry teaches leaders and organizations how to establish practices that lead to everyday brilliance. He is the author of seven books: The Accidental Creative, Die Empty, Louder Than Words, Herding Tigers, The Motivation Code, Daily Creative, The Brave Habit, which have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and he speaks and consults across dozens of industries on creativity, leadership, and passion for work.

With more than fifteen million downloads, his podcast offers weekly tips for how to stay prolific, brilliant, and healthy.

Resources Mentioned

Todd Henry Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Todd, welcome back.

Todd Henry

Pete, it is so good to be back on the show. Thanks for the kind invitation.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, thank you. You’ve got a fresh book, and you’ve said a lot of interesting things, and written a lot of cool books. I’m curious, why bravery as the topic now?

Todd Henry

10 years ago, I wrote a book called Die Empty. It released, and did really well, but there was something that I overlooked in that book, and it always plagued me. There was one topic that I didn’t write about. And it was kind of one of those forehead-slap moments when I realized, “Oh, there’s kind of an important thing I overlooked here,” and that topic was bravery.

Because I talked about all the ways that we can overcome these hurdles we encounter, these pitfalls, when doing difficult creative work, and some strategies for doing that, but the one key element that I found in people and in teams who were willing and able to do that was that they exhibited bravery. And so, I kind of committed to looking into, to investigating that topic of bravery.

And my ingoing assumption was that, “Well, some people are just wired for it. They’re just more risk-tolerant and some people aren’t.” But the more I researched the topic, I realized, actually, bravery is exhibited in all different kinds of places by all different kinds of people, and people who historically had not exhibited bravery suddenly started exhibiting bravery, and vice versa.

What I realized was that bravery is not a baked-in personality trait, that bravery is actually a habit, it’s a discipline that we can train ourselves to exhibit. And so, that was kind of the initial source of the book.

And so, for the last six years, it’s been a passion project. I’ve been working on this book, and it took me six years to kind of pull it all together, and now it’s finally here. So, it’s called The Brave Habit, and it’s about how to develop the habit of bravery as you approach creative work, leadership, relationships, and everything that you have to do in life.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, tell us, what impact does having upgraded bravery deliver for us?

Todd Henry

So, I think that we often conflate two things. We conflate bravery with boldness. And we also conflate cowardice with wisdom. And what I mean by that is we all have moments in our life where we recognize an opportunity, where we see that there’s something possible for us if we were willing to act, but there’s a little voice inside of us that says, “Well, maybe it would be better if…” or, “Maybe someone else is better equipped to…” or, “You really don’t have the skills to…” or things of that nature. And that’s really cowardice whispering in our ear, but we often conflate it with wisdom. We think this is wisdom speaking to us.

And what I discovered was that there really are two things that comprise bravery in those moments. There are two core attributes, two core traits, that people who consistently ignore the voice of cowardice that comes disguised as wisdom, and, instead, choose to engage in brave action. There are two core attributes and they tend to exhibit in those moments. The first is they have an optimistic vision of the future, meaning that they have a vision of a better possible future that they could be navigating toward. And the second attribute that they tend to exhibit is a sense of perceived agency to bring that better possible future about.

So, think about a team. When I look at the teams who are consistently doing what I would consider to be brave work, they are teams who have a vision that they’re navigating toward, they have a very clear North Pole that they believe in and that they’re willing, if necessary, to sacrifice on behalf of because they believe deeply in that vision.

Versus people who have kind of a pessimistic vision of the future, “Well, I really don’t know what the future holds. And who can really tell anyway, right?” And so, that’s sort of the opposite of what I’m talking about. And they tend to have a sense of agency, meaning, “We believe that we have the platform, the proficiency, that we have people around us who can help us accomplish that vision.”

So, when you have those attributes, you’ve created a fertile field within which bravery is likely to occur. Now, it doesn’t mean it will occur but you’re creating a fertile field within which bravery is likely to occur. So, how does that play out for us as individuals in the workplace?

Well, we all have to confront uncertainty, we have big projects we’re working on, ideas maybe that are noodling around the back of our mind, and we’re thinking about bringing them into the world, but that little voice of cowardice is whispering in our ear, “Well, maybe somebody else would be better suited to do that,” “Well, maybe you should wait and let somebody else step up,” “Well, maybe you’re not the right person to lead this,” or, “Well, maybe you need to do a power grab because you need to prove that you’re the right person.” Well, that’s not necessarily bravery. That’s just boldness.

So, we have these little voices whispering in the back of our ear. In those moments where we’re tempted with cowardice, we can ask ourselves, “Okay, am I afraid to act because I don’t have a clear vision of where I’m going, or I don’t have a vision of a better possible future? Or, am I afraid to act because I don’t trust that I have agency to be able to create meaningful change in the direction of my vision?”

And simply by asking ourselves those questions consistently, by putting some qualifiers on what we feel, inherently, that self-protection instinct that we have, we can, a) develop a better narrative to help ourselves get through those moments, and, b) identify any areas where maybe we are lacking. We tend to think bravery is, “Well, just do it. Just leap. Just jump from the cliff, right? Just say the thing. Just have the conversation.”

That’s not necessarily always bravery. Sometimes it’s boldness. Boldness and bravery are not necessarily the same thing. Sometimes bravery means waiting until the right time. So, when you ask yourself those questions, “Do I have a clear vision of where I’m going? And do I trust that I have the agency to be able to bring it about?”

If the answer to either of those is no, maybe the bravest thing you can do is wait as your vision is clarified, or wait until you develop the skill necessary to bring it about. That doesn’t mean you’re being a coward. That means you’re being strategic. And so, when you ask, “How does bravery benefit us?” It benefits us by giving us a sense of the places in our life where we can act in a meaningful way to develop our capacity to do work that is surprising, valuable, and, ultimately, contributive to the body of work that we want to build.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, I think there’s a lot of interesting tidbits here in terms of the voice of cowardice can be sneaky, and we may not even recognize that that’s what that is. I remember we had Kwame Christian say once early on the show that fear masquerades in many forms. And I thought that was really clever in terms of it’s procrastination, or, “You know what, maybe this isn’t the right time,” like, any number of voices. And it’s good to just say, “Oh, no, what’s really happening is I’m scared. What’s really missing here is bravery.”

And you’ve done a cool segmentation, so, “Is it a matter of vision or is it a matter of agency?” And help me out, when I’m feeling un-brave, I think what’s going on is I think, “There’s a substantial chance that this is going to go badly for me.” And so, do we categorize that as a vision matter, or an agency matter, or where does that fall into your schema?

Todd Henry

Well, that’s a really great example. Can I tell you a story of how that’s playing out actually for me right now? I think I mentioned to you, so before we started recording, I’ve been doing The Accidental Creative podcast since 2005.

As I was writing this book, I began challenging people, in the book, to ask some really brave questions and very dangerous questions, maybe. And among those questions that I began asking myself was, “If I were starting over again, would I be doing things the way that I’m doing them right now?” And the uncomfortable answer that I came to, Pete, was, “No. No, I wouldn’t.” Like, it’s fine, it’s working, people seem to enjoy it, it’s great, but would I be doing it this way? No.

Why? Because I have a vision of a way that things could be better, and I was feeling a little bit of discontentment around the way I was doing things. Well, there’s a lot of costs involved in changing something that has a substantial audience, and that has been successful, and that’s financially contributive to the bottom line of my business. There’s a substantial risk involved. And, to your point, you asked the question, “Well, what if this goes badly for me?” Yeah, there’s a lot of risk involved in doing something like that.

What compelled me to make the change that we made, which was basically completely rebranding the show, redoing the format, and eliminating thousands of back episodes of the podcast, and starting over with Episode 1 on January 1st, what compelled me to do it was that vision. I knew I had the agency to bring it about because I have created a podcast, I know how to do this, I know how to do creative work and make audio shows, but the vision was what compelled me. I had a very clear vision of what this could be.

And so, the question I asked myself was, “If I fail, will it be worth it if it’s in pursuit of a vision that I care about?” And the answer was, “Yes.” And like Seth Godin likes to say, “This might not work,” and it might not work. It still might not work. But the vision superseded my fear of failure in this case. And so, what my response was, “If it fails, I want to go down doing the thing that I believed to be the right thing. I want to pursue the vision for the work that I think is the best possible manifestation of this kind of work that I’m trying to do right now.”

And so, I think the answer to your question, that you have to be able to say, “It’s worth failing in the pursuit of this vision. It’s worth sacrificing something in the pursuit of this vision if I believe it’s the right direction.” And that doesn’t mean it’s always the case for everyone. In my case, it was, but the problem is we often don’t stop to ask the question because we just assume that the goal of life is to protect, to be comfortable.

Khalil Gibran said, “Verily the lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning the funeral.” So, when we succumb to the love of comfort, the lust for comfort, we murder our own soul. And so, the challenge I would have for listeners is, “Where are you falling prey to the love of comfort?” Not comfort itself. There’s nothing wrong with comfort, but when you fall in love with comfort, you’re inherently going to compromise what’s possible because nothing great is ever done from a position of comfort.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, then it sounds like the fear I have that things are going to go badly, in your categorization system, that’s a matter of the vision may not be clear or strong enough to overpower, in the internal tug of war, the reluctance or internal fear.

Todd Henry

Yeah, that’s right. Or, in some cases, like in organizations, it could be that that vision just hasn’t been communicated clearly enough, or people don’t understand how they play into that vision. There are a lot of organizations with people who are more than willing to be brave, and to do brave work, and to have brave conversations, and to confront uncertainty, but they don’t really understand how their efforts would matter because the leader hasn’t given a compelling vision for where the organization is going.

And so, the result is you have all these people who are at the ready, they want to do something, but they don’t really know what to do. Or, you have organizations where the leader is casting vision constantly but they’re not reinforcing the agency. They try to be overcontrolling in their organization. They step in and do the work for people instead of equipping people and giving them agency to do their own work, to come up with their own ideas. And the net result of that is people just feel powerless, they just succumb, and they say, “Okay, fine. Just tell me what to do.”

Well, are they going to do brave work? No, of course not because they’ve been robbed of a sense of agency. And so, as leaders of organizations, the biggest gift that we can give to people is to position them in places where bravery is likely to occur, which means being very clear about our vision but also speaking agency into them, speaking encouragement into them, giving them the ability to try things, to experiment, even to fail in small ways that aren’t fatal to the organization so that they have that sense of agency to act bravely in the face of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, let’s maybe zoom way in. Let’s say we have an individual, and they want to say something that’s maybe uncomfortable, unpopular, because they are going against the status quo, they’re challenging someone so they might get offended, outraged, create some political rifts, etc. Help us out, Todd. What are the key steps to follow in order to speak up when bravery is required?

Todd Henry

So, you have to be absolutely certain that your action is in the service of a vision, of a better possible future. It’s not self-serving, it’s not bold, because boldness is mostly self-serving. Bravery is always empathetic. So, how is speaking up going to be in service of a greater vision, whether that’s creating a better environment on the team, communicating something to the leader that maybe they’re not aware of, and they need to be aware of because this is impacting everyone else around us?

So, if the answer to that is yes, and the second question you have to ask is, “Am I the right person to have this conversation?” Because if a random person at a low level of an organization decides to ambush the CEO in the lobby of the building one day and say something, well, you have no agency, you have no platform. You’re doing something but that’s just boldness. That’s not necessarily bravery because what impact is that going to have? Probably very little impact. And, in fact, it could be detrimental to the overall cause.

And so, those are the two questions you have to ask, “Am I doing this in the service of a better vision, a greater vision? Or, am I just doing this to be self-serving for my own political purposes?” And the second question you have to ask is, “Am I the right person to be able to do this? So, do I have the agency? Do I have the platform to be able to do this?”

And if the answer to that second question is no, “Well, then who does have the platform? Who am I connected to who I might be able to, then, have this conversation with and we can go together to the leader, we can go together to whoever this person is and have a conversation together because the other person has platform, they have relationship, they have credibility that maybe I don’t have?”

So, again, this framework helps you in those moments where you have to make a brave decision, it helps you sort of gauge and diagnose places where, “Well, why do I feel hesitant to do this? Oh, it’s because I don’t really have the agency to do this. I could just go ambush this person with a conversation but they’re not going to listen to me because I don’t have the right platform, but I do know someone who does, so I’m going to go to them. We’re going to have a conversation, and we’re going to go together to them, and then we’re going to have a higher probability chance of creating the change we’re trying to create.”

So, two questions, again, “Is this in service of a greater vision or in service of me?” That’s the empathy question. And then the second one is, “Do I have the credibility, the platform, the proficiency to be able to have this conversation? If not, then how can I gain that agency in order to create this meaningful change toward the vision that I’m pursuing?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you maybe share some stories in which we’ve got a professional who is finding they would like an upgrade to their bravery, and then they walked these paths of upgrading the vision, or upgrading the agency to make it happen?

Todd Henry

Yeah, so this example I shared in the book of a guy named Scott. Scott was a commercial real estate agent, and it was the very fortuitous time of the late 2000s, so right around 2008, and you can kind of imagine where this story is going because we experienced a tremendous collapse in the real estate industry, and, thus, the entire economy in 2008, and so Scott was really in danger of just being without livelihood.

And so, he was talking with his wife, and they were expecting their first child, and it was obviously a really kind of nerve-racking time for them. And he was considering the possibility of making a transition into doing residential real estate but he didn’t really have a tremendous amount of experience doing residential real estate, so he had a job offer to go sell office furniture, and he was thinking about just going to sell office furniture because, “This is something that can pay the bills with our first child on the way.”

And as he was talking about this with his wife, his wife said, “Hey, listen, you have all of this experience in the real estate industry, you have some connections in the real estate industry, albeit not in the residential real estate industry, and you have a very clear vision of how you could do this differently, how you could be a different kind of real estate agent that could be more attractive to people, that could actually be kind of a partner with people rather than just sort of being the go-between in these transactions.”

And she said, “Let’s do this. Let’s establish some time, a timeframe, let’s call it six months, and why don’t you try this, let’s see what happens. And if we see some momentum, then we’ll keep moving forward. And if we don’t, then you can always go take the office furniture job, and we’ll just say, ‘Okay, now you’re an office furniture salesman,’ or whatever.”

And so, he did. So, he decided to launch his real estate practice, and it did not go well for the first handful of months, and it was a really difficult time in the market. But just in the nick of time, he did make his first sale, and that was enough to generate some cashflow and kind of keep the business moving forward. And the way that he did it was because he was following his vision, his vision of a better possible future, the way that things could be different in the real estate industry.

And the reason I share that story is because his instinct in the moment was, “Well, I just need to retreat to the easiest thing I can do, which is go take a salaried job to pay the bills.” Someone else came along, someone who had a very vested interest in his success came along and spoke agency into him, said, “Hey, you could do that. That’s fine. But that’s not what you’re capable of.”

“You don’t even know what you’re capable of yet. We haven’t even tried yet. You have agency you haven’t even tapped into. So, why don’t you go try this? I see what you’re capable of. I know what you’re capable of. You have a vision. Go try this.” He had someone, his wife, who spoke courage into him. And so, Scott did because she put him in that very fertile field where brave action is likely to occur, that place of agency and vision.

Now, 10 years later, his real estate practice is one of the top real estate practices in the country within his company, which is remarkable. But even if it hadn’t worked out that way, would he have made the brave choice? Even if it hadn’t worked out for him, would he have made the brave choice?

The answer, I believe, is yes, absolutely, because bravery has nothing to do with outcomes. You can make a good decision, Pete, that has a bad outcome, and you can make a bad decision that has a good outcome. That’s why it’s so difficult often to analyze our decisions because we tend to associate our outcomes with our decisions. But the reality is we make decisions with the best information we have at the time, and we can’t always control where those decisions are going to lead.

And so, even if Scott had failed, he still made a brave choice, and it still was probably a good decision for him to try it to see if he could make it work. And that’s part of the thing that I think leads us to succumb to cowardice, is that we are constantly analyzing our past decisions through our present understanding, and the net result is that we think that things were bad decisions, when, actually, they may have been good decisions, they just had bad outcomes. We made the best decision we could at the time.

So, I think that story of Scott is one that kind of illustrates what it looks like to have someone speaking agency and optimism into you in those moments of uncertainty.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Thank you. And we had Annie Duke, a professional poker player, say a similar point in terms of you may have made the best decision though the outcome didn’t work out, and that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the best decision. So, that’s good to consider. I’d love to hear the counterpoint to that in terms of we may be more likely to regret what we didn’t do. How do we judiciously, astutely, wisely, prudently determine, “Ah, this harebrained scheme of mine, I should kill right now rather than pursue it to my detriment”?

Todd Henry

Yeah. So, interestingly, we’re doing an episode of our podcast that kind of deals with that, how sometimes we get frozen in these moments. And as part of the interview, we revisited the conversation with Seth Godin about his book The Dip. And I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book but in the book, he talks about…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah, it’s short. I read it. It’s fun.

Todd Henry

Yeah, the fantastic. The two ways that we get stuck. The first way is what he calls a cul-de-sac, which is basically a dead end where we’re just going round and round and round and round the cul-de-sac, and it feels like we’re making progress but, really, we’re just stuck, we don’t really have a vision. And the best thing to do in the cul-de-sac is just to quit because you’re never going to get anywhere if you’re in a cul-de-sac.

And then he said the second thing, the second kind of place where we get stuck is in what he calls the dip. And the dip is that inevitable difficult moment after we’ve started a creative project, and we have all this energy at the beginning because it’s new, and it’s fresh, and we have a vision, and then it gets really hard, and so a lot of people give up. Scott Belsky calls this the project plateau. It’s the moment where it starts getting really hard but we don’t have the same excitement about the work, and so we tend to want to quit. But you don’t quit in the dip.

If you have a vision, of the way things could be, and you can see a path to get there, you don’t quit in the dip. You keep pushing. You keep going because there are rewards on the other side. So, when we talk about a vision of a better possible future, and the agency to bring it about, that’s really kind of where I’m playing as well, is when you get into those moments where you’re in the dip, and it’s uncertain, you don’t know what to do, and you don’t know if you really feel like pushing forward, if you have a vision, you need to push forward.

If you believe that you have the agency, the will, the capability to bring that about, you need to push forward. Not only do you need it, we need you to push forward because that’s how the world moves forward. So, if you’re in a cul-de-sac, quit. If you have no vision, quit. If you don’t believe you have the agency, just quit. Or, develop it, develop the vision, develop the agency, but if you’re in the dip, the brave thing to do is to keep moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty. Okay. Well, Todd, I would love to get your perspective. Do you have any top do’s or don’ts for folks looking to be awesome at their job as they are contemplating this bravery stuff?

Todd Henry

Yeah, the main thing, and this is why the book called The Brave Habit, is that bravery is a habit, which means that we can build practices into our life to prepare us for moments where we need to be brave. So, the main do I would say is have some time that you block off in your life, and I walk people through this in the book, where you basically follow B-R-A-V-E. Which is basically block time once a week to look at your calendar, look at your commitments, look at everything coming up in your life that week, conversations in your life, projects you’re accountable for. So, block the time, and the reason I say that first is because it seems like an obvious thing but we don’t do it, we don’t plan time for the things that are most important.

The second part is review. Review upcoming conversations that maybe you’re a little nervous about. Review client projects, conversations, that you’re going to be having, and review them for points of uncertainty, for tensions that you know are inevitably going to be there. The third is claim agency, meaning assess what agency you have in those moments. What are you bringing to those moments that you uniquely are able to contribute? Why are you right person to have that conversation? Why are you the right person to do that project? So, re-root yourself in your sense of agency.

The fourth is vision. So, what is your vision for each of those relationships, for each of those projects, for your work as a whole, your vision for your life, your vision for your relationships? What is your vision? Re-root yourself. And then, finally, express your intent, E, that’s the E part. Express your intent, meaning, “Here is the outcome that I am committed to for each of these areas.” By doing this, what you’re doing is getting ahead of those moments.

We’re often surprised by these moments where we have to be brave. We come into a conversation, and we’re completely ill-prepared because we haven’t done the pre-work to set ourselves up for bravery, for exhibiting bravery in the moment. But, again, as we get ahead of it, and as we build practices to prepare us for those moments, then, in the moment itself, we’re not reacting. We’re simply enacting the plan that we’ve already put in place, that we know that we’re going to enact. And then as we do that consistently over time, it becomes more of a habit for us.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Lovely. And any don’ts?

Todd Henry

The biggest don’t, and this is, by the way, true of anything that we do as creative professionals, people have to solve problems, is don’t wing it. Talent gets you in the game but your practices keep you in the game. Talent is the price of entry. People think that they can wing their entire career based on talent alone. You cannot. You will, eventually, fail. You’ll eventually succumb to the negative drag forces of the marketplace.

You have to have practices in your life to prepare you for those moments and to help you be successful. And so, that would be the biggest thing, is don’t wing it. Have practices in your life to prepare you for critical moments.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

I think the biggest thing that I would encourage people to consider is, listen, your life is comprised of moments, and how you approach those moments is going to define your life. We tend to think of life as a passage of days, and years, and months, and whatever, and that’s true but the reality is some of those moments are weighted far more significantly than others.

And how you respond in critical moments in your life is going to determine the arch of your life, and, ultimately, the body of work that you build, the relationships you have, and the degree to which you have deep regret later in your life. So, your moment is coming, make sure that you’re prepared for that moment when it arrives.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Todd Henry

Thomas Merton is one of my favorite thinkers, one of my favorite writers.

And he once wrote, “There can be an intense egoism in following everyone else. People are in a hurry to magnify themselves by imitating what is popular, and too lazy to think of anything better. Hurry ruins saints as well as artists. They want quick success, and they are in such a hurry to get it, they cannot take time to be true to themselves. And when the madness is upon them, they justify their very haste as a species of integrity.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

So, one thing that is really interesting to me in researching this book, I came across the work of a couple of key people. One was Martin Seligman, who’s kind of known as the father of positive psychology, and the other one was Albert Bandura, who did significant research into agency, and how agency affects us.

And one of the key tidbits that came out of the research was that people who live with an optimistic mindset versus a pessimistic mindset tend to outlive people who have a pessimistic mindset in their life, to the extent that people who live with a generally pessimistic mindset exhibit health effects that are similar to smoking packs of cigarettes a day in their life. Those are the kinds of health effects that they experience. Pessimism has such a negative drag on your physical health that is the equivalent of smoking packs of cigarettes a day. So, I thought that was pretty fascinating, actually.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Todd Henry

I was watching a video of a guy who was talking about the five-foot shelf of books, which is the complete Harvard Classics which were assembled like in the early 1900s by the president of Harvard. And he said, “If you read these books, this five-foot shelf of books, you will have all that you need in terms of, like, a Western liberal education.”

And so, I decided to commit myself to reading the complete Harvard Classics.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Can you share with us a couple titles that we’d recognize in that and a couple titles that we wouldn’t?

Todd Henry

Absolutely. So, right now, I’m in the midst of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, which is the very first part.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s so good. All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to help you be awesome at your job?

Todd Henry

The tool that I use more than any other tool right now, as a podcaster, as a content creator, is Descript. It has radically changed my world, and I don’t say that very often. I’m not, like, a big jump-on-the-bandwagon-of-a-tool kind of guy but Descript has completely changed my world. If you do any audio or video creating, you 100% need to be using Descript.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

The one that I see circulating the most, because it got picked up by some of the, like, habit apps and things, is, “Don’t let your rituals become ruts,” and so, I think, every so often, or I know, every so often, it’s important to do a review of your rituals and make sure that they’re still serving you, and they’re not just there for you to serve them.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

So, ToddHenry.com is my personal website. You can find all my books. Our podcast is called Daily Creative with Todd Henry. We just started over with episode one. So, you could listen to the podcast where you get podcasts. My books are at ToddHenry.com or wherever you buy your books. The Brave Habit is available now.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Todd Henry

It’s really important that we understand that your time is finite, and this is almost something we say so often, it becomes cliché, but it’s cliché for a reason, it’s because it’s true. And so, treat today, treat this moment, treat your next conversation, treat the project you’re working on not as if it’s going to be your last, but as if it’s going to be your legacy.

We often hear this advice, “Live every day as if it’s your last,” and I think that’s terrible advice because if it was my last day, I’m going to eat donuts and do whatever I want to do because I don’t have to worry about my health. Instead, I like to think, “What if today was my legacy? What if this was the only day? What if a biographer was going to follow me around today and look at everything I do, and then was going to write the story of my life based on this day? How might I approach this day differently? How might I approach that next conversation or that conflict differently? How much effort might I put into this project I’m working on?”

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Well, Todd, thank you. I wish you much fun and bravery.

Todd Henry

Well, thank you. And thanks so much for having me on the show, and thanks for the great work that you do.