KF #26. Being Resilient Archives - Page 2 of 21 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, thanks so much for having me on, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting. Your research has been designated as transformative.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
I like this. This is important. The air quotes, the transformative. It is. Yeah, it’s crazy, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Tell me what is this transformative research?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, I’m a stress physiologist, and rather than telling people to get rid of their stress, I help them to transform their stress and actually have it serve them. So, I think it’s a fool’s errand to try and get rid of stress these days. And it only makes people feel worse because they can’t do it. You’re not supposed to get rid of stress, right? So how can we actually use it as a competitive advantage instead?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I would love to hear any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made about how this is done in practice?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Sure. Well, I’ll start with the research that really drove me to dive deeper into this, and it was really about stress mindset. So, they were looking at 30,000 Americans over the course of eight years’ time. And, essentially, the question that arose was, “If you have very high levels of stress and believe that stress is bad for you,” well, those people die at very high rates which is probably unsurprising to all of us because we have high stress levels, and we’re like, “Oh, gosh I have to get rid of it. It’s really bad for us.”

Here’s the surprising bit about that research. The people that had very high levels of stress but simply believed that that stress wasn’t bad for them, that it was just energy, or that it was good, they had the lowest mortality rates of the entire study. So, that’s lower than people who had very low stress to begin with.

What that means is that it’s not stress that’s killing us. It’s the belief that stress is bad for us that is actually the real culprit here. And so, I am really interested in understanding stress mindset and how we can begin to shift it so that we can perform like Olympic athletes and break world records under high-pressure situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’ve heard this research as well and I’m thinking about the book The Upside of Stress. So, yeah, I heard about that, and I thought that was really interesting and striking. But we believe kind of what we believe, right, Dr. Rebecca?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, sure.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we shift a belief? Like, I think, if we have had experiences with stress, it’d be like, “That sucked. And, oh, my gosh, you know, I gained all this weight,” or, “I was having trouble sleeping,” or sort of whatever, we think too stressful times, we’re like, “Yeah, that was definitely bad. I don’t see how I can flip that belief, even though it would be nice if I had the opposite belief.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Cool. So, I’m going to give you my formula in a second, but before, I’m going to challenge your belief. So, here’s the question that I asked in my research. I want you to think about a project or an accomplishment that you’re most proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah? Now go back in time to when you were in the middle of that project. What was your stress level? Now, on a scale of zero to 100, I had the vast majority of people saying something like 5,842. Like, they were stressed out of their gourds during the time when they were doing their most meaningful, purposeful work.

So, yeah, sure, it might suck sometimes, but it’s also adding meaning and joy and purpose to our lives. And it’s unfortunate that we look back on it and think, “Yeah, that was good,” but we can’t live it in the moment. And so, my job is to help people recognize that stress really is a barometer for how much we’re caring about something in the moment, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that really does check out. And at times, it’s funny, when I feel overwhelmed, I have had the thought, “I wish I cared about this less. It’s, like, that would feel so much easier right now, but I am just being a stickler for having a high standard on this thing.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Sure. And, honestly, this is the weird thing about humans, and I love this about humans because we’re such strange, complex creatures, but we’re also the only animal on Earth that creates stress for ourselves. Robert Sapolsky, another stress physiologist, he wrote a great book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and there’s a reason, right? Lions, take lions, for example. Great hunters. They fail 80% of the time. Like, 80%.

If you fail at something 80% of the time, you would sit there, beating yourself up going, “Gosh, I’m such a lousy hunter. I can’t believe they even let me hunt with them. Like, I’m so terrible at this.” Lions, they miss a hunt, they take a nap. There’s no, like, thought that is creating more stress. And that’s exactly what humans do. We create more stress for ourselves. In fact, my research from last year showed that we create more stress for ourselves trying to get rid of the stress. So, yeah, that’s a big problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Tell us about this research, we create more stress for ourselves trying to get rid of stress.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much the whole summary of it. You nailed it right there.

Pete Mockaitis
But, I mean, what was the experimental design such that this was uncovered?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, no, it wasn’t that exciting. It wasn’t that exciting. We listed 3,000 Americans, working Americans, ages 20 to 70, and asking a whole bunch of questions about their levels of stress, how different coping mechanisms, how they handle. And, you know, we went from everything from massage to prayer to, you name it, looking at various ways to intervene with their stress.

And people who ended up doing more interventions, reported feeling more stress after those interventions. And this backs up a lot of the research that was done and came out in 2024 in the Journal of Industrial Relations, looking at 90 different workplace interventions, and none of them actually helped reduce stress with the exception of one. There was one. I want to make sure we put an asterisk next to. And that was service to others.

So, I think this is really remarkable because we don’t talk enough about this with stress. We certainly talk about cortisol and all of the negative effects of stress. What we don’t talk about is oxytocin, which is another major stress hormone, which is this hormone of courage that encourages people to reach out and connect through the stress. And that’s really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes. You know, this reminds me, talk about service to others, and I’ve shared this story before. One time I had a stressful situation. I needed to move out and I had a landlord who was difficult, and I just knew she was going to give me a hard time, you know, about like, “Oh, you didn’t repaint this section.” I was like, “I’m pretty sure I don’t have to, but, like, meh.” You know?

So, like, I knew it was going to be difficult, and it was very hot and there was a lot to be done. And you know that whole family, you know, in the mix, and I just decided that I wasn’t going to do this to please this landlord because I don’t really care about her opinion at all.

And I wasn’t going to do this to reclaim as much of my security deposits as possible because that was, hmm, she’s probably going to unjustly kind of capture as much as you could, regardless. And so, I didn’t have high expectations there. But I did remember that I had kind of a hard time moving in with power not being on and whatnot.

And I thought my purpose here is to give the next tenants the best possible experience when they come in and go, “Ah, this is home.” And that really did ease a lot of the toils, as opposed to me being grumbly like, “Oh, my gosh, tenants aren’t supposed to repaint. This is ridiculous. Aargh!” I was like, “Oh, someone’s going to come here and say, ‘How lovely! This is our home.’”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Isn’t that beautiful? Like, what a wonderful experience that you created. And not only did that probably help your stress, but it also relieved the stress of the person coming in. And so, this creates this lovely ripple effect of community. I think it’s so special. So, I love it when people are stressed. I’m like, “That’s great. You’re doing meaningful, purposeful work. How amazing.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, service to others. Let’s dig into it. Is that kind of your top thing we’re recommending here in your book, Springboard: Transform Stress to Work for You?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, it’s one of the tenets. So, I walk people through what I call my fearless stress formula. And, of course, you know, listen, the science is a really complex science. And in order to communicate it clearly, like every other author, I’ve broken it into three simple steps. Trust me, you’re going to have to read the references, go into the citations. It’s all there. But we try and make this as simple as possible.

So, the first step is simply, “Is it a tiger?” That’s the question. It’s the tiger. So, the tiger represents the fact that our stress response is really built for three minutes of screaming terror through the jungle. It’s a life and death situation. That’s what, whether you’re actually in a life and death situation, or whether you’re getting a full inbox, or a ping, or a ding, or a landlady who’s really upset with you, we’re having the same response.

And so, recognizing that it’s not an actual tiger, i.e. “This is not going to kill me in the next three minutes,” is the first step.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot because the specificity of, “There’s not a risk of it killing me in the next three minutes,” because it’s quite possible for our brains to immediately craft a story for why, “Well, no, this is super high stakes because if I blow this presentation, I could get fired and then I wouldn’t have the money to be able to pay for the mortgage. And we’ll be foreclosing on.”

So, it’s like, we can create a, “Well, no, this is, in fact, nearly life or death-ish.” It’s like, “Hmm, no, three minutes will make or break, life or death, is really what we mean here.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
That’s it! And, Pete, what you just did is it’s literally what I teach people. This is catastrophizing, it’s completely normal. It’s what our brains love to do, and it’s a feature. It’s not a bug. They’re protecting us from all the ways that this is going to go catastrophically wrong. And 99.9999999% of the time, you’re not going to actually die.

And so, at this stage, I ask people to invite the tiger in for tea. Don’t try and avoid it. We’re not trying to avoid the stressor. We’re saying, “Come on, let’s sit down. Let’s name you. What are you? Who are you? What are you all about? Oh, you’re not actually going to kill me. Great. If I can sit for three minutes with it and not be dead, then I can move to the second stage, which is the transfer stage.”

“That’s where I’m taking all of this energy that my body has created for me. Thank you very much, body, for this, right? I now have all of this stress energy that is helping me to perform in this moment, to rise to the occasion, which is a gift. And so, now I can use this energy. Instead of stressing and being anxious and worrying, I can shift it into energy that is excitement energy or joyful energy or even productive anger.”

Like, your example is great. You’re angry and you used that anger to do something that was helpful for somebody else. So, this shift is really about curiosity. And I ask people to try and get curious in the moment, like, “What is this feeling that I’m having?” Because when they do that, two things happen. One, curiosity and fear cannot coexist.

Like, there’s literally no brain mechanism that allows for it because for 200,000 plus years we never had a tiger charging them, and we’re like, “Huh, I wonder how fast it’s coming? I wonder how many stripes it’s got?” Like, those people died. And so, when we get curious, we kick ourselves out of this fear response and it frees us up to say, “What else could this possibly mean?”

And then our brain looks to our body, and if we’re sitting open-shouldered with a smile on and acting as if there’s a potential for adventure, our brain shifts into this mode of excitement, and it can begin to use all of this energy for other possibilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the third step?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
So, the third step of the formula is the trajectory. So where do we want to point all of this? Now we’ve got all of the butterflies in alignment, where do we want to point our stress energy? And what people mostly do is they point it away from the stressor, right? It’s like, “How do I avoid this? How can I minimize this? How can I calm down?” which is the opposite of what we want to do.

We want to run directly at the stressor in small, tiny, incremental ways to get through it onto the other side with more resources and more energy available to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now when it comes to the curiosity, what are your top recommended questions or explorations there?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Oh, I love that. You know, I think it’s really individual and, especially, very individual to the particular scenario. But a couple of good ones that I use frequently is, “What joy can this bring me? What will I learn from this? How will I grow from this? What adventure might I have?” Those are easy very applicable questions that really work for almost any scenario.

And I want to be careful here because I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish, right? People get horrible diagnoses every day. And I’m not saying you have to be joyful or have an adventure when you get a cancer diagnosis. What I am going to say is you still have energy that you get to use. And you can use that anger, that frustration, in a way that actually projects you forward through the stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess, I’m thinking there’s also some not so helpful curious questions that we could entertain. What do you recommend we not chase down?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Sure. “How can this go horribly wrong?” Although, here’s the thing, Pete, even if you do that, I’m actually okay with it because when you stay in curiosity, what you’re doing is you’re forcing your brain to go from that limbic system, that emotional processing center, to a more logical frontal lobe. And so now we’re actually listing out all of the horrible things that are going to go wrong, and we’re sitting in it.

And it’s going to light up our logical brain to go, “Well, okay, that’s a possibility, but is it a probability? Hmm, likely not.” And as long as we can stay in that curiosity, I wouldn’t say there’s a bad question. There are some that are better than others, but I don’t want to limit people to say, like, “I should never say X, Y, and Z,” because I guarantee you that’s where your brain is going to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, I suppose I have a knack for, if I ask myself a question, generating lots of potential answers for it such as, “Man, why am I freaking out about this so much?” “Oh, well, because of dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And it’s like, “Oh, well, now I’m feeling all the more unpleasant.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Good. No, that’s good for the moment. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, and I wish I could remember the person’s name – it’s bothering me – who coined the phrase, “Name it to tame it.” And what we’re doing with emotions is we’re actually naming them and it takes away their power. Because it’s not that, “I am angry,” or, “I am stressed.” It’s that, “I have it. This is a piece of what I’m experiencing.” And what it allows us to do is create a little bit of emotional distance.

So, one of the steps within the transfer stage is to begin to act as if. So, once you get all of those answers down on a page, what would be your best possible outcome? Like, what is the story you want to be telling right now? And when you select it, how would your body position itself if you were having an adventure, if you were going to learn something from this?

And then I ask people to, like, throw their shoulders back, put a smile on, like, “I’m still really anxious. This is not going well.” But when you do that, you actually give your brain feedback because your brain is constantly looking to your body, going, “What does this signal mean? What’s happening right now?”

And if you have a smile on and your shoulders are thrown back, your brain goes, “Interesting. This must not be a life and death thing. Maybe we’re okay. Maybe we’re excited about this.” And it opens the door of that possibility. So, acting as if there’s a potential for excitement or a potential for learning and growth is half the battle.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I believe that and I’ve experienced that, and you’re reminding me of some Tony Robbins action of power moves and all that. But could you share with us some of the underlying research there that shows that that is valid and legit?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, Amy Cuddy’s research out of Harvard, and this went through, oh, my gosh, she did a TED Talk on this research probably five years ago. And it received such critical analyses because people were, like, really questioning her methods. And it went through, I mean, years and years of scrutiny. At the end of the day, it turns out she was right.

So, this research is basically looking at the physiological response to the way our body is positioned. So, when we put our shoulders back and we have an open position or a superhero pose, and we put a smile on our face, or even a pencil in my mouth, when you mentioned Tony Robbins’ research, “I put a pencil in my mouth,” it kind of forces a smile and it’s more of a grimace. It doesn’t even have to be a real smile.

But what that does is it feeds back into our limbic system and creates the release of the same neurochemicals, the same hormones that we would be experiencing if we were smiling for real. And this research is so fun because there were graduate students that were paid to put their pencil in their mouth and come in and listen to lectures.

And they found those lectures to be funnier when they had a pencil in their mouth. They found those lectures to have more humorous content. And it was just because they themselves were smiling without even recognizing it.

I think we often think that we smile because we’re happy, which is partially true. But the larger truth there is that we are happy because we’re smiling.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a couple examples of folks who tied all this together and, in fact, saw some stress, but then did these three steps and were able to make that really work for them?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
So, I’ve been studying stress research for decades now. And there was a moment, about 10 years ago, when I quit my job, sold my house, and divorced my husband in a single month. Unfortunately, yeah, yeah, how about that? Unfortunately, my sister-in-law was diagnosed with a terminal disease and it’s one of those moments that really pulls the rug out.

And I looked at my life and I realized that, had that been my diagnosis, I’d be really disappointed with the life that I’d led. And so, that month, I quit my job, sold my house, divorced my husband. And I realized in that moment that I really needed to apply all of the research that I had been doing.

And so, this is actually when the fearless formula evolved, is I started to take everything in, and I was like, “Wow, this feels. I don’t have a place to live.” And when I tell you I have no plan, I mean the household, and I was like, “Where am I going to sleep tonight?” And so, yeah, it was a big moment.

And I had to recognize, “It wasn’t life and death. This couldn’t be an adventure. Take these small, tiny little steps forward, backwards, sideways, left, right, because the outcome doesn’t ultimately matter.” It’s that I’m taking action every day toward and through the stressor itself. And that’s actually how I launched my speaking career.

I really had always wanted to be in speaking, and I decided that my first small step was to call myself a speaker. And my second small step was to build a website. And my third small step was to give a free talk. And I just kept repeating this and recognizing this, “I’m not dead yet. I can still use this energy. I can take small steps forward.” So, yeah, there’s one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, cool. Congratulations.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, thanks. It’s been fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you help us more with the belief side of things? So, it’s like, okay, that’s cool. That worked for you. Okay, that’s cool for the people who put pencils in their mouths in the study. What is some more of the most killer evidence that this belief that stress is advantageous for us is, in fact, true?

[24:20]

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah. The 2013 study that looks at your purpose and meaning and your stress level. This was probably one of the most formative experiments for me in that, you know, I turned 40, I’m freaking out because, “What is life? And how do I make it meaningful?” And, so of course, the super nerd that I am, I looked to the research, I looked to the science.

And it turns out that the number one correlate to a meaningful, purposeful life is stress. So, past stressful events, current state of stress, and even future worry and anxiety. And that tripped me up. Like, that was a, “Whoa! How is this even remotely possible?” Because, to me, I’d spent so much of my time trying to avoid stress, trying to run away from it.

But what if we are, in fact, running away from the very thing that brings our life meaning and purpose? And I think that’s a really powerful reckoning to have, is to say, “Oh, gosh, yeah, when I care about something, I’m stressed. And if I’m stressed, that has the potential to bring purpose and meaning into my life.”

And so, the research that we did last year, I had people walk through my fearless formula for 30 days. They did journaling activity just so we could keep track and make sure that they were following the protocol, and they decreased their perceived stress levels, 85% of them decreased their perceived stress levels, and we had a massive increase in the heart rate variability of the participants.

So, heart rate variability, for anybody that’s not familiar with it, is just a biological measure of how well you adapt to stress. So, more heart rate variability, typically, is better. So that was a pretty convincing nod to this stuff. This stuff, there may be something to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a big fan of heart rate variability. In fact, I have an Oura ring and a Lief device, which is hardcore.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Nice!

Pete Mockaitis
It sticks to your body and all that. So, what I find really fun about that is, it is not within your conscious control.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
No. Hard numbers. Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like this, your heart is doing what your heart is doing. And you can use some breathing, which helps. But, generally speaking, as you’re living your life, that’s there. So, over these 30 days, their perceived stress decreased. What does that mean? Their meaning was also decreasing? Or, what’s the story here?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Great, great follow up. So, no, because here’s the weird part. So, we did a perceived stress assessment at the beginning and at the end, and we also did a meaning assessment as well. And so, while their perceived stress had decreased, their actual level of stress hadn’t changed. So, this is interesting, right? They’re still reporting the same number of stressors. They’re still reporting the same, of course, cumulative stress. They’re still reporting the same micro-stressors, but their perception of it had shifted.

So, they were able to actually use the stress, their mindset itself had shifted to the point where they could use it differently. So, they’re not changing their stress level. Those stressors are still coming at them. They’re changing their mindset around it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what are the sorts of things they were doing in these 30 days?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
So, they were walking through the T-minus-three technique, the fearless formula. So, they were identifying tigers at the end of the day. So, “What was the tiger that found me today? What stressors did I experience?”

They’d take two minutes to write out all of the stressors. They then take three minutes to transfer that energy to say, “Okay, how can I get curious about this? What did I do? How did I explore this? How did some of it become an adventure?”

And then they’d take the last two minutes of this. Again, it was a six-minute total intervention. And then the last two minutes were, “Where did I point the stress energy? How did I use it? How can I continue to use it tomorrow? What are my follow up actions that I’m going to take?” And so, six minutes, 30 days, pretty massive results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. So, they’re writing it by hand?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yep, by hand. Oh, good question. Very important. Yeah, again, our brain does a weird thing when we type. It’s not quite as effective. So, by hand, in a journal, that was sent to each of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious, good doctor, what if we find ourselves in the opposite boat in terms of, we’re just kind of dragging, we’re just kind of like not really feeling it, our lives aren’t sort of…?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Lethargically moving through life?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s not sort of an easy-peasy vacation, but it’s sort of like, “Hmm, I’m not really stressed. And I’m also not really jazzed. It’s like maybe work is going just okay, and other dimensions of life are fine, but you’re not really feeling all that freaked out or motivated to get after much.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, I’d say you’re in the meh zone. Like, “Meh.” Which, you know, look, I’m not going to prescribe anything to you. I’m going to say, “What do you want out of life? If you want meh, you’ve got meh. That’s great.”

Otherwise, I’d say, “Okay, what’s a bigger goal you can pursue? How do you bring stress into your life? How can you create some type-three fun, which is the type where you’re like, ‘This isn’t fun at all. This is just, like, it might be a good story 10 years from now, but it’s not fun.’” You actually hype up the level of stress in your life.

So, yeah, I’d say try some new things. Get out there and find some novelty. Do some discomfort exercises. We talked at the very beginning about staring at each other for, like, a very uncomfortable period of time. Connect with people. Put yourself out in a way that is slightly uncomfortable. And I would keep a journal because we’re really bad at in the moment at assessing our own levels of stress or what we think is going to kill us.

What I often find in these journals, and I keep some that I call a disaster diary, where I follow my own protocol, right? And, like, “Here’s the things that’s going wrong today. And here’s where I think I’m going to die. And this is my tiger.” And then I’ll go back in a month, five months, six months, a year. Most of the things I don’t remember, right?

If it really was memorable, I might have learned something from it, but nothing actually killed me. I mean, as far as I can tell, I’m still in the flesh living and breathing. So, when we recognize that, again, things can shift in perspective a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Well, tell us, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, I think the biggest thing to mention is to recognize that stress isn’t something to be rid of. And that the more people tell you to get rid of your stress, the more stressed out you’re probably going to become because you believe something is broken with you.

Nothing is broken in you, right? You’re not doing it wrong. You’re not meditating wrong or getting massages wrong. Like, stress is part of life and it should be. So, stop stressing yourself out about stress and use it differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I also wanted to get your hot take. Having read this research earlier, I was thinking about how that would be, that’s a great belief. I’d like to have it. And so going through 30 days of journaling sure sounds like a very robust way to get the memo thoroughly.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, it forces you. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, like, okay, message received. But I thought, “Well, hey, we’re rather more susceptible to suggestion in hypnosis.” So, I thought, “Well, there’s probably some cool hypnosis track I can find for this.” And I couldn’t find any of them anywhere because all of the stress-related hypnosis were about how to, like, chill out and relax. It was like, “No, no, I want one that’s going to make me think, ‘Hey, you’re stressed, but good news, buddy.’” You know, and I couldn’t find that anywhere.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, that’s maybe, well, maybe you should create it. Maybe I should create. Maybe we should. This is a new product.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe my soothing voice. Speaking slowly.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
I mean, look, the placebo effect is really powerful. I mean, I’m sure you’ve read the housekeeper study.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with the calories?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re decreasing your body fat and your waist to hip ratio in four weeks because you believe that you’re doing more work or that it is. I think humans are more susceptible than they think they are to shifting their mindsets. And, look, don’t believe it. Try it. Like, force yourself to do it for 30 days and see what happens. Record your heart rate variability. That would be my challenge to you. Yeah, do it. Do it and I expect a full report please.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lovely. Cool beans. All right. Well, now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
You know, my favorite quote is probably from my grandmother, who told me when I was freaked out over all of these colleges that I was trying to apply to, and I didn’t know where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with my life, she said, “Don’t let your options be your burdens.”

And I thought that was one of the most brilliant things anybody has ever said. I think the world that we live in presents us all with a lot of options at work, at home, in life. We are flooded with opportunity. And the more we can avoid feeling overwhelmed by them, the better off and happier we’ll be.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
My favorite study is probably the milkshake study. Are you familiar with milkshake study? Have you done this already?

Pete Mockaitis
Is this the one where they gave people different calorie contents in the milkshakes, but they lied to them about what’s inside?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so same caloric value in both milkshakes. One was the luxurious milkshake, the high fat content, really high calories, and the other was the diet shake. And, basically, people who had the high fat milkshake said, “Oh, gosh, I’m so full. I couldn’t possibly…” And their ghrelin levels actually increased.

And so, they actually did feel more full. So, there was a physiological response to this high fat milkshake, despite the fact there was no difference between the two. Whereas, the diet milkshake folks were like, “Oh, gosh, I’m starving. I only just had this diet milkshake,” and their ghrelin levels stayed the same.

So, I think this is, to me, one of the best placebo setups ever because you’re seeing not only are people vocalizing and sharing, like, how they feel but their body itself is having a hormonal response as well, which I think is fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
My favorite book is probably Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I think it is a must-read. It is probably marketed toward women. I think it is a must-read for all genders, for all people. It’s just a brilliantly written book about the way the world is perceived and the way we can un-tame ourselves, yeah.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Probably my WHOOP. I love my WHOOP band. I’m constantly, I’m a data freak, so measuring my heart rate variability and all of those things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Favorite habit is reading 10 minutes a day. It’s a simple, straightforward, very small step that I can incorporate at night and it helps me wind down and really get ready for processing all those thoughts as I sleep.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
“It’s not a tiger,” “Curiosity and fear cannot coexist,” and, “Invite the tiger for tea.” Those are probably the three. I actually had somebody who got a tattoo of a tiger sitting down for tea. So those are probably the three most resonant quotes.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
My website, RebeccaHeiss.com. You can get in touch with me there. You can email me. You can reach out directly to me. Or, my Instagram is @DrRebeccaHeiss. Please feel free to reach out. Love to hear from you.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, my final challenge to each of you is to stay stressed and lean into it. Start charging, running at that roar rather than avoiding the tiger.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Sumit, welcome.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hi, glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m feeling optimistic about this interview.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Me too, hopefully, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would like to kick it off. You’ve got a pretty dramatic story in terms of you share that you became an optimist on the night of tragedy. Can you tell us the story and how you came to this position?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah. So, well, it’s not so much that I became an optimist as I realized I was one starting at that point. So, some time ago now, my first wife died of cancer, or complications of cancer. And, obviously, this was a pretty bad time for me. But one of the things I did, or the main thing I did, actually, was in the aftermath, I was to think, “Well, how am going to get through this?” And I thought, “Well, the present is not great, obviously, but I have to believe that the future is going to be better. It’s going to be brighter than today is.”

And so, I started, more or less, kind of like a coping mechanism, really. I sort of declared myself to be an optimist. I said, “I’m going to be an optimist. I’m going to believe that the future is going to be better. And, in that way, maybe it will be.” And so, I started to do things that I thought might help me along that goal. And as I kind of did them, I realized a couple of things.

One was I realized that, actually, it was helping, and something that I kind of thought was frivolous. I thought optimism is kind of a fairly naive way to go about your life. I realized there was more power there than I had realized previously. And the other thing I realized was that, actually, I thought, “Well, this is coming at a very bleak time in my life.”

And then I thought, “Well, I’ve always been an optimist. This is something I’ve always assumed that things will get better. And even now in this darkest of moments, I still think things are going to get better.” And then realizing that I was an optimist and appeared to be quite strongly optimistic was quite difficult because I thought it was frivolous. I thought this was something that if you didn’t really want to think much about life, you’d just say, “Oh, I’m an optimist. Things will work out.” And that’s how you proceed.

So, both of those things came as something of a surprise to me, that optimism wasn’t this kind of throwaway thing, and that I’d always been one, which wasn’t something I identified with myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s powerful. Thank you for sharing. And I really relate to that. I remember, when I was 15, my dad died in a bicycling accident.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Oh, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was terrible and very sad. And, at the same time, in the mix of my thoughts, I remember thinking, “Boy, I’m so grateful that I had him for this long.” Because I just imagined, like, if he had left me three years earlier, I probably could have gotten into some real trouble, really, because I had some, I don’t know, wild rebelliousness within me.

And so, I was grateful for what could have been, that was not looking to the past, and you’re looking to the future, like, you believe the future will be better than today. Well, tell us, you know a lot of reason, fact-based, evidence-based things, is optimism rational, true, believable, defensible for the skeptic?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Well, I’m a science journalist, I should say. And that was one of the reasons I found optimism, or identifying as an optimist, to be difficult, because I kind of prided myself on being a critical thinker, or being someone who made all these decisions on the basis of evidence. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I was doing, right? And then I became a journalist. And, similarly, in journalism, you’re supposed to be a detached critical thinker.

You view things objectively, try and come up with the most accurate possible assessment of a situation, or of what you’re being told. And that doesn’t sit very well with the idea of optimism as this kind of belief that things will turn out for the better. And, actually, the more I kind of dug into it, the more I realized that actually optimism is kind of irrational, actually. I mean, people kind of often try and turn it into a rational kind of way of looking at the world.

And there are arguments for it and there are ways that you can kind of make it more rigorous. But at its core, optimism in the psychological sense is irrational. Psychologists refer to it as unrealistically positive expectations. It’s kind of believing that good things will happen more often than the numbers suggest or the experience of your peers suggest. And bad things will happen less often than the numbers suggest. So, it is basically irrational.

But having said that, you can make a good case for it. You can make a case for the fact that this irrational belief, nonetheless, helps us to get ahead in life. And when you kind of do the kind of research that psychologists have done, you discover that, actually, people who score as more strongly optimistic up to a point also seem to have better lives in many respects. Longer lives, healthier lives, happier lives, and more successful lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to dig into that. And I guess, with that strict definition of optimism, in terms of the belief that things will be better than they, statistically, are likely to be, I guess I’m curious, though, sometimes just having–we had Jamil Zaki on the show, and he was talking about hope, and that often our default assumptions are more cynical and more doubtful than the reality on the ground.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right, exactly. And I think that’s where optimism comes into its own, essentially. So, the reason that it’s irrational is because we don’t have the evidence to hand to say, “I believe this thing will work out.” We don’t have the evidence for that, you know, “I think I’m going to get this promotion,” say. You can’t say ahead of time that that’s definitely going to happen. Almost never in the real world are you in a position where you can say, “With 100% certainty, I know what’s going to happen,” or, “I know that things aren’t going to work out.” That’s just not the way the world works.

Most of the time you have to kind of try and make your best guess, and you know that your best guess is not going to be entirely correct. The difference between being an optimist and a pessimist in that situation is that as an optimist, you recognize that there are positive possibilities that you don’t see. There are positive outcomes that you’re not necessarily aware of.

As a pessimist, you kind of write those off. As an optimist, you think, “Well, there are positives. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what those further solutions, those further opportunities might be,” but you make the effort to keep yourself open to them, to keep looking for them. And so, if they do exist, you’ll find them, right?

If you’re a pessimist, on the other hand, you don’t do anything. And so, you don’t kind of realize those opportunities. So, basically, I mean, you start off in this position where, whatever your best assessment is, it’s going to be wrong. If you assume it’s wrong and there’s no upside, then that’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume it’s wrong, but there are positive outcomes out there that you haven’t foreseen, then you’ve got a better chance of achieving them.

Pete Mockaitis
This kind of reminds me of Pascal’s Wager.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah, it is very much like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Except we’re not talking about death and eternity, so much as life and the immediate weeks, months, years ahead.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right. Right, it is like that. Actually, I mean, it’s like optimism in its origins is actually a philosophical argument, not a psychological one. So, it actually doesn’t really come from, it’s become this kind of, you know, word for the way that we look at the world, and that’s essentially what it means to us today. And it has always meant that to some extent.

But once upon a time, it was a much deeper, more philosophical point about, “What way does the world skew?” You know, at a time when the kind of language of probability and risk and that sort of thing was not as evolved as it is today, you had to explain why bad things happened. And optimism was one way that you explained how that good things were more likely to happen than bad things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, the universe of statistics and probability and risk today is wild. I’m thinking about markets such as Polymarket and predicted and Kalshi, it’s like, wow, we’ve got a number of people putting money on the probabilities of all sorts of things. So, yeah, what an environment we find ourselves in.

So, well, could you share then a few of the biggest discoveries, the most fascinating tidbits you’ve uncovered within psychology that you share in your book, The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main kind of thing about this, as I say, is that you can make a good argument for why you should be an optimist even though being optimistic is not rational. And the way that pans out is that, essentially, by going after opportunities you don’t necessarily know exist, you tend to realize them in due course. And that kind of helps you to kind of benefit from the upside, from benefits from upsides that you don’t necessarily see at the outset.

And where this kind of shows up, in day-to-day life, essentially, is that it makes you better at coping. I mean, as I kind of talked about with my own experience at the beginning of this, I was doing this inadvertently, but it makes you better at coping with setbacks. It makes you more able to kind of bounce back when you hit a roadblock. You don’t kind of think, “That roadblock is absolute and total and I’ve gotten nowhere around it.” You think, “Well, actually there are probably are ways around this even if I can’t see them.”

And that translates not just like to the decisions you make about your own personal life in terms of what might be happening to you in your family life or whatever, as my example goes. But it also translates to the area of relationships. So, optimists tend to work harder at their relationships, both kind of your social relationships and your professional ones. And so, that means that you tend to kind of persevere more. You tend to try a bit harder to get past whatever your current problem is.

And that, over the long term, tends to mean that things work out. But there is kind of a caveat in here, which is that it does have to be something that you kind of do on a routine, regular basis. If you just get wildly optimistic about a particular thing, a particular event, let’s say you are going for a promotion. If you get massively optimistic about that particular event, that doesn’t necessarily help because it doesn’t–you can’t change the odds in your favor all that dramatically.

If, however, you kind of take every opportunity you have to advance yourself, and you take each of those individually with an optimistic stance, that’s what tends to pan out over the long term because, sure, you’ll be wrong sometimes and some things won’t work out, but sometimes they do. And over time that accumulates.

So, optimism is not a short thing. It’s not a one-off, you know, wild overestimation of how likely you are to get lucky in a particular time. It’s a game for the long term. It’s something you have to keep trying and keep trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is really juicy stuff, and it reminds me of some of Dr. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy, in terms of the beliefs we have about what is possible for ourselves really do translate into different results, not so much in a mystical law of attraction, universe bringing things into your life kind of a way, but rather a, “Well, hey, if you believe that it’s going to work out this way, or that you have the power to do a thing, then you’re going to go ahead and make an effort, and you get the results more often when you go ahead and make the effort than when you don’t.”

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Exactly. I mean, I think there are other ways in which this pays off. It pays off in terms of your relationships, I say, because people like optimists. People like people who are willing. And this is not difficult to understand, but, I mean, clearly, who’s going to kind of want to hang out with someone who tells you things are going to be terrible, right? I mean, you want to hang out with someone who says, “Things are going to be good. If you follow me, things are going to work out well.”

But if you kind of adopt that stance and you put in that little bit of extra effort, then you tend to kind of reinforce those relationships. And it works both ways, right? I mean, if you develop a stronger relationship, that then becomes a status resource, as it’s called, that you can then draw upon.

It means that when you kind of come to a point when you need something down the line, you’re more able to ring up that person you have that relationship with. You’re more able to kind of ask for a favor. You’re more able to ask for advice. And those are all the kind of things that, gradually, over time, add up to real material changes in your ability to achieve what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, could you share some fun stories that bring this all to life?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, I think the easiest place to see optimism at work at the moment, and you can take this however you like, really, is in the Valley. So, optimism is very strongly associated with entrepreneurship and with innovation. I say entrepreneurship, but I mean, essentially, anyone who wants to take a chance on doing something new or different requires a certain level of optimism because, at the outset, you can’t know that it’s going to work out.

So, whether you’re within a company or an organization, and you’re trying to do something differently or you’re trying to do something on your own, you need some degree of optimism to make it work. And I think there’s no kind of more successful example of optimism than the people we see who run the big tech companies at the moment and where they came from.

If you take someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he started out coding in his dorm room with a project with what eventually became Facebook. There was no kind of realistic way that you might think at that point in time that this was going to become one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the most powerful companies in the world, and that he would still be single-handedly in charge of that now. That this would be kind of his pet project.

Zuckerberg talks about this in terms of that language of the self-fulfilling prophecy. So, he talks about, you know, this is one of his favorite phrases that optimists tend to be successful, pessimists tend to be right. And this is the kind of thing about, so if you’re a pessimist, you can always kind of justify this to yourself. You can always say, “I was correct about that,” because you go and look for the evidence that supports your point of view.

You don’t do anything to confound it and, therefore, you end up being correct that something doesn’t work out. If you’re an optimist, you tend to ignore that and you build the thing, you build the multimillion, the multibillion-dollar company, and you go ahead and do it even though that’s not what conventional wisdom says you can do, even though that’s not something that someone working out of a dorm room is supposed to be able to achieve. That’s kind of where the power of optimism comes in.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. Could I have another story?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, in the story I tell in the book, I tell the story of how I eventually got my job at New Scientists. And it started off, when I was a kid, I was in my dad’s office. He took me to work when we were on vacation, when I was on vacation rather, from school, and I found a stack of magazines, New Scientists magazines, so science magazine.

I kind of thought at the time that writing in science were not very compatible occupations, which they, by and large, are not supposed to be. And so, I kind of looked at these, the stack of magazines and asked my dad, like, “Who looks after this magazine?” And he said, “The editor does that,” and I kind of, “All right. Fine.” And this is when I was about eight, and I thought, “That’s the job I want, basically. I like writing. I like science. That’s something I can do.”

And, obviously, at the age of eight, you don’t have any expectation that you’re going to be able to make that work, right, or what that means, essentially. But I clung onto that idea. And so, when I kind of went to school, I had to make my choices, I decided, “I still had this kind of thing in the back of my mind. This is the ultimate job for me, essentially.” It wasn’t that I necessarily thought I was going to get it tomorrow, but that was what I was aiming for.

So, when I came to having to choose between writing and science, initially I chose science because I thought you needed to be a scientist. And I thought that you could be a writer even if you didn’t have the training for that. So, I studied science, I studied astrophysics, I did all of that. And then I decided that I would switch to writing, which was kind of this leap into the unknown, essentially, at that point.

And it was kind of a, that was pure unbridled optimism. I thought I could make that work. I had no evidence for it. I had no background in writing. I had no track records. I had no particular expertise in that field. But I thought I’d give it a go. So, I did. And as it turns out, I did turn out to be able to make a career in writing.

But the most important thing, really, wasn’t that I was necessarily good at that. It was that by looking for ways to advance that career, I eventually lucked into a position where the physics background was very useful, which was in covering finance. From there, I kind of did that for quite a long time. I started a publication through a random opportunity, through someone I met through networking, carried on doing this.

And, eventually, after doing that for about a decade, I wrote back to New Scientist, and said, “Can I have a job?” And they said, you know, at that point, they kind of said, “Well, you know, maybe later, maybe if you get some more experience.” So, I got a bit more experience. I wrote back to them. And, ultimately, they gave me a job, a part-time position. It was a two-day a week position that I started out with.

And then, over time, I built up from there and, eventually, I became the editor in chief. And the kind of point I was trying to make here is that, really, I mean, there are a number of ways you can think about this. This was not a case of me saying at the beginning of this, I had the very naive, optimistic view that, you know, if I just went out there and did like, you know, wrote for a couple of years, I would somehow end up at New Scientist and end up in charge.

What it turned out to be was that much longer game, but every step along the way required me to take kind of optimistic leaps into the dark, essentially. It meant I have to kind of accept, I had to be optimistic about my chances of being a writer. I had to be optimistic about my chances of, once I’ve been a writer, of being able to run a publication.

And then I’d to be optimistic about my chances of getting into New Scientist. And once I was there, I had to be optimistic about my chances of progressing there. And so, there’s a succession of steps, each of them involved being open to possibilities that were not obvious at the outset. Each of them is kind of optimistic journey, a step down this line, that, eventually, ended up with me getting the job that I kind of set out to do, you know, 25 odd years earlier. And that’s kind how I got to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very cool. Congratulations.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. So, if we think, “Yes, that’s good. I would like some more of that,” but it doesn’t come so naturally to us, what do we do?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, there are a few things you can do, and some of these are given in the book. They’re not actually particularly complicated. The main thing is that we don’t take the time to do them. So, there are a bunch of exercises that people have suggested for how you can make yourself more dispositionally optimistic. So, the very specific optimism, I think we kind of know how to make ourselves optimistic about how to kind of G ourselves up for a specific challenge.

So, if we’re going for a job interview, or we’ve got a big project to pull off, whatever, I think we kind of all have an idea about how we kind of build our morale for that. But the bigger challenge is being optimistic in that longer term sense, in that persistent sense. And there are a couple of things that people suggest for that, or psychologists have suggested for that.

One of them, which I think is kind of something that has to become second nature, is called disputation. And this is the idea that when something happens, you need to try and explain it to yourself in a way that doesn’t kind of make it entirely an issue, you know, it doesn’t make it an inevitability. So, the idea is that we have different explanatory styles.

And one explanatory style is to say, “Well, I didn’t get that job,” or that promotion, or, “This project didn’t work because it was always doomed to happen that way,” “I wasn’t qualified,” “I’m not ready,” “I don’t have the right kind of skillset for it,” or whatever else, and to really internalize that. And, obviously, there’s always going to be some truth to that and you always need to reflect on the components of that that might have led to whatever situation you end up in.

But the other way of doing it is to think about, is to kind of to challenge that, and think about the other factors that were involved and how you might have controlled those, to think about whether there are external factors, whether you had a bad day, whether you had a personality clash with the person you’re talking to, whether there was a failure in the environment that meant you couldn’t deliver against whatever you’re trying to deliver against. So, with that, you have to keep doing it. It’s not something you can do once and then move on from.

It’s like having a little post-mortem every time something happens, and thinking about it and trying to come up with a constructive frame. And if you do that over and over and over again, you eventually become good at kind of coming up with an optimistic interpretation of what’s happened. And that then makes you better at coming up with optimistic interpretations of what’s going to happen, of the challenges that you face. It makes you better able to frame your challenges, your problems in ways that are amenable to solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can we dig it out into some particular questions or prompts or ways we might point our brain in the direction that gets there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So there are a few different ways you can do this. One is there’s a model called the best-possible-self exercise, which is kind of you sit down and you, essentially, spend 15 minutes talking about the best possible version of you. So, you try and you can do this in whichever way makes sense to you. You can do it as a written description.

So, one of the things I did when I was in my bereavement was, I did this as a blog posting exercise, essentially. I wrote down what I thought my life could be like. But you can do it that way, you can do it in terms of the things that you want to achieve over various timeframes. You can ask yourself what success looks like to you.

And the idea is to try and do that on a regular basis, to do it something like daily. You spend something like 15 minutes a day doing this for as long as you can manage, essentially. Initially, it helps to kind of do it over a short-term period, so do it for like two weeks or so. And then you can do it less frequently over time because it’s a lot of time commitment.

The thing about that is not something that we never do, but we don’t tend to do it very often. We only tend to do it when we have a particular decision to make. Whereas, doing it on a regular basis means that you keep kind of front and center in your mind what it is that you’re trying to achieve, what it is that you want to do, essentially, rather than being, getting lost in the fog of the moment or of the everyday.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about being lost in the fog of the moment or the everyday, if you do find yourself in that zone of sweeping condemnation or despair, do you have any kind of go-to tactics to lift yourself up out of there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the one thing that’s useful there is to think about the pivotal moments in your life and to think about the what-ifs. You kind of mentioned earlier the what-if when your father passed. And that’s kind of a quite extreme example. But I think one of the things that’s useful to do when you feel like overwhelmed is to think about the what-ifs in your own life. Think about the points when things could have gone differently for you. And there’s two kinds of implications of that.

One is the ways in which they went right for you and the ways that your life has gone in the direction that you wanted to. And the other is to think about how you would have reacted if they’d gone a different way. Because, usually, particularly with the passage of time, it becomes easier to see that, actually, whatever happened was not the only thing that could have happened and the only way that things could have worked out. There are other ways that things could have gone that would have been equally satisfying.

And you can usually see that with a remove. And that helps you to bring perspective on the current moment. No matter what you kind of look at, if you’re looking at the moment right now and you think, “I can’t see a way out of this. I can’t see what happens from here,” you’ve probably felt like this in the past. There are moments in your past when you would have felt like that, and things either worked themselves out for the better, or you know how they could have done. And that, I think, gives you perspective.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think there’s a lot of upsides to optimism, and they pan out over the long term gradually, more than they do in the short term. One of the things about being an optimist, I think you have to be careful not to let it kind of override your basic kind of common sense about how to treat people. I think optimism is a question of directing the optimism that you have.

I think if you kind of think about where you’re optimistic in your life and where you’re maybe not so optimistic, that kind of helps you to identify areas where you might want to concentrate using things like that best possible self-exercise, or where you want to kind of think a bit harder about disputing your version of events.

It’s not that easy to necessarily raise your level of optimism hugely. And I’m not sure that that’s necessarily that healthy an exercise because if you do that, you run the risk of starting to dismiss the problems in your life, or the problems in other people’s lives, or the real challenges that you face. So, I think that with optimism, it’s more a question of directing the optimism that you have and trying to increase it in specific areas than it is with being blanket positive.

It’s not just about being happy or being relentlessly positive about everything. It’s about trying to focus on the areas where you need that optimism. And that’s also true when it comes to assessing what lies ahead of you. One of the things that optimists, an optimist sees opportunity everywhere. And that means you can find it quite difficult to pick one thing to focus on.

If you’re an optimist like I am, you tend to kind of, as sort of from the little description I gave you there of my career, you tend to kind of want to try and do everything. So, you need to bring a little bit of discipline to that as well in terms of what the specific things you want to do, the specific goals you want to achieve, the specific jobs you want to have, the specific roles you want to play. So, optimism is about targeting. It’s not just about being relentlessly sun-shiny. It’s about choosing where you want to increase your ability to see that brighter future.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any guardrails or pro-tips on how much optimism is too much, or when we’re potentially flirting with recklessness?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the best answer there, really, is to listen to other people. So, generally, it’s the point at which you’re tipping over from constructing a version of events that suits you into denial. There’s a point at which people are saying, “You’re wrong about this.” And you need to kind of think carefully about whether they’re right or they’re wrong. You need to think about the data. You need to think about what the numbers say.

We’re disposed to ignore the numbers completely. You can’t ignore them completely. You need to pay a certain amount of attention to them. It’s clearer in things like in health outcomes. If you smoke 20 cigarettes a day, it doesn’t make any difference what you do. You’re going to have bad outcomes from that.

If you take wild financial risks, those also are not going to work out for you in the long term. So, there’s just a certain degree of remaining grounded and a certain degree of listening to what people are telling you.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, my favorite quote on optimism comes from James Baldwin, the Civil Rights activist. And so, he came out of, this is in 1963, he came out of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, who was the Attorney General at the time. And it was a very acrimonious meeting. Things had not worked out. They had not been able to find common ground. And Baldwin, as it happened, was doing a TV interview the same day.

And, in the course of that interview, he was asked, “Well, what do you think about the future of America? Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?” And he kind of thinks about it for a minute. You can see it on the film if you watch it. He’s kind of thinking for a minute about what to say. And then he says, “I think I have to be an optimist because, otherwise, you’re accepting that human life is an academic matter.”

And what he means by that, I think, is that, you can’t afford to– it goes a little bit back to what you saying about cynicism, that you can’t really afford to say that life is a purely a matter of calculation about what is bloodlessly correct. Life is something we live, and you have to kind of be engaged with it. And that, I think, means being an optimist.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
There’s one that kind of sticks in my mind quite a bit, which is one by three psychologists called Armor, Massey, and Sackett. And that was, essentially, about what people think about optimism.

They basically did an experiment where they say, “Here are some scenarios that the people are facing.” Someone is offered a promotion. Someone is asked to organize an event and a few other things like that. And they asked people, “What stance should people have going into this? Should they be optimistic? Should they be pessimistic?”

And almost universally, across the board with all of these scenarios, the answer is they should be optimistic. And that’s kind of very telling because people don’t expect realism from others. People don’t think that realism is the best way to go into things. People think that optimism is the best way to go into a new challenge.

And then it’s kind of a rider to that, so, two, actually. One is the degree to which they prescribe optimism depends on how much control you have over the situation, which is not surprising in some respects. The other one, though, is that they didn’t think people were optimistic enough. We almost never think that anybody is going to be optimistic enough, or that we are going to be optimistic enough in dealing with these situations.

So, there is an enormous kind of psychological weight to optimism, but one that we tend not to allow ourselves when we’re in a professional context. We tend not to allow ourselves to express that kind of belief, I think, because we think we’ll be viewed as naive, or we think we’ll be viewed as being unrealistic in some way. But I think it helps to remember that, actually, almost all the time, everybody thinks optimism is the right way to approach a challenge. And that, actually, we probably don’t make enough use of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
The book I would recommend is Candide by Voltaire. An old book, it’s published in 1759. The title is Candide or optimism. And it is a book that sets up two different strands of optimism. It sets up one which is, I referred to earlier, this kind of grand philosophical version of optimism in which the world is set up a certain way and things must turn out for the right within it.

And another, which is much more kind of concerned with the here and now in the present moment. And I don’t think either of those two kinds of optimism is necessarily correct or incorrect. They’re both different kinds of optimism. I think it helps to think about both of them. The one in which you try and make sense of the world and the one in which you think about what you can do, what you can do to make your own situation better, what you can do around you.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main tool I would say, the thing that’s really made a difference to me in the last few years, given that I’m a knowledge worker, essentially, is Roam, which is a personal knowledge management tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
My favorite habit is probably my version of the best possible self, which kind of takes various forms, but I do it over different time scales. So, I do one, which is sort of for the next month or so, I do one for the next year, and I do one for the next five years. The one that actually turns out to be most useful for me, I found, is the five year one, in point of fact.

Because I think the others, they get derailed very quickly. Things I need to do over the course of the next week, like everybody I set out with my list of to do, most of them don’t get done, you know, some of them do. The five year one, though, is like the compass needle of where I need to get to over the long term.

And I find that it makes it much easier to make all the little course corrections you need to do. And it makes decision-making easier when I’m thinking about what I want to be doing in five years’ time rather than what I want to be doing next week.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the best place is my website, which is Alternaty.com, A-L-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y dot com. You’ll find more information about me and the book there, and some other resources fairly soon. Not up yet, but they’re going to be, they will be shortly. Otherwise, I’m available on LinkedIn.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Always stay open to possibility. If you plant many seeds, some of them will grow. If you go out looking for new opportunities, you’ll find them. If you stay where you are, if you carry on doing what you’re doing, you won’t. So, keep moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sumit, thank you. This has been fun.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you, Pete. Thank you.