Rob Cross explains the dangers of microstress and provides practical solutions to build your resilience.
You’ll Learn:
- Why microstress is a much larger problem than we think
- Three types of microstress to watch out for
- Three solutions for when someone’s causing microstress
About Rob
Rob Cross is the Edward A. Madden Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College and the cofounder and director of the Connected Commons, a consortium of more than 150 leading organizations. He has studied the underlying networks of relationships within effective organizations and the collaborative practices of high performers for more than twenty years. Working with over 300 organizations and reaching thousands of leaders from the front line to the C-suite, he has identified specific ways to cultivate vibrant, effective networks at all levels of an organization and any career stage. He is the author of Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being and coauthor of THE MICROSTRESS EFFECT: How Little Things Pile Up and Become Big Problems—and What to do about it with Karen Dillon.
- Book: The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems–and What to Do about It
- Book: Beyond Collaboration Overload: How to Work Smarter, Get Ahead, and Restore Your Well-Being
- Website: RobCross.org
- Website: Connected Commons
Resources Mentioned
- Book: Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek Murthy
Thank you, Sponsors!
- Storyworth. Give the moms in your life something super special this Mother’s Day with $10 off at StoryWorth.com/awesome
Rob Cross Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.
Rob Cross
Thank you so much for having me here.
Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about your book The Microstress Effect: How Little Things Pile Up and Create Big Problems–and What to Do about It. So juicy. But before we dive into that, this is corny, I’d like to dive into your scuba enthusiasm. What’s the story here?
Rob Cross
That was well played, young man.
Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re certified. How does that happen?
Rob Cross
I did get certified, and I’m a huge believer and a practitioner of some of the stuff we write about, and kind of adding dimensionality to your life in different ways. And so, I did that this past winter with my daughter, and then she’s kind of off and pursuing med school right now, and so it’s going to be one of the things that we use to kind of keep connected, to do short diving trips here and there. But it’s actually pretty easy, and it does bring you into a completely different realm of people, realm of experiences in life, and has been completely worthwhile, completely love it.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, do you see dazzlingly colored fish, like on the documentaries? That’s what I imagine when I hear scuba, like, “Wow!”
Rob Cross
It’s completely like that. So, their last certification dive they take you, you’re able to go down to 60 feet with the certification I have, and I may advance that a little bit. We’ll see. But that’s when you get down there, and you’re, “Okay, this is real. If stuff runs out and I can’t get to my daughter’s regulator in time, you’re in trouble one way or the other.”
But you look around, it’s a peaceful sense of serenity like you’ve never had. She touched my shoulder at one point and pointed, and there was a five-foot nurse shark drifting 10, 15 feet away, and it’s just kind of a crazy experience overall to be able to see. What you’re talking about are the really small colorful fish but just also the serenity and kind of sense of being really removed, if you will, in different ways.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. And so, you’ve also probably have a lot of cold-water goodness going on as well. Does that happen?
Rob Cross
Yeah, definitely. It depends on where you go. So, you’re actually looking for the warm water but, yeah, definitely.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now I’m pumped to hear about your book The Microstress Effect. First of all, tell us what is the microstress effect?
Rob Cross
So, it is a book focused on small moments of stress. And what got me interested in this was I did a book called Beyond Collaboration Overload about two years ago, and that was very focused on how just all the ways that we interact with other people in our lives today, professionally and personally, but, principally, in the workplace, it’s overwhelming us because of all the modalities and the different instances of having to be on 24/7.
And so, as I got into that work, what became apparent to me is that people are drowning, and that stress is being created, burnout is at an all-time high in most places, and it’s not really the workload that’s gone up that much. Really, what’s gone up over the course of about 10 to 15 years has been the collaborative footprint around the work. We’ve de-layered, we’ve moved to agile-based work structures, one-firm cultures, all these initiatives organizationally that have created greater context and needs for collaboration.
And, simultaneously, we’ve enabled that with all sorts of instantaneous collaborative tools, but it’s created a context where people are overwhelmed. And as I went to these interviews and could see how stressed people were, what I was finding is it wasn’t the big things that was killing us. It was the small moments of stress that people were experiencing that they’re hitting us at a velocity and frequency that our brains just aren’t wired to deal with.
And that was what, over time, was causing people problems in kind of invisible ways. So, it got us very interested both in “What does that microstress look like? How do more successful people deal with it?” and strategies for kind of thriving today.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I’m intrigued from a science perspective, any particularly surprising, fascinating discoveries you’ve made here? Like, is it a big deal, microstresses, or is it, like, “Well, they add up to being just a smidge more in total”?
Rob Cross
Right. I think that’s a really great question, and I love the way you asked it because I think too many people go, “Oh, it’s just one more thing, and then successful people, we’re supposed to deal with that. Just one more thing.” But the problem is our body doesn’t distinguish between big stress and small stress. Our brains do. Our brains can go into flight or fight response and kind of trigger different ways of working with big stress when we experience it.
But the small stress, you sense misalignment with a colleague and you wonder how you’re going to solve it. Or, you see somebody on your team that needs to be coached for the third time and you’re wondering, “How am I going to do that and keep their engagement?” Or, you got a text from a child, and you can’t tell if they’re grumbling for 15 seconds and over it, but you worry about it for three hours.
Rob Cross
So, we know it’s real because we see the body reacting differently. We know, for example, that the same meal processed within two hours of being under this form of social stress can result in, actually, an additional 104 calories, which doesn’t sound like much but you accumulate that over the year, and that can be as much as 11 pounds.
Pete Mockaitis
And, Rob, when you’re saying we burn an extra 104 calories because we’re hyped up or we burn 104 fewer calories?
Rob Cross
No, the reverse, we add it, yeah. And we actually process the food differently in, actually, a negative way. We know that the blood pressure is a problem. One of the neuroscientists we interviewed was describing it as kind of an analogy of having kids jumping on your bed, microstresses being the kids. You got one or two kids jumping on your bed and everything is fine, but you keep adding and adding and adding, and, eventually, the bedframe kind of cracks.
And that’s a little bit of the effect that we see neurologically with this. And I cannot tell you the number of times, going through these interviews, where these are all really successful people, top companies, really successful people. First 10 minutes, it was all rainbows and lollipops, everything is great. And then you get down to kind of minute 30, minute 45, and all the cracks are starting to creep in, and you start to get a real sense of how people are struggling.
And I think the thing that troubled me most with all these conventionally successful people was how many of them described going three, five, eight years in their lives just persisting, thinking you have to fight through only to wake up one day, and go, “What have I done? I’m not who I wanted to be. I’m not where I want to be. How did this affect me in such a way?” And I think that’s really the insidious nature of the microstresses.
They all seem small. You’re just kind of getting over one more thing each day but it takes a toll physiologically and, also, kind of from a sense of purpose and meaning in our lives in pretty powerful ways.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Rob, you gave us a couple examples of microstresses, but just to make sure we’re all on the same page, can you give us a few more so we can really say, “Oh, those. Okay, I know what you’re saying”?
Rob Cross
Yeah. So, we have a set of them that are really what we call drains to capacity, and they’re interactions that decrease our ability to get done what we have to get done. And so, they create stress as a product of us having to work harder and ignore our family or other things that we want to do with our lives, or they create stress, beverage of underdelivering.
But as an example, one is what I’ve come to call small misses, small performance misses from team members or colleagues. And so, what’s happened in a lot of places is most people are on five, six, seven team efforts. They may only be assigned to one but they’re usually tasked with five, six, seven other collaborative efforts that they have to be a part of and contribute to, given the way work is happening today.
And what we know happens is if you happen to own one, and everybody shows up to your one, let’s say you have four other people on that team, and they show up at 95% done, so they’re almost there, and everybody has reasons, they misunderstood, “My boss pulled me in a different direction,” “My child got sick,” that sounds like small misses, and most people just gloss over it, but that 5% times four people means 20% to you, and you’re stuck with this decision of, “Do I work through the night and push a little bit harder to get it done, or do I underdeliver?” Most people choose to work through and just get it done.
And then what they’ve done is they’ve taught people that, “Okay, 95% is good enough here, and maybe 90% the next time.” And not because people are nefarious, I really want to underscore that. The problem right now is that people are so overwhelmed in all the interviews we did across both these books, that they’re making decisions on which balls to drop nine times out of ten and not how to excel in different ways. So, that’s an example that we see.
Another one very common are when authority figures shift expectations very erratically or consistently. And that would take the form of changing what they were asking you to do, changing the performance expectations of what they had, or just emotionally being a very different person from point A to point B, and that create stress on you, individually, but then it also manifests in the second order when you have to go protect your team, or you have to go and find other people to help because the direction has shifted and you’re stuck doing things you committed to colleagues before in a prior direction, plus you’ve got to figure out new people you need to work with in different ways.
So, there’s 14 of those but that, hopefully, gives you a couple of them to get a sense of.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m thinking about home life as well. What are some microstresses there?
Rob Cross
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. So, one of my favorite examples is my daughter, Rachel, is somebody who’s a high-level junior tennis player. We travel the country together, and she would, as a product of having a father that knew nothing about the game at all except just trying to help her, she got very used to relying on me and to kind of talk about things that were bothering her.
And what that did, we have a super strong relationship, but what that created over time was a tendency where if anything was going wrong, she would let me know about it, just text me very quickly. And, usually, it was exactly what I was referring to earlier, a ten-second text that she wouldn’t even be thinking about. She’s just telling her dad, and yet I would worry about it for three or four hours, until one day we kind of discovered it.
And so, it’s an interesting thing with our home life, with our friends. Here is a little being that is simultaneously the greatest source of purpose for me in life, humor, all sorts of great wonderful things, yet also is a source of microstress in terms of second-hand stress that gets created and passed on. And what we did in that case is just say, “Well, don’t tell me if it’s not important to you, and I’ll avoid my four hours of anxiety.”
We’re laughing about it, of course, and she knows I’m there if anything is serious, but that’s really the trick of this, especially the people we’re closest to. They tend to be both our primary sources of joy and purpose and life satisfaction, and simultaneously our primary sources of different elements of microstress. And the trick is, “Can you adapt the interaction?” Not dump the relationship, but can you see it in the interaction and make small shifts like I’m describing with Rachel? And we have tons of those opportunities when we start looking for them that have a material impact on our lives.
Pete Mockaitis
And you say second-hand stress, is this a common notion, it’s like we pick up almost like a contagion what’s going on from other people?
Rob Cross
Right. Very much so. Yeah, that was definitely one of the microstresses we deal most prevalently. And it can take the form of an aggressive tone on a Zoom call, how people are sitting, just dejected posture, convey us a tremendous amount. It can be just typical stress that’s processing through us and we take it to somebody else.
So, one of the most common things we would hear is people would get upset about something at work, and we go home and talk to our significant other about it. And because they don’t know the whole story and ways that maybe we caused part of the problem, they just take our side in it and they’re providing empathy, they think, but they further spin us up and kind of create a second layer of stress, if you will, that it feeds back on us if we’re not really thinking carefully about how we’re turning to others, if you will.
So, again, there’s a whole kind of suite of those ways that the initial moment of stress is one instance, and then it tends to also go forward in different ways if we’re not careful about it, in what we call second-order stress.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, can you share with us the physiological symptoms to help distinguish between just nothing, like not a big deal at all, versus microstress, versus a traditional stress fight-or-flight response? Like, is it that my heartrate bumps up 20 beats per minute on a fight or flight? Or, how do I think about that?
Rob Cross
Yeah, I think you feel that rise in blood pressure, the rise in flushing in the face, the anxiety you feel in the moment. I would say that a microstress, if I were trying to make it in layman’s terms, is more of a, “Oh, my gosh, another irritation in my day, and it’s another thing that’s just going to sit in the back of my mind. It’s not insurmountable, I’m not panicked, but it’s another thing that I’m processing and I’m holding on to.” That’s the things that we tend to really try to get people to focus on.
So, when I’m working with this, and we create a table that has these 14 microstresses down one side and then the sources of them – a boss, colleagues, loved ones, team members – across the top, and I’m asking people to go through and really identify “Where are two, three, or four of these that are systemic enough in your life that you should do something about it, that you can change the nature of the interaction, you can create more time between those interactions, you can shift things in a way that has some material impact for you?”
That’s how I’m trying to hone people in on where to take action and what matters. And, universally, people look at that, and they say, “Well, can I put 10 checkboxes?” and I’m like, “No, because if it’s everything, it’s nothing.” You want to hone in on “What are the three, four areas that, if I can take concerted action against, will have a big impact for me?”
And I would really underscore for people listening here the worthwhile nature of doing that. We have a kneejerk reaction to look for the positives in things, to say, “I need to go do more fun things,” or, “I need to meditate and do gratitude journaling and things like that to get through the stress.” What if you could remove it?
And what we know, from all of social psychology, generally, is that the negative interactions have three to five times the impact of the positive. So, what if we actually focus on “How do we shape those interactions to take that out of our context?” By not doing that, we actually end up leaving the higher-leverage stuff on the table versus actually kind of going after it and trying to structure the context that we’ve let accrue around us.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you mentioned one microstress category, drains your capacity to get things done. Could you tell us about those that also deplete your emotional reserves and that challenge your identity? And maybe give us a story that brings them all together.
Rob Cross
Yeah. So, the deplete emotional reserves, I mean that’s what it sounds like. It’s the interactions that hit us and kind of hit us emotionally. The most common one is what most people are used to thinking about, are conflictual conversations. And some people are wired to love those, but many people aren’t and they worry about potential interactions. Before the interaction, they’re stressed out during the interaction, and then they will go and replay it in their mind five times afterwards, maybe even talk to other people and drag them through the mud as well.
And so, that’s a more conventional one that we know. You can do an awful lot about it if you just address it early and address it with evidence in certain ways versus letting it accumulate up. Another one that’s a little bit less obvious is just the stress we feel for having to take care of others and worrying about them, whether that be people on your team, an aging parent, a child, a friend that’s in trouble.
One of the fascinating things about microstresses is they have a greater impact on us because they’re coming at us through relationships. It’s not just bad news on social media. It’s the fact that this is coming to me through somebody I dislike, and that’s going to magnify of it, or it’s somebody I love and that’s going to magnify the effect of it. And, in fact, we find that the people we love and care about are just as big contributors as the conventionally toxic people that we would associate with more conventional forms of stress.
And the last one you asked about was the challenges to identity, and that’s oftentimes just small pushes or interactions that are kind of slowly pushing us away from being the people we set out to be. And so, it can happen, as an example, with performance expectations that don’t line up with your own values, whether it’s being overselling in situations, or with all the physicians and nurses we talked to that was not getting enough time for patient care.
They kind of went into that industry, that business with an eye to taking care of people, and yet as systems have evolved, they have less and less ability to do that at the level that they feel good about. So, those are the three challenges: drains to capacity, and challenges emotionally, and then challenges to value orientations. And you can get a sense that they become progressively a little bit more subtle but a little bit more impactful over time.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, what do we do about them?
Rob Cross
So, what do you do? So, for me, it’s a three-pronged idea as a starting point. One is, how do you isolate out three, four, five that are hitting you systemic enough you can do something about? And that’s what I’ve already just spoken to a little bit. Second pass through it, for me, is how do you stop causing it? When we have people go through this table, it always catches people off guard when I say, “Okay, which ones are you causing unnecessarily in your life?”
And the reality is we don’t want to create stress, yet what I see, if I’m polling on large webinars with these ideas or other things, I have a couple thousand people, and I’ll say, “What are the stresses you’re experiencing?” And then I shift gears, and say, “What are the stresses you’re causing?” And almost every case, the profiles are very similar. So, the stress we experience, we tend to pass on to others, and so you want to stop that, just from an identity standpoint. You don’t want to be somebody that creates stress.
But the other reason you want to stop doing it is, I’m very convinced that the stress we create in one form, oftentimes boomerangs back on us in a different form. And so, we push a child a little further than we should, and they become belligerent or morose. Or, you lean on a favorite employee because they’ve always come through for you. Lean on them one step too hard and they start to burn out and disengage and it creates more work for you in another way. So, it’s a subtle but a really important thing to think about where you’re unnecessarily causing it.
And then the third pass for me is “Where do you need to rise above some of it?” And so, most people have had experiences in their life when they’re grumbling about how bad everything is, other people driving you crazy, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then something truly traumatic happens. You get a significant health scare, somebody you know passes away, whatever it is. But you look back and all this stuff that mattered so mightily, ten seconds go, and realized none of it mattered at that moment.
And what I’m really convinced of is the top people in our interviews, and we call them the ten percenters because it was about in one in ten that were really just living differently, that’s kind of how they go through life without the trauma. They tend to rise above a lot of the minutiae in different ways. And one of the most powerful ways they’ve done that is by being an authentic part of at least two and usually three groups outside of their profession.
So, the stories that always ended up poorly were the people that just let go of everything outside of work and direct family, and the ones that generally trended far more positively were people that maintained that dimensionality in their lives, and not just activities but putting that activity in a group of people with different perspectives and values that help to shape perspectives that you’re taking into your life.
Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re talking, like, rotary, chess club, church, like three groups outside of work. What kinds of groups are you talking about?
Rob Cross
Yeah, it could be those forms, it could be other forms. One of my favorite interviews, actually, literally, my first interview in this body of work, we were very focused early on, on “What are the ways relationships affect physical health, growth in and out of work, purpose and resilience in our lives?” And so, I just asked this woman, a really lovely British accent, I won’t try to emulate here, but I said, “Just tell me about a time in your life when you were becoming more physically healthy, whatever that means to you? not what you were doing, but what was the role of the connections around you?”
And so, she kind of chuckled and said, “Well, Rob, I was somebody that dodged gym every chance I could in high school. Wanted nothing to do with physical activity.” And she said, “That worked for me up until about my late 30s, and, all of a sudden, my doctor gave me a stern warning and said ‘You need to do something about this.’”
And so, her reaction was she started walking around a park outside of her flat in London. And then because she was going at the same time every day, bumped into a couple of people that were walking that same route, and they fell in together and started talking, and then they would walk longer routes, they did a charity walk, and then a charity run. You can kind of get where I’m going to where I was interviewing her ten years later, and she was planning vacations where she’d do a marathon with her husband first before going on vacation.
And this was the person that dodged gym in high school. And so, what she said is, “The identity of being a runner with that group, and the accountability, them expecting me to show up, enabled me to push back on things in ways that I hadn’t been doing for most of my life. Just on the margin, I was pushing back on things that were creating stress.”
But the real thing that she said mattered was that, “This was a diverse group of people that I never would’ve spent time with. They weren’t life science executives. It was the mailman, an IT person, people coming at life very differently.” And she said, “They saw me at my worst, I saw them at their worst,” and it was the perspectives that they brought and the friendships and the different vantage points into her life that just created a different perspective overall.
So, it’s that kind of thing, and it can come from any of the walks of life. You just mentioned music, religion, poetry, art, book clubs but it is always important to me that it is put in some form of group. It’s not typically running by yourself. That may be part of what you do but it’s typically putting that activity in a group and the diversity of perspectives that come into that with you that seems to be the real thing that matters.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, within the group, and maybe this is not knowable, but there’s good research showing that friendships, good social support, is a big buffer to stress. And so, it seems like that’s one element but you’re highlighting something beyond that, is a diversity of experience that kind of helps you get grounded, and say, “That doesn’t really matter.” Is that fair to say?
Rob Cross
Right, yeah. And I think, like you’re saying, there’s just emerging evidence from the Harvard studies, from the work done in the book Together that shows that people with quality relationships, they lived 2.14 years longer, they’re less susceptible to colds, like, we could spend an hour on all the benefits of having a couple of close relationships in your life. They can be friends, they can be intimates. But what’s interesting to us, as we look at this, is that’s not the only way we get resilience.
So, again, a great example of that was a neurosurgeon that was in our interviews, and he was stressed out. World-renowned in what he did but he’d allowed life to evolve and to just his profession, and was a highly consuming profession and family, and he had no kind of dimensionality built in. And on a whim, he said, “I’m going to go play guitar.” He used to play guitar in high school, and he went into a music shop and got a guitar.
And as he was walking out, he saw a flier for a group looking for a guitar player in a band. And there was something like, “What we lack in quality, we make up for in volume,” I think on the flier. And he, on a whim, went and tried out with them and got into the band, and he called me like two months after that, and he said, “This has been one of the best experiences of my life because I’m hanging out with 20-year-olds and I’m doing something completely different. I’m hearing different stories, different ways of living your life, different things around what matters in their worlds, and it’s just given me a totally different slant on life.”
Now, the key to it for me is that those were not his best friends, those weren’t the two, three, four, five intimates that we can sustain in our lives. And so, I think what we’re seeing is you find resilience through certain kinds of interactions that you build into your network but not all of it has to come from your intimates – your wife, your husband, your partner, and your parents. In fact, the way that most people have lost close relationships is actually, I believe, too much pressure on those categories of people to absorb all the interactions around us.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, okay, so we heard a running group, we heard a band. What are some other groups that are rocking for folks?
Rob Cross
People derive this dimensionality from so many places, but I’ll give you some broad categories. It was almost always one that was physical for the people that were doing particularly well, and, in particular groups that required you to show up. It wasn’t optional, so, like tennis, or basketball, or other things like that where there was an accountability, and the group didn’t go on if you weren’t there. It just kind of kept up that consistency of returning embedded in.
There was often ones that I’ll say are more aesthetic, and that could be spiritual commitments that people are making but it could revolve around music, poetry, book clubs, museum outings, foodie, dinner groups, all sorts of things that were more about an artistic or spiritual side of life. And then, oftentimes, it was purely social that one of the strategies, if you’ve fallen out of these groups and you don’t have them, and that’s the most people through COVID, one strategy is you do what I mentioned with the neuroscientist, you reach back to a hobby, and use that to slingshot forward.
Another equally effective strategy is to reach back to ties that have gone dormant – college friends, friends soon after you graduated from college – and use some activity to reignite that group – hiking, dinners, whatever it may be. So, there’s a lot of strategies like that that people would use but I think the things I would see is they would tend…the people that were doing particularly well had dimensionality built out in terms of a physical realm, a spiritual or aesthetic realm, a social and an intellectual realm that they were pursuing.
Pete Mockaitis
And that is often a means by which we support the perspective that all this stuff is not that big of a deal. So, how would you articulate that, that concept, like the clarity?
Rob Cross
I view it as rising above. Yeah, you kind of rise above. It puts in perspective. And I do not, at all, want to make this sound like rose-colored glasses but that it helps you start to get a different sense of why we’re living. There are so much, so many messages come at us that feed a very narrow model of what good looks like, what success looks like.
And we, as a society, have never had more ability to shape what we do and who we do it with than today, but we give it up a tremendous amount. And what we’re seeing is that, adding that dimensionality and preserving it, is one of the things it does is it just helps keep in perspective what’s significant, what’s important, what isn’t.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any other key findings among these ten percenters?
Rob Cross
Two things that pop to mind immediately. One is they were really good at tapping into others for resilience. So, we’re conditioned to think about resilience as something that we own, we have grit or fortitude or internal toughness. But if you asked hundreds of people about how they made it through difficult stretches and focus not on what they did but on how they leaned into others in that situation, whether it was “I didn’t get the promotion” up to “My spouse died of pancreatic cancer,” you find that we tend to get seven benefits from others in tough times.
You get empathy, for sure. You get perspective that this isn’t maybe as big a deal as you think. You get a path forward from people maybe that had been there and can say, “Here’s the way to proceed.” You get laughter from friends, and that turns out to be really important. And so, what we were seeing is that people that would weather difficult stretches better typically had those connections in their lives, have gone through in their life in a way that built those relationships, and, importantly, they know how to use them for them.
So, some people, it’s really laughter that they need to reset. Others it’s empathy, and then a path forward. And so, that was a big distinguisher, the degree to which we’re conditioned to think resilience is something we have, and yet it’s really in the interactions and the quality of the connections that we have around us as well.
The second thing for me is that the happiest people in the work, they were not all pursuing magnificent things for happiness. Like, they weren’t hiking Everest, or writing concertos, or sailing the ocean. Really, what it boiled down to is that they tended to live the small moments more richly in connection with others.
And so, as an example of that, again, one of my favorite interviews was a Silicon Valley executive, kind of mid-40s, a woman, type A, hard charger, wildly successful by anybody’s definition, and she had been a runner in college, and she said, “Rob, when I came out of college, I continued to run. And what happened to me is if every year I didn’t get a personal best on what I was running with, whether it was 10K or marathons, that was a bad year for running. And you know that’s a losing strategy. Eventually, life is going to catch up to you.”
And she said she woke up one day and realized that that was somebody else’s idea of fun, that was society’s definition of why you run for those times. And, really, what she wanted to be doing was running with her daughter, her daughter’s best friend, and a parent in the neighborhood. And so, they started running, and it actually evolved into this community group, and she got a great sense of purpose out of being more closely connected with her daughter, and more closely connected with that community.
So, what she was doing, and what I’m always trying to emphasize to people, is she wasn’t saying, “I need to go find another job to have purpose,” or, “I need to feed the world’s hungry.” She was saying, “How do I take what I already am doing and pivot it just slightly in ways that will pull me into interactions, into relationships that’ll make a more meaningful life for me.”
And that’s what we saw over and over again. The people that were really doing well, it wasn’t the big things. It was that they lived the small moments better and more authentically with other people around them.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’d also like to touch on this notion of engaging the people that are causing the microstress. Some people say, “You can’t change other people, Rob.” But tell me, if I’m seeing, okay, there’s a particular person who’s doing a thing a lot that’s a recurring sense of microstress, what are my options?
Rob Cross
Yeah, I think there’s a couple. And everybody will have examples of people in their lives that they can’t shape. And, again, I would also urge thinking about the positive connections too. And what I described with my daughter is an example. How do you find those opportunities to shift interactions that you may not even be thinking about? Like, I wasn’t thinking about those ever as microstresses when she was ladling stress on me. I just thought, “Oh, I’m the provider. I’m a good parent. I’m a good dad. Whatever it may be, and this is what I need to do.”
So, you are probably drifting towards, “Here’s the person that’s driving me nuts,” and that’s a form of microstress, too. But what I want to emphasize is we live in a sea of this stuff, and there’s opportunities all over the place. Now, when it is the conventional person that’s driving you crazy, of course, the lead is always to reset the connection.
And the more effective strategies are always saying, “Let me start with me. What am I doing that’s kind of leading you into this behavior, whatever it may be that’s driving you crazy?” and then try to move from that to what could they do, or what could they shift that would have a positive impact on you. Always providing evidence of the impact of the behavior and the tactics that they’ve been taking.
That’s one approach, where you have the opportunity to actually shift the behavior. And there’s a ton of great stories of people that actually developed the courage and went into the situation and found it was much more cathartic than they had feared. A second is to find ways to increase the timespan between the interactions. Third is to embed those interactions with other people.
So, if it’s one person that’s driving you crazy, bring them to lunch with three others, and not kind of have the interaction in isolation. So, there’s a whole set of progressive, I guess, actions you can take depending on how entrenched it is.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I’d like to shift gears into stuff you can do by yourself in terms of what about, you mentioned, exercise, breathing exercises, affirmations, meditation, visualization. Are there some stuff we can do that’s super effective to alleviate microstress that’s 100% in our control?
Rob Cross
Yeah, very much. And meditation is one, like super proven effect, and mindfulness practices in general. It doesn’t have to be massive. It can be small time commitments that people are making to meditation and breathing exercise. And there’s also some really neat breathing exercises through the day that can have impact as well that has been proven to be super effective.
Gratitude journaling is one of the most prominent and effective shown up over and over again to have perspective to help us keep our minds set on the positive. As a professor, a lot of times, I’ll be in an audience where there’s executives or undergrads, and I’ll have the individuals in the room, just as an experiment, I’ll say, “Tell me all the things that are stressing you out.” And it’ll be 18 things, very quickly that’ll come out of their mouths and I’ll get them on a flipchart or chalkboard or whatever.
And then I’ll switch gears and I’ll say, “Okay, now tell me the things you’re grateful for in the moment.” And it starts a little slower but what, comically, almost always comes out is an almost identical list of things. Somebody complains about having tuition they have to pay for, well, they’ve got a kid that’s successful and starting to thrive. And somebody complains about a mortgage, well, they’ve got a house that they’re safe in, as an example.
And so, gratitude journaling can help us from our drift to the negative and our tendency to do that to kind of see things on a more positive light. And I’ll give you one more thing that does go back to connections. This is a great experiment that a colleague suggested, and my co-author and I did it here. If you’re trying to rejuvenate connections that have gone dormant, people you haven’t talked to in a while, they’re proposing a challenge and say, “Just make seven-, eight-minute calls. Take one week. Write people, say you just want to catch up for eight minutes.”
And they’ll laugh at you, they’ll say, “Eight minutes? What are you talking about?” But it’s just a small-enough time block that nobody says no, nobody says it’s too busy, or “We have to wait four months to find it.” And that can be a really neat way to kind of rejuvenate connections that you want to be back in touch with and have a pretty positive impact as well.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. And you said breathing throughout the day, I’m intrigued. Is there a particular timing or way of breathing? How does it go?
Rob Cross
Cadence for me. So, it’s a four by four by four by four. So, four seconds on the in-breath, four seconds hold, four seconds exhale, four seconds hold. And it’s just one technique of a bunch to just kind of calm and bring presence in a little bit more.
Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned it doesn’t have to be long stretches of time. Like, how many minutes of this breathing or this meditation stuff is enough to make a significant impact?
Rob Cross
That’s a great question, and that’s going to drift beyond a lot of my expertise in terms of knowing the specific time intervals. I hear people routinely starting with 10 minutes, and then some people can take it much, much, much further than that. But it isn’t hours of time, let me say it that way.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Rob, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?
Rob Cross
I don’t think so. I think we’re good.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Rob Cross
So, I think probably, and this will sound a little bit corny, but it’s, “Ask not what you can receive, but what you can give.” I’m not getting it exactly right but I think that, to me, it’s a mindset that I have as I go forward in the work that I’ve been doing for some time. And I think it pays off in pretty significant ways.
Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Rob Cross
Favorite experiment for me is a whole body of work that’s kind of showing the effect of the relationships in our lives. So, my own work showed that having these energizing interactions is typically four times the predictor of a high performer as other things that we see happening in the relationships. And then, of course, the negative in my work is about two times as much. So, for me, that body of work is always really emphasizing the importance of managing the negative interactions, whether they be things we’re experiencing or things we’re causing in different ways.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?
Rob Cross
Favorite book right now would be Together, and that was the study that was done around loneliness and the epidemic that it’s hitting in society today.
Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?
Rob Cross
Favorite tool. I would have to say my iPhone. Constantly in connection with different people that way.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?
Rob Cross
Favorite habit is exercise with other people. So, I’m a heavy cyclist and I love tennis as a vehicle, not just be physically be out there but be with other people.
Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Rob Cross
Would look at my website RobCross.org, and there’s also the Connected Commons, the consortia that I’ve cofounded and direct research for as different ways to see us, a bunch of the research there.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Rob Cross
I would say lean into the small moments, really pay attention to the small moments and leverage those, whether that be adapting the negative or leaning into the positive in a different way. That’s what we have way more control over than we tend to give ourselves credit for in today’s workforce.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rob, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of good times and even less microstress.
Rob Cross
All right. Thank you so much for having me here.
