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Mar 17
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751: How to Decrease Loneliness and Increase Belonging with Ryan Jenkins

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Ryan Jenkins tackles the overlooked problem of loneliness in the workplace and shares expert tips for fostering connection and belonging for both yourself and your team.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you can still feel lonely around other people 
  2. Just how loneliness is harming our health and productivity
  3. The simplest thing you can do now to feel less lonely 

About Ryan

Ryan Jenkins CSP® is an internationally-recognized keynote speaker and three-time published author. He speaks all over the world to companies such as State Farm, Salesforce, Wells Fargo, FedEx, Liberty Mutual, and John Deere. 

For a decade, he has been helping organizations create engaged, inclusive, and high-performing teams by lessening worker loneliness and closing generational gaps. Ryan’s top-ranked insights have been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal. 

He is also co-founder of LessLonely.com, the world’s first resource fully dedicated to reducing worker isolation and strengthening team connections. Ryan lives in Atlanta, GA, with his wife, three children, and yellow Labrador. 

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Ryan Jenkins Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ryan, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Ryan Jenkins
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom. But, first, I need to know, since you visited all 50 states in the United States here, is there one that you think is underrated or overrated that you want to share your hot take with?

Ryan Jenkins
I like them all, to be honest, and I feel so…

Pete Mockaitis
Even New Jersey? No offense. Just kidding.

Ryan Jenkins
The most underrated? I guess I’d say Alaska and New York because, I think, personally, every time I go to New York, I’m always taken back by just how specifically large New York City is. It always takes my breath away. And then Alaska is just…it’s my favorite state. It’s so beautiful and it takes my breath away for a completely different reason. So, those are two standouts in my mind.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. You’ve got quite the stretch. And we’re talking about loneliness. I imagine, I don’t know, you can be lonely in Alaska or New York City. Tell us, maybe before we get into all the particulars, is there a specific discovery you’ve made in your loneliness research that’s really surprising or counterintuitive to you?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, you mentioned you could be lonely in New York, you could also be lonely in Alaska, and that’s true. And that correlates to one of the…probably the thing that most rings true or stands out to folks the most, which is the definition of loneliness. And loneliness isn’t the absence of people; it’s the absence of connection. So, I could be in a busy city like New York City and be surrounded by people constantly, but still feel isolated and alone.

Vice versa, you could be in Alaska surrounded by nobody but not feel isolated and feel very connected to other things. So, again, it’s not the absence of people; it’s the absence of connection. And so, that always kind of gets people to start thinking. That’s true and that’s probably why there are certain times of your life or certain areas of your life or your day that you feel more connected and less lonely, and then other times you feel very alone. And so, that’s probably what stands out the most, in my mind, and what gets people pondering the deepest.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say connected, I guess I’m thinking connected to people. Are there other flavors of connection that you’re thinking here?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, great question. And the reason I wanted to attack work with loneliness and specifically address workplace loneliness, is I thought the workplace was the best place to eradicate or help to lessen loneliness amongst individuals. And so, if you think about work, there’s a lot of connection points. There’s connection to one’s self, there’s connection to your team members, there’s connection to a leader, there’s connection to your work, there’s connection to a purpose or the organizational cultures. There’s all kinds of different flavors, and in your words, of connections.

And so, if we start thinking about it from that standpoint, we really start to get a better understanding of all these different points that we have to nurture in order to feel less isolated in today’s very isolating world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I’m curious, can you sort of give us the state of affairs with regard to the research? So, how widespread is the state of loneliness? I guess, probably, everybody feels lonely at some point, so maybe I don’t know if it’s monthly, weekly, or however you’ve got it sliced and diced. Like, how widespread is loneliness? How deep is loneliness amongst those who are feeling it? And just how big of a deal is that? Is it just sort of like, “Well, yeah, everyone feels lonely sometimes, you know. That’s part of being human”? Versus, is it really bad news?

Ryan Jenkins
All of the above, really. And loneliness is a universal human condition. We all experience it. And the reason why it’s stuck with us for so long is because loneliness was helpful and it continues. It is a useful emotion. That’s why we still carry it throughout humanity. Think about our ancestors who roam the planes.

When you were excluded, when you’re isolated from a group, your survival rate plummeted. There was literally strength in numbers. We could pool our resources, we could watch each other’s backs, we could strategize and socialize to take down wooly mammoths to create some warm fuzzy slippers. There was strength in numbers and there was safety in numbers.

And so, when we get excluded from a group, our body goes into fight-or-flight mode. And that’s why that’s such an important conversation, especially, as we think about how to be awesome at our job, is we have to understand how to fill our cup up and how to boost our connections and nurture these connections because, if not, we’re in flight-or-fight mode and we’re not able to fully show up at work.

So, back to your question. It’s a universal human condition and, according to our research, we surveyed over 2,000 global workers, and 72% of them say that they experience loneliness at least monthly with 55% saying they experience it at least weekly, and that’s all across the organization, individual contributors to executives. Loneliness is no respecter of person. It’s a universal human condition.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I’m curious, in your survey, did you…I don’t know if you can recall any particular word choices, but did you say, “Hey, did you feel lonely or lack of connection?” Or, how are we wording that, I wonder?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, we asked folks, “How often do you experience loneliness?” And we did our best to give them a little bit of context on how we defined loneliness, but it’s a tricky emotion. We experience a lot of emotions. It’s hard to pinpoint. And even today, the science around loneliness is really, really new. It’s pretty extraordinary. It’s only in the last five to six years that we really kind of really start to unpack it and figure out where it shows up in the brain.

I think part of the reason is loneliness has just been shrouded in shame, so even the neuroscientists and psychologists don’t want to touch it. but that’s changing, which is really exciting because, again, it can be useful. It’s literally our biological cue that we belong together and we’re better together.

So, we tried to give them the best idea of kind of what connection was so that they could, effectively, evaluate when and where they were experiencing feelings of isolation but it’s hard to pinpoint if “Does loneliness come first and then does that lead to depression? Or, does depression come first and that leads to isolation and loneliness? Do we get burnt out that leads to loneliness?”

It’s really hard to say which comes first. And, hopefully, as humanity becomes more open to talk about loneliness, we all become a little bit more aware and start being a little bit more in tuned with ourselves and how we assess it and when and where we feel lonely, and then also being able to identify it in others so that we can draw people in because the tricky thing about loneliness is that when we feel lonely, we do the exact opposite of what we should be doing.

We turn inward instead of turning outward, and we just start to go more inward and begin distrusting more folks, and we become less and less approachable. So, it’s a vicious cycle that creates a downward spiral. And so, that’s why it’s really important that all of us come together and really start to pull each other in and identify where folks may be feeling disconnected.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that part really resonates because I moved from Chicago to just outside the Nashville area, and I do miss a lot of my great friends there, and have felt some more loneliness here. So, when in the area, you can contact me pete@awesomeatyourjob.com. But to that point, it does resonate. Like, sometimes if I feel lonely, I feel, for me, it’s like I’m not quite at my best because I’m also not feeling like, it’s not really dramatic in terms of depression. But it’s sort of like, “You know what, I don’t really feel all that funny, witty, fun, interesting, engaging. I don’t really know if I want to show up to a thing in this condition.”

I want to put my best foot forward, making first impressions and connections, and have people think, like, “Oh, this Pete guy is awesome. I want to hang out with him again,” as opposed to, “Oh, yeah, he was sort of lame. I don’t really care to spend any more time with him.” And so, that’s kind of where my brain goes.

And so, that point really does resonate in terms of when we’re feeling lonely, we can look inward and that’s problematic. And I think Shawn Achor discussed some of this exact phenomenon in The Happiness Advantage. And so, you reminded me of awesome stuff. So, I want to make sure we don’t move too quickly past the notion of the dangers of loneliness.

So, we have links or associations or correlations to depression, to more, I guess, you said kind of limbic, amygdala, fight-or-flight type stuff, stress things. Any cool experiments that come to mind in terms of, “Oh, hey, we subjected lonely and non-lonely people to a stress, and here’s what went down”?

Ryan Jenkins
There’s a number of studies that we put a lot of them in the book, and it’s all so fascinating. I’ll share a few of them. One is they took…there was this one experiment happening where they were actually trying to figure out how mice were reacting to cocaine.

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds like a good time.

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, it’s exactly where they found out kind of how the brain processes loneliness. And so, they began experimenting and isolating mice, and they found that the more that we isolate mice, the more that they crave connection. And not surprising, that’s the same with humans as well. Another really interesting research, I’m sure many of your listeners are familiar with, is the Harvard University study around adult development. It’s the longest study ever, continuous study of adult development.

It’s gone for 80 years, it’s still going on, which is incredible that there’s enough funds and enough staff who stuck around to keep this study going. But now they’ve studied over 2,000 people, and according to the director, the definitive answer to a long and healthy life, after this longest study ever done in adult development, is quality relationships, so it’s essentially our connections. And study after study after study just reveals how detrimental it is to the human body.

And I think we’re just now starting to realize that we need this more and more. And silver lining, and the pandemic really pulled the curtain back, we all experienced it. We, perhaps, couldn’t put our finger on it, and now we’re ready to talk about this, and I think we’re all in a good position to start absorbing some more of this new research and insights on how to better establish and nourish our connections.

Ryan Jenkins
One other study, I think, that could be helpful for your listeners, Pete, and it is recently they did an experiment where they excluded people and they put them through an experience of exclusion, and the monitored their brain, and their brain lit up, of course, not surprising, but where their brain lit up was super fascinating and insightful.

And they actually discovered that the same part of the brain that registers physical pain is the same part of the brain that registers exclusion. So, that’s what’s really important and that’s really the research that really got me super interested in this because so many of the audiences that I talk to in organizations I serve, trying to get them to understand some of these concepts so that they can create more engaged, healthier and high-performing organizations.

We talk about loneliness, seems like a very soft topic but, in reality, if we don’t address this, that means we’ve got folks showing up to work that, literally, the pain part of their brain is lighting up, and they’re not able to fully show up so that they can deliver exceptional work and show up for their teammates and deliver for clients and customers.

So, that’s why it’s important for all of us, whether you’re an individual contributor or you’re a leader, a manager, is we’ve got to understand this so that we can lessen loneliness and get people to show up more fully at work, and that creates healthier individuals, and, ultimately, higher-performing organizations.

You could probably tell in my voice I’m excited about this conversation, and it’s no longer a soft one. it’s really a dire one. And it’s not that difficult to overcome. We’ve just got to be aware of it and then equip ourselves with some intentional tools to pick away at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that’s basically what your book Connectable is trying to do here. Or, how would you articulate the core message or thesis?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, it’s three parts. The first part, we talk about loneliness. We give our readers a better understanding of the science of it and how it’s impacting work specifically. Part two is we unpack belonging and how that’s the nemesis of loneliness and how that’s the antidote to loneliness. We talk about why humans need belonging, and then how we can start thinking about that in the context of work.

And then the third and final part is all actionable strategies. So, we created a four-step framework that folks can use to help lessen loneliness in themselves or the team around them, whether they’re involved in that team or they’re leading that team.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, I’m curious, when you mentioned earlier that loneliness being a complicated sort of a thing in terms of the human experience of emotions is broad and multifaceted and so many layers, are there any maybe clues or indicators or signs that you might highlight for us to tune into in terms of, “Oh, wait a minute, maybe you’re lonely”?

For example, I remember once I got dumped, it was a bummer. And then it was just before I went to San Diego for an event with Pat Flynn, and it was really cool, the 1-Day Business Breakthrough. And I remember Pat was so cool as to serve Chipotle burritos for the lunch at the event and I was chowing down, I had a big old burrito, and then had a bunch of chips and queso. And I thought I was still hungry, and I was like, “That’s really weird. Usually, this is plenty of food for lunch for me to not feel hungry,” and yet I’m still hungry. I was like, “Oh, wait, I’m not hungry. I just feel empty inside.” Sad face.

And then they proceeded to give me brutal feedback about my business, which needed to be shut down. It was fine. It was helpful. Thank you, guys. So, anyway, I guess I shared that story, not to make everyone feel sad and feel sorry for me, but to share that sometimes it can fly under the radar, it’s like, “We don’t even know that we’re lonely.” So, are there any things you might sort of highlight for us, like, “Oh, if these are the kinds of things that are going on, you may, in fact, be lonely”?

Ryan Jenkins
Yes, and not to be promotional, this is just a free tool that you can use, that we created. If you go to LessLonely.com, you scroll all the way to the bottom, we have a free assessment. It takes two minutes. It’s ten questions that’s been statistically validated, critically validated, to actually assess how connected you are to those around you. So, that can be step one, where you can actually test yourself and get a score as to, “Are you feeling lonely?” or, “How connected really are you?” So, that would be step one.

Step two is, specifically in the book, we looked at ten identifiers that show up in the workplace. So, you can think about these for yourself or you can start thinking about these as folks in your organization or on your team because, again, if we’re lonely, we tend to retreat. And so, it’s up to all of us, we’re only as unified as our loneliest team member, so it’s up to all of us to kind of be aware of some of these cues.

I won’t go through all ten of them but I’ll give you a few here, Pete. One is the idea of lack of learning and development. If your curiosity is waning, or your growth mindset, you don’t have that growth mindset like you had, that’s kind of a good indicator. If you have limited participation in training, disdain for extracurricular activities, you’re not asking questions, that could be a subtle indicator. If you skip or resent meetings, that’s a pretty good indicator as well because lonely people avoid others.

So, if you find yourself not apologizing for being late, or you keep your camera off all the time during virtual meetings, or if you’re just generally being disgruntled during meetings, that could be a subtle signifier. And then I think the one that perhaps is the most shocking to folks or perhaps the most unexpected, and the last one I’ll give you, is excessive working.

Someone that’s spending too much time working as a way to avoid personal responsibilities can certainly point to an imbalance in social relationships. So, if you’re volunteering for too many projects, you’re piling up your vacation days, you’re returning emails late at night, these are all subtle indicators that you might be intentionally going into overdrive to avoid other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we find ourselves in such a spot, what do we do? How do we get more of this belonging antidote going on?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, I think what the first step and we highlight in the book is to look at loneliness. And so, being involved in a conversation like this, listening to this, you could check that box. It’s really kind of being aware that this is a growing epidemic and we need to better understand it if we’re going to get our arms around it. If you were a psychologist, you probably heard the statement “Awareness is curative.“ So we, first, got to be aware of this problem.

And then second step, I’m not sure we’ll go through all four here, but the second step is, clearly, just to invest in connections. And one of the ways that we encourage in the book is to create safe spaces, to pursue psychological safety, because the number one burning question in all of us, in all of humanity, that research tells us our brain is asking it five times per second, and that core question of humanity is, “Am I safe?” Our bodies are constantly asking that, “Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe?”

So, most of the time, it’s unconscious, but our body is aware of our surroundings and if we’re safe or not, and we’ve got to start creating those spaces at work if, again, we want people to fully show up. Because if we want to quiet that voice in our head that’s constantly saying, “Am I safe? Am I safe? Am I safe?” We’ve got to create these safe spaces. And one way to do that is to create proportional conversations.

So, if you find yourself talking too much and stepping over the conversation of other people, dial it back. If you find yourself not talking at all, it’s time to start speaking up a little bit. And, specifically for leaders, this is for leaders, they can really start to help kind of orchestrate this. But, according to research, Google did Project Aristotle a few years ago, and they studied all these teams to figure out “What was the core element that makes up successful teams?” And they found that it was psychological safety, and the basis of that was having proportional conversations.

And it draws right back to loneliness. If you’re on a team and you don’t feel like your voice is heard, and you don’t feel seen on that team, then, of course, you’re going to retreat and you’re not going to put your best foot forward. So, it’s up to all of us to start creating these spaces, but, specifically for leaders, too, they have a great responsibility to start creating space where these proportional conversations can be had.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s interesting. When you think about proportional conversations, I’m visualizing, “It’s Pete’s turn now.” Like, if there are six of us at a meeting or something, I guess, is that the hope, is that each person would speak roughly six or sixteen-ish percent of the time, and that is associated with there being psychological safety because folks don’t feel the need to either retreat or dominate, and are aware and care about what’s going on here?

Ryan Jenkins
Exactly. Yeah, you want to speak equal amounts, and certainly there’s going to be more introverted folks that aren’t going to want to do that, but it’s up to the team and, specifically, again, the leader, to create other opportunities for those introverts can still feel like their voices being heard or they had equal opportunity to express their thoughts, ideas, etc. So, yeah, that’s it, exactly.

And the other thing that’s important if you’re a leader inside of an organization is to be speaking last. Too often, the clients that we work with and the leaders that we come in conversation with, they get excited about their ideas, they come to the table and they want to post the vision, and then ask questions at the end, or get the ideas from the team at the end.

And that’s too late because you’ve already projected what you’re thinking and the rest of the team is going to fall in line, and you’ve wasted that opportunity for those proportional conversations to be had and for other people to bring their bright ideas to the table. So, speak last is really important for leaders, again, to create that space for proportional conversations to occur.

Pete Mockaitis
We’re talking about leaders, and you mentioned orchestrating. I sort of literally imagined a conductor of an orchestra. I imagine I want to hear some, maybe, scripts or verbiage from you because I imagine you don’t want to say, “Okay, we’ve heard enough from you, Ryan.” Like, “Oh, okay, that doesn’t feel good at all.” So, any key suggestions to try to get that proportionality if you are orchestrating or leading that meeting?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, I think at times it’s you never want to shut down an idea because someone might have something similar but it could lead to the next big thing or the breakthrough that you’re looking for. So, keeping your responses neutral as a leader, like, “That’s an interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing.” You don’t have to tilt your hand as far as…

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s certainly an idea.”

Ryan Jenkins
“That is something.” Or, spending time on the frontend creating that agenda and kind of creating the timeslots for folks to speak, kind of assigning it, essentially. Or, the other thing, too, if you have a hybrid team, it’s assigning different folks to run the meeting. That’s another opportunity to where folks that might not be as likely to participate, they can be the ones that actually kind of orchestrate the meeting. And then there’s another tactic that’s used in negotiations. If you say the last three words of someone’s statement…

Pete Mockaitis
The last three words of someone’s statement?

Ryan Jenkins
Exactly. There you go. Then the other person is likely to keep expanding on their thought.

Pete Mockaitis
Keep expanding?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, keep talking more and more, like what’s happening just right here. And so, for someone, that’s a little bit more reserved or quiet, that might be a good tactic to draw a little bit more out of those folks as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Draw more out of those folks as well. That is a fun one. I think Chriss Voss mentioned that on the show, who’s awesome, and it really does work. It’s like, if you’re not too overt, it’s like, “Okay, you’re being weird. Cut it out,” like within reason and normal conversationally. Okay. Well, that’s great. So, now we got a four-step less lonely framework, we’ve gotten into it a little bit. I want to make sure we get a little bit of an outline overview of it.

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, so we’ve covered those first two. Third is this idea of narrowing the focus, so it’s really trying to put your attention on really what matters and, for that section, we studied astronauts because those are the folks that operate in the most secluded parts of the universe. And so, it was really fascinating to figure out, “How does someone, 250 miles away, that only interacts with 11 people for an entire year, how do they keep loneliness at bay? And how do they make sure that they sustain healthy mental health?” And so, they do some really interesting things. A lot of it is around focus and clarity.

And then the fourth and final step in the framework is a circle. So, the fourth and final step is to kindle, it’s a momentum. You get some traction going and you got to keep it going, and we relate human wellbeing to a battery, in the book. We don’t charge up once and we’re fully charged forever. Same thing with our connections. We don’t connect once with someone or a team member and then are fully charged and don’t need to connect ever again. It’s a constant thing that we have to maintain and stick with.

And we all know that to be true. We can’t just make a friend in an hour and then call on them two years from now. If we want healthy relationships, we have to attend to them and we have to be consistent about it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I must ask more about these astronauts. What are they doing with regard to combating loneliness?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, we looked at Christina Koch. So, she’s the female astronaut that spent the most continuous time in space, and for her, it’s all about regimentation. So, she has a very detailed outline of her day, and so she knows exactly what she’s doing on a daily basis. Astronauts, they have their days incremented down to the five-minute increments, so it’s pretty extraordinary.

But the other thing is big picture. They know the big picture and they’re doing important work. They feel very connected to that, and so that’s really important for folks as well. And one of the strategies that we share is this idea of, and this is specifically for leaders but I think there’s a lot of parallels for non-leaders, and that is to lead with context not control. So, how do you start painting the bigger picture for folks?

Because so much of what can drive loneliness is this absence of purpose, we don’t feel connected to something bigger than ourselves. So, how do we start connecting ourselves to this bigger meaning? And, of course, that seems pretty easy for astronauts because they’re doing some really extraordinary work and they feel connected to humanity in a much different way when they’re up there. They’ve always said that they can see the globe and it just gives them different perspective.

But for us down here on Earth, we have to work at this. And if you’re a leader, it’s really on you to start creating more of that context and that bigger picture, and constantly being the chief reminding officer of your team of what you’re doing and how each person’s role and their activities are connected to that bigger picture. So, giving them that context for them to then act with autonomy and not so micromanaged with just control.

Pete Mockaitis
And how does the regimenting of the day help with loneliness exactly? I got you on the connection and the purpose, and the mission vision, and what you’re doing and how that’s serving a bigger thing. And so, I guess I’m thinking back to the workaholism piece that we discussed. Like, in a way, that could be a warning sign, like, “Ooh, you’re doing too much, you’re like avoiding things.” So, how does the regimentation help exactly?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, it’s really around clarity, I would say. Think about clarity from the standpoint of clarity and direction. If you don’t have clarity and direction where you’re going somewhere, you’ll end up being lost. And what happens when you’re lost? You end up becoming alone and it’s frightening. So, this idea of having clarity and direction, so you can put your mind to it and you know exactly what needs to be done that day.

And, you’re right, you can totally plan or overwork yourself, but astronauts also have a really good balance of knowing, planning in their exercise and their sleep. They also have psychologists that they connect with on a routine basis, too, to make sure that they’re maintaining their mental health.

One other thing that I think might be helpful, Pete, is this idea around learning as well. Chris Hadfield is another astronaut, a Canadian astronaut, and he’s famous for doing the Space Oddity. Have you seen that YouTube video?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t remember.

Ryan Jenkins
He had a guitar and he lip-synched to Space Oddity in different environments that he did. Look it up on YouTube, it got tons of views, and it’s really well-done. It’s really cool. But one of the ways he lessened loneliness in extreme isolation was through learning. So, learning starves loneliness. And so, he was one that would always try to keep his mind active and to try things. It’s kind of the same idea of you can’t be angry and grateful at the same time. We can’t experience those two emotions.

So, the other idea is if you’re fully involved and interested in learning something, you’re not thinking about, “Woe is me. I’m so isolated up here in space.” And so, Chris would go around, and he called the International Space Station this old attic. And so, he actually found this old Japanese bell, and he became fascinated with how the sound would travel through the International Space Station. And then, of course, he was doing all kinds of other videos, like the Space Oddity on YouTube, just to keep himself occupied and learning as he was up there to kind of keep feelings of loneliness at bay.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it if you could give us just one or two or three immediate tactics or some do’s and don’ts. Like, what are some things we can do right now to decrease loneliness? And what are some things we should not do right now if we want to keep this fostering belonging going on?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, I think what you don’t want to do is beat yourself up. Loneliness isn’t shameful; it’s a signal. We all experience it and it’s useful. It’s a signifier and it’s our biological cue that we belong together, so don’t beat yourself up. Or, use it as a reminder that, “Yes, I need to go build a connection, or I need to start turning my attention outside myself.”

Something to do would be one of my favorite activities for individuals is to identify the beneficiaries of your labor. That kind of connects with purpose. So, they’ve done study after study after study, and they find that no matter what industry or line of work you’re in, if you can connect with the person that benefits from your work, for example,   actually perform better when they can actually see the people that they’re cooking for.

So, if we can get a better picture of the people that our work, that people are benefiting from our work. Straight of the line, we can draw from our work to those people and connect those two, we’ll see greater purpose and we’ll start to see loneliness lessen as well because, again, we’ve established those connections. So, that would be one don’t and do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I do that as well, which is why I have some cool software that will just sort of turn on the smartphone cameras on my podcast listeners so I can just sort of watch them and spy on them in the middle of their day, and it really helps keep me feel connected and motivated. Just kidding. Just kidding.

Ryan Jenkins
I’m sure. I’m sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I hope that’s impossible, and even if it is, I haven’t done it. Okay, so do’s and don’ts. Beautiful. Any final thoughts when it comes to loneliness before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ryan Jenkins
One of my favorite quotes when it comes to loneliness is by the late Robin Williams, the comedian and actor, and he said this, I think it’s really powerful. He said, “I used to think the worst thing in life was to end up all alone. It’s not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone.” So, whether ourselves are experiencing loneliness, or we know people around us who are experiencing loneliness, I think a universal relationship law for all of us is to never make someone feel alone, especially when they’re with us, or they’re with you.

And so, the research is clear that loneliness was growing before the pandemic. The pandemic put a spotlight on it and accelerated it, but because it’s increasing, it also means it’s malleable so it can decrease. And so, it’s up to all of us to start engaging with this. So, again, never make someone feel alone, especially when you’re with them.

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

Ryan Jenkins
One of my favorite quotes is by Dorothy Parker, who, she said, “I hate writing, I love having written.” And, of course, that’s been on my brain ever since I learned about that quote. And as a writer, I have three books, I can relate. The process is grueling but the end result is fueling, and I always am so excited to have written even though the process of writing can be so challenging. And I’m sure many people can relate. The process, whatever process might be, really tough and aggravating, that end result can often make it all worthwhile.

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

Ryan Jenkins
There was some really interesting research, a social psychology research done that proved that people who have time constraints are severely less likely to engage with others by a big, big percentage. And that really stood out to me because all of us tend to be busier and busier than ever before. We constantly keep putting more and more on our to-do list and plates are overflowing, and we got to be cognizant about it because the more busy we are, the less margin we have, the less likely we’re going to show up and connect with others. And so, a subtle reminder there, even for myself, to really be thinking about that margin is where we create some meaningful connections. So, make sure that we’re prioritizing margin.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. And I’ve felt it even in myself, it’s just like, “Oh, I should give so-and-so a call but I only have eight minutes. That might be kind of lame.” Like, “Hey, I have some time. How about you entertain me on my schedule, and then I’m going to peace out?” So, I guess to some degree, how that might feel to someone. But, at the same time, it’s like, “Well, maybe schedule some time when you have some time.”

And sometimes, my buddy Connor and I, we just have an understanding that we might do a quick check-in call, and that’s just what’s happening. Like, that’s the normative, a six-minute call might be like, “Okay, cool. And now I know what’s going on. This was fun. Thank you. Good day.”

Ryan Jenkins
Those are great examples, Pete. I’m right there with you. Thomas Friedman wrote a book. It’s been years now, but he titled his book Thank You for Being Late. And the reason he came up with that title for the book is because he was at an important meeting at one point in a busy coffee shop, and the person was late. But when the person showed up, they’re like, “I’m so sorry I’m late.” He actually said, “Thank you for being late because, since you were late, I got to eavesdrop on that couple’s conversation. I got to connect with a couple of thoughts that I had and just kind of take in my surroundings.”

And so, one way for us to connect with others, even though we might be busier than ever before, is show up early for things, and just kind of be there and open the kind of whatever connections might come your way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ryan Jenkins
I’m a big Seth Godin fan, and so anything he writes, I just eat up. I just love how simple he is yet profound at the same time. And so, I’ll say anything by Seth Godin.

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

Ryan Jenkins
I use Evernote consistently to dump any ideas I have for books and ideas, and so that’s probably the one I’m using the most. I also use Asana to track all of my to-do list and to make sure I’m nothing is going through the cracks.

And then the third tool I’ll give folks, this is probably the most groundbreaking tool and the one I think I cannot live without, and that’s Boomerang, which is a Gmail plugin that allows you to boomerang emails back to your inbox that folks haven’t responded to so that way you can make sure you keep track of folks that you’re trying to connect with.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to resonate with folks; they Kindle book highlight it, they tweet it back at you a lot, a Ryan Jenkins original quotable gem?

Ryan Jenkins
They say that authors write the books that they need to read themselves. I’m an introvert. My co-author is an extrovert. We’ve had some good perspectives in there. But the thing that I learned the most throughout this process is this. Meaningful connections don’t have to be lasting, and that’s something I always fell prey to, that, “If this person is not going to be an integral part of my life, I’m not going to take the time to invest in this relationship or this connection.” And that’s just false.

And so, now, whether it’s my barista, or someone in the elevator that I share, or someone that’s walking by, like I try to do my best to connect and simply just ask folks how their day is going or something else because it only takes about 40 seconds to actually lessen loneliness. And, again, meaningful connections don’t have to be lasting. They’re all around us and we should invest wherever we can.

Pete Mockaitis
Forty seconds. Good to know. I love a number. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point us?

Ryan Jenkins
Yeah, go to LessLonely.com. That’s kind of the one-stop shop for the book and all. We’ve got assessments and a digital course, so that would be the best stop. Check us out on social. We’re very active, even on TikTok @ryanandsteven. And then, finally, we also have a podcast called The Case for Connection wherever you listen to podcasts. And that’s where we unpack the research even further, and we have a lot of fun doing it. So, my co-author and I just having some deep conversations around connection. So, LessLonely.com, @ryanandsteven, or The Case for Connection podcast.

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

Ryan Jenkins
If you want to be awesome at your job, take connections seriously. Do not underestimate the power of human connection.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ryan, this has been a treat. I wish you much good belonging and connection.

Ryan Jenkins
Thank you, Pete. Thanks, everyone.

Feb 21
0

744: Mastering the Skill of Confidence with Nate Zinsser

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Nate Zinsser reveals practices that athletes and military cadets use to overcome pressure and build the confidence to perform anytime and anywhere.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why confidence is a skill–not a quality
  2. How to make affirmations work for you
  3. What to do when you feel unmotivated

About Nate

Dr. Nate Zinsser is the Director of the Performance Psychology Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the most comprehensive mental training program in the country, where, since 1992, he has helped prepare cadets for leadership in the U.S. Army. He also has been the sport-psychology mentor for numerous elite athletes, including two-time Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning and the NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers, as well as many Olympians and NCAA champions.

He has been a consultant for the FBI Academy, U.S. Army Recruiting Command, and the Fire Department of New York. He earned his Ph.D. in sport psychology from the University of Virginia and his senior black belt rank from Shotokan Karate of America.

Resources Mentioned

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Nate Zinsser Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nate, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Nate Zinsser
Pete, thanks for the invite. Wonderful to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat with you. One of my best friends went to West Point, and you’re the director of Performance Psychology, and I love performance psychology, and you’ve got a really cool background and resume with being a wrestling champion, a mountaineer, a karate black belt, working with elite athletes like Eli Manning. Could you share with us maybe one fun story that cues this up in terms of a transformation and what’s possible when we get a handle on some of this mental stuff?

Nate Zinsser
Okay. Well, here’s one fun little story about how I actually ended up at West Point.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
I had been prepared for a fairly traditional academic career in the field of sports psychology, although I was very interested in doing applied work, and I had gone to a graduate program, a PhD program at the University of Virginia that was very much emphasized on applied work, actually dealing with athletes and helping them rather than just being in an Ivy intellectual tower.

And I found out that there was a job opening at West Point, and I found out that on Thursday but I also found out that I had to get the credentials in and the application materials done by Monday. So, I had to believe in myself enough that I could assemble everything, and this was not your standard application. This was a very complicated federal employee application process, so I had to believe in myself to get all that stuff done rather quickly, get it in the mail, and then be patient while the system works through.

As the system worked through, I was not originally selected as one of the finalists for the job. And when I found out about that, I took the bull by the horns, I called up the United States Military Academy, I eventually got through to the gentleman who I would eventually be working for, and I said, “Colonel, you have got to look at my resume because I am the guy for this job.” And the rest, ladies and gentlemen, as they say, is history.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, I love it. It’s so bold and, in some way, I’m just putting myself in the colonel’s shoes there in terms of it’s sort of like you’re taken aback, like, “Well, this doesn’t really ever happen. I’m intrigued and curious. Okay, Nate, why? I’m all ears. You have my attention.”

Nate Zinsser
Yeah. Well, I explained to him that I was the guy for the job and I had everything that he was looking for, and he was open enough and relaxed enough about the process, not being able to go by the rules, play by the rules, but interpret them a little bit here and there, and the rest is history. I’ve been there for almost 30 years.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. You know, it’s funny, I think I did that technique way back in college when I wasn’t interviewed. I did not get an interview. I think it might’ve been for Walgreens for an internship, and I thought, “Well, I can see some of the people who did get interviews, and not to be totally arrogant, but I’m smarter than them, just like from grades or extracurricular achievements or whatever.”

And I thought, “If you’re interviewing them, you’d be interviewing me.” And so, I said that. I think I found a more diplomatic way to say that so they don’t say, “Who is this arrogant jerk?” And they said, “Oh, okay. Sure. We got a slot open here.” I was like, “Oh, cool.” And so, it worked. It worked for you, it worked for me. I guess I didn’t get it after the interview but it’s fine. Things worked out just fine in the summer.

Okay, cool. So, that’s some confidence and your book is called The Confident Mind, so it seems like you’re walking the talk here.

Nate Zinsser
I do, indeed, try to practice what I preach, and it was indeed a process of believing, having a sense of certainty about myself that I was indeed the right guy for the job, so I was not hesitant or nervous or afraid to put myself forward.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, so then tell us, what is the big idea behind your book, The Confident Mind, the thesis, if you will?

Nate Zinsser
The big idea is that confidence is a skill that you build and you apply the same way you would build and apply any other skill. You work on your backhand or your second serve if you’re a tennis player. You work on your understanding of organic chemistry and gross anatomy if you’re a medical student. You work on understanding your product and your audience if you’re in the sales business. You work on that stuff. It takes practice. Confidence is the same thing. It’s not a mysterious quality that magically descends upon you. It is a quality that you develop through the practice of specific thinking skills.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say I want that confidence, what’s my practice look like? What is my gym exercise equivalent for building the confidence muscle?

Nate Zinsser
Okay. In broad strokes, the exercise regime consists of being very careful in the management of your memories, both long term, short term, and immediate memories that accumulate over the course of a day. That’s one component. Another component is being careful about how you think about yourself, the stories you tell yourself, the way you think of yourself and your various capabilities in the present. How do you think about yourself? There are guidelines and techniques to manage that.

And then there are also guidelines to help you think about your future. What are the pictures? What are the short video clips that your imagination produces when you think about things that have not yet happened? By combining all of those effective thinking skills about your past, about your present, about your future, you can build the psychological equivalent of a bank account – a whole lot of constructive useful thoughts.

And when you have that, it contributes to a sense of certainty which allows you to step into an arena, a game, a contest, a negotiation, a presentation, and be rather automatic, rather instinctive, rather natural in your execution.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really good. I’d like all of that. And so, that’s an interesting word you’re using, management of memories and managing the way you think about yourself and the way you think about the future. So, management implies proactive, assertive, the will, as opposed to just, “Hey, man, thoughts come up and that just happens, man. Thoughts are thoughts.” So, you say it’s a little bit different than that.

Nate Zinsser
Well, thoughts are indeed thoughts. They do come up, but you have to manage them. You have to manage the weeds that grow in your garden. You have to get rid of things that aren’t helpful and you’ve got to nurture the plants that are helpful. That’s management but you have to manage your own cognitions. And a lot of people, unfortunately, are the victim of their cognitive habits rather than the master of their cognitive habits.

And those cognitive habits either create or contribute to that sense of certainty or they erode it. And it’s a simple matter of exercising your free will to use your mind effectively. I say it’s simple. I didn’t say it was easy all the time. There’s a difference, but it is the matter of taking control, intentional control, of how you think about yourself in the past, in the present, and in the future. When you do that, the certainty builds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is this certainty or confidence more like a universal, like I can do anything, or is it more of a specific, like, “I excel at tennis”?

Nate Zinsser
Well, it is entirely situation-specific.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, entirely.

Nate Zinsser
One of the misconceptions is that confidence is this all-encompassing quality and once you have it, it applies everywhere in your life, and if you don’t have it, it applies nowhere. That’s not really accurate. Confidence is highly situation-specific. You can be very confident about your tennis game, and you can be very worried and insecure about your knowledge in your mandatory statistics scores for your business major.

Interestingly, even within your tennis game, you can have varying degrees of confidence about forehand, backhand, volleying, serving, etc. But the good news is that you can develop confidence in any area of your life that you choose to by following the guidelines, by managing your thoughts, by creating a mental bank account that is specific to a particular skill or particular set of skills that you wish to have.

Pete Mockaitis
Particular set of skills always makes me think of Liam Neeson in “Taken” so thank you for that. Let’s develop some of those in a different context for a different purpose. So, I want to dig into some details of the management of thoughts in the past, present, and future, and how precisely that is done. But, first, if there’s any skeptics thinking, “Oh, that sounds kind of woo-woo and I don’t know,” could you give us a story of a client or a cadet or someone who really saw a pretty cool transformation from not so confident and not performing well to super confident and super performing well, and/or, for stacking the evidence, some excellent research or studies underscoring this?

Nate Zinsser
Well, to give you an idea of a case study, just this very afternoon, I was contacted by a West Point graduate who was the captain of our women’s tennis team back in the early 2000s, and she is now a very successful entrepreneur. She has served with distinction in her combat deployments before she retired from the Army. And she recounted to me how clearly her experience working with me changed her ability to believe in herself, and that belief led to greater execution.

She came in as a relatively low-level recruit to our women’s tennis team, but she graduated playing number one in her junior and senior year, and graduating as captain. And it was not a matter so much of her having to redefine herself physically and technically, although, let’s face it, she did a heck of a lot of work on that stuff too, but she was very clear that so much of her development had to do with her ability to manage her thoughts, to get through those tough matches, to handle criticism, to handle setbacks, and that is all just an internal process of being in control of your own mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, let’s do it. So, how do I go about managing my memories, in the past side of things?

Nate Zinsser
Well, let’s first take a long look back. When you consider your experience in your profession of choice, or in your sport of choice, let’s go back and let’s take a look at the memory, the moment where you’ve discovered that, “Hey, this is pretty cool. I kind of like this, and maybe I’m pretty good at it.” What’s the feeling that that moment creates for you as you think back upon it? And then, as we move forward in our memory from that moment, let’s notate, record, write out the memories of a few other powerful moments that create a similar kind of feeling.

I refer to this as the top ten exercise. What are your top ten moments as a tennis player, as a medical student, as a sales manager, as a white-collar athlete, as I like to put it in any other sport? What are the major contributions you’ve made to your organization? What are the projects that you’ve completed? What are the recognitions or awards that you have accumulated in the course of your professional development?

In a way, it’s like writing a resume but you’re writing your accomplishments, you’re writing your top ten fulfilling memorable moments. That list of top ten things, those are your original deposits into your mental bank account. That’s taking ten checks down to the local savings and loan, and say, “I’m opening an account. Here’s my money.” And so, that’s how we take a look at our long-term memories.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, I like that notion of it’s like a resume but it’s a bit different in that the audience is just you, and you pick what’s meaningful as opposed to what you’re thinking someone else might find impressive, and you’re prioritizing based upon the emotional juice, as oppose to someone else’s perceived valuation of that thing.

Nate Zinsser
Exactly. This is a very personal exercise. And so, once we’ve established our bank account with those top ten moments, then it becomes a matter of managing our memories day by day by day. What did you accomplish today as you look back on the day? What did you accomplish in terms of effort? Where did you give quality effort? What moments in your day were characterized by maybe pushing through something that you knew you had to do but really didn’t want to do? Where did you overcome a little procrastination, which plagues us all, let’s face it?

So, record an episode of effort, and then look at the day, and ask yourself, “What did I get right? What little successes did I have?” Record some episodes of success, be they ever so small and ever so humble. And, third, think about your day, think about maybe some of the previous days, and record an episode of progress, “What am I getting better at? What do I seem to be improving?” And so, you have a daily ESP reflection. E for effort, S for success, P for progress. And that is an exercise that you conduct at the end of every day some time before retiring. And those are some deposits that you make daily into your mental bank account.

And we can take it one step further. Looking at how you manage your memories in the course of a day, “I finished a meeting. I have five minutes before the next one. I can take 30 seconds of that minute, of that five minutes, and say, ‘Hmm, what was the best moment for me in that meeting? Where did I hear properly? Where did I respond properly? What did I understand?’” And just that little tiny memory, of a little very small highlight, with a very small H, that’s a deposit.

And so, you can make many small deposits throughout the day, some bigger ones at the end of the day, and they are complemented by your top ten, and so you’re in this process of daily and, indeed, hourly building up a sense of certainty about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And, again, all these are within a particular context.

Nate Zinsser
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, what’s your advice on this one, Nate? How many domains can we tackle concurrently? Because I love the notion of focus, but if it’s sort of like, “Oh, boy, I need more confidence in my professional life, and as a parent, and as a spouse, etc.”

Nate Zinsser
You can do it for as many different performance arenas or performance situations as you care to. I would start out with the one that’s most important to you in the long term to get that started. But you could, indeed, conduct a daily ESP for your physical training if you’re working on your fitness training for a 5K or a 10K or a marathon. You can do a daily ESP for your professional work. You could do a daily ESP for your relationships that are key. And, again, this daily ESP is about a three-minute exercise, ladies and gentlemen. And we all got that kind of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So we covered the past nicely, and it seems we did the present as well in terms of the super recent past. Or is there more that you’d like to add about the present in terms of the way you think about yourself right now?

Nate Zinsser
Yes, the way you think about yourself right now revolves around the stories that you keep in yourself about yourself. We all have opinions about how smart we are, how good we are at this, how bad we are at that. So, telling yourself stories that contribute to a sense of optimism and energy is really important.

The key skill here is to think about a particular skill you’d like to have, a particular quality you’d like to have, a particular accomplishment that you would care to achieve, and phrase your desire for those things in the present tense, “My crosscourt backhand goes deep and scores points.”

That’s a skill I want to have so I am affirming it, I am saying yes to it, and I’m very specific about what I want, the story I want to tell myself about myself, “My backhand is…” “I listen carefully to each of my subordinates,” “I easily stay in the moment to solve problems as they come up.” Telling yourself these stories are further deposits into your bank account, and they kickstart effort and action that is consistent with what you are affirming.

If we continue, if you tell yourself, “I’m really not good at that particular technological application. I really struggle with some of the remote platforms,” if you tell yourself that, if that’s a story you tell yourself, you will be less likely to work at that enthusiastically and with an open mind so it’ll be really hard for you to get that technology down.

If, on the other hand, you change the way you think about yourself in the present, “I easily learn new skills,” “I easily learn new applications.” If you’re a student taking a graduate course, “I easily retain the origin, insertion, function, and intervention of each skeletal muscle.” If you’re talking to yourself that way about yourself in the present, first person, present tense, very detailed, you initiate a very functional constructive self-fulfilling prophecy.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m curious then, and there’s been some really cool studies on affirmations. I’ve dug into them in terms of, sure enough, like salespeople getting superior results and so very quantifiable and such. I’m thinking about how we had a great conversation with Hal Elrod about the six morning habits of high performers. And he said, when it comes to affirmations, we got to be careful that they’re truthful enough such that you don’t respond internally with, “No, I don’t, and that’s bull crap.”

Nate Zinsser
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I don’t easily remember these bones, or new software programs, what’s my gameplan here? But I want to.

Nate Zinsser
I want to remember so I would phrase your affirmations, at first, for things that are just a little bit out of your reach or just a little bit different from the way you’ve been thinking about yourself in terms of something that you do. One of the stories that I cite in the book comes out of Harvard where hotel workers, the folks who make the beds, vacuum the floors, scrub out the bathrooms every day, hour after hour after hour, they were taught to think of their daily work as good exercise, so the thought, “I’m getting good exercise every day.”

A group of workers were given that instruction and taught how to talk to themselves and think about their work, their daily work, as good exercise, and the control group received a placebo treatment. Well, the group that changed the way they thought about their daily exercise lost a significant amount of weight, lowered their blood pressure over a period of time while not doing any more work, while not doing their work any faster or harder, but simply as a function of changing the way they thought about themselves. That actually changed their physiology.

And there are plenty of other studies along that line, really looking at the effect of just this element of mindset on not just our mood but our actual cardiovascular, endocrine, and neurobiological systems. It’s interesting stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely, it is. That is a really cool study. And so then, I’m curious, in terms of like the specific phrasing of the affirmation. So, if I am having trouble with a software but I want to be learning it easily, if I say to myself, “I learn the software easily,” my mind will say, “No, you don’t. That’s bull crap. You’ve been struggling mightily with this while your colleagues seem to be getting it just fine.”

Nate Zinsser
Ramp it back a little bit and think, “I’m getting one piece of this down every day.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s true. I love it. That is not a lie and you can look back, and say, “Sure enough, that happened yesterday and the day before.” Boom! Cool. All right. So, then that’s the present. How about the future?

Nate Zinsser
How about the future? The question is, “What kind of future do you want? And what kind of future are you allowing your wonderful imagination to create?” We have this fantastic audio and video production studio in our imagination. We can dream up all kinds of things. And the things that we dream up have direct, again, physiological effects.

Every one of your listeners could deeply imagine holding a nice ripe juicy lemon in their hand, and smelling the lemony smell, and feeling the waxy texture, and they could imagine cutting open, cutting that lemon in half, and bringing it up and really smelling the fresh juice, and then taking a small careful lick of it, then maybe a bigger lick, and then maybe even biting into it.

And everybody will experience their mouths watering while they do that because just the thought, when you combine the picture of it with the sensation of smell, with the sensation of taste, with the sensation of texture, that literally fools the taste buds which sends messages back to your brain, and the messages come from your brain back to your salivary glands, you’re actually fooling your nervous system into creating the experience that you want.

And this is why athletes and other performers will very carefully mentally rehearse in as much real time as possible, with as much realistic detail as possible, the game-winning field goal, or the closing argument in a legal case, or that great homerun point of the sales pitch, and they’ll feel themselves in the room giving that pitch, they’ll hear the tone of their voice, they’ll see the respective faces of the audience and create a multisensory representation of that experience that they wish to have.

And when they do so, they’re actually manipulating, working their nervous system so that when they get to that moment, they’ll have a sense of familiarity about it, “I’ve been here. It’s an important moment but I have seen it happen, I felt it happen, I’ve envisioned it carefully, and my nervous system believes that I’ve already done it.” So, the experience, when you get there, while still having some excitement and some emotion, for sure, but there’ll be an element of comfort in that experience that you might not have had you not done this kind of mental preparation.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Thank you. All right. So, past, present, future, the mental management we do in order to have that confidence going. I’m curious, when we hit rough patches in terms of maybe it’s a number of failures or just, “Hey, I’m tired, I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed, I’m de-motivated, I don’t give a hoot anymore right now,” is there any sort of acute or emergency stuff you recommend we do in our brains in those moments?

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, welcome to the real world that we all live in. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to experience setbacks. This is one of the important points about confidence, in general, is that it’s not a one-time thing that you do. Confidence is fragile. You have to rebuild it. There is no decisive victory that one can win over fear, doubt, worry, insecurity, etc. It is a relatively ongoing war of attrition, as one of my cadet advisees understood it as. There’s no decisive victory. I can’t just get it and expect to have it all the time because the world is going to kick back.

We have a saying in the military, “The enemy gets a vote,” and we all got to be aware of setbacks, difficult things that happen around us that can negatively affect our confidence, and then there are the things that we say to ourselves internally that also negatively affect our confidence. So, a few safeguards in this context, Pete, is how you look at those inevitable failures and how you respond to your own inevitable simple human imperfection.

You have to look at those moments and acknowledge that they happen, but one way to think about them is that they’re temporary, “It happened that one time. It happened that one time. It happened. It happened that one time.” As opposed to having something go wrong and you sort of unconsciously assume that it’ll continue, and you fall into the, “Oh, here I go again. Same stuff all over again.”

You’ve got to protect yourself from that trap by keeping it in the time that it occurred, “It happened that one time. It’s temporary.” And you may have to do that four or five times, “It happened this time. It happened that time, but it’s just those times.” You keep it in that context.

The second rule about this is to look at those imperfections, those mistakes, those setbacks as limited in where they occurred, “It happened in that situation,” “It happened in that game,” “It happened in that moment of my day, and that moment is just a moment by itself, that situation. And I don’t know why something that happened in one situation, in one setting, to sort of ooze out and affect my feeling about what’s going to happen in other situations.

I don’t allow a mistake in one part of my game to make me think, “Uh-oh, my whole game is in trouble today.” No, no, that one part of my game. “Okay, my second serve isn’t getting in very well. That’s just my second serve. My first serve can still be a bomber. My forehand, my backhand, the rest of my game can be fine. I got to keep my mistakes and my thoughts about my mistakes limited in where they occur.”

And then, finally, and this might be the biggest one for most of us, when the setback occurs, when I experienced some of my own imperfection, I got to be able to say to myself, “Look, that moment, that mistake is not representative of who I am as a player, as a performer, as a professional, as a person. It doesn’t tell the truth about me,” even to the point where you can say, “Okay, yeah, that happened. I did blow that but that’s sort of a fluke. That’s really not me.” So, to keep your mistakes temporary, limited, and non-representative are ways of protecting this bank account that you’ve built up through the other methods that we’ve been describing.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. And now, as I think about just before the moment of performance, the big game, the big speech, or even just an afternoon in which you’ve got to be productive and you’re not feeling it, what are your top perspectives on how to get into the right state, mood, emotion, the mindset place to rock and roll and perform well the thing you want to perform well at even if you’re not feeling it in the moment?

Nate Zinsser
This is the million-dollar question that we all face many times in the day. The answer is, as you’re about to enter that performance, if you’re about to get down to the workload at 3:00 o’clock or 4:00 o’clock, and you got to get it done before you can leave, that’s when you have to look at yourself, and say, “Okay, I’m an athlete, I’m contending for this prize of winning this moment right now, and I have to be willing to think back, maybe access my mental bank account, look how far I’ve come. I did this. I’ve done this. I’ve done this. I’ve done that.”

And then you take a few breaths, and I give some advice on breathing in the book. I’m not an expert but I’m pretty knowledgeable about it. And then it’s getting out of your mind and just getting into your senses, “What’s the one thing I have to pay attention to now? I have to pay attention to that column in these spreadsheets to get through this task. I have to pay attention to this comment from these people in my work team in order to get through this day.”

I kind of have to limit my mind to something that is important so I cue up some confidence, I breathe, and I attach my attention, attach my awareness to what’s important. And I may have to do that several times over the course of the task but I will continue with that, I will continue with that, I will continue with that. In many ways, it comes down to a matter of willpower but willpower, in and of itself, doesn’t work great unless you have some tools. And these mental-focusing tools, combined with your will, can make a big difference in your day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, since you mentioned breathing, I’m intrigued. Is there a particular formula, timing, counting, approach that makes a difference?

Nate Zinsser
Well, breathing, in general, is another rather misunderstood process for most of us. When we take a deep breath, we tend to lift our chests up and sort of breathe up, up, up high, when a really effective breath is a breath that expands your midsection, it goes down and out using the downward action of the very important diaphragm muscle.

So, I encourage people, if you want to take control of your breath, first, exhale, and have the feeling that there might be a python squeezing you around your waist, and that’s squeezing you in and it’s squeezing air out, squeezing you in, and that air is escaping upward and out your mouth, and then that python relaxes, and now have the feeling of breathing down and out, almost like you’re inflating an inner tube around your waist.

And then you can squeeze it to put it out, and then you can open it up, down and out to get maximum oxygen into your lungs because you really want to get the lower part of your lungs where the most effective oxygen-carbon dioxide transfer takes place. You really want to activate that lower part of your lungs. Do that a couple of times, you will feel a change in your mood.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
And that’s when you open your eyes, and say, “Okay, this is what’s important. I’m just going to focus there and I almost allow myself to get into that highly focused zone-like state. I can make myself very friendly to the zone when I do that.”

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

Nate Zinsser
I would just reinforce for people, it’s a skill, it takes work, but the work is well within your capabilities, and it is a constant thing. And, very importantly, if you develop the quiet internal sense of certainty I’m describing, you can remain, indeed, a very polite, modest, respectful, pleasant person to be around. One of the misconceptions is that confidence equals outspoken, chest-beating arrogance. No, no, no, no, no.

We occasionally see, and unfortunately the media likes to highlight these loud, brash, outspoken individuals, but what the media doesn’t often help us understand is how many quiet, introverted, yet very confident people there are out there. And so, for all you quiet introverts, plenty of hope for you, folks. It’s about how you think. It’s not necessarily about how you open your mouth and portray yourself.

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

Nate Zinsser
A favorite quote that I find inspiring is from the great folk rock poet of the ‘60s, Bob Dylan, and the phrase reads, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s from a song “It’s Alright, Ma.” And I’ve always liked that quote because you are either in a process of developing, expanding in one way or another, or you’re in a process of shrinking and stagnating.

If we look at developmental psychology, this is, indeed, a theme that takes place throughout each stage of development right through our most senior years. Are you generating things even in your 70s and 80s? Or are you stagnating? “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

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

Nate Zinsser
Okay, here’s one. And I included this in the book because I think it’s really important. We’ve been talking about the way you talk to yourself, the stories you tell yourself, and we’ve been talking about how you get rid of the internally generated negativity. A study that took place in the University of South Africa took trained cyclists, highly trained athletes, and they were all tested on a time-to-exhaustion test, meaning, “You’re going to go as fast as you freaking can until you just can’t.” So, we get a baseline of what they’re absolute maximum output is.

Half of those trained cyclists were taken through a course in what you would call motivational self-talk, learning to talk to yourself in the moment while you are working very hard, “Keep this going. You can handle this.” Essentially, talking back to that voice of worry and doubt and fatigue that every middle-distance athlete knows it’s that fear of not being able to maintain the pace, “I can’t hold this during my mile run, or my two-mile run.” “I can’t maintain this for the duration of my swim workout.”

But these athletes were trained to start and continue and finish with a very powerful group of affirmational statements, “Get this down. You’re fine. Keep the hammer going,” etc. And then the other group were given a placebo treatment. Three weeks later, everybody was retested. On the average, the group who had learned to talk back to their voice of negativity lasted 18% longer than the non-trained subjects. They showed an 18% improvement over their previous baseline and they had a lower sense of perceived exertion while doing so.

Eighteen percent improvement? Who wouldn’t want that in their batting average, shooting percentage, sales figure growth? Who wouldn’t want an 18% improvement? That’s a pretty powerful study. And it all had everything to do with how you talk to yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, that’s really compelling study, Nate. Do you happen to know the principal investigators or have a citation?

Nate Zinsser
Yes, I’ve got that. Samuele Marcora, University of Kent.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome.

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, you want to look at the book Alex Hutchinson’s Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. That’s a William Morrow 2018 reference, page 260.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you.

Nate Zinsser
Yeah.

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

Nate Zinsser
I make sure that I practice 15 minutes of very careful but very energizing breathing every morning. I make sure that I am working that diaphragm muscle, I’m working those abdominal muscles, I am massaging the liver, which is what happens when you breathe properly, and it’s a very relaxing experience but, at the same time, it’s somewhat exhilarating.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have like music or an app or a track that guides you?

Nate Zinsser
Nope, I do this simply seated on a small cushion. I don’t need any guidance. I have been practicing meditation since 1971 where I learned the technique that involved the repetition of a sound, the repetition of a mantra that you do over and over again with sub-vocally. But these days, it’s all breath training.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Nate Zinsser
And, by the way, I keep my own ESP daily journal as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Nate Zinsser
I’m still practicing Japanese karate, and so every day, I’m looking at my physical practice and making notes about this movement, this feeling, this interpretation. It’s an ongoing iterative process.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you’re known for or people quote you on often?

Nate Zinsser
Doc Z says, “A little bit of delusion is the origin of every major important change in your life.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Nate Zinsser
A little bit of delusion, yeah.

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

Nate Zinsser
I have a website, DrNateZinsser.com. You can reach me there. And the book The Confident Mind has a lot of good nuggets in it.

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

Nate Zinsser
Yeah, here’s the call to action. Is the quality of your thinking consistent with the quality of life that you want to lead and the quality of the performances that you want to experience?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Nate, it’s been a treat. I wish you much luck with your book The Confident Mind and all you’re up to.

Nate Zinsser
Well, thank you, Pete. This has been a wonderful interview. My best wishes and best luck for all your listeners. Let’s have a great 2022.

Feb 07
0

741: How to Stop Struggling and Start Thriving with Nataly Kogan

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Nataly Kogan shares how to become the boss of your own brain and beat the negativity bias.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why struggle is optional
  2. The two questions to boost your emotional fitness
  3. How to combat your brain’s negativity bias 

About Nataly

Nataly Kogan is a former VC and the founder of Happier, a global technology and learning platform helping individuals and organizations to realize full potential by adopting scientifically-proven practices that improve their well-being. 

Since launching Happier, Nataly has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, New York Magazine and Time Magazine, and has appeared as an expert on Dr. Oz, Bloomberg TV, and “One World” with Deepak Chopra. 

She is a sought-out keynote speaker, having appeared at events that include at Million Dollar Roundtable, Fortune’s Tech Brainstorm, Blogher, SXSW, the 92nd St. Y, Harvard Women’s Leadership Conference, TEDxBoston, and many more. 

 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Athletic Greens. Support your health with my favorite greens supplement. Free 1-year supply of Vitamin D and 5 travel packs when you purchase from athleticgreens.com/awesome.
  • University of California Irvine. Chart your course to career success at ce.uci.edu/learnnow

Nataly Kogan Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nataly, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Nataly Kogan
Thank you. I love the title of the podcast. I’m excited. I overuse the word awesome more than any other word, so we’re in good company.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s meant to be. In fact, your latest book is called The Awesome Human Project. We’ve got a lot of awesome human listeners. Can you tell us what’s the big idea here?

Nataly Kogan
The big idea is that challenge in life is constant but struggle is optional. So, I’m calling official BS on the meme of “The struggle is real” because struggle is something we can reduce by improving our emotional fitness, and what’s real in life is challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there’s a distinction right there. Challenge versus struggle, can you expand on that?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, I think it’s one of the most important insights that I’ve gained on my journey. I spent most of my life struggling. I thought that’s the way it’s supposed to be. I came to the US as a refugee. That was a lot of struggle. And I thought to do anything meaningful in life, you’ve got to struggle, it’s got to be hard. And that’s what I did until I completely burnt out and almost lost everything that was meaningful to me, including this company, Happier, that I was building to help people and companies and teams create a culture of gratitude and joy.

So, that taught me a really powerful lesson that challenge is something we cannot control in life. And, as we all know, the times we’re living in right now, there’s a lot of challenge. Challenge is always there. But we can reduce our experience of struggle by creating a more supportive relationship with ourselves, by strengthening our emotional fitness, by training our brain just like we train our body to be more physically fit, by training our brain to help us get through challenges with less overwhelm, anxiety, and stress.

And not only does that feel better, which I think is a wonderful goal, but that actually gives us more energy, more of our capacity to solve problems, make decisions. And so, everything I share in my new book and everything I teach to teams and companies has come from my own experience, but it’s also backed by mountains of research that show that when you cultivate your wellbeing, when you actually reduce your struggle, when you fuel your energy, you’re more productive, you’re more creative, you’re better at helping people, you’re more awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so then if struggle is optional, I guess I’m curious, if you were to sort of go back in time with your refugee journey, you said there’s some struggle there. So, that struggle was optional. How would you kind of think about it differently in hindsight?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah. So, challenge wasn’t optional, to leave. I grew up in the former Soviet Union, and we left with my parents when I was a teenager with six suitcases and a couple hundred dollars, and we spent months in refugee settlements in Europe applying for permission to come to the US. That’s really hard. That’s a lot of challenge. But a lot of the struggle that I experienced came from my inability to handle my difficult emotions. I had no skills around that. Of course, I felt anxious and I had tremendous loss of identity and self-doubt.

And that went on for decades. On the outside, I became a very successful leader, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, you name it, but on the inside, I struggled because I never developed emotional awareness. I didn’t know how to handle difficult emotions so I just pretended I didn’t feel them. I engaged in tremendous amounts of harsh self-talk and treated myself, to be honest, like a military sergeant who’s not very nice. And those are all things that, in retrospect, I could’ve improved which would have…the challenges would’ve still been there but I would’ve struggled less through them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so then, I’m curious, can you lay it on us, what are some of the training approaches if we want to have less overwhelm, anxiety, and stress? What are some of the most effective things we can do to feel better on those domains?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, this is what my book is about. So, at its core, the way that I think about emotional fitness, it’s a skill of creating a relationship with your thoughts and your emotions that actually help support you. And the thing we need to understand, before I give you some tips, is our brain is not here to make us happy, or to make us awesome, or to help us thrive. The only thing the human brain cares about is to keep us safe from danger. Our brain is here to help us survive.

And because of that, it’s developed certain characteristics that actually can increase struggle. We all have a negativity bias. We see and notice many more things that are negative or could be negative, and our brain ignores a lot of things that are positive or meaningful or okay especially if they’re familiar. Our brain is also afraid of uncertainty. And so, when we’re facing uncertainty, our brain creates a lot more stress and anxiety because it doesn’t know how to keep us safe, and it creates these ruminations on worst-case scenarios as a way to give it control.

And so, I share this little mini-neuroscience lesson because at the core of creating or strengthening your emotional fitness, so you struggle less, is this practice of, what I call in my book, becoming the editor of your thoughts, and understanding that just because your brain gives you a thought, it doesn’t mean it is fact, it doesn’t mean it’s an objective observation of reality, it doesn’t mean you need to go along with it.

So, two questions to ask yourself. When you become aware that your brain is giving you thoughts that are causing you to stress, to struggle, to doubt yourself, to think about worst-case scenarios, two questions to ask is one of my favorite practices in the book. The first is, “Is this thought true?” And, by that I mean, “What are the facts I have to support this thought?”

So, when your thought tells you, “Oh, my God, this project you’re working on, it’s never going to work out,” or, “Oh, my God, your boss thinks you’re doing a terrible job,” well, is this thought true? What facts do you have to support it? Which we often find out when we ask this question, “Well, I don’t have a lot of facts. It’s just a story my brain has made up.” So, that’s the first question to ask, is, “What are the facts you have to support this thought?”

The second question to ask is, “Is this thought helpful?” And by that, I mean, “Does engaging in this thought, does it help me move forward through this challenge? Does it help me bring my best to the situation?” And asking those two questions is a really powerful way to shift your thoughts away from those that cause you stress, anxiety, overwhelm, self-doubt, and actually help your brain be your ally to help you move forward in the best way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that sounds really handy in terms of asking yourself those questions. So, let’s just say you’re in a situation at work, a colleague criticizes or questions something you’ve done such that you’re feeling kind of bummed, like, “Oh, man, I’m such an idiot. That was so stupid. What was I thinking? I’m a moron. Oh, my gosh, am I going to get fired? Or, maybe they are going to fire me.” And so then, you maybe go through these questions, “Is this thought true?” It’s like, “Well, they’ll probably not going to fire me. And I’m probably not a piece of garbage.” And, “Is this thought helpful?” “Well, no, not really. It’s kind of bringing me down.”

And so, we’ve concluded rationally, “Okay, these thoughts are not true and they are not helpful, but, nonetheless, I feel yucky. What do I do?”

Nataly Kogan
All right. So, this brings us to the next skill, which is the skill of what I call acceptance in the book. And the skill of acceptance, I used to hate this word acceptance because I thought it was like being really passive, “Whatever happens, happens. I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a refugee, I’m a fighter.” Well, that’s not what acceptance is.

Acceptance is a skill of looking at the situation clearly, so as you’ve just done, separating the facts from the dramatic story your brain has told you, and then, using that as a foundation to say, “Okay, this is how it is. This is how I feel. What is one thing I could do to move forward in the best way?” And so, in your situation, so you’ve determined that, “Well, my brain is kind of exaggerating. I don’t really have any facts that my boss is going to fire me, and this making me suck at my job if I sit here think about it all day. So, what is one thing I could do to move forward?”

And that answer depends on your situation, but a couple ideas just for the scenario you offered, because it’s a common one. Well, you could focus your attention on working on this project that you’re working on. You could focus your attention on that. You could have a conversation with your boss. Another really important skill that I talk about is emotional openness. So, you could have a conversation with your boss where you can say, like, “Listen, I just want to tell you, in our last conversation that we had, it kind of left me feeling like maybe there’s something I’m not doing. I’d love to talk. I’d love to get some feedback.” Those are all things that you are now in control.

So, you’ve now shifted from being out of control, “My boss hates me. I’m going to get fired.” That feeling out of control is one of the worst things for the human brain. This is how we get into tough spots. And you’ve now shifted into, “Okay, this is how it is. This is how I feel. What is one thing I could do to move forward?” which gives you a sense of control and progress, which brings your best out in the situation. And then, whatever you learn in that next step, you can move forward from there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, we’ve got some strategy sort of in the heat of battle, in the midst of things. Can you talk to us? You mentioned the emotional immune system. Are there some things we can do kind of throughout time, and not just front and center, acutely that will put us in good shape?

Nataly Kogan
Yes. So, if you think about your emotional fitness, again, a great comparison is physical fitness. If you want to be more physically fit, you don’t just like work out once and then you’re done. You have a regular workout, you probably eat healthy, you might take some vitamins. The same thing about our emotional fitness is we have to practice to give ourselves this level of emotional fitness and then we have certain skills for in the moment.

So, a couple things to kind of improve your emotional fitness on a regular basis. One is to practice emotional awareness. We can’t improve something if we don’t know where we are. And most of us have grown up in work environments where emotions are not discussed. I definitely, I worked with some leading companies like Microsoft and McKinsey, and no one ever talked to me about emotions. I didn’t think that mattered. The old idea of “Leave your emotions at the door” is not actually possible. Emotions affect everything we do.

So, we have to get into the practice of checking in with ourselves daily. We check in with friends, colleagues, like, “Hey, how are you? How are you doing? How are you feeling?” We don’t check in with ourselves, and emotional awareness is at the core. So, every day, take a moment to check in with yourself, “How am I feeling? What is my energy level like?”

And research shows that people who practice this kind of emotional awareness actually improve their wellbeing because when you become aware, awareness gives you choices. So, that awareness might tell you, “Wow, I’m really stressed out. Okay, well, how can I support myself? Oh, it’s actually this one thing that’s really stressing me out. Let me go have that conversation.” So, emotional awareness is really, really important.

The other skill that I devote a lot of my new book to is gratitude. So, I think gratitude is one of those things that we all know is good for us, and we think we should do it on Thanksgiving, but I actually mean gratitude as a daily skill. And the reason gratitude is so important – and all the gratitude is, by the way – it’s focusing your attention on things that are positive, that are the moments that in your day of comfort, things you appreciate. They don’t have to be big things.

The reason it’s so important is because of that negativity bias that I talked about that our brains have. Without practicing gratitude, essentially, your brain is lying to you about your reality. You see things much more through a negative lens and that actually drains your energy, increases stress, reduces your ability to be awesome because it makes you use all that energy thinking about all the negative things.

So, having a regular daily practice of gratitude balances out that negativity bias that actually reduces your stress. It helps you have a more centered clear picture of your day so you can be at your best. So, those are a couple practices I recommend on a daily basis to improve your emotional fitness.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you talk about gratitude, I’ve heard a number of flavors associated with gratitude practices. What are some of your favorites and the research associated with them?

Nataly Kogan
Yes. So, I think there are two parts of gratitude that I want to mention. There’s a gratitude practice for yourself. So, my favorite practice, which is also in the book, is what I call the morning gratitude lens. Very simple. In the morning, hopefully before social media has taken away your attention or your reading – your 17th news article of the day, which we know we all do – take a moment, think of three specific things you are grateful for and jot them down in some way.

And this is a practice that counters that negativity bias I just talked about. Really, really important to be specific. So, I work with a lot of leaders and teams, and I ask them, “Tell me something you’re grateful for,” and they say, “I’m grateful for my family. I’m grateful for my health.” That’s very general. Your brain doesn’t really care about general things like that, so be specific. Ask yourself, “Why? Why am I grateful for my family? Why am I grateful for my health?” Be really specific. So, that’s a way to practice gratitude for yourself.

And then a really, really important part of gratitude is to express your gratitude to others. To look at other people, your family, your friends, your colleagues, your boss, your customers, through what I call the lens of gratitude, and to actually share your gratitude with them by, again, being specific, by saying, “Hey, Pete, I just want you to know, I really appreciate your thoughtful questions in this interview.”

Again, when we are specific with our gratitude, it has this really powerful impact, and it’s a gift that gives to both people. So, when I shared my gratitude with you, I remind myself, “Wow, there’s this person in my life who supports me, who’s meaningful, that helps me,” and there’s so much benefit on the receiving end of gratitude.

I think we all know it feels really good. But in the work context, being on the receiving side of gratitude improves motivation, improves resilience. It actually helps you get through more challenges because, at our core as human beings, we need to know that what we do matters. And when someone expresses gratitude to us, that’s what it reminds us of. So, those, to me, are the two sides of gratitude that I encourage you to practice for yourself, and then expressing authentic specific gratitude to others.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also curious, I was listening to a podcast from the Huberman Lab, Andrew Huberman. Love his stuff. And he was talking about gratitude practices with regard to some interesting research associated with hearing other people’s stories in which they were helped, and they expressed their gratitude and/or reflecting upon the times that you received gratitude, when someone was like, “Oh, Nataly, thank you so much. That was awesome. You changed everything for me.” And I thought that was kind of a different take and a different kind of vibe and flavor of gratitude. What do you think about those?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, I love that you brought that up. There is so much research that shows that just witnessing someone sharing gratitude with another person – so it’s not at you, it’s about someone else – improves our wellbeing, boosts our mood, and that is because, at our core as human beings, we’re all connected, and our emotions are connected, our emotions are contagious. And so, a lot of research shows that witnessing or hearing someone talk about, expressing gratitude, actually both boost your own wellbeing and it’s contagious. It encourages you to share that gratitude with others.

And, actually, something I want to mention on that, because a lot of times I work with a lot of teams and companies, and I tell them about this practice that I want them to do this in meetings. So, in a meeting, express your gratitude to someone in the meeting and tell them why you’re grateful for them. And often I’ll get a question of like, “Well, isn’t that like, won’t the other people feel weird that I’m not like expressing gratitude to them? Won’t they feel bad?”

The opposite is true. It actually makes everyone feel good because what you’re communicating to them is, “I am a kind of person who practices gratitude, and I appreciate other people around me.” So, it doesn’t make people feel jealous or envious or annoyed. It actually helps for them to express their gratitude to others. So, sharing your gratitude publicly is always a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Very cool. And you mentioned, and we may have already covered some, you’ve got three mindset shifts that help make happiness and emotional health reality for folks. What are those three shifts?

Nataly Kogan
So, these are my like…what do I call them? Kind of like principles, the core principles, and we’ve actually covered a bunch of them. So, the first is to think of…to recognize that your happiness and your emotional fitness is a skill. It’s not a prize you get at the end. So many of us, and I definitely did this in my life, so many of us live with this idea of like, “I’ll be happy when…”

So, for everyone listening, I’m sure you can relate, “I’ll be happy when I get this promotion,” or finish this project, or launch this thing, or lose weight, or gain weight, or move. And we think that something on the outside can actually give us that lasting happiness, and that can never happen. And there’s a biological reason for that, there’s nothing wrong with you.

The other thing to know about our brain is it’s very adaptable. We get used to things. And so, while you’re working towards that big promotion, your brain is really swimming in a lot of dopamine, it makes you feel good. When you get it, your brain is like, “Yes! Awesome! Got it! What’s next?” And so, “I’ll be happy when…” doesn’t work. Happiness is not a reward.

When you think of it as a skill, when you think of happiness and emotional fitness as a skill, something that you practice – we just talked a bunch of different ways to practice – that actually is what builds that. So, that’s a really important mindset shift. We talked about another one, which is life is full of challenges, and challenges will never go away. Challenge, change, uncertainty is always there, but struggle and your emotional experience of those is something you can improve. You can reduce struggle. So, that’s another core mindset shift which we’ve covered.

And one more, which is so essential, and that is that you don’t need to make any dramatic life changes to feel better to improve your wellbeing. Small shifts in how you treat yourself, in your relationship with your thoughts, in your relationship with other people, small shifts have huge impact when you practice them consistently.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, I’d love to hear then, we got a number of principles and tips and tactics. Can you bring it together in terms of a story of someone who had a pretty cool transformation of doing some of these things and turned things around to become all the more awesome at their jobs?

Nataly Kogan
Yeah. Well, so many examples come to mind, but I’ll use one example of a leader who’s a really amazing woman leader. I do Elevating Women Leaders leadership program for women every year. It’s always virtual. It’s a yearlong program. And when this woman leader came into the program, she’s very accomplished. She was running a huge brand but she was really exhausted, she was on the edge of burnout, and she admitted that she was not bringing her best or anywhere near her best to her work. And she didn’t really quite know what to do. She’s done kind of all the things that she could think of.

And by practicing, first and foremost, just becoming aware of her emotions and developing a relationship with herself that were supportive, so when she felt a difficult emotion, instead of stuffing it down, she actually acknowledged it and found ways to support herself by practicing gratitude. She began a daily gratitude practice on her own, and she began a weekly practice of gratitude with her team where everyone on the team would share a gratitude with other people.

It was an amazing transformation. She talked about how not only did she become, as a leader, better and started to thrive, but she said the entire culture of her team changed. They all began to work much more cohesively together. They were better, more effective. And it was a pretty incredible transformation when you think about these practices. They’re not complicated. But here was someone who went from being on the edge of burnout, not bringing her best, to changing herself in such a way that she encouraged her entire team to elevate their performance.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Well, Nataly, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Nataly Kogan
I think the only other thing I want to mention is everything I teach and everything that’s in my book, it comes from my personal lens. I teach things I’ve learned, and obviously I’m a total research geek. And I just want to leave listeners with kind of this reminder that really helped me after I was recovering from burnout, and it’s something I share with teams and leaders and people, and it’s that you can’t give what you don’t have.

We have an epidemic of burnout now going on, and there’s a lot of articles about how things are bad and we’re burning out, but you always have a choice. You always have a choice. There are always things within your control that you can change, and, as we’ve talked about, they don’t require any kind of Herculean life changes. But you can always find ways and practice skills to support yourself, to support your emotional fitness and wellbeing. And there are so many people who consider that selfish or they feel guilty taking care of their happiness or emotional fitness.

And so, I want to break through all that and, again, tell you that you can’t give what you don’t have. If you’re on empty, if you have no energy, if you’re exhausted, if you’re constantly beating yourself up, you cannot be awesome at your job, you cannot show up as a patient, thoughtful, clear leader, you cannot show up in the way that I know you want to, to people you care about. So, it’s probably something I say most often throughout the day, both to other people and to myself.

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

Nataly Kogan
I’m going to share this quote which my teacher, who was my teacher as I was kind of healing from burnout and really going through a process of reinvention. She said to me, she said, “You’re a being, not a doing.” And, at the time, I had no idea what that meant, and I didn’t really care. I was very much to doing. I connected my worth entirely to my achievements for the day. But I find it one of the most inspiring things, and I do want our listeners to hear that.

I think there’s so much more that we can all contribute to the world and to our jobs if we value our being, our essence, our energy, ourselves, and not just connect that to our achievements.

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

Nataly Kogan
Ooh, let’s see. Well, one of my favorite bits of research is…you’ve gone into my favorite area. I’m such a research geek. Okay, let me share one around the negativity bias, gratitude being important because I think it really lands it. So, they’ve done experiments where they have people wear headphones, and in one ear they have negative words coming in, and in the other ear they have positive words coming in.

And even if the positive words are louder and clearer, when they asked people what they recall, they recalled the negative words. Our brain is constantly on alert for anything negative. And I just love that study because it’s so literal that it brings it home this reality that our brain is looking at everything through this negativity lens, and we have to correct it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a research geek as well. That’s so intriguing. And I’m wondering, hopefully, they rotated the headphones, the left and the right.

Nataly Kogan
They have done. And you can look into it. They did all kinds of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. And a favorite book?

Nataly Kogan
I would have to say The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, which is probably the book I give to people more than my own books. And it’s an incredible story of this very promising economics PhD student who, one day, decides that he needs to figure out why there’s constant chatter in his brain, like we all have this voice in our head that’s constantly chattering, “You’re not good enough. You didn’t do it.” No, you’re just commenting on everything.

So, he quit and decided he was going to be a yogi and he was just going to be Zen and calm his mind. And it’s an amazing story of how that actually led him to run a $2-billion company we’ve all heard of, and an incredible journey of what happens when we practice acceptance, when we actually accept ourselves and the world as they are. So, I absolutely recommend that book.

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

Nataly Kogan
So, in terms of my favorite app, I love Todoist. For anyone who doesn’t use it, I love it. It’s a way I keep track of all my to-dos and projects. And I’m also an artist. You’re looking at some of my art behind me, so I love my iPad. It’s where I draw. It’s where I write things down. I think those are, for me, two tools. And I’m going to mention one that probably has nothing to do with work, but fresh air. I could not be awesome at my job if I did not go outside for a walk every day.

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

Nataly Kogan
Yeah, the thing that I hear back most often is this idea that I shared of you can’t give what you don’t have. And this is for senior leaders and junior employees, and men and women. I think we have this inner martyr that comes out and where we think we have to go last, and that’s the way to be a good leader, a good teammate, a good colleague. And so, when people have that breakthrough, this understanding of in order to give, in whatever way you want to give, I have to actually fuel myself. So, you can’t give what you don’t have.

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

Nataly Kogan
Very easy. Go to NatalyKogan.com. And I’m very easy to find there. I’m on all the social media but NatalyKogan.com is the hub.

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

Nataly Kogan
Well, my call to action is twofold. I actually love giving homework, so I love an opportunity to give homework. I always give homework at the end of my talks and keynotes. So, my homework is twofold. Take one thing that you heard me talk about and make it a practice for the next five days. There’s no magic, by the way, about five days, just like there’s no magic about 21 days. It takes much longer to create a habit. But five days is a really good amount of time to do something, and then check in with yourself and then see if it’s made a difference.

So, take one thing you heard and do it for the next five days. Make that commitment to yourself. And the second part of your homework is, share your gratitude with someone today. It can be someone at work, it can be someone outside of work, but tell someone why you appreciate them. By the way, you never have to use the word gratitude if you don’t want to. You can say, “You’re awesome because…” Tell someone why you’re grateful for them today, and the impact of that will be so clear to you, hopefully you’ll keep at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nataly, thanks so much for this. And I wish you much awesomeness in the weeks ahead.

Nataly Kogan
Thank you. This was an awesome interview. Thanks for having me.

Nov 01
0

716: How to Save Your Career without Leaving Your Job with Darcy Eikenberg

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Darcy Eikenberg says: "Have we actually used all of our control to try to get more of what we want?"

Darcy Eikenberg offers solutions for turning your job around when you feel like quitting.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three shifts you can always make to improve any job 
  2. How to to ask for and get what you want
  3. How to reset your relationships and boundaries at work 

About Darcy

Darcy Eikenberg is on a mission to help us change our lives at work without changing everything in our lives. She’s the author of Red Cape Rescue: Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job which shows how to get more of what you want without changing careers or finding a new job—and without sacrificing yourself. She’s coached leaders at companies such as The Coca-Cola Company, State Farm, and Deloitte, and offers encouraging ways to change work for the better, for good.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you Sponsors

  • University of California Irvine. Chart your course to career success at ce.uci.edu/learnnow

Darcy Eikenberg Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Darcy, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Darcy Eikenberg
Thanks, Pete. I’m so glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your latest work, let’s hear it, Red Cape Rescue. What’s the story here?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah, the tagline is “Save Your Career Without Leaving Your Job.” And the story really came out of working with a lot of my clients where I would hear these conversations going on where they’d say, “You know, I’m smart and I should be able to figure out what I want next, but something is not quite right at work. Something is just bugging me or something is just changed for me but I can’t put my finger on it.”

And recognizing so often that the conventional wisdom was telling them, “Well, if something is not right at work, you better go find another job.” And then maybe they’d try that, and it didn’t really work well, or maybe they found another job, and in six months, they’re asking the same question again. And I realized that the conventional wisdom is just wrong, that often there are so many things we can do right where we are to change our life at work without having to change everything in our life.

And so, that’s really the core of the book, the kind of strategies that you can use right now, wherever you are, to take back control.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Okay. Well, so maybe could you start us off with a cool story of someone who did see a nifty transformation while staying right there?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah. So, I have a client who was a leader in an advertising agency, but thought she was up for the next promotion and didn’t get it. How many times has that happened to folks, right? And the reason she didn’t get it, she didn’t get a good explanation, and she really just got angry and frustrated, and then she got really down on herself.

And someone introduced her to me, and we started really teasing apart what did she want and what was going on with this rejection for this promotion. And she realized that she was feeling like she had to go find another job, kind of out of just out frustration. But, in truth, she loved a lot of the things about the company, about the people, and about the work.

And so, we found ways for her to have better conversations, to get clear about what she wanted, to be able to be more direct with the folks who were making decisions, about what was getting in her way, and also to reshape her own story so that the things they weren’t seeing in her for this particular promotion, that she could tell different stories to bring that out.

And so, that person who could’ve just left, she could’ve found another job, but she didn’t. And now, a couple years later, she’s actually second in line to the next president of the whole agency. So, I think there’s a lot of us who might like to not throw away everything that we have in our lives at work and be able to make more of it, but we need some different skills. We need some different strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay. So, then in this particular instance, it was more about sort of sharing, “Hey, this is what it did,” kinds of things.

Darcy Eikenberg
So, two things in this particular instance. One was getting clear on what she really wanted at that phase. So, did the promotion represent something? But what did she really want? And, really, what she wanted in many ways was the opportunity to make a bigger impact but she hadn’t been able to express that. No one had pulled that out of her, and she hadn’t even recognized that. So, that clarity first is often a step when something is happening.

You’ve hit a road bump at work, it’s like, “What is it that I really care about here? What does this really mean?” So, that was one of the first steps that she took to get really, really clear about what she wanted.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, first step was getting clarity. And after the clarity came, what was the second step?

Darcy Eikenberg
After the clarity, really comes the confidence to be able to have better conversations. So, being able to ask for what you need, to be able to not feel like this illusion of transparency, that, “Well, they should know, right? People should know that if I didn’t get the promotion, then I’m upset or I’m getting a negative message.”

We make so many assumptions in our life at work because we’re so close to it. But she had to learn how to have a different conversation and be able to talk to the decision-makers, in this case, the CEO of her company, and be able to say, “So, this is what I observed that happened. Here’s the decision you made. Here’s how it made me feel and here’s what I’m interpreting from that. But is that accurate?”

And without having that conversation, she had made up a story in her head about what not getting the promotion meant. And it actually meant something very different, something that the CEO hadn’t even really articulated yet.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, so then tell us, what are perhaps the key insights that folks need to be aware of if they want to have a rescue of their career without leaving their jobs?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah, a rescue, a reboot, a reset. So many of us are in this reflection mode right now, and I think the key learning is to recognize that we only control three things. We control what we think, we control what we say, and we control what we do. No matter how hard we try, we can’t control anything else. So, recognizing that that’s all is in our control, then being able to go through and say, “So, in this situation, when I’ve hit this road bump, this speed bump, this thing that’s happening at work that is not making me love my work anymore, can I change something that I think? Is there an assumption I’m making? Can I change something that I’m going to say? Like, can I speak up more, or speak out, or have a different conversation than the one I’ve been having? Or, is there actually something to do differently?”

Or, in some cases, it may be something to not do. One of the chapters in the book that’s getting a lot of attention is the chapter called Drop Some Balls. It’s like, “Are there things I’m doing that’s too much, that’s actually distracting people from understanding what I do and how I create value in this organization?”

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. Well, can we talk about some key things that we might wish to drop and under what circumstances?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah, we often accumulate, especially smart people, people who want to be awesome at their job, we accumulate things on our to-do list. We have good ideas and we might propose a good idea, and then the good idea becomes our responsibility. But we also have things that add up, like meetings, reports, different check-ins with stakeholders, and we don’t often take a step back, and say, “Are these things still valuable and important for what I care about…” back to that clarity point, “…for what I really want to do?”

And being able to take a hard look at that list, and recognize that, “You know, we may have needed that team meeting a year ago, but do we still need it in its same format now?” or, “The report that takes me half a day every month, maybe we don’t need that anymore because now we have the system where anybody can get the data anytime.”

So, when I do this exercise with my clients, we’ll often find 20% to 30% of things that they are doing, that they are spending time on, and most of the time it’s things that are not in their superpower space, they’re not the places where they are at their best and high issues. But that 20% to 30% that if they just stopped doing it, nobody would notice. It’s amazing exercise to go through to really say, “What could I drop and nobody might care?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s pretty wild, 20% to 30% is not just suboptimal but rather totally inconsequential. It’s wild.

Darcy Eikenberg
It’s a huge chunk for somebody. And I don’t think we intentionally make up more things to do. But I think in our effort to want to be good, to think through things at a bigger level, those are excellent behaviors, and those are behaviors that continue to get you moving forward and help you learn. And, at the same time, if you’re somebody who has been saying, “I’m overwhelmed. My workload has grown. I’m not spending time in the place where I am the best in high issues, in the place where my company really needs me and values me,” taking a hard look at what balls we can drop is a way to take back control.

And maybe if you don’t think that you can just stop doing them without permission, which I would whisper in someone’s ear that there’s a lot of things you don’t need permission for in today’s workplace, that you could just do or stop doing, but you could also have a better conversation with people around the costs and the impact of that time that you’re spending. And today, at such a time of change, there is so much more opportunity for creativity than the chaos. And for people to make suggestions about how we can do less but create more value.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, so could you give us a few examples then of, “Hey, here are some things that people stopped doing and nobody noticed and it was all good”?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah. So, reports or big PowerPoint presentations, those are things that, tactically, for a lot of people that I work with, a lot of people that I talk to when I’m out speaking, that there’s just something. And the strategy I’ll offer listeners and anybody wanting to experiment with this is to find that thing on your list that you dread. Like, that thing that just keeps moving maybe from day to day on your list that you procrastinate, that just is not the thing that really lights you up. Because that stuff that lights us up, that feels easy. But it’s the stuff that drags you down.

So, I have a client who, at one point, was responsible for putting together what turned out to be like a 50-page PowerPoint presentation every month. Now, there’s maybe half of it was the same month to month but she had to go through it to check. But what she realized is that there was only two pieces of data that anybody cared about in that entire deck, she ended up doing a one-minute video that was put on their share space and be able to be distributed to everybody, that said, “Hey, here’s the change from one month to the last month. If you have any questions, let me know.” And that took her maybe 20 minutes compared to the hours that she would put in trying to develop the PowerPoint.

So, there are ways that we can think differently about what we’re doing so that we’re not spending so much time on the things that don’t matter. And that’s what I mean by taking back control of what you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really interesting, those reports, because I can see how there may well have been a time in which is like, “Hey, we really need a broad overview picture of all that’s going on with this thing.” It’s like, “Okay, sure. Okay, we made the PowerPoint and there it is.” “Okay, cool. Well, hey, now, we need the up-to-date information.” “So, I guess I have to update the whole thing.” And then it’s just sort of like lands that way as opposed to, like, “Oh, wait. Well, actually, now that we already know the broad strokes of everything, just tell us the new stuff that’s going on right now.”

Darcy Eikenberg
And we don’t often revisit it. It’s like the old story of the fish in the fishbowl. Like, the fish goes around and around and around in the fishbowl and learns the edges. But then you go to clean the fishbowl and you put the fishbowl in a tub full of water, but the fish now has all of this space to swim but still swims in that little tight circle that they’re used to.

I think we get into those habits in our workplaces where we think, “Oh, well, we have to do the XYZ report,” but we don’t stop and say, “Who says?” or, “Is this still relevant now?” I have a client who has probably had three to four different managers in the past year and a half. This is a theme I’m hearing quite a bit as we restructure and people move on and lots of things happen, and she caught herself doing something that manager number one had as a priority. But managers two and three never understood it but they weren’t going to question it because it was just what she did. So, when she really did that analysis to say, “Okay, what can I drop? What’s draining me? What are the things that are making my job not as awesome as I would like it to be?” she realized, “Hey, this boss doesn’t have those same needs, so I don’t need to do it in the same way.”

We just don’t stop and realize everything we do is very organic, and it’s all made up, so why don’t we take control to make up what we want?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s some pieces on the do’s side of things. Now, when it comes to the thinking, you got a chapter called Conquer the Battle of the Brain, which sounds very helpful. What do you mean by this?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah, so there is the part of the brain, and you’ve had some awesome guests on who are much more into the neuroscience than I will ever be able to be, but the brain is programmed to protect us in many ways. It’s that little lizard brain, as Seth Godin says, that is that voice that’s holding us back, that’s saying, “No, don’t speak up. No, don’t go there,” or, “Be careful if you’re going to ask for that because there could be this consequence.”

We’ve got to learn to talk back to that part of our brain. We’ve got to learn to be able to not realize that part of our brain is not ourselves. It’s not our heroic self. It is just trying to keep us small. And it triggers the same biological feelings that it did in our ancestors when they would hear a tiger roar. The same part of our brain triggers our hormones when we hear our project manager roar. It’s the same kind of feeling today.

But we can learn to separate that from ourselves and be able to talk back to that. And one of the strategies that I’ll always use is to give it a name. I have a client who calls her little negative voice by her second-grade teacher’s name. This teacher was always on her for talking too much, now she makes her living talking. So, being able to say, “Be quiet, Mrs. Washington. I’m in charge here.” So, we can find these strategies to not let the negative brain that’s trying to hold us back keep us back.

And negative emotions pull us back but positive emotions pull us forward. We need to be magnifying the positive emotions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then in practice, what are some of the key things we can do to magnify the positive emotions and prevent the negative pieces from hijacking us?

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah. So, giving it the name, personifying that voice is one thing. Also, giving the other voice, that heroic voice, I call this listening to the whispers, giving that voice more space, giving that voice more volume, trusting it even more, but we can actually change how we listen to that voice in an instant. The beauty of realizing that you control what you think is that we can choose our thoughts in the same way that we choose what we’re putting on each day.

So, if you’re faced with two different thoughts, they both could be true. It could be true that my job is on the rocks, and it could be true that there’s more possibility here. But why not choose the thought that’s going to move you forward? Why not choose the thought that’s going to be helpful to you? Because staying in that place of, “My job is on the rocks. Everything is hard. Everything is awful,” only triggers all the hormones and emotions that make you feel bad. Why not choose that thought that make you feel good? And that’s not fooling yourself. That’s actually really understanding that your brain is going to send these different signals to hold you back, but you get to override that. You get to choose your thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, talking about some things to do or not do, and some ways to think better. How about what are some key things we should say, some critical conversations that you think need to be had that make a world of difference for a rescue?

Darcy Eikenberg
One of the things to say, I think, it’s sort of a combination of how you think and say, is to assume positive intent, that very often when we’re listening to that little lizard brain, when we’re listening to that negative brain, we’re going to assume the worst. We go right to the worst-case scenario, “Oh, I can’t possibly have that conversation with my boss or my leader or my team to tell them that we need to realign the workload because they’ll get mad at me, they’ll fire me, they’ll put me on the layoff list,” whatever the things we make up in our heads.

But when we assume positive intent, when we assume that the other person we’re talking to wants what’s best for the group, wants maybe even what’s best for us, we get to go into these conversations with a lot more relaxed, also with more of a posture of like arms open and having an open conversation as opposed to like being all tight and in fight mode.

So, assuming positive intent, and being able to even say that, say, “I know you and I want to make sure that the work gets done on time and on budget. So, to be able to do that, here’s the thing that I’m going to ask of you. Here’s the thing I need from you.” So, we can use those skills to be able to say things differently in a way that keep people listening to us, and also make sure that we’re not coming at it solely from a position of fear, of, “I’m not sure what I need so I’m hoping you do it all for me.” We can assume positive intent first.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then, I’m curious, that’s a really great frame to put around any number of requests up front in terms of as opposed to just sort of like being whiny, like, “Give me, give me, give me,” so that’s great. And then tell me, what are some key requests that you’ve seen people make that have been transformational in terms of high leverage, all the difference, when a couple smaller shifts or accommodations have been made?

Darcy Eikenberg
This goes back to getting clear about what you want. One of the things I worry about in this great reshuffle, great resignation, they know something is not right where they are, but they’re not clear about what they would want to change, and so there’s a question I always ask, is, “If you had a magic wand and could change one thing, what would it be?”

And, often, that can get you centered in on the conversation. And even on the not only just what the ask is, but who is the ask of. Because, sometimes, you need to reset the relationship. You need to say, “Hey, Pete, we’ve been working together for a while now, and our relationship isn’t as smooth as I’d like it to be. So, could we do something to fix that? What would be helpful from your point of view?”

And being able to approach those kinds of conversations so you can reset a relationship, you can reset a process, similar to what we’re talking about before about changing from doing a long PowerPoint or a detailed report to maybe something that’s just a quick update. We can reset our boundaries. This is a conversation I’m having with a lot of people right now where they’ve recognized they’ve let their boundaries slip.

We went in the beginning of COVID from being like a sprint, all-hands on deck, everybody, we’re all on this together, to now we’re in a marathon. And things that people have gotten accustomed to doing need to be revisited and recreated. So, asking for a different boundary, saying, “Hey, I know you’ve been calling me after 8:00 at night because I know that works better for your family, but here’s my ask. I’m going to ask you that we stop any phone calls by 6:00 o’clock, or leave me a voicemail. I’m turning my phone off. I’ll get back to you at 8:00 in the morning.”

Whatever the thing is for you, you have to be able to get clear about what it is, but to know that you can ask for the reset, you can ask for the reboot. And, often, people aren’t even aware of some of the things that they may be doing, or that the process could be fixed. We take so much for granted that the things are the way they are for a reason. Often, they’re not. They’re all made up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that is, boy, a master key to life and career right there. We assume things are the way they are for a reason, and the answer may be 50/50, on whether or not there is but don’t just assume it is.

Darcy Eikenberg
Right. There was always a reason at one point, right? There’s another parable that I love about a monk who had a young cat, a kitten, and they would go into meditation with his followers. And the cat would come in and annoy everybody and distract from the meditation. So, they started to chain the cat to a tree during meditation. And over the years, that got to be an ingrained habit, “Well, we’d chain the cat to the tree before we meditate.” Then the cat died and the followers were distraught, “How can we meditate now that there’s no cat?” but the two were never linked.

And we confine these kinds of examples in our workplace all the time of were. We make these assumptions based on what has been or what we might assume is important. We see these with leaders all the time, “Well, the CEO says everybody is going back to the office.” Let me tell you a secret. Even in the companies where the CEO has said that, those decisions are changing every day, and the exceptions, the individual negotiations, the accommodations that are being made are so much more than ever that blanket statement. So, it’s all made up, so why not make up, or at least be clear about what you need to be at your best and high issues in the organization that you want to work with and doing the work you know is making the biggest difference?

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

Darcy Eikenberg
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that when you’re feeling like, “Oh, I need to quit,” and all the noise around you is, “I have to leave.” But if there’s some hesitation, “But there’s some good here.” Certainly, there are plenty of opportunities where we should get out of bad situations. But so often, have we actually used all of our control to try to get more of what we want? And that’s just the little be, just that little moment between reaction and response that I invite people to do to say, “If you are on that fence and you think there’s something good there, try some of these strategies and take back control and see if it doesn’t change things for you, and at least help you make the most of where you are right now without having to change everything in your life.”

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

Darcy Eikenberg
So, for me, from a quote, I think the Gandhi quote of “Be the change you wish to see in the world,” always is a good quote to be aligned to, because if we’re not willing to take the effort to make the change, then who’s going to?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a key study or experiment or a piece of research you like?

Darcy Eikenberg
I am a huge fan, i.e., groupie of Amy Edmondson and a lot of the work that she’s done on psychological safety. And so, the idea of psychological safety, I think, is one that still isn’t talked about enough, and it is so critical today to make our workplaces work. So, that would be any of her work on psychological safety, I’m all over it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Darcy Eikenberg
A favorite book is probably The Art of Possibility by the Zanders. It’s an oldie but a goodie. But there’s a chapter in there that talks about starting with an A, so always giving people an A right off the bat. And it’s so powerful, and I’d encourage anybody to pick it up, The Art of Possibility.

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

Darcy Eikenberg
Probably, from a tool perspective, it’s just cheap pens. That’s not very sexy but I write a lot, I take a lot of different notes, and I’m always looking for a pen. And so, just having a stash of cheap pens around keeps me able to just record whatever is going on in my head when my thumbs get all thumbs and I can’t put it into my phone, so.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Darcy Eikenberg
Favorite habit, I don’t have any TVs in my house, no. So, when I moved to the house that I’m in now, I didn’t install any TVs, I don’t have cable hook up, and it was sort of a macho experiment because I loved TV. I used to have six in the house I was in before but it makes me read more, it makes me go to sleep earlier, and I think I have a little more peace of mind because if it’s there, I’m going to turn it on. So, when it’s not there, I just don’t turn it on.

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

Darcy Eikenberg
They key nugget is probably what I consider my mantra, which is, “Somebody out there needs you.” I think, so often, we get stuck because when we’re making changes in our life at work, we think it’s about us, we think, “Well, I want more. I want different.” But I think that one of the things that can keep us going, and I know it does for me personally, is to recognize that I might not know who is going to be the person that I’m going to impact today, but somebody out there needs me. And I think that’s true for every single one of us.

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

Darcy Eikenberg
Go to RedCapeRescue.com. That has all the information on the new book as well as ways to contact me, and also get a companion toolkit that goes with the book that’s free and allows people to follow along in different ways.

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

Darcy Eikenberg
I guess I’ll go back to that remember that somebody out there needs you. You matter. And no matter what you’re feeling in your life at work, you will be awesome. You are awesome. And you need to show up that way so that those people who need you can get what you have to bring.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Darcy, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck and keep up the great work.

Darcy Eikenberg
Thank you, Pete, so much. Appreciate it.

Sep 06
0

700: How to Make Your Anxiety Work For You with Wendy Suzuki

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki talks about how you can leverage your anxiety to solve problems and boost your well-being.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The six superpowers of anxiety 
  2. How to trick your brain into relaxing
  3. How a 30-second meditation can make all the difference 

 

About Wendy

Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology in the Center for Neural Science at New York University and a celebrated international authority on neuroplasticity. She was recently named one of the ten women changing the way we see the world by Good Housekeeping and regularly serves as a sought-after expert for publications including The Wall Street Journal, Shape, and Health. 

Her TED talk has received more than 31 million views on Facebook and was the 2nd most viewed TED talk of 2018. 

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Wendy Suzuki Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Wendy, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Wendy Suzuki
So happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. Now, you are a professor of neuroscience, but you also spent some time observing baboons in Botswana.

Wendy Suzuki
Yes, I did.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us the story here. How did that come to be? And any insights or hilarity from that experience?

Wendy Suzuki
Well, it was just awe from that experience. Well, I call it my Jane Goodall experience. It was my very first sabbatical of studying behavior, and decided to apply it to baboon behavior, and got associated with an amazing lab out of University of Pennsylvania, Cheney and Seyfarth, who had a baboon cognition research station in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana.

And so, I went there for about two or three weeks. I worked with their postdocs and I was the most highly educated research assistant ever. My job was to collect poop, so I was a baboon poop collector. And I proudly did my job and it’s actually much more difficult than you might imagine because you have to be able to tell the difference between the different baboons so that you collect the correct poop, and that was challenging.

Did you know that baboons in the wild are identified by their ear markings. Their ears get beat up in fights and things, and so what you get is not like a little picture of the face of every baboon with their name, “Here’s Elvis, here’s Loki,” but you get the name Elvis and you get a little drawing of his right and left ear.

So, you are walking around kind of trying to look at the ears of all of these baboons, which that was actually really funny to watch me do, but it was so fascinating. It was like a little soap opera out there. You would not believe the intrigue and the sex and the dastardly deeds that get done in these baboon colonies.

Pete Mockaitis
Intrigue and sex and dastardly deeds. We’re off to a great start, Wendy.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s baboons. We’ve got dastardly deeds. Let’s hear a little bit about anxiety. That can cause us to do some dastardly things or feel not so great. You have come to some insights associated with anxiety. Can you share what’s one of your most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made along these lines?

Wendy Suzuki
So, the whole book Good Anxiety is really about how if you are able to embrace all aspects of your anxiety, both those negative, uncomfortable feelings, but also all the information your particular form of anxiety teaches you about yourself, then your anxiety transforms into something that could bring you to a more fulfilling life, a more creative life, and, ultimately, a less stressful life. So, that is the take-home message of Good Anxiety that is the culmination of all the research and the science and just the observations that I’ve done around the area of anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re saying the benefit of anxiety is the teaching that it gives us primarily. Is that right or are there more things there too?

Wendy Suzuki
There’s lots of things. So, one of the superpowers that one gets with anxiety, in fact, we talked about six different superpowers that come from good anxiety, they include resilience, compassion, flow, mindset, focus, and creativity. Now, I’m not saying that somebody that’s in the throes of what I call bad anxiety, when anxiety starts to block you, and you can’t go out and you can’t speak fluidly because you have lots of anxiety. That is not when you start to get these superpowers.

What the book takes you through is, first, exercises and activities to help you flip that bad anxiety into good manageable anxiety. And it’s when anxiety is in this manageable state is when you can take advantage of all of these positive aspects of anxiety, including all those superpowers that I talked about. And that is what the book describes, how these powers of resilience come from the fact that if you are experiencing lots of little bouts of anxiety, every single little bout is contributing to your little piggybank of resilience.

Now, if these bouts are very debilitating, that’s hard to appreciate. But, in fact, scientific experiments have shown that if people go through large numbers of more controllable bouts of stress or anxiety, they develop what’s called stress resilience. They are more resilient than other controls that get either uncontrollable stress or no experience of stress, either controlled or uncontrolled. So, there are definitely positive aspects that come to it. You have to know how to leverage all of the information and superpowers that do come with anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to have those superpowers, so can you walk us through an example here? So, you’re feeling anxious about something, and then what do you do to make it work for you?

Wendy Suzuki
So, most people, the most common question that I get is, “I get bouts of anxiety. I don’t know how to make it go away, make it feel better.” And so, I always start with the two most direct ways that you can counteract anxiety. You don’t need to practice, you don’t need to do anything, and here they are.

First one is deep breathing. So, you don’t practice it, just deep breathing. Because what you’re doing with deep breathing is you’re activating one of our amazing nervous systems that we all have in our body called the parasympathetic nervous system. It’s also called the rest and digest nervous system. This is a nervous system that kicks in when you have a little more time on the weekends. You can digest. You’re not doing ten things that your boss just asked you to do. And that causes a whole bunch of physiological responses – slowing of the heart rate; deeper, fuller breathing; blood flow into your digestive system and away from your muscles.

Whereas, the stress system, or parasympathetic nervous system, the stress nervous system, does the opposite. I live in New York so taxi cabs come too close to you, clips you, almost clips you on the street, and you jump back. You don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to analyze it. Your stress system and danger-alerting system has you jump back. Your heart rate goes up, your blood flow is going to your muscles because you have to get away from the danger.

And so, I want less of that stress activation systems in my normal life, and I want more of that rest and digest system. So, it’s hard for me to slow my heart rate consciously, but the best way into that system is deep breathing. By deep breathing, you start to activate other elements of that rest and digest relaxation system. So, that’s a wonderful way to do it. Again, you want to catch it before it gets into really deep anxiety. So, as you start to feel anxiety coming on, get those deep breaths going. That’s number one.

Number two is another very effective way to quell bad anxiety is simply moving your body. Go for a walk outside, do some jumping jacks, whatever is most natural for you to do. Why? Because even moving your body a little bit can stimulate the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, noradrenaline. I like to say that every time you move your body, you give your brain a bubble bath of positive neurochemicals, including dopamine and serotonin that are going to activate your feelings of reward and happiness.

So, those are two immediate things that you can do because, as I said, you can’t get to the superpowers when you’re in a state of bad anxiety. So, you’ve quelled your anxiety. You haven’t gotten rid of it. You have lots of things. We all have our own personal anxiety stories. And so, now, you’ve quelled your bad anxiety and it’s a little bit more manageable. It still comes with those negative feelings, but it’s not as debilitating as it was before.

Now, you’re able to start to tap into some of those superpowers. And one of the superpowers that I love to talk about is the superpower of compassion, that is I think it’s very easy to understand. So, let me give an example from my own life. When I was in middle school, high school, I was a very, very shy young person, scared to talk, scared to raise my hand in class. I knew the answers but too scared to actually interact and say the answers out loud. And that caused a lot of my early anxiety in my life.

So, I’ve developed ways not to be shy in that way. But what I realized is that deep understanding of that feeling of fear has given me the superpower of compassion. And I’m able to use that particular superpower in my own teaching because I happen to become a teacher. And so, I use it altruistically by making sure that all the students in my class have many different ways to talk to me, interact with me, tell me what they know, because that is very satisfying to a student. I know from my own student days.

But I’m very, very aware of all those students out there. They know the answer but they have an anxiety of speaking out in class. And I do this also not just in the student kind of classroom situation but in a meeting situation. Sometimes there are people that easily speak out and others have a harder time. So, if I’m directing the meeting, I always make sure that everybody gets a say. And if somebody hasn’t said anything, I made sure, without putting them on the spot, that they had their say taken.

And that level of compassion comes from my particular anxiety story. And you can kind of apply compassion from your own deep understanding of whatever anxiety you have. Money anxiety, aging anxiety, grade anxiety. What can you do to kind of help others because you understand so deeply what that anxiety is?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s lovely. So, when it comes to the deep breathing and the moving your body in order to get you to a more useful place, I’m curious, is there…do you suggest a particular amount of breaths, or a pace, or a cadence, or an amount of exercise? Is there a sweet spot where you start to get diminishing returns?

Wendy Suzuki
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, I like to start off with just the quick and dirty activity. Just breathe more deeply. Know that is helpful. Walk outside is the easiest thing to do. However, if you have time and you want to kind of really dig deeper here and find your own sweet spot, here is what I recommend. There are literally thousands of kinds of breath meditation, and you can learn about them simply by using YouTube, and going to three breath meditation. Find one that you like. There are so many. You can judge them by how many views, how many millions of views that they have, and practice that in a non-anxiety provoking situation just to find out which kind that you like.

There’s a kind that you do in yoga class that you might be familiar with. Alternate nostril breathing, there’s counting breathing where you count four breaths, four counts in, hold if for four counts, and then slowly breathe out for four counts. That’s another very common easy one. But some might be more relaxing or less relaxing to you. So, that is the easiest kind of free way to do that.

Similarly, for exercise, we know from experimental studies, and one of my expertise is the effects of physical activity on the brain. We know that walking alone can decrease anxiety levels, decrease depression levels, and improve positive affect, simply walking outside for a minimum of 10 minutes. So, do that.

Some people might like doing something like the 7-Minute Workout from the New York Times. That’s another good way. Again, you can explore, see what you like to do, see what’s more natural. Some people might want to stay indoors to do their physical activity. The other one that I like to recommend is dance. Dancing is a wonderful form of physical activity. Turn your favorite toe-tapping music on from whatever period, and just dance for the three minutes of the song. That is guaranteed to improve your mood as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I dig it. Thank you. That’s a nice lineup and quick and fun, and makes an impact. So, you mentioned a number of superpowers. I’m most intrigued by flow. How can I use anxiety to get more flow?

Wendy Suzuki
Yeah, that’s a great one. So, flow, as it was originally defined, is kind of depressingly unattainable. You have to have 10,000 hours of practice. You have to be so high-level performance. I think of Yo-Yo Ma because I love the cello. And so, Yo-Yo Ma playing the Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suites can achieve flow, but I will never be able to do flow because I can’t do anything that beautiful with my hands. So, it’s depressing and also anxiety is a really big flow supper. So, not only is it really hard to get flow but anxiety kind of digs a hole deeper that makes it harder to get.

And so, I’ve come up with something that I use all the time, which is the concept of microflow. So, microflow is not dependent on how many hours you practice or how high a level. Microflow is dependent on how much you enjoy the process. So, for example, I experience microflow after every yoga class in Shavasana because I’m really good at laying still on my back. And I categorize that as a moment of microflow, and it’s really important. This superpower is one that’s both a tool to help people out of bad anxiety, but it becomes a superpower as you practice it more and more. And it’s really a practice and a strategy of noticing all the things that you do enjoy in a given day no matter how fleeting they are.

So, Shavasana always seems so short, but I categorize that as a moment of microflow. My green smoothie that I make in the morning that took me months to finalize the recipe that I love. That is a daily moment of microflow for me. Of course, everybody can cultivate this. But people with anxiety, it’s even more important that they do this so that they can feel this flow and really appreciate the positive lovely moments in their life, and put that in the piggy bank.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s about the savoring, the appreciating, the pausing. So, I guess I’m wondering, in terms of like the recipe there, I guess first you noticed, “Hey, I like this,” and then I guess it’s not just sort of multitasking in your brain and rushing and trying to get it done and go to the next thing. Any other particular mental practices that you’re doing there in order to arrive in that place?

Wendy Suzuki
Yeah, it’s really, I think, it’s an art of savoring good moments in your life because, I can tell you, from my own personal experience, when I was experiencing much higher levels of anxiety, that we all do at certain points in our lives. Any good moment like that, my first thought would be, “It’s going to be over. It’s soon going to be over and I’m going to go back into anxiety.” And so, I was anti-savoring the moment.

And the thing that really, really helped me was a practice that will be very familiar to many people and it’s in the focus superpower, which is the practice of meditation. So, the practice of meditation is really an exercise for your prefrontal cortex. Your prefrontal cortex is what is giving you that unending what-if list, “What if this happens? What if that happens?” For me, that always happens right before I’m trying to fall asleep. How do I quell that? Well, you practice, you get yourself in a quiet state, and, very important, you start very, very short, with a very short meditation, 30 seconds.

Have you ever done a 30-second meditation? That could be just a breath meditation, going back to our how you quiet a bad anxiety in the first place. But I think one of the biggest mistakes people make is trying to meditate for too long, and thinking that they have to have all thoughts go out of their mind, that their mind has to be a blank slate. That never happens. You can quiet your mind. You can focus. That’s why focusing on the breath, on loving kindness and compassion meditation focusing on that feeling of loving kindness and compassion, which one can’t get. The trick of the trade that I learned from some expert meditators is think about puppies and babies, things that make you go, “Aww,” will make you want to have immediate love for them.

And it’s a lovely meditation to do. It focuses your attention, it focuses your emotional state on cuteness and love and protection of this lovely creature, but it also trains your prefrontal cortex to go in this calm state. And that is very, very powerful for building focus, which often flies out the window with anxiety. And so, by practicing that, that is one of the ways that you can create a superpower of focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Lovely. Any other pro tips on the focus?

Wendy Suzuki
So, throughout the book I interview a number of people, just real people, different ages, different backgrounds, to tell their story, their anxiety story, and how these approaches helped them. This person actually gave us a wonderful kind of tool for the focus superpower. And that is an immediate turning your what-if list, that often kind of derails your focus, into a to-do list. So, this happened to be an entrepreneur that had terrible anxiety about raising money and couldn’t kind of get over a no answer and second-guess himself for all the things that he could’ve done differently to get that money back or get that investment.

And the tip that he got from a colleague of his, that he shared with us, is that all of those second-guessing that you do, all that creates your what-if list, you turn that into an action list. So, use that as, “This is great. That what-if, that’s going on the list. I’m going to change that. I’m going to do it differently for next time.” So, you turn it into an action item. And it’s kind of turning the negative activation of anxiety that creates this what-if list that puts you into deeper anxiety, and turns it into an immediate action list.

And he was able to implement this and kind of changed his view on his anxiety kind of in one conversation. And he was a very driven person but it is powerful to think, “What if I just turned all those what-ifs into my exploration list?” And that is part of the superpower of these things that come up in anxiety, these thoughts that come up in anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, Wendy, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention?

Wendy Suzuki
Yeah, one of my favorite superpowers, I think we’ve covered most all of them, is a superpower that comes from good anxiety is creativity. So, creativity is a natural byproduct of anxiety because anxiety often pushes us to find workarounds, “I can’t do that. I can’t go in that direction because that’s difficult but I’m going to do it a different way.”

And, also, the difficulties that come with anxiety, anxiety caused by difficult family members, very difficult upbringings, we know from history, often lead to some of the most creative kind of outlets for that – writing, song. You don’t have to be a number one on the hits list but they are inspiration for lots of creative outlets.

And so, instead of, again, just focusing on the negative feelings, can you get inspiration from all of these people that have used their negative anxiety-ridden experiences to create something beautiful and new? And, in fact, many of them say that their creativity came from their pain and their anxiety, so it’s inspiring to think about anxiety that way, that your anxiety story can become a creativity story.

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

Wendy Suzuki
The first quote that comes to mind that always inspires me is from Gandhi, “Be the change you want to see.” And that is an underlined quote that I used to write this book. I don’t just write about good anxiety and the superpowers. I lived all these superpowers, I use them in my life, and they change my life in profound ways, which is part of the story of Good Anxiety.

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

Wendy Suzuki
Yeah, so my favorite bit of research was a preliminary study that I did in a classroom at NYU in August of 2020. It was the first semester where everybody was going to be remote, and I was invited to speak to a freshmen cohort. I was going to share my research on the effects of exercise on the brain, and I had 30 minutes.

And I decided to truncate the lecture so it was only going to be 10 minutes long, and I decided to do an experiment on them. So, I sent them all off to do, a clinical anxiety survey, this was after I told them about the positive effects of exercise, including that wonderful neurochemical bubble bath that happens when you move your body.

So, after they did the anxiety survey, we all came back, this was all on Zoom, and I happen to be a certified exercise instructor. So, we all did 10 minutes of a workout that I teach called intenSati that pairs physical movements from kickbox and dance and martial arts and yoga with positive spoken affirmation. So, as you punch, front punches, you say things like, “I am strong now.” And every move has different affirmations.

And so, there was 10 minutes of it. It was surprising. They did not know they were going to do this. And then, at the end of that, I had them all go back and retake that anxiety survey. And the next day, I sent everybody that was in that, there were 30 freshmen in that session, I sent them the results.

What I found was before the exercise, those 30 students, on average, were just shy of clinically anxious, very high levels of anxiety. Again, this was right before their first remote session of their freshmen year at NYU, so not so surprising there was high levels of anxiety. But my favorite part is that just 10 minutes of working out over Zoom with me decreased their anxiety scores by 15 points on average, which brought them all to the normal anxiety levels.

So, that is just a quick experiment on the power of moving your body on affecting anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Wendy Suzuki
I’ve been obsessed with memoirs, and I’ve been reading memoirs of comedians because I admired their writing and I’ve always wanted to be a funny person so I’m curious about how comedians tell their life story. So, one of my favorite books that I’ve read recently is called A Very Punchable Face by Colin Jost from Saturday Night Live.

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

Wendy Suzuki
I feel like my superpower tool of being awesome at my job is staying connected with a whole bunch of creative friends who are really, really inspiring in lots of different ways. So, I find myself time and time again inspired, thinking about how to bring elements of performance, or, I don’t know, musical theater into my teaching and into my talk world. So, my superpower is my creative cohort of friends.

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

Wendy Suzuki
My morning tea meditation. So, every morning, I wake up and I do about 45 minutes of meditation over the brewing and drinking of tea. It’s a particular form of meditation that I learned from a monk, a tea monk, and I set up my day beautifully with that tool.

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

Wendy Suzuki
Yes, the quote that I get most often is, “I love your image of a bubble bath for the brain every time you move your body.” It’s an image that’s novel and it sticks with people, and that’s the one that gets quoted back to me the most often.

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

Wendy Suzuki
Yes, best way to learn more about me and get in touch is my website www.WendySuzuki.com. Everything is there from classes, to books, to lectures, to TED Talks. So, you’ll find everything there.

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

Wendy Suzuki
My call to action is to and I’ve done this myself, great to focus on your major strengths. But what if you could use your anxiety to be even better at your job? It’s hard to think about that. It’s a Jiu Jitsu move that I try to show everybody how to do, but that is my best tip for a new way to improve yourself using your own anxiety story.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Wendy, thank you. This has been a treat. And I wish you much luck and good anxiety in the days to come.

Wendy Suzuki
Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.