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KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

1075: The Sustainable Path to Achieving Success and Finding Meaning with Kathy Oneto

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Kathy Oneto offers a sustainable path to achieving your goals in work and in life.

You’ll Learn

  1. The major myths surrounding ambition
  2. How to overcome inertia to achieve your goals
  3. How to keep your energy up for the long term

About Kathy

Kathy Oneto is a consultant, facilitator, and coach who is passionate about helping ambitious organizations, teams, and individuals explore how to live and work differently for more success, satisfaction, and sustainability. She is the founder and podcast host of Sustainable Ambition and is author of the book Sustainable Ambition: How to Prioritize What Matters to Thrive in Life and Work (June 2025). She helps people get more from work and life without sacrificing their joy or ease.

Resources Mentioned

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Kathy Oneto Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kathy, welcome!

Kathy Oneto
Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to talk about Sustainable Ambition. Great title. It seems like something we’re into here. But could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising and fascinating and/or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned about folks and ambition from all of your consulting, coaching, facilitating years and many, many clients?

Kathy Oneto
This is the thing I’m going to start with, which is often where I end, which is to remember that we’re human, and that it’s both natural as humans to be both ambitious and to have goals. It’s not a bad thing. We’re wired to do this. And also, in our pursuit of ambitions that we don’t always get it right and that we stumble along our way. And that’s the life journey. And to, really, end this journey, to be generous with ourselves as we navigate the ups and downs of pursuing what we want for ourselves in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, is it your observation that we tend to not do these things, we either vilify ambition itself or harden ourselves as we over or under do it?

Kathy Oneto
Ambition, in our society, can have a negative connotation. And so, for some of us, we can be judged when we are ambitious.

And what can happen over time is that our ambition ebbs and flows. And people are surprised by this and it throws them off and they start to judge themselves around this. And there’s a lot of angst that is associated when our ambition ebbs and flows like this, when it goes up and down.

And I think what I’m wanting for people is just to embrace a little bit of, “Yes, this is part of our human nature. We have these different tendencies that tug and pull on us.” I’d like people to find a little bit more joy, peace, and ease in this journey as they navigate their ambition over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, joy, peace and ease are things I’m into. Thank you. And you’re right, like, I don’t think I’ve ever really stopped to ponder this point until now. So, thank you. This is valuable already because I’m thinking… It’s so funny, ambition can be perceived as positive or negative by different people at different times, and ourselves at different times. And then it just kind of gets you wondering.

So many things are popping up here for me. I’m thinking, so we have the old aphorisms, like, “Oh, the early bird gets the worm,” as in, “Oh, that’s a good thing. You want to be up early to get worms. Otherwise, as a bird, you will starve if you don’t. So, you should, you should hustle.”

And then there’s this hustle culture like, “Yeah, that’s cool.” But then there’s also the backlash against hustle cultures, like, “No, no, guys, Big Tech is just pulling the wool over your eyes. They want you to think hustling is all that because they benefit from that if you’re the employee and you’re hustling.”

But then there’s the flipside as well, in terms of, like, “Oh, someone’s trying to be…” I don’t know if this slang is still in popular usage, but I’ve heard it before at times, like, “Oh, oh, he’s trying to be extra, and that’s not cool. It’s not cool to try to be extra,” or another word for ambitious. And yet, one of my favorite Onion articles, we’ll link in the show notes, headline: “Man’s Utter Failure in Life A Bit Of A Sore Spot.”

And so, it was like, “Ha, ha,” and that’s the joke. It’s like, “Of course, it’s a sore spot.” And so, we’ve got all of these conflicting messages from the outside, as well as I’m thinking about in my own world. I studied finance in college, and so we learned very firmly that the sacred duty of the firm is to maximize shareholder wealth.

And so, now as I’m doing my own business thing, it’s like that idea was just in there. And it was kind of a revelation, it was like, “No, Pete, you can see an opportunity to go get money and just not do it because you don’t want to. That’s okay.” And it was like, “Wait, it is?” And yet, if it was a different context, like if I were the CEO of a publicly traded company, that I kind of do have a legal duty to go after that and could get sued if I don’t. So, yeah, it’s quite easy to get all mixed up on this subject, Kathy.

Kathy Oneto
It really is. I studied undergraduate finance as well, so this is in my brain. I have an MBA as well. And I think what we all can benefit from remembering is we humans live amongst constructs. We make up these constructs. Yes, sometimes there’s math and science behind them, but there’s one person who determined that, “Why does a firm exist? To maximize shareholder value.” Well, there were other constructs before Milton Friedman said that as to why firms existed and how firms got ran.

And so, we can challenge some of these norms around, “Well, how do we define success? How do we define what ambition is?” And I think that’s where I’m inviting people to really reclaim that and to determine, “What is work? And what is worthy work? And what is worthy of your effort?”

And I think, in today’s culture and society, we often think it has to be tied specifically to monetization. And so much, you brought up technology companies, so much of this world of, like, social media, we kind of are called into, you know, we need to monetize ourselves. And so, this is an invitation to also kind of say, like, “How do you want to define work for yourself?”

And, yes, work that is your professional life is important, but there can also be other aspects of work that can really be soul-filling and keep you sustained as well, and can be important parts of who you are, and can really allow you to have more holistic ambitions than just think that our ambitions are solely about our professional life, which I think is something that people also get wrong about ambition.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re right, and it’s fascinating. Now I’m thinking, this is so dorky, Kathy, but what comes to mind is one of my all-time favorite games that’s really shaped the way I think about the world and resources was from 1992 called “Master of Orion.” And you try to conquer the galaxy with your alien race and do resource management, yadda, yadda. And so, I just thought it’s the coolest game and sometimes I’ll still play it.

And I just learned that this guy, his name is Ray Fowler, just decided that, “Yes, this game is fantastic and the new generations need to know about it.” And so, he just created, by himself and with collaborators that he hired with his own money, to create a whole new version of this for the modern era called “Remnants of the Precursors,” and just gave it away for free.

He just spent multiple years of his life making this thing, because he thought, “You know what, this is an amazing game and the world needs to know about it and not be turned off by the old graphics or interface or whatever, and so I’m just going to do that.” And it’s just free.

And it’s fascinating because there’s some ambition and there’s no money whatsoever, and his motivations, as far as I could tell, I’ve tried to stalk him and learn, it’s just that, “No, this is an amazing game and the world should know about it so I’m just going to make that possible.” And he went and did it, and we’re enriched for him having done so. And we can all do that, we have permission to do so, and he seems quite pleased that he made that choice.

Kathy Oneto
I love that. And that’s what I would call a right ambition, right? It’s something that, for him, is personally rewarding and satisfying, I would imagine, and he felt was worthy of his effort. And I think more of us do this more often than we probably realize and recognize. And I think what’s important is acknowledging that and claiming that as something that is really worthy of your time and your effort.

Somebody who I interviewed on my podcast, we really went into this distinction between paid work versus non-paid work. And I, even for myself, have thought about my own work in this context, and really struggled because people ask me, “Well, why do you call that your paid work?” versus this is what I would call my service work or my creative work.

And perhaps only because I was asked, I was kind of like, “Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t be calling it that.” But in this conversation with this guest, it really became, for her, this distinction between saying it’s paid versus non-paid work, really allowed that non-paid work to be on equal footing with her paid work. It serves her and it fulfills her and satisfies her and, frankly, sustains her so greatly that is just as valid and just as important in her life to be putting her time and attention to those activities.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well said. Because if it’s not work, is it a “distraction” or a hobby? The other words we have available to describe such things are a bit diminutive in, like, “Well, of course that’s not as important as your job. That is of utmost importance.” So, there is some handy language pieces there, which I appreciate.

And I also want to talk about ambition, in and of itself. There are some negative connotations, there are some positive connotations. But, as I think of other words that are virtues, that we could all just kind of agree that, “Yeah, it’s a good thing to be fair or kind or patient or humble.” And, of course, you could take these to some extremes and that might be not ideal.

But how do you think about the word ambition and what makes it good or bad or virtuous? You use the words right and wrong a lot. Can you unpack a little bit of that?

Kathy Oneto
Yes. Let me start with the last thing you said because I think this is really important to distinguish. I talk about in my sustainable ambition method that, really, where I’m pointing people is to find more sustainability by aligning the right ambitions at the right time with the right effort. And what’s really important about using that term right is that, actually, I don’t think that there’s necessarily a wrong. It’s that right is making sure that it’s right for you.

Pete Mockaitis
But it could also be wrong for you if it’s not right for you?

Kathy Oneto

Perhaps that’s fair. That’s fair. That’s a good pushback, yeah. But the distinction, and what I appreciate about what you just said, was this is individual, it’s personalized. And I think where I’m trying to point people, or where I am pointing people, is, for a lot of our lives, we are influenced by external factors, by social norms, and these things guide us.

But I’m calling people to step into a self-authored mind, and starting to say, “What do I want for myself? How do I step into what I want and make this personal?”

And so, I appreciate what you just said, Pete, which is, “It’s wrong in terms of what’s personal for me. Meaning, like, I’m going after a should as opposed to something that’s not aligned to who I am and what I really want for myself.” So, I think that’s how I think about that context.

I also think that ambition is good. It is what motivates us to shape the things that we want for ourselves in our lives and what we want for the world, and it’s what pulls us forward. But it can also, I talk about this idea that there’s a U-curve of ambition, similar to the U-curve of performance, where if your ambition is too low, you can get into this, what I call stagnant zone. If your ambition is too high and you’re driving hard all the time, or you’re in this unproductive sense of striving, you can get into the severe zone.

And so, it really is about, “Well, how do I dial in my ambition to be kind of the right level so that it is sustainable for myself?” So, I guess that’s how I think about it in terms of this context of, like, “Well, how do you dial it in to be just right for you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say U-curve, I’m already imagining I have axes and I have a U. Can you go into some depth here?

Kathy Oneto
Sure. So, on the Y-axis is sustainability, from low to high, and on the X-axis is ambition, from low to high. So, if you’re low ambition and low sustainability, you’re going to be in the stagnant zone. If you’re in the middle, around the right level of ambition, you’re going to be in the optimal sustainable ambition zone.

And then if your ambition is too high, you’re starting to get into this area of, “Okay, now my sustainability is starting to come down because I’m really, perhaps, either I’m not aligned to what my ambitions are, I’m too externally focused, or I’m really in the sense of unpredictable striving, where I’m really just driving hard all the time. I’m not taking breaks. I’m not prioritizing other aspects of my life that are important to me, that matter, that also help keep me sustained.” So that’s how I think about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so, as you describe this, this sort of sounds like a lowercase N as opposed to a U, if that’s the curve, as we follow. Is that accurate? The optimal would be a medium-ish level of ambition, which is maximumly sustainable?

Kathy Oneto
Yeah, the optimal level is, like, in the middle, right, if that’s what you’re describing. But the U is kind of an upside-down U. So that’s why you’re saying, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. All right. So, there we have it. So, we have an upside-down U or lowercase N, if you will, curve, with the optimal level of ambition for sustainability being somewhere in the middle. And that makes sense, because if you’re going minimally, life is kind of, “Ugh, meh, whatever.” It’s kind of depressing. And if you’re going to the max, it’s like this is exhausting and anxiety-provoking and just a crazy town, not a great place to be.

So, I hear what you’re saying is that midpoint of ambition in the optimal is sustainable because it’s sort of like you’re challenged, it’s fun and interesting, but you’re not overwhelmed and you’re not bored. This kind of reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s perspective on flow, with kind of any given challenge of the moment that you’re in.

Kathy Oneto
Right. And if you start to get into where that challenge is overly stressful, it starts to also take you not into that optimal sense of flow, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, a great thing you said earlier about not going after a “should,” which would just be the sort of, like, the socialized perspective of whatever people say just is the thing to do, like, “Oh, you should do that.” And I always, I’ve been criticized for taking things super literally at times, but, like, with your U and your N.

But when people say should, it’s interesting. They could say to all sorts of things like, “Oh, I should really get back into…” whatever, TV show, or game, or thing. And I often will directly challenge them, it’s like, “Should you really? Would that be optimal for you?” It was like, “I mean, probably not. No, I’ll just continue not watching that show. And that’s probably actually the right choice for me. Cool. Thanks.”

So, can you unpack a little bit? What is right ambition, right time, and right effort?

Kathy Oneto
So, right ambition is, again, I talked about redefining success based on your own terms. And so, this is really about shifting from looking at that external lens and starting to say, “What is going to be personally rewarding to me?” And it’s starting to look at what you want to do.

So, again, it’s shifting from that external to internal motivation and really getting clear on what internally motivates you. I point to four different areas in the book around this. What’s your vision? How do you like to give or contribute, which a more common lexicon that gets used these days is purpose? I look at values, and then also what you love to do, intrinsic motivators. And so, that’s really about, “How do you motivate your effort around what you’re pursuing?

Right time is about considering your life and work together, and is focused on choosing, “Well, where do you want to put your attention, your effort, your energy based on really what’s personally important matters most in your life and work now?” And so, this is shifting a mindset from doing it all to really focusing on doing what matters and helping you focus your effort.

And then, finally, right effort is about really being discerning about the level of effort you’re putting towards your ambitions and goals rather than just thinking you should be putting a ton of effort into everything. Ambition is often tied to this idea that it’s, like, maximum effort. But then it’s also being discerning about, “How am I really managing my effort and my energy so that I do keep myself sustained over time?”

So, this is really about managing your effort and energy, shifting from constant drive to really being more strategic about how you manage your effort.

Pete Mockaitis
Now you said right time was about doing what matters. Can you help me distinguish all the more clearly? That kind of sounds like right ambition, if it’s in conjunction, if it’s working with my vision values and what I like to do.

Kathy Oneto
No, this is great. So, those two things work together, in terms of like, so right ambition is like, “Okay. Well, how do I ascertain, like, how I either define success on my own terms,” or defining my goals and even checking like, “Are these things that I truly want to do?”

Right time is about, “Okay, great.” If I think about my vision for my life, I might say, I’ll take a very simple one that is’ve had an ambition or goal that I’ve wanted to do all my life, which is to live abroad for an extended period of time. I’ve not been able to make that happen in my life.

So right time is really about, “Well, what is most important now? How do I think about both, what do I have energy for now and what really is urgent for me to pursue at this moment in my life? What is my life context or what am I being called to do right now such that I’m making this a priority in terms of what’s important in my life at this moment in time?”

So, these two things do work together, but I invite people into, “Well, how do you think about your life in arcs and periods and thinking about horizons? And how do you think about what really is important now in this moment? And what might you shift out to different time periods? What might you say, like, ‘Okay, this isn’t a priority right now. I actually am going to put this on the back burner for now and allow myself to focus my attention on what matters to me at this moment.’?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, given the season and the context of what’s up, that will vary.

Kathy Oneto
And your stage of life as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, let’s talk about the right level of effort. What are some of the telltale signs where our effort is too little or too much?

Kathy Oneto
I think, in terms of if our effort is too little, it could be that you yourself are feeling like you’re stagnating, that you’re not making progress, the kind of progress that you want to see. It could be that, again, it goes back to the first thing I said, like, “What is your energy level?”

But, like, even if your effort isn’t the right level of effort, that may start to bring into question, like, “Huh, is this the right ambition for you at this time?” So, checking in with your energy level and whether or not you’re putting enough energy into something is a really great clue as to whether or not you’re motivated around pursuing something or not.

I think, on the other side, and the other extreme in terms of “Are you putting too much effort into something?” is, “Do you start to feel like you are ignoring certain things in your life that really matter to you and are important to you? Do you feel like you’re constantly driving hard all the time and you’re never taking breaks?”

“Are you starting to feel, you know, are there physical symptoms that you might not be operating at your best? Are you starting to have health problems that are giving you clues that you are potentially putting too much effort into all that you are trying to do?”

So, there are a number of different signals that you can be looking for in terms of this sense of, “Am I putting a little too much effort?” It can start to become like these signals that can be associated with workaholism, and there’s different factors around workaholism that can start to show up, which are not just behavioral. They can be psychological. They can be biological as well in terms of these health aspects too.

Pete Mockaitis
And what about those tricky situations where it’s, like, “I really want the results and outcomes of a thing, but I really just don’t like doing the work to get there”? For some people, that might be in the fitness zone, that could be in the business career finance zone. What do we do with these matters?

Kathy Oneto

There’s a couple of different ways that one can manage this. So, one is, “Is this something that, in terms of pursuing a goal, something that you don’t really enjoy doing? Is it something that you yourself have to do or is it something that you can outsource?”

And where you can get help and support so that it’s like, “Well, this isn’t my zone of genius. So, as this part of this ambition or goal, I’m going to hire out or have somebody help me achieve some of these aspects of what I’m trying to pursue that can actually help me reach that goal.” That is a possibility depending on what the ambition and the goal is.

Then there’s the other side, which is, sometimes these are things that we have to do ourselves. I’ve experienced this, too. And I think you have to question, “Well, how committed are you to that ambition and goal? And how much do you want that result?”

So, that’s one way of going at it, which is, “Okay, I am really committed. This is going to be the way that I’m going to pursue it. I’m going to go ahead and do some of these things that I don’t love because I really want to achieve that goal.”

I think the middle way is to challenge, like, whether or not you need to be doing the specific thing that we think we need to do in order to achieve that goal, and whether or not there is a middle way that one can find that is actually better aligned to who you are and what your values are.

Sometimes, again, it’s kind of like, “Well, this is the external norm of how something is achieved, but is there actually a way that I can achieve the same outcome and the same results, and do it in a way that is better aligned to who I am?”

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some fun examples of folks who have done just that?

Kathy Oneto
I would say that one of the examples is, I’m thinking about somebody who is, like, she has grown her business, and she’s not on social media. And I think the norm these days is, “Hey, I need to be on social media, and I need to be building a significant following.”

And she has taken a completely different approach that is much more aligned to who she is in terms of building a following through an email newsletter and through offering really valuable content. And that approach has worked for her, and also through building relationships.

And so, I think that we often see examples or think that there’s only one way to go about achieving a goal. And yet, there are ways to realign towards something that is better aligned to oneself. I’ll say, even on this, around my book, I would say I’m not a huge fan of social media either.

And so, a way that I am going about this that is much more resonant for me is to, what I want to be doing is talking about this topic as well as connecting with people and partnering with people to get this message out. And that’s a way that I am approaching this in a way that is much more resonant and aligned with my personal values.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s lovely. I’ve experienced that, people say, “Well, you’ve got to get on Twitter. You’ve to do all the things.” And there are numerous counter examples. I’m thinking about Cal Newport famously just doesn’t do much on social media. His books are doing great, and that works just fine for him.

So, that is a fine thought, to challenge the conventional wisdom. Although, to perhaps also be cautious not to fall for, I don’t know, snake-oil, get-rich-quick, the Ab Belts, which does your workout for you, kinds of things that promises of low-effort results are often misleading. So, I guess maybe that’s a distinction to draw there.

Kathy Oneto
I think that’s important. One of the things that I talk about with Sustainable Ambition, too, which may surprise people, is I believe in hard work. I think it’s just being really discerning about, “Where do you want to put in that hard work?” And also, being really discerning about, “How are you going to sustain yourself in the process?”

And so, I think that people may be naïve in thinking that there are these get-rich-quick kind of schemes, but I think, like, even something like get on, create a digital course, or get on social media, or do these various things that I think are quite common are often posed as being that you can have this immediate success, but that’s often not the case.

Pete Mockaitis
That, indeed, it is. So, when it comes to being sustainable, taking care of ourselves, resting, recovering, rejuvenating, do you have any pro tips on how you think about how much time we spend doing that, and/or if there are any research-backed approaches that are phenomenally efficient and effective at giving us rest, recovery, rejuvenation with a relatively modest investment of our time and other resources?

Kathy Oneto

I think what’s really important here is a couple of principles. One is to think about sustainability on different timeframes. And I think what can help people is to make sure that they’re, I mean, it sounds so simple, but the problem is people don’t do it, which is to think about sustainability on a longer time horizon.

I think why people can often get tripped up with work-life balance and that concept is that they think that, “Oh, I’m supposed to be in balance all of the time.” And yet, again, there’s going to be intense time periods. That’s a reality of life and how our life and work, work together.

And so, are you thinking about a broader time horizon, 12 to 18 months, and kind of ascertaining, “When am I going to take those down times? And when am I going to give myself those breaks so that I can keep myself sustained over time?”

And then the other, in the opposite direction, I would say, I think where people can get this wrong is thinking that they need to make all these big gestures in order to keep themselves sustained over time. And what I really advocate, and, again, it’s quite simple, which is, like, make sure you’re taking small breaks regularly. And the problem is that most of us don’t take those breaks.

And so, research by Slack a couple of years ago found that about 50% of knowledge workers around the globe don’t take breaks during the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, so they would know. Slack, they can tell you, “Slacking nonstop, guys.”

Kathy Oneto
Exactly. And some people challenge me on that, like, “Ah, people probably are taking breaks,” but often they’re checking email or they’re looking at social media or they’re checking their Slack. It’s not necessarily really getting themselves that psychological detachment that they need from work. And so, I think it’s being really discerning again about, “How am I taking these breaks?”

And things like a five-minute walk outside, five minutes of deep breathing, being in nature, going and talking with a friend, five minutes of daydreaming, are all these things that are quite simple to do and don’t have to take a lot of time, and yet, really, can help us reduce our stress in the moment and keep us sustained for a longer period of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I love these, and then you can get as wild and weird and unique as you want to with whatever you’re up to there. And with these five-minute breaks, I imagine there’s going to be some variation person to person, but do you have a range of just how many or how often are these five-minute breaks optimal for folks?

Kathy Oneto
Well, I’m going to borrow from a colleague, John Briggs, who wrote a book called The 3.3 Rule, which is based on some science that he has rooted in his book, which is this idea that we really shouldn’t work more than three hours at a time.

And there’s different studies out there. That’s a maximum, but there’s different studies out there around, like, the optimal amount of time that one should work. But what his 3.3 Rule is about this, like, for whatever amount of time you work, take a 30% break after it.

And so, you can use that to kind of have as a gauge in terms of how often one should be taking a break. So, no more than three hours and then taking an appropriate amount of break after that. Personally, one of my greatest tools that I really pay attention to and use myself is just really being tuned into my own personal feelings and my energy.

And I kind of follow my energy in terms of paying attention to, “When am I starting to get distracted? When am I starting to lose focus?” And that’s typically a clue for me that I’m ready for a break.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Kathy, tell me, any final do’s, don’ts, tips, tricks before we hear about your favorite things?

Kathy Oneto
I think sustainability really lives in being aligned to who we are, so get to know yourself.  The other is to pay attention. Things change on us. And, oftentimes, part of what causes that angst that I talked about earlier, Pete, is that we’re thrown off when things change on us.

And I think that we often need to start to plant seeds and start to try new things much earlier than we realize. And so, paying attention, starting to lean into curiosity, try new things. And then the final thing I’ll say is to remember that this is a practice. Oftentimes, people can be hard on themselves when things start to go off track.

And that’s a reality and also helps us start to understand where are the boundaries around how do we want to define sustainability for ourselves. So, I encourage people to just embrace the practice of it all and learn along the way.

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

Kathy Oneto
Yes, this is from Benedictine monk brother, David Steindl-Rast, where he said, “The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest. The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.”

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

Kathy Oneto
One of mine is from Sonja Lyubomirsky and Laura King, which talks about how, if we focus on putting our attention on personal success linked to fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness, that is more likely to lead to external success than necessarily the other way around.

So, if we are just focused on external success, that is not going to necessarily lead to us being happy. But if we focus on, what the studies have shown, generally, is that if we focus instead on what’s really meaningful and motivating to us first, it’s more likely that that external success is going to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Kathy Oneto
One is called What You Are Looking For Is in the Library. It’s a novel by Michiko Aoyama.

And then the second is the Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers. One is called A Psalm for the Wild Built, and the other is A Prayer for the Crown Shy. And I just love these for the philosophical questions that they pose that are, for me, squarely centered around sustainable ambition.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your clients?

Kathy Oneto
“It’s not sustainable if it isn’t yours.”

Pete Mockaitis
Can you elaborate?

Kathy Oneto
Well, it’s really this idea that, again, sustainability is rooted in what’s personally motivating to you and what really matters to you. And so, if you’re pursuing things that are external from you, that are a “should,” or what others want for you, are what society says, at some point, we often reject that and it’s not sustainable.

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

Kathy Oneto
They can find me at my website, SustainableAmbition.com, on LinkedIn, and on my podcast, Sustainable Ambition on their favorite podcast player.

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

Kathy Oneto

I just shared this a little bit earlier, but I’ll reiterate it, which is to really pay attention to how you’re feeling and, again, to be curious and look ahead, and start to think about what might be next much sooner than you think. So, always be learning, always be experimenting, always be taking good risk.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kathy, thank you.

Kathy Oneto
Thank you so much, Pete.

1067: Better Decisions through Neuroscience with Emily Falk

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Emily Falk reveals the hidden science behind how we make decisions—and how we can harness that to make more fulfilling choices.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to make doing hard things easier
  2. The one belief that’s limiting your possibilities
  3. How to disarm resistance to change

About Emily

Emily Falk, author of the upcoming book What We Value, is a professor of communication, psychology, and marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and the vice dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, where she directs the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. 

Falk is an expert in the science of behavior change. Her award-winning research uses tools from psychology, neuroscience, and communication to examine what makes messages persuasive, why and how ideas spread, and what makes people effective communicators. 

In What We Value, Falk illustrates how we can transform our relationship with the daily decisions that define our lives—opening pathways to make more purposeful, fulfilling choices; more successfully change our behavior; and influence others to see differently—by thinking like neuroscientists.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Emily Falk Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Emily, welcome!

Emily Falk
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m excited to hear some of your goods. So, then, tell us, with your book, What We Value, what’s the big idea or core message here?

Emily Falk
Well, the big idea in What We Value is that our brains shape what we value, and that happens in ways that we might not realize as they’re unfolding. And my hope is that if people can understand how their brains are calculating value that that has potentially a lot of benefits.

That one possibility is that we can feel more compassion for ourselves and for other people when we make decisions that don’t necessarily make sense to us. That it might also help us make choices a little bit differently or also communicate more effectively with one another.

So, the book is in three parts right there. The first part that explains how this all unfolds in the brain, then there’s a second part that focuses on what we might do if we want to change those kinds of processes, and then the third part focuses on how we connect with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you discussed the value calculation. What is that? And, ultimately, how are we generally going about making decisions?

Emily Falk
Well, your brain has a set of regions, a system that neuroscientists call the value system, and it takes inputs from lots of other brain regions, and integrates them into a subjective assessment of how rewarding each of any different possible options might be for you. And this kind of unfolds in three phases.

So, in the first phase, your brain identifies what the things are that you’re choosing between. And then in the second part of that, it assigns a subjective value to each of those possible options, which is really weighted towards things that are psychologically close, meaning things that are immediately relevant to you, like rewarding soon.

Geographically close to you, like, stuff that’s happening here in my community, as opposed to, like, across the world in Sudan. And, also, socially close, like, people who are similar to me or people who I know really well, as opposed to people who I think are really different from me or far away.

And in the brain, you can see that these kinds of psychological distance are computed similarly. So, like, future me is similar to a different person. So, in that second phase, your brain assigns a subjective value to how kind of immediately, presently rewarding things are likely to be. And then it connects to other systems that execute the choice.

So, we choose the one that we think can be most rewarding, and then keep track of how it went afterwards, like, “Was that actually as rewarding as I thought it would be?” And if it’s better than you thought it would be, like, let’s say, that you are at work and you sign up for an assignment that you’re willing to do, but it turns out that it’s like way more fun that you thought it would be, it generates what’s called a positive prediction error, and that makes it more likely that we’ll do that thing in the future.

Rather than something that you were really excited about, turns out to be worse than you thought it would be, it generates this negative prediction error, and we learn so that, in the future, it’s going to be an input to future value calculations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, that’s what’s going on underneath the hood when we’re thinking about, “Do I do a thing?” And so then, if different people choose differently, I guess, what are the primary variables that explain it?

So, if someone says, “Hey, some guys are getting together for a fishing trip,” and then some people on the email say, “Yes, I’m in,” others say, “No, I’m not,” I’m sure there are all kinds of things that are happening externally in their life and their situations and their travel plans. But internally, what are the core things that might make the difference between folks saying, “Yes, I’m in,” versus, “No, I’m out”?

Emily Falk
Well, each of our choices that we’re making in a deliberate way like that are shaped by our past experiences, like we just talked about. Our current context, which can include a lot of different things.

Like I said, there are all these other brain systems that are feeding into our value calculations, which include what we think about ourselves, like, “Am I the kind of person who goes fishing?”

What we think other people around us might be thinking or doing, like, if many other people in the chain have already replied enthusiastically, then that signals that this is, like, maybe something that is going to be fun or beneficial. And those kinds of social influences are really powerful in shaping our value calculations.

Our current mood and our emotional states impact our decision-making, and there are lots of other things as well. So, there’s all of these different context cues that feed into our subjective value associations. And so, the difference between somebody making the choice of say yes to the fishing trip or no to the fishing trip is going to be dependent on all those different things.

But I think one of the things that’s really helpful to understand is that we can shift how we feel about it depending on what we pay attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about shifts, can you tell us the tale of Ernie Grunfeld’s parents and how that brings this to life?

Emily Falk
Yeah, Ernie Grunfeld, for folks who don’t know, was a star NBA player and went on to become the general manager of several major NBA teams. So, he’s had a really star-studded career in basketball. But when he first came to the US, he immigrated from Eastern Europe, and his parents and he were Holocaust survivors.

And they ended up in New York, and his parents made all kinds of sacrifices to get the family to the US. And so, when they arrived, his parents set up a store, and Ernie would help out at the store on the weekends. He enrolled in school. His parents prioritized sort of higher-rent housing situation in order to be able to get him that education.

He came from this family that had a really strong core set of values related to those things. But, on the playground, it turned out that Ernie was amazing at basketball. And so, Ernie started to play on the playgrounds in New York, and then eventually, in high school, he got really, really good. But his parents were really busy working and they didn’t know that.

And so, his son, Dan, wrote a book where he describes the high school basketball coach calling up Mr. and Mrs. Grunfeld, and saying, “Your son is incredibly talented, and this is something that he could pursue as a ticket to college. Like, it’s going to be his ticket to getting scholarships. He’s going to be able to pursue this education,” in a way that really resonated with them.

And I’ll also add that Ernie’s dad, Alex, was an athlete himself. He had been a star ping-pong player, among other things. And so, the conditions were really right, where you could imagine some parents being in the situation where they’ve sacrificed so much for their kid to be able to be in this new place and pursue an education.

And if Coach Isser had focused on other things, like, for example, maybe how talented he was at basketball and what a gift it would be to the sport for him to play, like, I don’t know how that would’ve changed his parents’ calculations.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, good for basketball, that’s not our priority right now. Okay.

Emily Falk
Yeah. And so, the people who are receiving the message, his parents, have one set of things that’s really important to them, and through this conversation, Coach Isser was able to kind of highlight for them what an amazing opportunity this talent that Ernie had could afford. And so, there’s a really incredible story of them coming to the gym one night to watch him play basketball. They closed the store, which was something that they never typically did.

And they came in to the gym, and they didn’t even recognize him on the court in his uniform and playing, and so they were like, “Where’s our kid?” And then, it turned out that there he was, like, being amazing on the court. And after seeing that, I think that made it even more concrete and vivid for them, like what was possible.

And so then, they became really big supporters of him playing basketball. They released him from his duties working at the store. And he did go on to have a really incredible college career and, eventually, moved into the NBA.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you mentioned releasing duties from the store. So, whereas, before, it sounds like, was a bit more of a, “Okay, we tolerate this basketball thing because it’s a thing you like to do,” and then they got shifted over to, “Oh, wait a minute. This is the ticket to all the things that we’ve been trying to create for you, so now we’re all in on you and basketball.”

Emily Falk
Yeah, I’m not sure even how much they talked about it before Coach Isser brought it up, right? Like, this incredibly amazing story that highlights his parents not even recognizing him at the gym. I think it wasn’t on their radar that this was something he did. Like, he went to the playground, he played with his friends, he did whatever he did after school, and then the coach kind of brought that into their focus.

So, thinking about that first part of decision-making process of, like, “What possibilities are even available?” Coach Isser sort of foregrounded this as something that could be a path for their kid, where I don’t know how many conversations Ernie and his parents were having before that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s say that we’re to utilize to use this cool brain science to see some good results in our lives, and maybe there’s any number of behaviors that we would like to change, maybe, “I wish I could focus longer, or on difficult strategic high-impact career things, or exercise, or have some challenging conversations with folks.”

If we want to make a shift in what we’re doing to doing more of the things that we think we “should” or would be good for us to do, where do we start?

Emily Falk
Yeah, let’s stick with the Ernie example for a little bit longer there because I think, although we’ve been talking about sort of his parents’ decision-making process, thinking about that long-term future for him, which is often something that his parents or as managers are trying to do, Ernie had different motivations for playing basketball.

He was playing basketball because he loved it. It was a way to make friends. It was a way to do something that felt really joyful for him in the moment. And I think that is a really instructive path towards success.

So, in particular, we often focus so much on distant outcomes, and in doing the thing that we think is going to be the best for us that we disregard or down-weight the things that, actually, is going to make the process joyful.

And so, going back to that idea that our brain has this system for calculating psychological distance, like our self-relevant system calculates what’s me and what’s not me, and it prioritizes the things that are immediately rewarding, that are socially similar to me, that are geographically close to me.

And so, when we think about how we can make those choices that you’re describing easier, I think one of the things that we can do is try to being them psychologically closer, try to bring the rewards psychologically closer.

And so, just to be concrete about what I mean, so you’re talking about, like, networking as one example. Sometimes we think about how we can take advantage of a conference or a new situation or we’re going to meet people at work as an opportunity to network and to build relationships that are going to be useful in the future.

But I think when people think about it that way, it’s kind of obvious why you would dread that, it’s like, “I’m going to kind of muddle through these maybe awkward interactions in service of some payoff that’s in the distant future.”

Whereas, if we think about, like, the chance to get to know somebody now and to actually have fun with a few people that we care about, like our peers, I think that can be a more successful strategy because it’s fun in the moment. So, it’s rewarding now but it also is building those bridges to the future.

And what I would say about that also is when we think about research on conversation, that people often underestimate how fun conversations with strangers are going to be. And so, maybe we are dreading things unnecessarily. Like, when you actually start to ask people questions that you’re curious to know the answers to, rather than just kind of the trite small talk stuff, then it actually can be really fun.

We also tend to underestimate how much other people like us. And so, people sometimes avoid having conversations because they’re worried that other people don’t want to have them but then it turns out that they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you’re great, Emily, and I like you.

Emily Falk
I think you’re great, too, Pete. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we bring it close to us. And then I want to hear a bit about, when you say “like me” or “not like me,” my buddy, Scott, gave me a tip from somewhere about how it can actually be quite powerful to say, as we’re doing a thing that we want to do more of, it’s like, “Oh, it is so like me to wake up early and exercise.” And I was like, “Is that a real thing, Scott?” Tell us, Emily, is that a real thing?

Emily Falk
Yeah. Well, that is a good strategy in terms of thinking about the ways that the things that we want to do can be congruent with aspects of our personality or identity already. So, in the book, I talk a little bit about an experience that I had talking with my brother who is a real athlete. And when I was growing up, I didn’t really think of myself as specifically an athlete or a runner. I run to de-stress, I exercise for my mental health, but my siblings have always been much more athletic than I am.

And one day my brother came to me, and he said, “You know, if you did some targeted workouts, you could get much faster.” And initially I was like, “Why would I want to do that?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Speed? Who cares?”

Emily Falk
Yeah, right. Like, “Why do I need to run faster? Like, I have this other goal in mind.” And he was like, “Well, if you got faster, then you could hear the gossip on runs with me and Lily,” my sister. So, that was one motivation. But in terms of whether I was capable of it, he said to me, “Academics often make really good runners because they know how to plan and work hard towards a goal. And you already have all of these mental skills that you would need in order to be a really good runner.”

And so, he kind of reframed what I would think of as like a dichotomy previously of like nerd versus jock, like, “I’m really good at math and science, and I really like school.” And, instead, he said, “No, actually those things that make you really good at your job also could make you really good at this other thing.” And so, by connecting that aspect of my identity with this thing that he wanted me to do, he opened up that possibility.

And so, it’s not like, all of a sudden, I’m running marathons as quickly as he is but sometimes, I’ll add a few sprints to the end of my run now. And then there’s this kind of feed-forward cycle, where when we do do a thing that’s compatible with the longer-term goal, then that can become more a part of our identity. So, like, “I am a person who could run faster,” right? And so, then once I have that in mind, it makes it more motivating to do it in the future.

And underneath that, when we think about what’s happening in people’s brains, what we see is that self-relevance and value are really deeply intertwined. Like, there’s been research that Rob Chavez and Dylan Wagner did, where they showed that the same patterns of brain activity that can distinguish between whether somebody rates, say, a photo of a puppy as good or bad, positive or negative, that value calculation, can also distinguish whether somebody, that same person, will say that a given adjective, like boring or intelligent or messy, describes them.

And so, what that means is that, since the brain is kind of conflating self and value in these ways, that we tend to prioritize choices that immediately kind of feel like me and that sometimes we cut off or take off the table of possibilities for things in all different aspects of our life because they don’t necessarily immediately resonate as something that someone like me would do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking about Bob Cialdini’s work with, who’s on the show and he’s amazing, Pre-Suasion, where he asked folks, I think the study was they asked folks to check out a new energy drink or a new food or beverage of some sort. And most people are not interested, like, “Hey, I’m just trying to shop, like go away.”

But if he prefaced it with, “Would you consider yourself an adventurous person?” and most people are like, “Well, adventurous is good. And I guess kind of, yeah.” It’s like, well, that was the pre-question. And then he asked, “Well, would you like to then try this new product?” The response rates went up because I think, in so doing, he made kind of a bridge in terms of, “Oh, yeah, trying this new product is congruent with who I am. I am an adventurous person and, therefore, I try new foods and beverages. Why not?”

Emily Falk
And that’s a great example of sort of that second part of value calculation, where if you want to change the way that you’re responding to something, or the way somebody else is responding to something, that the context matters so much, right?

And so, in general, maybe you’re moving through a supermarket and you’re thinking about one set of factors, like, “Am I thirsty? Like, have I already had a cup of coffee today?” whatever, right? But, by focusing on this aspect of your identity, like, “Oh, actually, I’m an adventurous person,” that is shifting the spotlight onto a different part of, like, the choice space, right? And so, it’s making it easier for you to say yes to that thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, you also had some research showing that our brain activity in the value system predicts whether or not we’re going to do some stuff better than whether we, ourselves, say we’re going to do the thing, whether it’s about using sunscreen or reducing smoking or exercising more. Can you speak a bit more on this?

Emily Falk
Sure. And I would say that those sources of information complement each other. So, it’s not necessarily that the brain is better, but that sometimes it gives different information than when we ask people about things like their intentions to change their behavior or their confidence in their ability to do it or their attitudes, like about the behavior in question.

And so, just like you said, we found that when you look at what happens in people’s brains, as they’re being exposed to these messages about all different kinds of behaviors, it can help predict not only whether people are going to change their behavior, but also what kinds of messages are going to be effective in shifting people’s preferences or other kinds of things that they do.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, under the hood, is it that we can observe, I’m talking about, brain waves or activation energy? What is the thing we’re seeing? And what does it mean in terms of “activity” in the value system?

Emily Falk
There are a lot of different neuroimaging techniques that scientists use to measure brain activity. Most of the studies in what we value focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, which uses changes in oxygenated and deoxygenated blood as a proxy for brain activity. So, the way that MRI, magnetic resonance imaging technology works is that there’s a big magnet and a changing magnetic field, and all of your blood has hemoglobin, like little tiny bits of iron that are susceptible to that magnetic field.

And so, what we can do is we can follow the change in concentrations of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood that are going to fuel your brain cells. All of the cells in your body need oxygen and glucose in order to function. And so, that’s why when certain parts of your brain are firing a lot, then they’re consuming more of that energy, and so the blood flow changes in order to supply that.

And so, the fMRI tracks, over the course of seconds, how much is the blood oxygen level dependent signal shifting. And so, when we say that the activation within the value system is changing, what we mean is that certain neurons in your brain are firing in a way that is then changing how the blood is flowing and supplying them with energy, and that we can pick up on that proxy for brain activity.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. Because I’ve read that a lot, I was like, “Oh, FMRI studies show activation,” I was like, “How exactly does that even work?” So now we know. Thank you. That’s fun.

So, then, I guess I’m curious, it sounds like, as I’m imagining a person who’s hearing about a message about exercising more, and who ends up doing it, and then someone who doesn’t, the difference is that, in their brain, the parts associated with the value system are kind of they’re working it, they’re in it, they’re fired up, they’re doing the thing. And then someone else is, I guess, less so into it.

So, I’m curious, could you maybe venture to speculate, what are the kinds of things happening inside someone’s mind? What does it sound like when their value system activity is revved up versus what is it not? What is maybe a snippet of example illustrative internal dialogue sound like?

Emily Falk
Great. So, we started to talk a little bit before about some of the things that might make people more open to changing. So, one of them is feeling like there’s a more immediate reward.

In studies that we’ve run, looking at people who were relatively sedentary, and we’re trying to coach them to be more physically active, we may give them messages about how or why they would do that.

So, stuff like, “People who are at your level of physical inactivity are at increased risk for heart disease,” or, “The best parking spots are the ones that are farthest away. So, park at the edge of the parking lot and get some extra steps as you’re walking into your office.” And for a lot of us, when we get this kind of coaching that suggests that stuff we were doing in the past might not be optimal, one of the reactions that it triggers is defensiveness.

And that goes back to the idea that we conflate self and value, so stuff that I did in the past, we tend to be biased to think like, “Well, that was me, and so, ideally, that was a good decision.” And so, messages or coaching or feedback that suggests that what we were doing in the past isn’t optimal can be threatening to that sense of self.

And so, people, their internal dialogue might be something like, “Yeah. Well, okay, some people who are sedentary are at increased risk of heart disease. But I eat a pretty good diet and I try to keep my salt down, so it’s probably not that big of a deal for me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, this is what low-value system activity kind of sounds like.

Emily Falk
Yeah. So, if it’s like coming up with reasons why this doesn’t really apply to me, or that this information, or advice isn’t particularly valuable, then we’d expect to see less activation within the value system. And so, in the study that I’m describing here, one of the ways that we tried to help people be more open to that information was a process called values affirmation.

Where before they got any of the coaching, half of the people are randomized to get these values affirmations where they choose a value that’s really important to them. And then we have them think about scenarios where that value is going to come into play. So, like, what’s a value that’s really important to you, Pete? Friends and family, creativity, spirituality?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say learning.

Emily Falk
Okay, great. So, learning is a value that’s really important to you. So, we’d have you maybe vividly imagine situations where, like, what’s a time that you have learned something that was really amazing that helped you do your job better? Or what’s a time when you have learned something that changed the way that you interacted with other people? Or what’s a time in the future where learning is going to open new doors for you?

And so, we might have you reflect on these different kinds of scenarios and imagine them vividly. And that would be the values affirmation. People in the control group would do a similar kind of thing but we would give them a value that’s not important to them.

And what we saw was that then going into those coaching messages, which are literally the same for everybody in the study. The only thing that’s different is whether they’ve gotten to reflect on that value that means a lot to them or not beforehand.

The people who got to do that work of kind of zooming out and thinking about what actually matters to them, I think, could then see that, like, whether or not they parked in the farthest parking spot from their work, or actually we’re moving around as much as the federal guidelines recommend, that that doesn’t actually determine whether you’re a good person or not. It’s not the thing that determines your self-worth.

And so, that’s one possibility for why we would see more activation in the value system, more activation in the self-relevant system when they’re exposed to those coaching messages after getting that chance to zoom out.

And then the last piece of the puzzle was the more people showed increased activation in the value or self-relevant system as they were getting those coaching messages, the more they went on to actually change their behavior.

So, for the month afterwards, we sent them text message reminders that were kind of little boosters and measured their physical activity with accelerometers, like imagine a Fitbit that doesn’t give you feedback.

And so, it seemed like the intervention that we did, made people’s brains more receptive to the information. And then the more they were receptive to that information or the more they showed activation in these brain regions, the more likely they were to change their behavior afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really cool and actionable. Thank you. I guess I’m curious, if there’s many, many different values, it seems like some of them would seem to map better to exercise more than others. But just doing it, value affirming any one of your values, makes you more down to exercise kind of whatever the value, regardless of the value?

Emily Falk
Well, there’s two different pathways that I think you’re pointing at. So, one is, in values affirmation, in that literature, mostly people focus on values that don’t have to do with the behavior that you’re trying to change, because the idea is you’re trying to get somebody to kind of zoom out and reduce the threat of the thing that you’re asking them to change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so defensive reduction happens regardless.

Emily Falk
Exactly. So, you’re trying to reduce their defensiveness by anchoring them in something that kind of is bigger than themself, right, something that connects them to other people, ideally, like something that is self-transcendent.

And so, when they reflect on those kinds of things, then the logic is that it can help them see that, like, like I said, whether you exercise or not this week doesn’t make you a good or bad person, right? And that there could be useful information in this coaching, even if it means changing something about what you were doing in the past. So, that’s like one pathway.

You’re also kind of highlighting, though, with your question that, like when my brother tried to connect my identity as an academic with the possibility of running, that’s sort of a different way of tapping into a connection between something that we value and our identity, and tailoring a message in that way can also make it more effective. So, there are tons of studies that have shown that when messages are tailored to people’s values and to their lifestyle and to their demographics that it can make the messages more effective.

So, for example, in a study that Hannah Chua led at Michigan, looking at smokers, when smokers received messages that were tailored to their personal motivations, let’s say, it’s like they’re motivated to quit because smoking is really expensive, or they’re motivated to quit because they have kids and they’re really worried about the effects of secondhand smoke, that those messages both increased activation within parts of medial prefrontal cortex, which is core to several of the kinds of key systems that we’ve been talking about. And that those tailored messages are more effective in changing their behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that you got me thinking about those tailored messages, do we tend to get better results stoking our fears or by amplifying a beautiful positive vision, or the combo?

Emily Falk
There have been meta-analyses that show that fear appeals can work. So, you can get people to change their behavior by highlighting the negative consequences of things that’ll come.

There’s also a set of research on what’s called mental contrasting with implementation intentions, where the idea is that it’s not enough to just fantasize about a future that you want, like the good things that would come. You have to identify what the gap is between where you are now and that future state. So, that’s the mental contrasting part.

And then once you’ve figured out, like, what are the things that are potentially in the way of you moving from where you are right now to where you want to be in the future, then you can use the second part of that MCII, mental contrasting with implementation intentions, the implementation intentions part, which is those if-then plans where you say, “If I’m in this situation, then I will do this.”

So, for example, this has been applied to voting, like making detailed plan of like, “When it’s Tuesday morning and if it’s raining out, I’m going to get my partner, get an umbrella, and go to our polling station anyway,” or, “I’m going to get a ride from my mom,” or whatever the thing is that’s going to help you overcome the obstacle that you’re perceiving.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Emily, in our final minutes here, can you share what are your top-top do’s and don’ts you recommend if we are looking to make a change? Do more of something or do less of something, we want to, if we could, as close as possible, flip the switch, wave the magic wand so that we’re now behaving the way we’d like to be?

Emily Falk

One is, I would say, do think about how you can make the process joyful now. Like, don’t just save all the rewards for later. So, if you’re trying to get more exercise and you really hate running, like, go dancing or choose something, which is gonna be…

Pete Mockaitis
Pickleball.

Emily Falk
Yeah, Pickleball. If you love pickleball, play pickleball, right? Do the thing that’s going to be fun now and also compatible with the longer-term goal. Or if you’re trying to eat healthier, like, choose things that are both tasty for you now and healthy. Like, surely there are things that are at the intersection of those rather than just, like, stomaching something that you are not going to want to do over and over again for the long term. So that’s one thing.

Another thing I would say is thinking about that defensiveness and making sure that when you go into a conversation or situation where you’re going to get feedback, that you don’t throw out helpful advice because it’s potentially threatening to your sense of self, right?

So, knowing that our brain’s default is to kind of conflate self and value, we can be aware and on guard for that kind of feeling. And instead, think about, like, “What are the things that we can learn from the feedback that we’re getting? What are the pieces of feedback that can help us grow and change and do what we want to do?”

And then the last thing that I would say, that we haven’t delved as deeply into, is that social rewards are incredibly powerful. And so, for all of these things, as we’re trying to think about, “How can we make something more rewarding now that the long-term payoff is far in the future?” We can do it with other people who also care about it.

In my lab, we often work together on tasks that are the least fun tasks, work on that thing you don’t want to work on. An acronym for that, that my grad school pal, Elliot Berkman, coined is wotty’d wot wot. And when you do it with other people who also value the goal and the work, then it’s more fun.

And, likewise, you can think about, like in this moment, looking around and trying to think about like, “What can I do to improve the situation that we’re all in?” like, that can feel vague and distant and in the future. But if you think about like, the most important thing is just to do something, right? Like, think about what you want to change, and then do it visibly with other people. That can also be a really powerful reward. So, those are a few for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, beautiful. Thank you, Emily. Well, now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Emily Falk
Yeah. One of my favorites right now is the study that I talked about where they showed that the same brain patterns that can classify whether something is good or bad can also classify whether something is me or not me.

Because I find, personally, that that’s so useful to keep in mind, that those things are getting intertwined in our brains in ways that we may not necessarily be paying attention to, and then can have all of these knock-on effects in terms of making us feel defensive or on the other side, restricting the possibilities that we see for ourselves and others.

And that same research team has gone on to do a bunch of other interesting research about, like, how we represent our sense of self and relate to other people. So, that’s one of my favorites right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Emily Falk
One that I used as a foundation for the last chapter in the book is Maria Ressa’s autobiography, How to Stand Up to a Dictator. And one of the things that I really love about that story is that it highlights how the person that we become, and when we do big hard things like she did, that it’s really a series of these tiny little decisions.

And so, as we think about the choices that we’re making on a day-to-day basis, Maria Ressa went on to get a Nobel Peace Prize for her work in journalism, making all of these extraordinary and brave choices. But when she describes the process of growing up and the things that shaped her values and the things that shaped her daily decisions, it feels accessible and ordinary. So, that’s a book that I really loved recently.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Emily Falk

One of my favorite tools in the lab is what we call fast friends. And fast friends is a protocol where you can randomly assign people to have a friend in the lab. And sometimes you want that because the real history of people’s friendships comes with all kinds of baggage and different people have different kinds of friendships and so on.

So, psychologists develop this tool called fast friends, which starts out with surface-level questions, like, “If you could have dinner with anyone in the world, who would it be?” or, “What constitutes a perfect day for you?” And then the questions get increasingly intimate, building to things like, “If you were to die tonight, what’s one thing that you haven’t told anyone? And why not?” And asking your partner for advice.

And so, over the course of like an hour, you actually become friends with someone. So, that’s a favorite psychological tool for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is this the same questions to fall in love with anyone?

Emily Falk
Yeah. So, the media has often characterized this as, like, 36 questions to fall in love. And, yeah, great, use it for that. But also, I’ve done it with my grandmother. I’ve done it with my father-in-law. I’ve done it with my kids.

I’ve done it with, recently, I went to an experience potluck, which was super fun. People brought different experiences with them and then offered them to each other, kind of like a food potluck, and I brought fast friends, and I got to do it with a stranger who’s now my friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

Emily Falk
Making time to actually focus on quality time with my partner. So, a habit involves something where there’s a cue and then a thing that you repeat and then kind of a reward that you get at the end. And so, after our kids fall asleep, that’s the cue, and then there’s like half an hour to an hour where we hang out in the kitchen and try to actually focus on the present.

And the reward is getting to feel close to a person that I care about. I don’t always do that perfectly. So, I don’t know if it fully counts as a habit because the definition of a habit involves essentially doing it fully on automatic pilot, and that’s kind of the opposite.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you’re being quoted back to yourself often?

Emily Falk
That we’re not ever really making decisions alone.

So, we imagine that we’re making decisions independent of lots of other factors, but the data really bear out the idea that our brains value systems are deeply influenced by what other people are thinking and feeling and doing in so many different areas, ranging from what foods we like to who we think is attractive, to the art that we hang on our walls, to whether we vote.

And so, that idea that we’re not deciding alone and that it’s not just that we’re performing some kind of conformity, but that our value calculations are actually deeply shaped by the people around us. And so, I think that really kind of, like, complicates the idea of authenticity, right? That, like, often, sometimes people think that, when they’re conforming or when they’re following along with other people’s preferences, that that’s somehow inauthentic.

And actually, I think, the people that we choose to spend our time with are really deeply shaping who we are in so many important ways. And so, we want to be aware of that, both in terms of who we’re choosing as role models, and who we’re choosing to spend our time and energy with, and how we’re showing up for our kids and our friends and our colleagues because we’re shaping them also, right? So, the kind of future and the way that the world is going to unfold is starting also in our own minds.

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

Emily Falk
Well, my lab’s website, FalkLab.org, has all of our research papers for free. I also share research, both from our team and others on LinkedIn. And then our lab has a bunch of other social media channels that you can find on the website.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Emily Falk
Just like we know that other people influence us, we’re influencing other people. And so, when we look around and we see big challenges or hard things that we want to have be different in the world, then it’s not that we have to have a perfect plan, but that if we choose something and start to move towards it in a way that prioritizes doing it in a way that feels fun and joyful, and then we can bring other people in and show them what we’re doing, that I do think we have the capacity in aggregate to make big changes.

Pete Mockaitis
Emily, thank you.

Emily Falk
Thank you, Pete. So great to talk to you.

1066: How to Thrive When Your Resilience Runs Out with Dr. Tasha Eurich

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Tasha Eurich shares why pushing through sometimes isn’t enough–and how to bounce back stronger than ever.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hidden costs of “grit gaslighting”
  2. How to know when you’ve hit your “resilience ceiling”
  3. The three needs that unlocks the best version of yourself

About Tasha

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author (Shatterproof, Insight, Bankable Leadership).

She helps people thrive in a changing world by becoming the best of who they are and what they do. With a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Tasha is the principal of The Eurich Group, a boutique consultancy that helps successful executives succeed when the stakes are high.

As an author and sought-after speaker in the self-improvement space, Tasha is a candid yet compassionate voice. Pairing her scientific grounding with 20+ years of experience on the corporate front lines, she reveals the often-surprising secrets to success and fulfillment in the 21st century.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Tasha Eurich Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Tasha, welcome back.

Tasha Eurich

It’s so great to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, it is great to be chatting with you. I am excited to talk about the insights of your book, Shatterproof. I listened to it in its entirety and then had to get the text as well. And there’s so much good stuff to get into. Maybe, could you orient us a little bit? You’ve mentioned that this is the book that you needed as well, and that’s the first time this has happened for you in your author journey. Can you expand a little bit about the health backstory and how that plays into this?

Tasha Eurich

Yeah, I mean, I think my last book I needed. I needed to become more self-aware, even though I didn’t know it when I first started out. But when I say I needed this book, in the context of becoming shatterproof, it was literally, it felt like a matter of life and death. And I look back and I know that it was.

And basically, the very, very short story is I’ve had a lifetime of mysterious health ailments that nobody could diagnose, that nobody really thought was real, like all the tests would come back normal. And I did my best to manage, resiliently, to push through, to power through, to be the fifth-generation entrepreneur that I am, and suck it up and keep going.

And starting in early 2021, when the world was starting to recover from COVID, I started getting very, very sick. And within a couple of months, I was bed bound. I had 10 out of 10 pain every day. My resting heart rate was 150 beats per minute. I was fainting all the time. I couldn’t remember what I had done 10 minutes ago or even the names of my family or my longtime friends.

And the way I started to cope with this was what I’ve always done, right? Which is, you and I were joking about our resilience spreadsheets. I had my list of practices: gratitude, yoga as much as I could, social support, reaching out, telling my husband at the time what I felt and what I thought, trying to reframe challenges as opportunities, and active coping.

I went to every single specialist under the sun, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was having more anxiety than I’d ever had before. I was more depressed than I ever was before. And, eventually, I had the experience that I eventually uncovered, as a researcher, kind of along right around the same time, where I hit my resilience ceiling, which means I sort of lost all ability to cope, and the tools that I’ve been using my entire life stopped working.

And so, I was in a position where I knew there was an alternative because we had this in our data. Some people are able to take the hardest things that happen to them and become better, stronger, wiser. And finding that answer was so personal to me that, you know, I probably spent longer on it than I would have.

I think I was able to dig into, like, the complexity of the solution and tried to make it simple. So, simplicity on the other side of complexity. But the point there was, I think no matter what all of us are facing, we all need this book. We all need an alternative to resiliently powering through, being mentally tough. There’s a point at which that doesn’t help us anymore. And if we keep trying to do it, it hurts us.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Very well said. You had a lovely quote. It’s ascribed as a Chinese proverb. Can you give it to us about when the wind blows?

Tasha Eurich
“When the winds of change rage, some people build shelters and others build windmills.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that just viscerally paints a picture of what’s unique and fresh and lovely about your work here. Because we just recently had Dr. Aditi Nerurkar on sharing about the five resets, and that’s all very good. Yes, indeed, exercise is great. Breathing is good.

Tasha Eurich
And if it helps, yeah, keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Gratitude journaling and such. Like, these are all great, great uses of things to do to feel better, to overcome some stuff. But that shift from shelter to windmill, I think really, really captures it. Because that’s how it can feel sometimes, like, “Oh, man, I’m getting battered. Well, I got to exercise more. I got to breathe more. I got to do some more yoga.” Yeah.

And as you identify, sometimes that just runs out, it’s like, “Oh,” and that’s a spooky feeling, just like, “Uh-oh.”

Tasha Eurich
It is. It is. And what I’ve found, in talking to high achieving-people, you know, of kind of all walks of life, is it is the most distressing for the strongest people because we look back, and we say, “Gosh, maybe this isn’t even the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” which was the case for me. I’m like, “Why can’t I just show up with my gratitude journal and do my meditation and find some relief?”

And then you start to do something that I called grit gaslighting, right, which is where we blame ourselves for struggling under the weight of the very real difficulty of living in this world in the year 2025.

And so, yeah, I think, especially for high-achieving people like your listeners, part of what I want to do with this conversation is normalize that you are not failing at resilience. You are hitting your resilient ceiling, and everyone has one.

Pete Mockaitis
And, boy, the grit gaslighting is something sometimes I even do to myself, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete. Like, I mean, your business is like stellar. Compare this to, like, seven years ago, man. Like, this is great. You’ve got three wonderful children, a wonderful wife, a nice house.”

It’s like things seem like they’re rocking here, and I have been through some tough stuff, and then, throughout history, it seems like folks had it way tougher. You read about the folks fighting the Revolutionary Wars, like, “Oh, jeez.”

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, “What am I whining about, for God’s sake?”

Pete Mockaitis

And yet, and I don’t want to linger too much here because it’s kind of like the nonfiction, the obligatory nonfiction book intro, “Today is, like, so difficult and unprecedented, and that’s why this book is exactly what you must buy.” So, I mean, in a way, that’s quite obvious.

Tasha Eurich
And yet it is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we could maybe briefly hit us with, “Okay, why could we be okay with being not okay in the current climate? And why are we not just weenie babies who can’t tough it out? Like, the folks fighting the Revolutionary War or dealing with ‘real hardship’”?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, like Marvel characters and business casual, right? So, there is a thing, so I’m a scientist. I am a quantitative scientist at heart. And when I first started this research program five years ago, I wanted to answer that question. Because what I was seeing all around me, and I’ve been coaching CEOs for 20 years, was a completely new level of exhaustion, chaos, stress, demands, and not just professionally, personally, in all of their lives, and in my life, too.

And so, what I wanted to see was, like, empirically, was that true or did it just feel that way? And I stumbled upon this excellent, very, very sort of scientific metric called the World Uncertainty Index. And it uses a variety of factors to come up with every year, basically, and it plots the level of uncertainty.

And what I thought I would find was kind of crazy, like, after 9/11, it went down; went kind of crazy during the Great Recession, maybe went down; COVID, it spiked, went down. But what I found was, like, a pretty consistent high level of uncertainty until 2023, 2024, and it went like this, “Boop!” exponentially higher.

And when I show it, when I get to speak about this book, and I show it to audiences, people’s eyes get wide, and they go, “Oh, it’s not just me.” And so, I think you’re right. There is always the sort of drama of the beginning of a nonfiction book. But, for me, as a scientist, like, it’s real. You’re not imagining it. It’s real.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Uncertainty Index, and it’s intriguing. So, 2023, 2024, it doesn’t seem like anything happened. Or, am I overlooking something that happened?

Tasha Eurich
Well, it’s worth going to their website to look. It really gets crazy this year, which is interesting, right?

Pete Mockaitis
With AI, that’s kind of wild.

Tasha Eurich
AI is pretty wild. In the business world or organizations, a lot of sectors are being disrupted that people never thought would be disrupted because of a lot of external factors, and the effects of COVID are still being felt. I think all of that together, along with just the pace of life. Like, think about right now, at this moment, the number of people that need something from you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, geez, I don’t want to.

Tasha Eurich
Right? Like, if I think about that too hard, I start to flip out because it’s like, “Oh, well, this thing I was supposed to have to them a month ago, and this other thing.” And so, even something as “simple” as the cumulative demands, they don’t stop. Like, nobody’s saying, “Well, I’m going to just really need all this stuff from you, and then I’ll go away, and you can go on vacation for three weeks.” So, that’s the piece of it, is the chronic compounding stress across multiple areas of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That really gets me. And I’m thinking about the email inbox, which I struggle with. My buddy, Brent, shout out, listener, sent me one of those Someecards, it said, “Congratulations on hitting inbox zero. Oh, sorry about that.”

Tasha Eurich
Brent for the win. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s how it is, like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, at this very moment, I am caught up. Oh!” And it lasted about nine   seconds.

Tasha Eurich
That is such a great example of this, right? It’s, like, this is Sisyphean, for anybody who’s into philosophy. We’re pushing that boulder up and the boulder rolls right down, and we’re back to zero.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess we got that in terms of modern humans. The folks who had their own challenges of poverty, starvation, war, extreme challenges, no doubt that is brutal. We, however, have our own flavor of brutality being waged upon us that they did not. And it’s so unprecedentedly high levels of uncertainty. And you mentioned in your book that we humans have a real hard time with a lot of uncertainty. What’s that about?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, human beings were not designed for the world that we live in right now. If you think about it, our ancestors were, you know, their lives were difficult. They’re sort of hunting and gathering. They don’t have the comforts that we have now. But they were punctuated by danger, but things would sort of go back to normal.

So, you imagine you’re out hunting, and you see a tiger, and your stress system goes crazy, your cortisol goes up, all of your stress hormones, your fight or flight, and you’re able to escape the tiger. And then you go on with your day, and you go back home, and you have a nice night by the campfire. But the way that we are living now is our bodies actually are built to perceive a passive-aggressive email from our boss, for example, as that tiger running towards us.

And then if you multiply that email with all of the other emails just in your inbox, we have stress hormones coursing through our bodies all the time. So, we were sort of designed to have that danger, go back to normal, and our bodies can restore themselves. But what I say in the book is living in perpetual fight or flight mode isn’t just stressful, it drains the very resources we need to cope with stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s brutal. So, the traditional resilience practices are useful. They have their place and they do some things, and yet they can run out. And you reveal there is another path for us. What’s the path?

Tasha Eurich
So, the best way to think about it is to contrast it with resilience, okay? So, resilience is about putting our heads down, powering through so that we can bounce back. And that’s really important. So, resilience is the capacity to bounce back after hard things. That’s kind of the agreed upon consensus in, at least, for researchers.

What becoming shatterproof means is proactively channeling adversity to grow forward. And we don’t do that by powering through our pain. We do it actually by harnessing the broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And there’s a great analogy, like conceptually, and we’ll talk about what that looks like practically, but, conceptually, have you ever heard of the Japanese art of Kintsugi?

Pete Mockaitis
I have a couple of times. Why don’t you paint the picture?

Tasha Eurich

Yeah, so it’s this beautiful art form where the artist repairs a broken piece of, usually, it’s like pottery or ceramic, with lacquer and precious metal. It’s usually gold. And, basically, like, mending broken objects with precious metal. What that does is it creates a whole new object that is stronger at its broken places.

And the question I always ask is, like, “Instead of powering through our pain and our cracks and our breaking points, what if those became fodder for us to identify what in our environment is tripping us up?” to understand, “What are the needs that we have that are going unmet? What are the self-limiting patterns that we’re showing up with that are making things worse for ourselves? And then how can we actually use that opportunity to pivot?”

And not change everything about who we are, but to try to find new ways of getting our needs met? That’s the idea, is kind of leaning into those cracks, not in a way where we’re pain shopping or anything of that nature, but to lean into those cracks as an opportunity for, you know, I say it’s self-awareness walking.

It’s finding those moments in our worst times where we can find unique insight about ourselves, how we interact with our environment, how we make our choices, how we live our life, so that we can access that best version of ourselves. And I think that’s what we all do, right?

All we want is to be happy and to enjoy our lives, and to find that version of us that we know is there, but that feels like it’s being, you know, it’s handcuffed to a furnace somewhere, and, like, locked up because of all the chaos that can’t come out.

So, that’s kind of the contrast between resilience and shatterproof is don’t just grit your teeth and push through to gain back a status quo that probably wasn’t that good anyway. Use this as fodder for self-examination and self-improvement. And that’s the contrast I make is it’s bouncing back for resilience. When you’re shatterproof, you grow forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say needs, you’ve identified the three to thrive. Can you share what are these needs? And how, of all the needs we might have, Tasha, do we know these are the three to thrive?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. Well, the good news is it is not I who has uncovered these needs. It is hundreds of researchers over more than a half century that have been researching this theory, that it’s actually my favorite theory in psychology. It always has been, and I’ve worked with it, gosh, 20 more years ago in grad school. It’s dating me. It’s called self-determination theory.

And the theory itself asks a really simple question that I think is so unbelievably practical, it’s, “What brings out the best in humans? And what brings out the beast in humans?” And what they’ve identified, and the main researchers are Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, is that there are three biologically programmed psychological needs that every single human existing on earth is programmed to seek.

I’ll tell you what they are, and then I’ll tell you what happens when we get them and when we don’t get them. So, the needs are, number one is confidence, and that’s the need to feel like we’re doing well and we’re getting better. We’re kind of showing up. We’re meeting challenges.

The second is choice. And what that’s about is feeling a sense of agency in our lives, as well as authenticity, “I can be who I am. I can be centered around my values. I don’t have to pretend or fake.” The third need is connection. And that’s a sense that we belong, and that we have close and mutually supportive relationships.

And what they found, these researchers in self-determination theory, is when these three needs are met, we are the best version of ourselves. No matter what is happening in our lives, no matter what fresh chaos is erupting around us, we can rise to the occasion.

But when any one of these needs are, especially, actively frustrated, not just unmet, but being frustrated by the situation we’re in, that’s what brings out the worst version of ourselves, the reactive version, the person that falls back into comfortable but self-limiting habits in the face of these sorts of triggers all around us.

And so, it’s so interesting because, when I was doing this research, it took me a couple of years. It took our research team of 12 people a couple of years to finally figure out that that was what separated shatterproof people from everyone else, was this idea that, “If I’m not getting my needs met in my environment, I need to find new ways of crafting them myself.”

And it sounds so simple. But if you think about the world we live in, that’s sometimes cast as selfish, right? Like, “Well, why are you meeting your own needs when everybody needs something from you?” And it’s the opposite, right? When our biologically programmed psychological needs are met, we become better for ourselves and better for everyone. We can be a better spouse, a better parent, a better employee, a better leader.

So, I think we sort of get it wrong. It’s like the idea that, “I’ll finally be happy when…” It’s like, “I can finally focus on my needs when…” But you have to reverse the equation. That’s where you have to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so powerful, and I find it reassuring. It took y’all a couple of years to get into it. It’s because I think that many of us have probably dealt with that question, like, “Man, what’s my deal? Like, why can’t I just be awesome like I was last year or whenever?”

Tasha Eurich

Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it’s sort of like mysterious. And yet, when you just look very clearly, it’s like, “All right. Well, let’s see. Well, how well are my needs, these needs being met – my needs for confidence, my needs for choice, my needs for connection.” It’s, like, “Oh, well, that’s my deal. That is my deal. There it is, right there.”

Okay. And so then, I would love to hear, within the research, because I’ve heard different typologies for needs. So, we got Forrest Hanson and his resilience book, talking about safety, satisfaction, and connection. So, I see some overlap. And I remember my teenage idol, Tony Robbins, had a rundown of, like, six. Like, certainty, uncertainty, significance.

So, could you maybe expand a bit about, so self-determination theory, what’s some of the most compelling evidence that, “Yup, these are the three as opposed to not nine, not maybe this other thing over here. But, no, no, focus on these three”?

Tasha Eurich

So, I want to differentiate between self-determination theory and every other theory of human needs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tasha Eurich
Self-determination theory. The first paper was published the year I was born, 1980. And if you go to Google Scholar, and you type in self-determination theory, it is article after article after article where, and it’s, actually, it’s not even a theory. They call it a meta theory.

There are so many facets to it that have been rigorously empirically supported that it sort of rises above any theory of needs as a meta theory. So, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Everybody sees that as like the end all, be all, of human needs. There is almost no empirical research to back that up. So, it’s one thing to have a model. It’s another thing to have 50-plus years of rigorous empirical research being done by hundreds and hundreds of well-respected academicians.

And from my standpoint, there’s just no comparison. And, again, it doesn’t mean that we can’t pull from multiple theories. But I think about, you know, I talk about this in the book, a CEO I was coaching as I was writing the book, was leading his company through this massive organizational transformation. He and his wife were caring for aging parents. There was so much going on, and he didn’t have a sense of confidence.

His board was at his throat all the time. His employees were unhappy. Everyone was just saying, like, “Why can’t you be doing this better?” He had very little choice, which is strange as a CEO, but he was constrained by so many things. He was constrained by the health challenges that he was helping to manage.

And then connection, you know, it’s lonely at the top. It’s shockingly lonely. And he would always say, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” and I knew he wasn’t fine. And one day, he called me and, he was like, “Guess what happened? I just got on a call with my team and, like, through the most minor thing that just happened, I started screaming at them. So, I guess I’m not fine, right? I guess I’m not fine.”

And he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” And my response is the response that I would give all of your listeners and that I try to remember myself, which is, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You are a human being whose biologically programmed needs are under threat. And what that’s telling your body is you’re being chased by a tiger.”

So, the good news is there are ways to move through that. But the way, one way to not move through that is to resiliently power through.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. You mentioned Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” And you mentioned in Nietzsche’s, in fact, very own life, he disproved that shortly after writing it. Can you tell us that tale? And then unpack, well, what does determine whether or not an injury makes us stronger or weaker?

Tasha Eurich
I love that question. It really gets to the heart of it. So, this is probably my favorite story in the book. Nietzsche, what I tried to do is trace that expression, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” as early as I possibly could. And I found in one of his books that was published in the late 1800s

And so, he published “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” A month later, he was strolling through a square in Turin, and he came across a horrible scene, a man beating a horse. And for some reason, something snapped in Nietzsche at that moment. Something just snapped. He started hysterically crying. He rushed over.

He threw his arms around the horse. People started gathering. The crowd started gathering. The police were called. Someone was sent to, like, escort him home. And the next day, he was taken to what they called, at the time, an asylum and basically went mad, and he never emerged again. So, what I think is so powerful about that story is saying things, saying things that sound right or that sound good, doesn’t always make them true.

And I think we have to start pressure testing some of this commonly held wisdom about navigating adversity, “Does it sound good or is it actually the right advice?” And I think that, to answer the second part of your question, if I boil it down, the difference between resilient people and shatterproof people, the most fundamental difference is instead of powering through, they use that opportunity to proactively reinvent themselves.

In other words, pausing, observing, looking at some of the things within themselves that might not be the best things, and then intentionally pivoting to find, as we were talking about, new ways of meeting our needs. But I think it’s this orientation of, you know, “There’s got to be a better way. And even if I don’t know what it is, I’m going to set out on this path.”

And, by the way, I give four steps of the shatterproof roadmap in the book, “I’m going to set out on this path to build a better me and what might be one of my worst moments.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love bettering here at How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Tasha Eurich
Better is great.

Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned that personal growth, self-betterment, is just about the tops, a way that we can find positive psychological outcomes. Can you expand on that?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, I talk about, I call it the shatterproof six. And there, in the book, is a list of empirically supported goals that if we start however small, like whatever small step we take, but if we start to pursue them, we’ll meet our deepest psychological needs. Those three to thrive needs that we talked about.

And self-development is one of them. Especially, if our need for confidence is being frustrated, if we commit to personal growth, to expanding our horizons, what the research in self-determination theory shows us is, just by pursuing that goal and by asking, “What’s one step I can take today to get a little bit closer to feeling confident and, like, the best version of myself?” that feeds our needs no matter what’s happening in the situation around us.

And I don’t say that lightly. There’s been research showing that three to thrive need satisfaction works for people who are living in extreme poverty or who are refugees. There’s one really compelling study that was done with Syrian refugees, that showed that a really simple intervention where they pursue these sorts of need-based goals, their entire lives get better. And not in a sort of toxic positivity way, but you start to feel real fulfillment that feeds you during these tough times.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s walk us through this four-part process.

Tasha Eurich
So, the first step is to probe your pain. And what that means, in a nutshell, is to pause and say, “Pushing through my pain or avoiding it is going to give me temporary relief, but there’s two problems.”

Number one is this thing researchers have called negativity rebounds, which means that when we sort of deny the emotional reality that we’re experiencing, especially when it’s really negative, we’re okay for a minute, and then it comes back in full force. So, that’s the first problem.

The second problem with not paying attention to our pain is we’re missing really valuable data, right? So, the question to ask is, well, there’s two. The first is, “In the last week, what are the negative emotions that I’ve been experiencing that are kind of higher than my baseline? So, maybe I’ve been feeling a lot more shame recently, or I’ve felt anger, or I felt sadness.”

And then the second question is, “What is that pain trying to tell me?” So, for me in my health journey, I sort of, I hit my resilience ceiling, I gave up for a couple months, it was not pretty. But one day, I kind of woke up and I started asking myself this question, like, “What am I feeling? I’m feeling helpless. I’m feeling powerless.”

And what I realized was my pain is trying to tell me that I have totally lost control over my life, right? There’s no cavalry that’s going to come save me. I have to save myself. So, that leads us to the second step, which there’s so much richness to this, but again, I’m going to try to boil it down, which is trace our triggers.

So, we look internally first at our pain. Then the next thing we have to do is say, “Okay, what is happening in the world around me that is sort of creating this internal state?” And sometimes we don’t help, but almost always there’s going to be some kind of external trigger. So, it might be, and there’s different triggers for different need frustration.

Someone might have criticized us, hurts our confidence. We might have a micromanaging boss, which hurts our choice. We might have recently ended a relationship, which kills our connection. And so, once we have that trigger, we’re not done. We don’t just get to blame it on everything external. We have to go back inside and say, “Okay, what need is that trigger getting in the way of?”

So, for me, what I realized was the trigger was sort of just being pushed through this healthcare system that is designed for patient volume and not patient helping, right, and being told over and over that what I was experiencing wasn’t real. And that was triggering my choice need. I was massively undernourished in the choice department, and I wasn’t helping myself.

So, that’s actually what leads us to step three, which is to spot your shadows. What happens in the face of triggers, what happens in the face of need frustration, is we have these instinctive responses that feel helpful, but that are actually pushing us further and further away from our need. So, in my example, I was, and I talk about different ways these shadows can show up in the book, but just as an example, I was giving up.

So, there’s some of them that are really counterintuitive. Like, “Why would I, when I’m totally powerless, when by the way, I make a living bossing around CEOs, why would I give up? It makes no sense.” But what I’m doing there is sort of, like, assuming that I’m not going to be able to fix it, and conserving energy, and saying, “I’m not a doctor, I can’t diagnose my rare disease, so I’m just going to sort of go along to get along.”

But what that shadow was doing was leading me further away from a solution. So, the question I always tell people to ask if you’re trying to spot your shadows is, “How is my behavior right now different from when I’m at my best?” And the example that I just gave is a good one, of like, “Normally I do this, but right now I’m doing this.”

So, that brings us to step four, which is pick your pivot. Pivoting means proactively moving away from these familiar shadows that make us feel better, and towards new paths to need fulfillment. And we do that through something called need crafting. And the good news, for step four, is we sort of already talked about this, right? These shatterproof six or the goals, where if we say, for me, like as an example, instead of letting myself give up, my number one goal in life is maximizing my physical health.

And that’s one of the goals that’s been shown that if we pursue, we will have greater need fulfillment, specifically in this case with choice. So, what did I start to do? I changed the way I was showing up. I changed the way I was engaging with doctors. I spent 30 minutes, this is pre-ChatGPT, I spent 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases.

And, eventually, it took me a minute, a couple months, but then I had a list of these are the diseases that I might have. And then I finally had like the one that I knew I had, and I started changing the way I engaged in doctor’s appointments. I would show up with a summary, with a list of objectives. And they would open their mouth and I would say, “Thank you so much for being a participant in my care. Here’s what I would like to accomplish in this appointment.”

And some of them didn’t like it and I had to find new doctors, but I had to become the CEO of my medical journey. And the beauty of this process, just to kind of put a period on the end of a sentence, is, it wasn’t right away, because I had to find the right specialist, but within a few months, I finally had the diagnosis that I knew that I had through my research, which is something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disease where your body can’t produce the two proteins that are in every system of your body.

And so, it leads to these really kind of unrelated, confusing symptoms that usually show up as normal in diagnostics. And I can say with 100% certainty, that if I had not discovered this in our research, I certainly wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I’d be here at all. And if I was here, I would be a shadow of my former self.

And so, when I tell people this works, there is no better way for me to share that than to say, “You know, I didn’t sort of find this as a dispassionate researcher. I found it as a human being whose life felt like it depended on these solutions.” So, that, my friend, is the shatterproof roadmap.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful.

Tasha Eurich
So, there are six kinds of overall objectives. And then, for each of them, there’s a couple of options. So, the first is to rise. And that is making myself better. We already talked about self-development. That’s a perfect example of a shatterproof goal. And those, again, are largely geared towards building confidence.

The second kind of category is to flourish. And that’s making my life better. The health goal that I mentioned is in that category. Something as simple as joy, like rediscovering the love of the game by immersing myself in something I like to do. The third is to activate. Oh, and by the way, sorry, flourish mainly focuses on rebuilding choice, as does the third, which is activate, and that’s kind of making things happen around us.

And I’ll give a couple of examples, because this kind of has different flavors. One of them is advocacy, right, speaking up for myself, making my needs known. Another one is agency, making my own choices, being my own person.

Then we’ve got another choice-based aim, which is to align. And that’s kind of making authentic choices. The best example of a goal under this is authenticity. It’s not going along to get along. It’s not sort of pretending to be something that I’m not. It’s expressing my values and showing up as who I really am.

And then the last two shift over to connection. So, if your connection is thwarted, you might decide to relate, which means that you’re making meaningful connections. I’ll give you a couple examples under this because I think it’s so rich.

One is closeness. So, that’s kind of deepening close relationships by giving and getting support. It might be reactivating a connection that you’ve kind of let slide because of your busy, stressed out, striver lifestyle. Or you might choose forgiveness. Letting go of old grudges, not for them, but for my own wellbeing.

And then another one I really like under this is spirituality. Whatever that looks like to you, religious or not religious, connecting to something greater than ourselves is kind of a powerful but underutilized way of maximizing connection.

The sixth, and final shatterproof kind of category, is contribute, making the world better. And when we engage in service, we’re actually powerfully meeting all three needs. So, you think about Adam Grant’s work when he wrote Give and Take, his first kind of big mega hit book.

There is so much behind that, where when we give, when we contribute to the greater good, when we try to make positive change, it’s satisfying our deepest fundamental human needs. So, when we give, we get. And I think that’s why it’s the one objective that meets all three needs.

Pete Mockaitis
And is it your recommendation that we pick a single goal?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. My goodness, yes. Sometimes people are shocked when I tell them that, in my job of coaching CEOs, we pick one behavior to work on, one high-impact behavior for an entire year. And everyone’s like, “Well, I mean, could that possibly be helpful? Why don’t you do more?” And the reason is, in my experience, if we have any more than one thing we’re trying to focus on developmentally, we’re not going to do it.

I’m coaching a CFO right now who brought me his development plan that we were going to kind of blow up and rethink, and he’s like, “It has five components.” And I covered up the paper, and I said, “Name them.” He couldn’t name a single one. And we both laughed. We said, “Uh-oh.” So, that’s why making your growth and development easy isn’t a crime. It’s a present to your future self.

So, one shatterproof goal, even break it down to one shatterproof habit. Like, for me, it was those 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases. Start there. Keep it something that you can regularly focus on. And that’s something that you go crazy on for a week and then get so overwhelmed that it becomes the last thing on your list.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some more examples of a single behavior of a senior executive for a whole year, just so I get a sense for the scope of a “behavior”?

Tasha Eurich
So, I’ll give you one from someone I just got off the phone with who is doing an amazing job. He’s killing it. His CEO is thrilled, which is improve collaboration with open-mindedness and empathy.

And sometimes it’s even simpler than that. Sometimes it’s, “Listen better.” But if you think about it, if you’re a CEO and you’re not very good at listening and, all of a sudden, you start listening to people, the ripple effects are endless, right? So, I think it’s counterintuitive, but as long as you’re picking something that, in this case, like, your stakeholders are saying is limiting you, it can have a bigger impact than we think.

And I think we just try to overcomplicate development because we’re all type A overachievers, but that’s not how breakthroughs happen, in my experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just to follow this through a little bit more, if we did pick listen better or whatever, what might that mean in terms of, is it a daily behavior that we settle in on next or what’s the very next step?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, so this is kind of getting away from the shatterproof framework, but I think this is a great way of operationalizing it. Usually, what we’ll do is we’ll come up with that development goal, and then we’ll have an action plan that is 10 to 12 specific behavioral elements that they’re going to try to do every day.

So, it might be specific to a certain relationship. It might be how to show up in meetings. Like, the executive I just mentioned, his goal of improving collaboration is asking a question before he provides his opinion. Like, that level of specificity. Or, “Making sure that I find something to agree with before I disagree with someone.” So, it’s 10 to 12 things like that, and then we actually track them.

Most of my clients have a checklist every day. And this is from the Marshall Goldsmith School, “Did I do my best to listen before I talk?” “Did I do my best to amplify others’ contributions?” So, yeah, breaking it down into that level of detail, I think is, again, it feels tedious. It feels something. But that’s how change happens.

And the data are there, like, that process on its own. There’s a reason I have a money back guarantee. If I’m coaching a senior executive and there isn’t quantitative improvement in their targeted behavior as rated by their stakeholders, theoretically, never had to do it, they get their money back. So, that is how serious I am about this process and how much it works.

I think there’s going to come a day when it’s going to happen, right? And that’s what it’s going to be, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years now.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so then, when we were talking about the operationalizing, so if we’re zeroing in, it’s like, “Okay, betterment is the thing.” And then I’ll maybe take another step of specificity into, it could be fitness, it could be listening. You sort of, then, identify a sort of specific daily thing that you’re going to be getting after.

Tasha Eurich
That’s it. And it is not a crime to make it simple, easy, and fast. For me, 30 minutes a day, that’s all I had to do. And I talk about other examples in the book of people who maybe had a little bit more, like, resources mentally and physically at the time. Like, I talk about one woman who had five sort of daily habits, but they were really simple.

It was, like, “Wake up.” She had just gotten out of a really toxic marriage. And one of the things on her list was, “Wake up every day, grateful for the freedom that I now have,” right? Or, “Make sure I ping one or both of my sons and tell them how much I love them.” And all these things to kind of reconnect with herself and her life beyond her ex. I think if we keep it simple, it’s even easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And that’s just the magic. I’m thinking now about the 80/20 Rule, in general. So, in terms of, if we have in the entire universe of what’s your malfunction, what’s your deal in life, it’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, hey, it’s within the zone of the psychological needs of confidence, choice, or connection.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re already eliminated a lot of noise.”

Tasha Eurich
We have.

Pete Mockaitis
But even further, we got, “Okay, hey, it’s choice. Choice is the thing.” And then we can get even, even further, it’s like, “By golly, I’m going to be renovating this house I hate,” or whatever.

Tasha Eurich
Whatever, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And that, in fact, can become transformational.

Tasha Eurich
Over time, like, think about it. If you get one percent closer every day to a full sense of confidence or choice or connection, and if you do that most days, I’m a realist, not all days, most days, you’re going to see some pretty significant improvement in a shorter amount of time than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic! Well, Tasha, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Tasha Eurich
Oh, one thing that I want to mention, because it’s very cool and it’s in service for your listeners, is if anybody is curious about that idea of my resilience ceiling and how close am I to my resilience ceiling, for the launch of Shatterproof, we put together, it’s a really cool tool. It takes about five minutes. It’s an online survey.

You actually have the option of sending it to someone who knows you well, if you want their perspective on how you are kind of showing up, and you get a report back showing you your overall, like, how close you are. You get dimension scores. You get tools. So, if anybody wants to take that, I’m sure you’ll put it in your show notes, but it’s totally free, no strings attached. It’s Resilience-Quiz.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now can you share a favorite quote that you find inspiring?

Tasha Eurich

“Whatever you do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And I love this quote so much by Goethe, it is tattooed on my body. So, that’s my favorite quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Tasha Eurich
Well, I would go, just because it’s fresh in my mind, but that study that I talked about with Syrian refugees and need crafting, this whole idea of crafting our own needs is so new in the research. It took a brilliant young woman named Nele Laporte to kind of introduce it in 2019. But there’s so much promising research around that. I just think it’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Tasha Eurich
I would say nonfiction is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals. And I would say fiction, without question, number one, The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool?

Tasha Eurich
Favorite tool, ooh, we didn’t talk about this, the 222 tool. So, when you are super overwhelmed, you feel like you’re hitting your resilience ceiling, you take a deliberate time out. You ask yourself, “What do I need in the next two minutes, two hours, and two days?” So, the two minutes is psychological first aid. It’s breathing. It’s splashing cold water on your face. It’s saying out loud, like, “I am struggling and I feel overwhelmed.”

Two hours is something that is just for you, something that makes you happy, that relieves the pressure a little bit. Netflix marathon, happy hour with a friend, going to the gym. Two days is a deliberate pause on ruminating, analyzing, and problem-solving, as much as possible, with the thing that’s pushed you to this point.

I use this tool all the time and what I find is, because our subconscious mind is still working on it, but if we give ourselves the space to just relax and be, when we come back to it, not only have we helped a little bit with our need satisfaction, we usually have a better perspective on the problem. So, again, the 222 method, I use a shockingly large amount of days. I think I’m on, like, three by now, so. yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tasha Eurich

My favorite habit is drinking water.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that people really resonate with, they respond to, they retweet in your speeches and such?

Tasha Eurich

Yeah, the grit gaslighting idea seems to be really resonating with people. It’s giving language and permission to experience something that, I think, we shame ourselves for.

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

Tasha Eurich
Oh, goodness, I’m everywhere. TashaEurich.com. Every social media. I’m trying to build my Instagram, so if anybody wants to come hop on there with me, that would be amazing. But, yes, very findable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a final challenge or call to action for someone looking to become awesome at their job?

Tasha Eurich
Two-part question, “What would the best version of you do? And what if you could be you, but better?”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Tasha, thank you. This was fantastic.

Tasha Eurich
Thank you so much. Great to be here again with you.

1064: Timeless Wisdom for Greater Success and and Meaning in Work–According to the Torah–with Mark Gerson

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Mark Gerson shares timeless, practical insights about work–sourced from the Bible and supported by modern social science.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why Bible has helpful gems for folks from all religion–or lack thereof
  2. The one question that leads to greater meaning
  3. The optimal number of hours to work in a week

About Mark

Mark Gerson, a New York–based entrepreneur and philanthropist, is the cofounder of Gerson Lehrman Group, 3I Members, United Hatzalah of Israel, and African Mission Healthcare—where he and his wife, Rabbi Erica Gerson, made the largest gift ever to Christian medical missionaries. 

A graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School, Mark is the author of the national bestseller The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life. Mark’s articles and essays on subjects ranging from Frank Sinatra to the biblical Jonah to the Torah and science of clothing have been published in The New Republic, USA Today, Commentary, and Christian Broadcast Network. Mark lives with his wife and their four children.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Mark Gerson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome!

Mark Gerson
Pete, great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ve been so excited to have this conversation with you for a while. One of my good friends and mentors, Mawi Asgedom, episode one guest, said you were one of the most unique, interesting people he has met in his life.

Mark Gerson
That’s so nice. Wow! I would say the same thing about him. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, no pressure, Mark, we’re just expecting uniquely interesting things to be falling out of your mouth, nonstop here.

Mark Gerson
We’ll see.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom here, and you’ve got an interesting book title that’s a little different than some of the book titles we’ve had on the show and I just want to set the stage a bit. Religiously speaking, our listeners come from all sorts of backgrounds – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, the so-called nones from the Pew Research folks.

And you’ve got a provocative title, God Was Right: How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah Is True. Can you set the stage for us? Is the goal of this book to convert folks to Judaism?

Mark Gerson
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, what are we doing here?

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, the first question to ask is, “What is the Torah?” So, the Torah is the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, what’s called The Five Books of Moses. What Christians call the Old Testament, we call the Torah, we Jews, or The Five Books of Moses. And then you have to ask, “What is the genre of the Torah? What kind of book is the Torah?” And that’s the first question you have to ask approaching any text.

If you’re reading a book of science fiction, and you think it’s science, you’ll say it’s not true, but then the answer is, “No, no, no, you’re reading science fiction. It’s not meant to be science.” So, the first thing we got to do is to get the genre right. What kind of book is the Torah? What kind of book is the Bible? The Bible, and I go in the book as to why it’s not the following things.

It’s not a history book. It’s not a science book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s exactly what Moses says in Deuteronomy 29 it is, it’s a guidebook. Moses says in Deuteronomy, “This book is for your benefit.” The Bible should not be in the religion section of bookstores. It should be in the self-help section of bookstores because it gives intensely practical guidance for everybody about how to live better lives, how to make better decisions, how to find meaning, how to find purpose, how to be healthy, how to negotiate any kind of challenges facing you, how to approach any kind of opportunity that you seek.

The Bible is the most relevant, eternally practical guidebook ever written. So, whatever anyone is thinking about, the Bible is likely to have the answer. And the Bible makes, in the course of being a guidebook, it makes hundreds, maybe thousands of psychological claims, sociological claims, all of which have intensely practical relevance to our daily lives in 2025, regardless of what faith tradition we come from.

And so, what I do in God Was Right, in several dozen chapters, on several dozen subjects, I go through, “Here’s what the Bible says. Here’s what modern social science says,” and then, “Do we see if they line up?” And they always do. And the reason why I approached it that way is because, for 3,000 years, people have asked, “Is the Torah true?”

And until now, we’ve only had faith and experience to go by. But in the 21st century, social scientists have, usually without knowing it, asked the same questions that the Biblical authors asked. So, now we can assess, with social scientific certitude, “Is the Bible true? Is it false? Or is it just a good book that’s right some places, wrong other places?”

And what I’ve discovered, in the course of doing this research, is that the Bible is true on every subject it touches, and it touches every subject relevant to our lives today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Mark, thank you. Well, I just want to set the scene, set the stage, in that folks of all stripes can appreciate this, and if listeners are thinking, “Well, hey, this book seems to be doing it for people for thousands of years, and some folks are finding wisdom in it to this day, and Mark has some extra layers, then there’s richness to be enjoyed here in this conversation.”

And I love it, like you’ve got dozens of chapters in 700 pages unpacking this with fun titles, like, “Why the Israelites Hated the Perfect Food,” and “IKEA Succeeds the Torah and Science of Effort,” so it’s really fun to dig into these pieces. So, lay it on us, Mark, here, we’re all about being awesome at our jobs, why don’t we dig into maybe three insights or so that are really rich?

And if I may be choosy to prioritize, I’d like you to think through what are some of the most transformational insights that can really just be game-changing for a career, and yet are often overlooked? They’re not common practice, so they’re rare but powerful and they point to this ancient wisdom text. No pressure, Mark, but lay it on us.

Mark Gerson
So, let’s just talk about one example. Let’s talk about the Biblical Joseph. So, Joseph is the only person in the Bible who’s called a success.

So, Joseph has the most amazing career of anybody in the Bible. He goes from being an arrogant young man, and then he’s sold into slavery by his brothers, he becomes a slave, then he becomes a prisoner, and then he rises to become the number two man in Egypt, and the number two man in the world. So, he has an incredible career, and he’s the only person called a success.

So, then we have to ask, “When is he called a success?” He’s not called a success when he’s the number two man in Egypt, the pharaoh’s right-hand man. He’s called a success when he’s a slave in the home of Potiphar, and when he’s a prisoner in pharaoh’s jail. So, he achieved success in both these places. And the text goes through, not only that he’s called a success but that he receives promotions in both places.

He goes from being a lowly slave to the head slave. He goes from being a lowly prisoner to the head prisoner. He’s a success. He gets promotions. He achieves success in the same way that we would look at success. So, then we have to ask, “How does he achieve success?” So, what Joseph is, is the God-laden man in the Bible. He talks about God all the time.

So, what does that tell us? That tells us that Joseph is always finding meaning in his work. And when he’s always finding meaning in his work, when he thinks that God is with him everywhere, then he becomes a success. Okay, so how do we think about that in 21st century context? Well, in the 21st century, social scientists have identified a term called job crafting.

So, what is job crafting? Well, a great example of it was, and this story is attributed to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, but one of them visited the NASA headquarters, and they noticed how clean the premises were and they complimented the custodian on what a good job he was doing cleaning the floors.

And the custodian said, “I’m not cleaning the floors. I’m putting a man on the moon.” We see the same thing in a 2001 study from the University of Pennsylvania about hospital custodians, where certain hospital custodians view their jobs as cleaning the rooms, and other hospital custodians view the same job as creating a healthy healing environment for patients.

The people who find meaning in their work, the custodians who view their job as creating a healthy and healing environment for patients, end up getting far more promotions, making far more money than those who don’t. So, what does this teach us? It teaches us that success is not defined by the job you have but how well you do in that job.

So, Joseph is a success as a slave and as a prisoner, but he does very well in those jobs, therefore, he’s called a success. And by the virtue of being successful, he gets promotions. And what we see is exactly the same thing playing out in our day, it’s that those who find meaning in their work, those who can tell themselves a story about how they’re an integral part of creating something important, they get promotions and they make more money than those who don’t.

That’s job crafting. Joseph is the first job crafter. Now there’s a whole social science literature about it.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Mark, I like that a lot. We had Gary Burnison on the show, who’s the CEO of Korn Ferry, and I think, “Well, this guy probably knows a thing or two about advancement in career.” And I go back to this quote all the time, and he says, “I think you have to first start with purpose and start with happiness, because, if you’ve got that purpose and happiness, you’re probably motivated. If you’re motivated, you’re probably going to outperform and love what you’re doing.” And I think that that just resonates deeply right there.

Mark Gerson
Absolutely. The studies on job crafting just keeps showing how beneficial it is for one’s career. There was an analysis in 2019 of 122 independent studies that found that job crafting was associated with improved job performance, job satisfaction, and reduced burnout. And that’s in addition to the promotions and the financial benefits that accrue to people who job-craft.

So, I think what Gary said is exactly right, people who find meaning and purpose in their job, and people can find meaning and purpose in every job, because whatever job someone has is contributing to the production of a good or service that’s valued by others who are willing to part with their money for it.

So, there’s satisfaction, there’s meaning, there’s purpose to be found in every job. And people who find that meaning and purpose in their job, people who job-craft, just like the Biblical Joseph, end up getting that promotion and enjoying successful careers.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And what you described are some roles that seem like they wouldn’t be the most fun or rewarding in terms of janitorial services or, in Joseph’s case, you know, being literally a slave.

Mark Gerson
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet they’re bringing this purpose, this perspective. When you say job crafting, how does one do that in practice?

Mark Gerson
So, one does it in practice by, first, asking oneself, “What job am I in?” And then recognizing that every job has an important function and a crucial purpose. And then they have to articulate what that purpose is. So, the perfect example, I think, is of the hospital custodian from the University of Pennsylvania study. Hospital custodians are creating a healthy, safe, and healing environment for their patients. All they have to do is tell themselves the truth. They’re doing that.

And by telling themselves that truth, they’re setting themselves up for not only to be awesome at their job, but to be successful in the ways that we conventionally define success. So, no matter what job somebody has, the person with the job should think, “What purpose am I serving? What function am I realizing?” And by asking those questions and giving the very truthful answers that will come out of those questions, they’re job crafting and they’re setting themselves up for success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, just to get some reps in, could you share, let’s say someone works in the finance function of a content streaming organization, like Disney Plus or Paramount or something. Lay it on us the job crafting and the purpose.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, great example. So, if someone is in the accounts receivable department, they could say that, “Because of me, our company is able to get the revenues that it’s earned and, consequently, is able to pay all these employees, all my colleagues, and to create a life and a living for all of their families. If the finance function of the streaming department of a content studio did poorly, there would be a lot less revenue to go around. The company wouldn’t get what it earned, and lots of people would not be able to provide for their families.”

If that person in the finance function is in charge of, let’s say, audit or something like that, they can say, “Because of me and because I’m performing this role excellent, because I’m awesome at my job, the company’s books are going to be honest.”

And when a company’s books are honest, it’s the fundamental thing. It’s the foundation of any enterprise’s success. The company’s books have to be reconciled. They have to be honest. They have to be true and they have to be right. And without really good finance people, no organization can make that claim confidently.

So, if someone is doing audits in the finance section of a streaming company, they should tell themselves the absolutely truthful story that, “Because of me, my CEO, my colleagues, my shareholders, my vendors, every other stakeholder, can trust the numbers and, consequently, trust the business.”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I like that pathway in terms of, because, in a way, we can point to multiple stakeholders. Because where I thought that we were going to go first was the end consumer or customers.  And so, in a way, if you’re in the finance function, you’re a bit more removed from the end consumers’ experience of actually streaming the stuff.  But I suppose that you might draw your purpose pathway connections along that vector instead.

Mark Gerson
Right. I mean, the customer is not going to have any music to listen to or films to watch if the company blows up because its books are wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Mark Gerson
And who’s there to assure that the books are right? The person at the finance function of the streaming company.

Pete Mockaitis
Now it’s funny, Mark, I’ve done this sort of exercise, and when I do so, sometimes it’s really inspiring and motivating, like, “Heck, yeah, I do have this purpose, and it’s really meaningful and that’s cool.”

Mark Gerson
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And other times it’s just like, “Yeah, I guess.” It doesn’t have as much sort of emotional resonance for me. And maybe that’s just the human condition of moodiness that we all have. But do you have any pro tips for thinking through, getting the most motivational purpose juice force from the exercise?

Mark Gerson
Let’s just take your example of the finance person at the streaming company. Everything that I said that he should think is absolutely true, right? If the revenues aren’t collected, the company’s in trouble. If the costs aren’t reconciled, the company’s in trouble. There’s no customer experience if the company is in trouble. There’s no other employees being paid and their families being provided for if the company is in trouble.

So, the job crafter is telling the absolute truth. He just has to liberate himself to tell that truth and to give meaning to his work, all of which is completely right. I mean, take the hospital custodian, no one would want to be a patient in a dirty hospital.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve smelled the urine in medical facilities and it’s a real bummer. A real bummer.

Mark Gerson
It’s a real bummer in a lot of ways. So, how much do we appreciate the custodian who makes it smell like the clean establishment it should be, the clean hospital it should be? A lot. We should a lot. And that custodian should be the one who appreciates his work as much as anybody because patients can only have the kind of experience that leads to health if they’re in a clean and sanitary environment. And the environment can only be clean and sanitary if the custodian is awesome at his job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I like about this is the chains of logic feel unassailable, like, “Yeah, this is true and it is hard to argue the counter.”

Mark Gerson
Well, that’s exactly the gift of the Torah. The Torah’s chains of logic are unassailable, exactly as you said so beautifully. It’s exactly right. Which is why we said at the beginning of the conversation that the Torah is a book, it’s a guidebook that can be appreciated, learned from and lived by, by people of all faiths because its secular logic is unassailable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I think we got one really handy nugget here associated with job crafting and purpose and how that ties to the story of Joseph. Lay another one on us, Mark.

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, the Bible says, “Six days you shall work.” God says in the Bible, “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest.” Okay. It’s interesting. He doesn’t say six days work shall be done. He says, “Six days you shall work,” teaching us that there’s something fundamentally important about work, independent of the output. That it’s important for the human soul to work. And there are lots of ways to work.

Someone who throws themselves into volunteering is absolutely working. Someone who’s home with her kids is absolutely working. There are lots of ways to work, but, “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest.” Okay. So, let’s say someone follows that, and observant Jews follow it, Sabbath-observant Jews follow it, how many hours a week can you work if you follow that?

So, let’s say you can work 10 hours a day for five days a week. Now the sixth day, you really can’t work the whole day because part of the Sabbath is preparing for the Sabbath. So, you have to get home before the Sabbath and prepare for it so you’re ready for the Sabbath. So, let’s say you can work a half day on the sixth day. So, five days at 10 hours, one day at five hours, 55 hours a week. Someone who follows the Biblical formula for how much you should work and how much you should rest, and we can get into what rest is, it’s definitely not relaxing, can work 55 hours a week.

Social scientific studies of machinists in World War I and of Twitter employees in 2018 found that the optimal amounts of hours to work in a week is 55, the exact number. From 55 to 60, you have significantly-diminishing margin returns to your work. After 60, the work turns so bad that you start to compromise what you did in the previous 59.

So, the Bible gets it exactly right. The Bible’s telling us you should work 55 hours a week. And modern social science has completely, independently, the study of machinists from World War I and the Twitter study from 2018, they weren’t thinking about the laws of the Sabbath at all. But it turns out the Bible has exactly the number, to the number, of the amounts of hours that a week one should work to optimize production.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, 55 hours. That’s a good number to have in mind. And I’m thinking we had Morten Hansen on the show who had done a great deal of studying associated with high performers and what was the story there.

And I think he also landed in that zone. It’s, like, what they see when they study high performers, it’s somewhere between like 50 to 65-ish hours a week is the max. And beyond that, it’s sort of counterproductive. You’re better off just not doing that because it’s a negative. It’s harmful to push there.

Mark Gerson
Exactly, yeah. After 55, it goes to diminishing returns and then it quickly goes to negative returns. And the shocking thing is that’s exactly what the Bible says, “Six days you shall work,” 10 hours for five days, half a day on Friday, and that’s it, and then you have to rest. And what’s the rest? And this has also been proven by modern social science.

So, six days of work, the seventh day of rest. The rest is not relaxing. The rest is purposeful rest. So, what do we do on Shabbat? What we do on Shabbat is we inaugurate Shabbat on Friday night. We have a dinner with our family and friends. We pray. We have a great time. And then on Saturday, it’s not a day of sleeping as late as you can. Someone who sleeps as late as he can is considered a Sabbath violator. It’s a day of purposeful rest.

We play games with the kids. You might go to synagogue. You might study. You’re renewing the soul. And in that time of purposeful rest, what we’re effectively doing is preparing ourselves to be awesome at our job in the six days to come. So, if you want to be awesome at your job, what the Bible says is work six days and have purposeful rest on the seventh. And that purposeful rest will give you the mental and physical energy that you’re going to need to be great in the following six days.

So, if you want to be great at your job, keep the Sabbath. And, of course, someone could say, “I want to keep Saturday,” “I want to keep Sunday,” “I want to keep Wednesday,” whatever it is, but take one day and commit that day to purposeful rest.

Pete Mockaitis
And again, to the notion of work, a portion of that can be…it’s funny. If we count the childcare, Mark, then I’m blowing past my 55 hours, and maybe that’s why I’m so stressed and exhausted so often.

Mark Gerson
Right, yeah. Well, I mean, childcare can be, I guess some of it can be considered work and some of it can be considered purposeful rest. But let’s just take what we traditionally define as work. Like, more than 55 hours, people who brag about working 60, 80, 100 hours a week, they’re just wasting lots of hours and they shouldn’t brag about it. They shouldn’t do it. No boss should ask it. Why shouldn’t they ask it? Because modern social science is very clear that there will be limited productivity after 55 and negative productivity after 60.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I believe there’s also studies about video game developers will commonly enter a crazy busy season shortly before the release of the game. I don’t know if they call it crunch time. They have a name for it, but they see that exact phenomenon in terms of, actually, you’re just causing problems that you and others have to, now, undo.

Mark Gerson
Oh, very interesting. Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah, very interesting. I mean, it applies to everybody, and that’s kind of the point of the Bible. And why I wrote this book is because it doesn’t say, “Six days, you shall work, and seven days you shall rest for certain jobs.” It says it for everybody. So, the Biblical author might not have known about video game developers, but this formula certainly works for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you brought up the point at the very beginning, like, “You shall work.” It’s not so much about output needs to unfold, but rather we, as humans, need to do work for our own benefit, the doing of the work is necessary. And even if AI makes universal basic income unlock for everyone effortlessly, it would be to our detriment to not be doing work.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, exactly. I remember, so Dr. Ruth was a very close friend of ours, and she would come over for Shabbat on most weeks. And I remember, I had a friend who was over and she said to him, “What do you do?” And he said, “Well, I just retired.” And we just saw this look on her face and she stares right at him, and she says, “You cannot retire. You can rewire but you cannot retire.” Dr. Ruth, as always, was exactly right.

And, Pete, getting to your point, we see this in the social science literature, too. This is the IKEA effect, which was discovered in 2011, which is that people value things more when they build the things themselves. People value the work of their hands. They value work independently of the thing. And the IKEA effect is so interesting because one would think that we would value pre-made furniture more than we would value furniture we have to make with our own hands.

Because everyone would say, “Well, I value my time at something. If I don’t spend my time on it, I should attribute that value to the thing, and I should value the pre-made thing more.” But we don’t. We value the things that we create with our hands more than those that we don’t. Now, why is this? It’s because the Bible was right when it says, “Six days you shall work.” Work has a psychic, spiritual benefit, independent of what the work is and even what the output is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s just true. There are also studies associated with elderly folks, folks that maybe they don’t expect much from them because their health is poor and it’s hard to get around and they’re long retired. And yet, when they adopt real responsibilities associated with doing some mentorship and tutoring, for example, this is a good study, their stress levels increase because, okay, now they got some responsibilities on their plate, and yet their life satisfaction and joy increases all the more.

Mark Gerson
Totally right. And, exactly, the Bible says, “Six days you shall work, the seventh you shall rest.” It doesn’t say until age 65, in which case you should rest all the time. It could, but it doesn’t say that. It’s because it’s a fundamental human need. Now, of course, the job that one can do at 20 is probably not the job that one can do at 80, or it might not be. But the person at 80 or at 50, just find another job.

And again, it doesn’t have to be a paying job, but find something else that can be considered work. And your example, Pete, is great. A mentorship program that imposes responsibility. Not something you pop in and out of, but saying, “I have to be at this place to do mentorship, to do teaching, to do tutoring, to do counseling,” which people of all ages can do really well, that’s work.

And if someone hits a certain age when they can’t do the work they used to do anymore, totally fine. Just identify what skills, what gifts, what talents you have and see where else it can be applied, but the answer can’t be nothing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mark, lay it on us a third timeless insight to help us be awesome at our jobs.

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, let’s start with the story of Rebecca.

So, you have Rebecca and her husband, Isaac. And the question becomes, “Which son gets the birthright?” In other words, “Which son gets the mantle of Jewish leadership?” And Isaac, who has the ability to bestow it, he’s going to give it to Esau. Rebecca wants to give it to Esau’s twin brother, Jacob. Rebecca is right. Esau has his strengths, they’re discussed in the text, but the qualities needed for leadership, to perpetuate the Jewish people into the future are not one of them. The birthright has to go to Jacob.

So, Rebecca engineers in the moment, she’s a brilliant woman, engineers in the moment this ruse where Jacob is going to trick his father into thinking that he, Jacob, is his twin brother, Esau. So, how does Rebecca tell him to do it? Rebekah tells Jacob, “Put on Esau’s best clothes.” Now that’s interesting because the old man, Isaac, he’s blind so what does it matter what Jacob is wearing? But she says put on his best clothes.

So, what do we learn from that, and the many other mentions of clothing in the Bible? Well, the reason why Rebecca tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes is because of her insight, which is amplified throughout the Torah, which is that we are what we wear. So, she’s telling Jacob, “If you want to imitate Esau, if you want to be Esau, you have to wear his clothes,” because what we wear defines us.

Okay. So why is this relevant? Well, first, is it true and is it relevant? Well, there was a study out of Northwestern in 2012 where one group of participants was given a white coat. There were two groups of participants. They were given the same white coat.  One group was told it was a doctor’s coat. One group was told it was a painter’s coat. Then they were given tasks that required paying attention to detail.

Those who were told it was a doctor’s coat did much better. Just by thinking it was a doctor’s coat – it was the same coat – by thinking it was a doctor’s coat they did much better on attention-seeking tasks. There was another study out of Yale from 2014, which was a negotiation workshop. And the young men who wore suits made triple the profit of those who wore sweatpants. Same cohort of students, but those who dressed in a suit did vastly better than those who dressed in sweatpants.

And so, what does this teach us? It teaches us that what we wear is of fundamental importance for so many things, particularly being awesome at our job. Now, I think it’s a fortunate thing that this whole work from home culture is ending. But even if one were to work from home, what would be the lesson from the Bible, which has been validated by modern social science? Dress like you’re in the office.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, it’s funny, as we speak, and you’re looking so sharp, I’m looking at my blazer in the corner, I was like, “I should probably put that on right away.” So, thank you for that. And we have had that come up with Dr. Srini Pillay, what he calls psychological Halloween-ism.

Mark Gerson
Interesting. Great term.

Pete Mockaitis
When we dress the part, it psychologically impacts how you’re approaching things and showing up, so I could see that pathway with the suit. But could you actually give us some more detail on that study, the whole tale there?

Mark Gerson

Well, yeah, the two studies from Northwestern about just by wearing the same coat and being told it’s a doctor’s coat, you get attention-seeking tasks. And you have the Yale study, which showed that men wearing suits did three times better in the negotiation workshop than their colleagues from the same cohort of Yale students who were wearing sweatpants.

There was another study out of UNC from 1998 that said that female students who wore swimsuits scored worse on math tests than those who wore sweaters.

So, the lesson for being awesome at your job is no matter where you are, even if you’re working from home, just dress like you’re working from the office because, I love your term, psychic Halloween-ism, I would have used that in the book if I knew about it at the time, but it’s a great term and it says that we become what we wear, which is exactly what the Bible is telling us in so many different ways, in so many different places.

The canonical place is when Rebecca tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes. Interestingly, not any clothes, “Put on his best clothes. You put on his best clothes; you’ll be Esau. And you got to be Esau to trick your father.” And it works. And, interestingly, there was another study that showed that much of the cure for female depression is in the woman’s closet.

Because when people are feeling depressed, you wake up in the morning, you’re feeling depressed, what will most people typically do? They’ll put on like baggy sweatpants, a big sweatshirt. That makes them more depressed.

So, what this study showed is that if you’re depressed, put on a flowery dress, mix up the colors, and then you feel the vitality that your clothing reflects. So, it’s such an easy hack right from the Bible, which is that if you want to be a certain way, dress that way. Don’t dress how you feel. Dress how you want to feel.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Mark, this is so good, and it’s funny. I mean, I’ve had years of working from home, and there was an era of my life in which I put a great deal of attention into my attire, and I had shirts made to my measurements, and it was when I was peak dating times, like, find a wife time. And I put serious time and money into my clothing, and I have not since my wedding day.

Mark Gerson
Well, it’s interesting. We can talk about the secrets of the top performers, too. So, Deion Sanders, of course, the NFL Hall of Famer, great quote from Dion Sanders, “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good.” I mean, Tiger Woods, he always wore red on tournament Sundays because red, he said, is his power color.

Michael Jordan. So, Michael Jordan started the trend of wearing baggy shorts in the NBA. Why? He was wearing his UNC shorts under his bull shorts. Why was he wearing his UNC shorts? Because, to him, it channeled his beloved coach, Dean Smith.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, boy, there’s so much there in terms of the garments. And then, well, now as we talk about these athletes, it feels sort of like in terms of, like, ritual and memory and – what is it – embodied cognition.

Mark Gerson
Embodied cognition, that’s a term, yeah. Or enclothed cognition.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, sit in this place or with these things or see these reminders, that’s triggering an emotional, physiological state of being, and some physiological states of being are way more conducive to having smart, creative thoughts that are useful, versus just the opposite.

Mark Gerson
Right. And so, what it teaches, you want to be awesome at your job? What you wear matters. That doesn’t dictate what you should wear, but it does dictate that you should be intentional about what you wear.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Whether it’s your UNC shorts or a sharp orange jacket, whatever it may be.

Mark Gerson

Exactly. And so, why do I wear this orange jacket? Because I co-founded the charity United Hatzalah of Israel, which is the country’s crowdsourced system of volunteer first responders. We have 8,000 volunteers throughout the country. All EMTs are paramedics. And our goal is to get to a 911 call within the 90 seconds that separate life from death. We do about 2,300 calls a day.

Well, orange is our color because orange is the safest color at night. And we have a thousand volunteers on motorcycles, and so we have to have the safest color at night. So, I wear this jacket every day to channel United Hatzalah and the love I have for the organization, the respect I have for the volunteers and the purpose that I have with being the chairman of this great organization.

So, I have one of our board members sold his fabric company, and I asked him to make me an orange jacket, and I did. I started wearing it every day. He said, “Well, you can’t wear the same jacket every day.” So, he made me five of them. And I have our logo right here.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is perfect. I remember, I got this suit made to my measurements. It felt amazing. It was delightful in terms of, like, how I felt ready for anything.

Mark Gerson
Exactly, yep. Exactly. You totally nailed it, exactly. By wearing that suit, you felt ready for anything and everything. And what the social science suggests is you were probably more awesome at your job because you felt that way, and you felt that way because of what you’re wearing. It’s one of hundreds of great practical life hacks right from the Bible.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, Mark, tell me any final things you want to share before we hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Mark Gerson
Well, first, what a great conversation. So, I so appreciate it. But, no, I mean, I’d love to share anything and everything in the book. And “God Was Right” will be out in June. And you talked before about, before you were married, you paid great attention to your clothing.

Well, clothing is a separate chapter, but the Biblical formula for dating, romance, and marriage is totally fascinating and it’s been proven absolutely right by modern social science, and it’s unfortunately not practiced today nearly as much as it should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is not a dating show but we can’t just let that lie. Mark, can you give us the two-minute version of that we need to know?

Mark Gerson
Okay. Okay. Now I’m so glad you asked. Okay, so, the happiest marriage in the Bible is between Isaac and Rebecca, which leads us to ask, “Well, how did they decide to marry each other?” So, Abraham sends his servant, Eliezer, to find a wife for Isaac. So, Eliezer sees this young woman, and he only knows three things, and this is key, only three things about the young woman.

He knows she’s from Haran, which is important because Abraham had made souls in Haran. He knows she’s very fair to look upon, and she’s exceedingly generous. She brings water for him and all of his camels. On the basis of those three and only three things, Eliezer says, “She’s the woman for my man, Isaac.”

Then this young woman, Rebecca, is given the choice, “Do you want to go with Eliezer and marry Isaac?” She has never met Isaac, but she knows only two things about him. One, that he’s rich, so he’s a good provider, and, two, that he loves God. So, on the basis of knowing only two or three things, they decide to get married.

Then the text tells us in Genesis 24:67, he married her, she became his wife, and he loved her, in that order, teaching us that the Biblical formula for finding your spouse is identify two or three characteristics, no more. Whether his friends are funny, or whether she likes to ski, or go to the beach, they’re not in there.

Identify two or three genuinely important characteristics, and there aren’t that many to choose from, then just get married. Then start doing spouse-like things, probably iterative acts of giving, and then love will follow. The opposite of that is what people in secular society do now, which is they date for years, often the same person for years. eHarmony said the average dating before marriage is 2.6 years.

In the process, they’re looking for all kinds of characteristics which are completely irrelevant to a happy marriage. In so doing, passing up perfectly good people for no good reason and they eventually decide to get married when they fall in love because, as I said in the book, you can’t fall in love. Love is something you have to cultivate. Love is saying it’s intentional.

You might fall on your face, you might fall down, but you don’t fall in love. What the Bible tells us is that love follows commitment. First, they get married, then she became his wife, they’re two different things. So, marriage is obviously a legal process, then becoming a wife is a much more substantial process, iterative acts of giving, and then love follows.

And the social science demonstrates that the Bible, as usual, totally gets it right. So, the lesson for young people is identify two or three characteristics, then just get married, then start doing spouse-like things, and then you’ll experience love.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, now I’m curious about hiring in terms of do the same principles of having a very short list of critical factors in a candidate apply there too?

Mark Gerson
Yes. As long as those characteristics are the right characteristics, and that’s true in dating too, that two or three characteristics have to be the right characteristics. In hiring, it’s going to be two or three characteristics. And then, of course, you have to do background checks and references and all that.

Pete Mockaitis
May I ask for, I mean, you’ve hired a lot of people in your day, what are your top characteristics?

Mark Gerson
Well, I think one of the underrated characteristics is “What’s the character of the man or woman?”

Pete Mockaitis
Character.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, because if you can find, if you can identify, you can do tests or look to experience for technical capabilities, but you want to work with people of good character. You can trust them when there are, inevitably, adversity and challenges. You can have the confidence that they’re going to stick through it and work through it and be with you. That they’re going to be really concerned about customer problems, they’re going to be really good colleagues. So, yeah, I think character is a very important trait to look for in someone you hire.

Pete Mockaitis
So, character, in a way, can encompass many, many different virtues. Here it sounds like you’re talking about honesty, integrity, and, like, discipline or fortitude. So, when you say character, is that kind of what you mean by that?

Mark Gerson
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Character is encompassing. It’s honesty, integrity, diligence, rigorousness, taking responsibility.

So, I would say, look for people who have it within their character to take responsibility because problems are going to happen, mistakes are going to be made, and someone who takes responsibility for them, that’s the kind of person that you want to work with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there another key factor in addition to character?

Mark Gerson
Character, I would say, is the most important thing, and it is the encompassing thing. But also, problem-solving ability and resilience. And I have a chapter in the book on anti-fragility, which the Bible asserts in Exodus. And then modern social science has completely validated it as something that is both possible and very positive for people.

So, in Exodus, we’re told the more they were, talking about the Jews in the early days of the slave experience, the more they were afflicted, the stronger they became. Now, one would normally think the point of afflicting somebody is to weaken them. But the Bible says the more they were afflicted, the stronger they became.

So, teaching us that afflictions can be strengthening and modern social science has totally validated that, for instance, scientists who’ve had their first paper rejected have more successful careers than scientists who had their first paper accepted, so long as they stay in the profession, showing us that these setbacks, these challenges, these rejections can be a real impetus for growth.

So, I think, when looking for someone to hire, when looking for a vendor to work with, that’s a really important thing. What’s going to happen when things go bad? Are they going to take responsibility? Are they going to complain? Are they going to seek a solution? These are not easily detectable in interviews, but it’s something that every employer should consider and try to ascertain as best as he can.

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

Mark Gerson
Well, I’ll just go with my favorite from the Bible, which I think it was Leviticus 19:2, which is very simple, “Be holy.” Holiness is something that’s available to everybody of every faith in every time, at every strata of society. We can all be holy.

And what does that mean? It means that when confronted with the decision to do the right thing. And it’s such an inspiring piece of wisdom from the Bible because it’s telling us that holiness is completely accessible.

Everybody, anybody can be holy, should be holy. We can understand what holiness is because the Bible wouldn’t tell us to be holy if it were inscrutable. So, we can understand what holiness is and we can do it. And it’s just a great piece of Biblical wisdom to live by.

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

Mark Gerson
So, there was one study in the early 2000s, it’s a fascinating study, which is available for anybody to look up on YouTube, just go to Gorilla Experiment, where you have a bunch of girls throwing a basketball to each other. And then this big guy in a gorilla costume comes in the middle of the game and starts beating his chest. And then he goes off screen. He’s there for like 10 seconds out of the 60.

And then the question is, “How many people noticed there was a gorilla interrupting the game?” And the answer was fewer than half. So, you have this one-minute game of girls throwing the ball, a guy comes in with a gorilla, but because noticing is so hard and so counterintuitive, very few people actually noticed.

Then there was another study out of an Irish insurance company on this that says, “Who are the best drivers?” And this class of people are the best drivers to such an extent that this insurance company, Carole Nash, gives them lower rates. They’re motorcyclists. So, why are motorcyclists the best car drivers?

Well, let’s look at the cause of motorcycle accidents. The bulk of motorcycle accidents are caused by what the traffic experts have named “Look but failed to see.”

In other words, the driver, he looks at the motorcycle in front of him, but he doesn’t see it. So, it’s in his eyesight, the motorcycle, but because he’s not used to seeing motorcycles on the road, because his brain is conditioned only to see cars, he doesn’t actually see the motorcycle right in front of him, he crashes right into it.

So, that’s how important noticing is, is that car drivers very often don’t even notice the motorcyclist right in front of them, even though they can physically see him. That shows how hard noticing is. So, who are the best car drivers? They’re motorcyclists. So, why are they the best car drivers? Because if you’re a motorcyclist, you better be a really good noticer because there are all kinds of perils on the road.

So, motorcyclists become really good noticers and, consequently, they become really good car drivers. And this is the inspiring thing about it, it’s a skill that can be cultivated. The motorcyclists have cultivated the skill of noticing and, consequently, it helps them as car drivers and elsewhere in life.

And then we have to ask, “Well, why is this relevant in my life?” Well, the answer is motorcyclists know. And lots of accidents, and not just car accidents, lots of mistakes that we make in all endeavors of life just come because we’re not noticing things. I mean, maybe you don’t notice that someone in your life is having problems that you can help with. You just don’t notice it. And you just think it’s a normal course of things, but if you notice it, you’d see there’s something different, and you can step in and help that person.

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

Mark Gerson
Probably the most important part of my routine is I run six miles a day, I’ve not missed a day in over 20 years. I have an addiction to exercise. I need to run. And I do my Bible study on the treadmill.

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

Mark Gerson
They can go to GodWasRight.com or email me at Mark@GodWasRight.com.

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

Mark Gerson
Realize that what you’re doing is important. What you’re doing is, if someone is parting with his or her money for a good or service that you’re involved with creating or producing, what you’re doing is really important.

And you should just understand the importance of it and properly define the importance of it, just like we talked about with the hospital custodian who said, “I’m not just cleaning the floors. I’m creating a healthy environment for patients.” And there’s so much wisdom in that hospital custodian. And I think everyone who wants to be awesome at his job and to find meaning and happiness in his work should take that to heart and be like the Biblical Joseph and job craft.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Mark, this is beautiful. Thank you.

Mark Gerson
Thank you so much, Pete. What a great conversation.

1062: How to Build a Personal Brand that Resonates with Lola Linarte

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Lola Linarte reveals her three-part framework for building a strong personal brand.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why every professional should care about their brand
  2. The critical first step to building your brand
  3. The minor tweaks that greatly improve your online presence

About Lola

Lola Linarte is a New York City-based international model, marketing expert, and entrepreneur. She was born in Bluefields, Nicaragua, and was raised in South Padre Island, Texas. Lola attended Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where she studied Social & Cultural Anthropology, which inspired her career transition into media & entertainment.

In 2022, Lola founded Alma Feliz Group, a boutique marketing strategy & personal branding agency that centers on helping emerging & established brands elevate their image, clearly sharing their story, and connecting them with the right audience.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Lola Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Lola, welcome!

Lola Linarte
Hi, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited for this conversation. We are talking personal branding, and we’re old friends, so I can just give it to you straight.

Lola Linarte
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
I think I’m been a little biased against personal branding because of – what is it – like the first exposure rule, like a first impression rule, because my first exposure to the concept of personal branding came from the movie, I don’t know if you remember this one, is one of those Disney pieces. It’s called “The Kid” from the year 2000, starring Bruce Willis, where he meets a young version of himself, little Rusty, and they have an exchange.

So, Bruce Willis works, and here’s the exchange. Rusty says to older Russ, “So what do you do?” And Russ says, “I’m an image consultant.” Rusty says, “What’s that?” Russ says, “I help people present themselves in the best possible light. I tell them what to say, how to act, and what to wear.” And then Rusty says, “So you help people lie about who they are.”

So, as a young, impressionable fellow, I guess I was 17, I encountered this and I thought, “Oh, man, is that what an image consultant is? Is that what personal branding is? That doesn’t sound like a good thing.” But I know you and you’re an upstanding person. So set the record straight for us, Lola.

Lola Linarte
Yeah, no, I mean, that’s so interesting. So, you’re Rusty in this analogy.

Pete Mockaitis
I was. I mean, I’ve warmed up over time, but, you know, first impressions can stick.

Lola Linarte
No, and I get that, right? And, I mean, that is the common misconception. I hear that all the time, right, about what personal branding is, and I really enjoy that. I love a misconception because I love proving it wrong. But, whether you like it or not, if you spent absolutely any time online, if you’ve sent an email, if you’ve started a social media account, if you’ve done a presentation, so if you spent any time in front of a single human, you have a personal brand.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Lola Linarte
It’s how you pitch yourself. It’s what people think about you. People have impressions of you. So sometimes people ask me, “Well, I’m a plumber. Do I have to have a personal brand?” And I’m like, “They’re not separate things. You are your story.”

So, I think that when people think of a personal brand, they think of like an entity, a business, and your brand is just a story. Your brand is your reputation, and it’s just up to you whether or not you’re going to control it or neglect it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so my brand is a story, it’s a reputation, and it exists, just period, because humans are forming impressions of me and saying things about me. So, a story and a reputation attached to me just exists, period, fact.

Lola Linarte
Right. We have interactions with people, and, to your point, we’re already making assumptions about them immediately, good or bad. And one of the things that I ask people, not even my clients, is, “Do you know what happens when we Google you? And if you do, do you like what comes up? And if you don’t, let’s control that.”

And that’s what it is. It’s not lying. It’s just more about controlling the narrative. And what does that mean? Okay, well, are you putting enough work out there that is relevant to where you currently are now, right? I’m sure if I Googled you, I’m sure your podcast would pop up. But, you know, maybe you’re thinking, “Oh, well, maybe my podcast is popping up, but this isn’t. Why?”

And we would ask those questions and then we would come up with those strategies to do that. We wouldn’t take the Bruce Willis approach and lie about it, which I think I’m so glad you started with that because so much of my work is so different, which is why I decided to do what I do because it’s not rooted in aesthetics. It’s not rooted in making you into something you’re not.

It’s bringing out what you already are in a more aligned way and then amplifying that to the world instead of lying it and making it into this pretty thing that’s not sustainable for you because that’s not who you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Lola, you’re really striking some chords, and I’m thinking, you know. I think if you Googled me, it might still be pretty high up there. I should probably take a look. It’s been a while. I recorded a silly video when I was 26 as a speaker reel to do more college keynote speeches, which was fun and silly and cool and was effective. I got some bookings, and shout out to Ian who filmed it and did a great job.

But you’re right in that, for now, 41-year-old Pete Mockaitis, podcaster, professional, business owner, etc., that is not one of the first things I want people to see. That’s more like, “Hey, we’re at a cocktail party. Let me show you this silly thing and we’ll have some laughs about it,” as opposed to, not the ideal first impression, so then, maybe, I should make some efforts to address how that shows up, and say, “Yo, Ian, let’s maybe take my last name off of that so the YouTube video is not so…”

Lola Linarte
“Make it a little more ambiguous.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Not so prominent.” Okay. Understood. So, it makes sense. We have a brand, whether we like it or not, and we may benefit by putting forward some effort into shaping that. So, could you share with us maybe some cool success stories of, “Is this really worth the time and effort? Can I just do me?” Tell us what kinds of good things happen when we put a little bit of effort into this?

Lola Linarte
Yeah, could you go about your day, about your life? Yeah, you can. But any time you put… What’s that’s saying is like, “The grass is green where you water it.” Anytime you put intention behind something, it can’t help but flourish.

So, I have one particular client who is a psychiatrist out of East LA, and up until this point, that’s what she’s done. She’s had a very successful private practice out of East LA, but she got to the point where a lot of my clients do and she thought, “Well, what now? What’s next?”

And she realized, “Okay, I want a new iteration of myself. What does that look like?” She didn’t want to keep coasting. And she could have just kept having a great and successful private practice.

So, she decided to lean in, and say, “Okay, well, I want to see about having trauma-informed businesses and be a speaker. And I also want to help CEOs be better versions of themselves and train them to be better CEOs. But I don’t know exactly how to do that.”

So, we pushed go. And I have a process, I have a framework that I use with my clients that we’ll talk about later, but I brought her through that process where we got really clear on what she wanted to do, and she now has put a backseat to her private practice.

I use the pie of, so she’s now, instead of 90% of her income is coming from that 33% on purpose. And now a majority of her income is coming from her speaking, and that’s giving her so much more fulfillment, much more joy. And that’s something that she’s always wanted to do but didn’t allow herself to do. And through branding herself, unknowingly she leaned into her story.

What the heck does that even mean? That means that she was uncovering that part of herself that she was limiting. And now she’s doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s really cool, and that makes total sense how that can be super powerful when you’re going to the market as a speaker, “And this is this is what I’m offering.” And because, in many ways, your story is a part of “the product,” “the service,” “the offer” that is a keynote speech from this person, and their story, their background, where they’re coming from, what they’re going to be putting out there.

So, I could see that that 100% makes perfect sense to really think about that carefully and put the thought into it and make it awesome. I’m curious, for regular folks with regular jobs, with regular stories, is it still worthwhile?

Lola Linarte
Absolutely. I think about, I have an attorney who has just decided that she wants to lean into a different form of practice of law. She likes her job. She wants to stay in law. She doesn’t want to create her own business. She just decided that where she’s been for the last nine years served her well, and she’s ready for something different.

So, we optimized her LinkedIn. That was a good first step for her. We did new branding headshots, something she had never done. We decided to take a really good look at her resumes, just simple things, things that people neglect after a while. You’re in your job after two, three, four years, you’re coasting. You don’t really think to “zhuzh it,” you know, why would you? Simple things like that, actionable things like that.

Your headline on your LinkedIn, people don’t even think about, your banner on LinkedIn. And then even buying your own domain on the web, buying your name on there, getting that for yourself. Simple things like that. Just having a landing page for her to control, just taking control of her narrative. And so, that now when she goes to, and she’s actively applying to jobs, she just feels more in the driver’s seat as she’s applying to jobs.

So, she’s not going to start a brick and mortar. She’s not going to be having a TED Talk, but she just feels like she is absolutely in control of her talking points as she’s speaking to the next interviewer for her next job.

Pete Mockaitis
Lola, I really appreciate when you share these things. They feel very practical and sensible and, “Ah, yes, but of course,” as opposed to, sometimes branding can feel a little bit airy-fairy in the sense of color palettes.

Lola Linarte
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Which, you know, I’m sure some people look good in certain colors. Okay, that’s a thing. I’m not very good at that, but that whole domain of design. But this is super practical, like straight up, there are people Googling you, seeing your profile on LinkedIn right now. Are they encountering something that is going to be supportive for you and your goals? And I’m thinking about LinkedIn, it’s quite telling. It’ll actually tell you how many people saw your profile recently.

And so, there very well could be dozens or hundreds of occasions in which first impressions of you are occurring that are not even in your conscious awareness, like, “Oh, yeah, I forgot about LinkedIn. I updated that four years ago when I was job hunting and haven’t looked at it since.” That’s a thing that occurs. And yet it’s well worth our time because, I’m thinking, all the time when we haven’t looked at something in a while, it is off.

And I was just speaking with another lawyer who is considering launching a podcast, we were walking through this, and I said, “Hey, on your website, I noticed you had the number for this and the number of cases and the number of damages awarded. If I divide it, it looks like there’s not a whole lot of damages awarded per case. So, if I’m a prospective client, I think, ‘Oh, maybe I’m not going to walk away with much money if I hire these guys.’”

And he’s like, “Wow! Oh, well, thanks. Yeah, we’ll get that updated.” But I’m sure if I went into some nooks and crannies of awesomeatyourjob.com, since it’s been years, I, too, would say, “Oh, geez, why is that still there?” or, “How come I didn’t mention all these awesome things that have happened in these years? Oh, I just haven’t gotten around to it.” And, thusly, I could be missing out on, who knows what opportunities of folks who are sniffing around, it’s like, “Oh, should we book Pete to do this thing? Nah.”

Lola Linarte
I mean, Pete, LinkedIn is how I knew you were doing all these awesome things with your podcasting. It wasn’t through the other forms of social media. It was because you have so many eyeballs on your podcast that the algorithm was like, “Look at this. Look at this thing.” And I thought, “Wow, this is really awesome.”

And people have misconceptions about social media and they have this ick about it, and they don’t want to think about it until they have to think about it, and then it’s too late. Then it’s too late. I mean, not like forever and ever, but you should be just kind of going with it bit by bit by bit by bit. You don’t want to get the facelift at 75. Maybe you get a little bit of work done here and there, here and there along the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us. You’ve got a process framework. Can we hear what’s step one, two, three? How does this go down?

Lola Linarte
Yeah. So, like I said, my clients are exceptional people, and I guide them through this three-phase process that I call anchor, refine, and resonate. So, we start by anchoring, and that’s getting crystal clear on who they are.

And this is what I call the soul work. And this is just getting clear on their identity, their purpose, and figuring out what their next chapter looks like, and what they stand for, and really prioritizing long term-goals. But also, I really get down to their limiting beliefs and where they tend to stumble. And this is really important because this helps me understand what’s kept them from elevating and from evolving, and also how they are currently showing up.

And this entire phase is all about alignment and not aesthetics. And then we move into refinement, we go to refine. So now, with all this information we have with anchor, you have all this internal clarity that you can move into external strategy.

Now it doesn’t have to be empty and lies. Like, you actually have something that’s rooted in you and that you can get so abundantly clear on your strategy being for you, and the messaging is clear for all the touch points, and we can have a cohesive message for yourself in person, online, your website, anything tangible, your headshots, absolutely everything.

And then we move into resonate. And so, resonate, what I mean by that is not you’re just posting every day, which is already hard enough. What I mean by that is you’re connecting to your audience, you know at this point what deals you’re saying yes to, what you’re saying no to, and why, and who you’re connecting to, and what opportunities are right for you, and why you’re saying yes or no.

And that’s my favorite part because we’ve distilled it down so much that, at this point, my clients are figuring it out in much faster rate, and they are just, like, happy that they’re not throwing spaghetti at a wall and hoping to see what sticks. They can identify, “Oh, yeah, I can do that and it doesn’t have to be. My version can look like my version and not what I see or what I think I should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so clarity on identity, purpose, what you stand for, limiting beliefs. Mercy. How does one accomplish all that?

Lola Linarte
It’s really, it’s when you ask yourself these questions. I’ve had to do that myself, right? And I do think it’s best to have someone else do it with you. You can’t do it yourself. I don’t recommend anybody brand themselves. You’re too married to your fears. You’re too married to your likes, your dislikes. You kind of have to have someone outside looking in with a 30,000-foot view, just asking you some of these questions that are kind of holding you accountable.

And your identity, right, it’s like, “Well, what are the biggest goals that you’ve had up until this point, but you haven’t?” Like, really, just understanding how you tick and just figuring out why I like certain things and what makes you, you, and being really good with that. Because I often find that my clients are, while they are brilliant and they’re high achievers, high performance, that doesn’t make them immune to being afraid of showing up fully as who they are.

They’ll sometimes hide behind their accolades, behind their degrees, behind the work, so that when it’s time to show it fully as their most aligned and rooted itself, and speak on their point of view, say, online, they are worried about maybe seeming too much, about maybe perhaps nobody wants to hear this, or maybe this is seeming like self-promotion. And I hear that a lot. And I have to remind them that there’s value in sharing their story and their knowledge and working through that.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. Could you share with us some examples of perhaps posts or statements that give us a feel for, “Hey, this is what it looks like when someone is aligned, rooted, standing for their thing, self-expressed and bold, such that it might feel like too much,” but in your take, it’s just right?

Lola Linarte
Sure. I have this incredible photographer. And she has a completely different take on what boudoir photography should be, but she was so nervous about that because she’s newer into the field and she has a different take on that. And that niche of photography is so small and so specific that people will cut you down and will cut you out.

So, they get very specific on, “It has to be this and it has to be that. If it’s not this, it’s not that.” So, the way that she was defining it was beyond that scope, and she was sort of tiptoeing around that. And she wanted to have it with a couple and she wanted the messaging just to be bolder, and she wanted it to feel cooler. She just wanted it to feel cool.

And when it came down to rebranding her, I just thought, “Man, like, share that, say the thing, say the thing that you want to say. Be bold in absolutely how your experience is.”

And that was very scary for her. She went ahead and, through how she now speaks on her social media, on all her copy, on her website, rather, she’s shown up fully as, like, “My experience is X. Expect this and it’s not that.” And, my God, now, because she’s speaking directly, it’s laser focused to the person who wants that. She’s not trying to be everything for everybody. She’s getting exactly for the person that’s like, “Ah, I found you. Oh, my God. Finally, somebody said the thing.”

And she’s now getting exactly the client that she wants. She’s creating the art that she wants to create in the way that she does.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really interesting in terms of it feels like it’s not what’s done, and it may seem improper to others. And yet that distinctiveness, assuming it’s appealing to a certain segment, will be extra super appealing, like, “Yes, at last, finally, this is what I’ve been looking for.” And I’m thinking, in professional work contexts, could you give us an example of someone living that brand boldly such that other professionals go, “Oh, yeah, that’s our guy. That’s our gal”?

Lola Linarte
So, I recently had a tech, just like a tech whiz, who’s kind of in middle of his career. And he’s kind of ready for the next move. He’s ready for what’s next, but he doesn’t exactly know what that is. And he’s trying to figure out if that means being a speaker. Does that mean just elevating in his career for the next move and getting a promotion?

And so, with him, it’s really exciting because he’s uncovering things about himself that he hasn’t just yet, and same things apply. He hasn’t looked at his LinkedIn. He’s had his website for years. He’s like, “I’ve had this thing for 12 years and I haven’t touched it.” And he’s like, “I’m sure it’s got my college resume on it for goodness sakes.”

And what we’re going to do with him is just make it current to who he is. And the beautiful thing about that is that, once he does that, you can’t help but just uncover things. When you actually spend time with yourself and figuring out next moves, because we tend to just hurry along to the next task with work, with life.

So, with him in particular, he probably does want to speak. He wants to be a speaker. He has so much that he wants to share, but he doesn’t exactly know what he wants to speak on, right? And with our work, he’s going to be untapping what those themes are. They’re already there. He loves to give back to his community. He loves to have an element of being bold.

And so, we’re going to get him out of the theory and platitudes and actually make it applicable to what he’ll end up speaking on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And speaking of theory and platitudes, I want to hear, when it comes to, let’s say the LinkedIn headline, are there any do’s and don’ts? I noticed there’s a lot of ninjas out there.

Lola Linarte
Oh, God, kill me.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it a good or bad idea to be a ninja or a thought leader? I mean, I want to hear, what are some things that you think are great ideas versus very bad ideas to be placed in the LinkedIn profile?

Lola Linarte
I feel like everyone’s a ninja. Everyone’s a ninja. Everyone’s an architect. Kill me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You say no to ninjas and architects. What if someone is literally that, you know, they’re in Japan, and they study these martial arts and they can throw the stars, or they actually design buildings?

Lola Linarte
If you are, please, please share that.

Pete Mockaitis
Little ninjas and architects, we may be called that, otherwise, not.

Lola Linarte
Yeah, no, I think people do that because it’s buzzy, right? People do that because they want to grab attention, because I think it’s something like a max of three seconds that we have before someone is scrolling along and moving past. So, they want to grab your attention and it’s the same old, same old. But beyond titles, that’s what I work with my clients.

It’s, like, don’t tell me what you do. Tell me who you help. Tell me how you’re different. And it’s not going to be because you’re an architect or ninja of marketing or podcasting. Just take some time to think about it. That’s always a really good first step. And something I’ve been telling my clients is maybe you don’t say, “I help my clients do such and such,” but if that’s who you are, that’s what you are, right?

If that’s, like, the first thing that comes to your mind is, “I help my clients uncover the experience of travel in the most luxurious way.” Fine, right? Because that’s something. It’s helping you not just have something generic, right, but that’s also the beauty of AI and ChatGPT. You can have something that you can play with more. But if you spend some time with it, and you curate your voice to it, you’ll come up with something special and different.

But, by God, everyone who’s doing that is just doing that because they feel like they’re unique little snowflakes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Lola Linarte
Yeah, I don’t like that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can I hear what amazing sounds like then? If architect and ninjas, not so amazing, and I help X people do Y is okay, what’s awesome sound like?

Lola Linarte
Awesome sounds like just clear, just very clear. Like, I’ll actually pull mine up, what does mine even say? Not to say mine is the best in the world, but mine says, “Elevating influence and personal brands for high-performing entrepreneurs and executives.” And then I say, “I’m the CEO and founder of Alma Feliz Group.” What does yours say, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I think it’s my title. I think it’s a…

Lola Linarte
Let me see yours. Podcast host and launch consultant. I love that. How to be awesome at your job. CashflowPodcasting.com, discover and share. Yeah, this is great. Yours is very good. And he did not pay me to say that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Yeah. Well, so, yeah, I think you’re right. Well, now I’m going to go over to it too. It’s like discovering and sharing transformational wisdom.

Lola Linarte
That’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s interesting is that, I guess it’s tricky because that might feel like a corporate-y descriptor, but, in my heart of hearts, that is really what gets me fired up, like, “Ooh, I just discovered something awesome. I can’t wait to tell everybody about it.” Yeah.

Lola Linarte
And that’s exactly why that works is because, if I’m reading that, and I am, say, your desired audience, your go-to audience, I’m resonating with that. I am thinking, “Hell, yeah, I want to know what he’s discovering. What is he sharing? What is his version of transformational wisdom that he’s curating for me? And I’m locked in. I’m curious.”

You’ve already done that just with your LinkedIn bio, your headline. I want to know more. And so, it’s that easy. It really is that easy for someone. If you just were to post, “consultant” that leaves too much. It’s too much to question. Or, like, if I was just to say, “marketing and strategist.” Of what? Who cares?

Use up those characters that LinkedIn gives you there. With your “About,” you have such an opportunity there to embed key words. You can talk more about yourself in a very specific strategic way so that you tell more of a story that your experience doesn’t.

Yeah, you talk about your positions that you had, and maybe you got a promotion here and there, but yeah, your “About” can be exactly the story that you want to tell. I tell my clients to look at their LinkedIn as a landing page almost, as an extension of their website.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. Well, tell me any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Lola Linarte
I often have people come to me, and they think that personal branding is just about aesthetics. They think brand and they think it’s really just about, like you said, picking colors and taglines. And it’s really not about that. I always tell people, first, to audit where they currently are. I have a five-question audit on my website and it’s very simple. And just to do a checkpoint with themselves and to figuring out where they are, what they want, and the do’s and don’ts.

And if they don’t like where they are, where they can pivot and change. So, don’t hire a PR agent right away. Don’t start making a logo and spending a bunch of money.  Don’t skip the steps of figuring out who you are, and really figuring out your goals. Do the tedious work. Do the work right now. Do the work on your LinkedIn. Buy your website. I know that it seems like it’s antiquated. It’s not.

I know if we learned anything from last year’s TikTok blackout and Instagram blackout, where a lot of people were using that as their portfolios, that can get lost in a second. So, you want to take control of your narrative and make sure that you have complete control of where your work lies. Don’t neglect what happens when you Google you.

And, just be excited. Stay active and excited about the possibilities that can happen when you pour into your brand and your goals and your dreams.

Pete Mockaitis
Any other misconceptions to clarify?

Lola Linarte
Yeah, I hear all the time that once people have figured it out, okay, so you’ve done all the work, then they’re done. And it doesn’t work that way because I remind people that their personal brand, their story, is living and breathing, and it’s a reflection of their growth, and it evolves, just as we do.

And just as you get a new role, or you have a new position, or you’re growing in your goals and new seasons of your life, so should your brand. It should be reflecting as that. Go back to your LinkedIn, we’ve talked about ad nauseum. Go back to your website. Keep updating these things. And just recognizing your brand isn’t static. It’s growing with you and it’s unfolding in real time.

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

Lola Linarte
So I love this quote by Carlos Castañeda. And it is, “We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.”

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

Lola Linarte
Okay, so back in the day, I thought I was going to be a professor like my parents, and I was studying, I was in a biological anthropology class. And my bioanthropology professor was telling us about symmetry in animals.

And she was saying how, in particular, this study was on peacocks and peahens, and how they had the test of one season of mating – I can’t believe I’m telling you this – on this peacock in this peahen sanctuary, and how they measured the tails, the feathers of this peacock. And nothing else changed from one season to the next. And they trimmed the feathers of this peacock the next season.

So, they tested how many peahens chose this peacock for the next season, and it lessened significantly because of the trimmed feathers on him. And I just thought that was so fascinating how something so simple could make such a significant impact on the, I guess, on the selection for them.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Lola Linarte
I love The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And one of my clients right now, she has this book called The Habits of Healing, it’s Nakeia Homer.

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

Lola Linarte
Tool, like a software?

Pete Mockaitis
It could be, yeah.

Lola Linarte
Oh, man, I’m old school, Pete. I am so old school. I love a good fricking journal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Lola Linarte
Sleep Hygiene 3000. If you can figure out your sleep, your circadian rhythm, and figure out how to sleep, my God, it pays in dividends. You will be so much better for it if you can figure out a more stable rhythm of sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your clients, you hear them quoted back to you often?

Lola Linarte
“If you don’t define your brand, you’re going to leave it up to other people to do it for you.”

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

Lola Linarte
AlmaFelizGroup.com. Alma Feliz is A-L-M-A, Feliz, F-E-L-I-Z group.com. And it’s Alma Feliz throughout all social media, and then Lola Linarte as well for me.

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

Lola Linarte
Always take inventory of where you are. Always ask yourself if you like where you’re headed, if you like where you’ve been. Ask yourself if you’re settling. If you want more, figure out if you’re the thing that’s holding you back.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lola, thank you.

Lola Linarte
Thank you so much, Pete.