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

845: The Surprising Power of Shutting Up with Dan Lyons

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Dan Lyons says: "Listen more, talk less."

Dan Lyons shows why and how silence can be your greatest superpower.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How conversations dramatically influence overall health and happiness.
  2. How to tell if you’re talking too much.
  3. How pauses wield enormous power.

About Dan

Dan Lyons is the author of Disrupted: My Adventures in the Startup Bubble, a New York Times bestselling memoir, and Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. He was also a writer for the hit HBO comedy series Silicon Valley. As a journalist, he spent a decade covering Silicon Valley for Forbes, ran tech coverage at Newsweek, and contributed to Fortune, the New York Times, Wired, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker.

Resources Mentioned

Dan Lyons Interview Transcript

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

Dan Lyons
Well, thanks for having me. It’s nice to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to chat about the wisdom of your book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World. But, first, I have to tell you this is fun for me because I have seen every episode of “Silicon Valley,” and I’d love to hear if you have any particularly fond memories or moments from your work on the show.

Dan Lyons
Well, the funny thing is I was on the writing staff, and we would come in for, I’ll say, 12 weeks or something before shooting began, and then I’d be gone, so I wasn’t ever really there. I think, once, I’ve stayed for a couple of weeks of shooting, so I never really saw the show get made. And one thing that struck me, because I’m not a career TV guy, was that one script that I worked on and delivered, when the episode came out, it had bits and pieces that resembled what was on the page.

Because I think what happens is you write it, then they do a table read that goes well or poorly or somewhat in between, and then they do another rewrite, and then they start shooting but then they tell on every take, tell these guys to improv, and so a lot of the improvised takes are better than what we wrote. And then it goes, it gets edited, and then at that point, they’re looking at the whole season. So, they’re moving things around that used to be in episode two are now in episode five.

So, I learned a lot about how TV gets made, and there were funny moments but, I tell you, it’s kind of a grind. You just sit there, and it’s, like, ten people in a room. Or, imagine, for 12 weeks, five days a week, in the longest business meeting you’ve ever been in, and, yeah, some of the people are really funny but also you spend a lot of time sort of agonizing trying to make plots work. Yeah, it sounds like ridiculous. It’s a lot of work. It’s that hard. But mostly you’re just sitting there dealing with boredom, so, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I wondered how that works in practice, and maybe different writer rooms have different kind of work vibes and styles and approaches. But I imagine it would be a little bit of a divide and conquer, like, “Okay, Dan, you go and write and bring it back.” But is it pretty much, “Nope, all of us are in the room together, slogging through each line of dialogue”?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, the latter. And I don’t know how all shows are, but there’s always a showrunner. And the showrunner really is the head writer and it’s his show. It’s, like, in our case, it was Alec Berg, who’s really a real veteran. And we would all sit around and fill whiteboards with ideas together, and then once we had an episode, it seemed like, “Okay, that’s all there,” Alec would go off and write a version of it in prose, not in screenplay format.

And then he would dish that out to person A, person B, or me, and say, “Okay, now go take this and put it into final draft, put it into screenplay format, and give it back.” And so, it wasn’t really writing. It was more talking and pitching ideas in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you for the inside scoop there.

Dan Lyons
I’ll tell you another thing I learned, which is, and I was always guilty of this myself. You’d watch a show and be like, “I think they’re wrestling with this and that and the commentary.” Every week on “Silicon Valley,” I think it was TechCrunch, or maybe it was another tech publication, would do a big essay. Oh, one was the one that Sarah Lacy had.

Anyway, they do this long, long piece about analyzing the story and who they thought this character was based and what the themes were. And I can tell you, nobody talked about themes or big ideas in the room. It was just joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, “How can we get more jokes? And what plot would be at least plausible?” And, yeah, nobody ever talked about big ideas, or grand themes, or doing satire.

There was some but, yeah, so they would ascribe meaning to these episodes, and I would read it and kind of crack up, going like, “I was there when we envisioned that. Believe me, that was…” so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s funny and reassuring because I remember, as a youngster, when I was first learning about the very concept of a theme in literature, and I was skeptical from the get-go, it’s like, “Do you really think the author had that in mind the whole time when they were doing that?” And I think, in hindsight, my take on this now is like, “Okay, books like ‘1984’ or ‘Animal Farm’ like, okay, is straight up is allegorical. It’s just trying to say something.” But other things, it’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe he just wanted to write a cool story, and you just made that up.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, you know, I taught creative writing and sort of literature after grad school at the University of Michigan. It always comes up, like, “Do you think the poet or the short-story writer of the novels meant that?” And I think sometimes, yeah, clearly, you know what they were trying to do, what the point is they’re trying to make with the story. But you get down to these details of, like, wordplay and stuff, and I actually came to believe, like, “I don’t care if the author meant that. It’s kind of interesting, so let’s just untangle that. Let’s talk about that because it’s kind of interesting.”

But, yeah, I wonder, too, intention, what was there, what wasn’t. Or, who said this? Oh, my son was telling me about this. Oh, no, maybe it was a painter, but he was asked to explain, “What’s this mean?” And he was like, “Well, if I could explain it in words, I wouldn’t need to paint it. It’s a painting, just look at that.” So, yeah, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And sometimes words are something that we just hold onto and keep our mouth shut. Tell us, this book STFU: The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, any particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you made while putting this together?

Dan Lyons
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you a couple. Well, this podcast is about how to be awesome at your job, so I’d talk more about listening. There are a couple of things up front that have to do with health and wellbeing, and the connections between how you speak and even, like, your immune system. There was this fantastic researcher at the University of Arizona, who, for the past 20 years, has been trying to study these connections between speech and other aspects of our lives and our physical and emotional wellbeing, and he’s making these incredible breakthroughs.

And he’s not ever really been written about. There are articles about when each of these studies comes out, but I spent a lot of time with him. He’s just a fascinating, fascinating guy.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s his name?

Dan Lyons
Matthias Mehl, M-E-H-L.

Well, so I don’t know how I stumbled across him. I set out trying to figure out how to keep myself from talking too much, how to talk less because I had a problem with compulsive talking. And I started doing research, like, on two things, “Why do some people talk too much? And how can you fix it?” And I found these researchers who had created something called the talkaholic scale. It was a test you can take. The test, it’s in my book.

And I pegged the needle on talkaholic, just way, way up the charts. And then started trying to figure out, “Well, how do you fix that?” And so, I go off on this journey. And in that journey, I met Matthias Mehl. Because in the ‘90s, there was this book called The Female Brain that came out and talked about who talks more, men or women. And for centuries, the stereotype was always that women are the talkers and men don’t talk.

And The Female Brain came out and said, “Yeah, women speak 20,000 words a day, and men speak 6,000,” ballpark, and like 3x. And Matthias and some of the other people who were at…he was a grad student then at UT Austin, looked at that, and said, “That cannot be true. Those numbers cannot be true.” So, they built this little thing called the electronically activated recorder, or EAR, and, basically, the original was the primitive kind of like digital recording device, and maybe even tapes, with a thing attached to it that would turn it on at random intervals.

So, you had people carry this for a day or a few days, and it turns on and off, and on and off, and from that, you can extrapolate how many words a day they’re speaking. And what they found is, like, no difference. Men and women absolutely the same, both about 16,000 words a day. And, at the extremes, the highest talkers on the survey were all men, so it kind of blew this all up.

So, then he said, “Well, God, if we can study how many words you speak, why couldn’t we study what words you’re using or what kind of conversations you’re having?” So, they did the same thing but they tried to extract the character of your conversations. Then they tried to correlate that with happiness. So, they would have you carry the EAR device and they would calculate how many substantive conversations you had, how many really good conversations you had in a day, and how much of your talk would shift small talk and chitchat.

So, how much of your day is chitchat? And then they found that the people who had more good conversations and fewer bad conversations, or less small talk, turned out to be happier when they did self-scored reports of “How happy are you?” Then he said, “Wow, if people who have good conversations are happier, I wonder if they’re healthier?”

So, he did another passthrough, recorded all these people, then matched them to blood draws that measured their immune system, and found the same thing. Good conversations correlate with healthier immune systems or a lower risk of heart disease and inflammatory disease. And it’s gone a little beyond that, too.

But, yeah, it’s fascinating to think, and it sort of reinforced what I was thinking, that when I stopped just going blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and became intentional about my speech, and spoke less, yeah, I did get happier, I did feel better, and I thought it was just that I was not annoying people as much. But Matthias sort of said, “No, it really is a physical reaction.”

And his example, if you want to know what a good conversation is, is that it’s authentic and you’re being honest and transparent. And the best way he puts it to me is it’s the difference between saying, “Hey, how are you?” or saying, “Hey, how are you?” or, “Really, how are you?” Anyway, that was a huge thing. And I think it does apply to work because I think it’s one thing maybe we don’t always do at work is to really have deep substantive conversations.

And I don’t mean like talking about your personal life, but at work, really digging into really important things that I think probably makes a healthier workplace. I think a lot of the lessons that I learned that apply to individuals also can be applied to an organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Dan, that’s a lot of powerful stuff. And it’s sort of funny, as we’re speaking now, you say you’ve recovered from being a talkaholic.

Dan Lyons
Well, there it is, I just gave you an overly long answer to a simple question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, as I contrast the conversation that we’re having now with videos we’ve seen of you being interviewed elsewhere, and from years past, it is like you have a different demeanor. So, it checked you out.

Dan Lyons
Do you think so?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dan Lyons
Well, I don’t know because I…hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, when you’re talking about “Silicon Valley,” the startups being a Ponzi scheme, I was like, “Wow, that guy is really going.” And it’s like, versus now, it does. It’s a different vibe in terms of just thoughtfully considering the pieces and the pacing. Yeah, I see the difference, Dan, for what that’s worth.

Dan Lyons
That’s good to know. My wife was very relieved that I did a lot of work on this. Can you imagine?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so far, fascinating, the quality of our conversations can determine the quality of our happiness and health. That’s cool right there. So, can you tell us, your subtitle is The Power of Keeping Your Mouth Shut in an Endlessly Noisy World, in addition to being happier and healthier, what else can folks, looking to be awesome at their jobs, get from keeping their mouth shut?

Dan Lyons
Well, I’ll tell you another story. I do a lot about listening, again, so if you’re not talking, obviously, you have the opportunity to listen. And it’s something very few people can do well, and I include myself on that. I don’t think I’m a great listener, although I’m working on it. So, I’ll tell you a story. When I wanted to learn how to listen, there’s an executive coach named Jerry Colonna, who, he’s called sometimes The Yoda of Silicon Valley, or The CEO Whisperer.

So, he works with CEOs, with startup founders, or sometimes big CEOs, and he does these, like, three-day intensely emotional bootcamps, and everybody ends up sobbing, talking about their shame and guilt. He really digs deep into this, but the biggest thing they teach in these workshops is how to listen. And I think it’s become pretty much conventional wisdom now that a leader needs to listen more than talk.

So, I called him up, I got an appointment with him, “Can you just teach me a couple of the techniques you use in a bootcamp? I can’t come to a bootcamp but what I wanted to exercise is what I would do while I was there, and give me a couple of quotes. As a journalist, just, like, give me a couple of good quotes.” And so, we get on the call, and it’s like this, on video, and say hi or whatever. And then I get my laptop, I had my keyboard here, and I’m ready to ask him questions, and he says, “Dan, all right, stop talking. Stop taking notes.” I mean, not talking. “Stop typing. Stop taking notes. Stop and just look at me.”

I’m like, “Oh, crap.” He’s like, “So, what are you thinking right now?” And I’m like, “Enough of a jerk. Well, I’m thinking I’m not going to get anything useful for my chapter.” And he’s like, “Okay, fine.” He’s not rattled by that. And he starts interviewing me, and the questions get more and more intense. And his final one is like, “What do you fear? What do you most fear? What are you afraid of?” And I end up telling him this thing that I probably told two people in my life, like my wife, and I don’t know if I’ve even told anyone else. Like, really deep.

And then I’m welled up, like I’m kind of crying on this call. And then we’re out of time. It’s 30 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s how you listen, Dan.”

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. Listen, dude, so I hang up. And he’s like, “We can book another half hour to do the interview.” And I was like, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” but I hang up and I was like, “No way am I ever getting near that guy ever again. Like, he’s a witch. I’m not getting near whatever he does.” But, also, I was kind of angry, because I was like, “Now, I got nothing. I wasted all this time.”

And then I realized what you just said, like, he didn’t tell me he’s listening. He just showed me how to do it, and then he showed me how devastating it can be, like how powerful it can be if you do it well. So, I keep encountering this in work. We have meetings, and someone says, like, “Let’s have a half hour,” and there’s five of us, and someone just throws up, “Let me share my screen,” and throws up a PowerPoint deck with eight zillion datapoints on it, and just talks for 30 minutes, and the rest of you just sits there, going, “Oh. Mm-hmm.”

Or, companies do all hands, and it’s just an hour and 90 minutes of slam, slam, slam, slides and then five minutes for questions. And I come to think that if you’re a boss or you’re just a manager with a few direct reports, or you’re the CEO of a company, like listening is probably the most powerful thing you can do. Just imagine, if you’re a CEO, all you do is talk, you never listen, you have no idea what’s going on in the business. You live in a bubble. So, yeah, I really, really became, like, born again about the power of listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s powerful stuff. And I’m thinking about times that I’ve really been listened to, and I’m thinking about this dude. His name is Corey McQuade, he was with the Northwestern Mutual Financial Network, and we’re just talking about insurance-y finance-life things. And so we did that in one meeting, and he was really listening, and he’s taking some notes, and then we had a follow-up meeting. He said, “You know, Pete, I heard you say duh, duh, duh, duh.”

And it was weird because it’s like, “I know I told you those things, and yet the fact that you internalized them, held them for this period of time, and are able to summarize, synthesize, represent, share implications, is like casting a spell on me.” It was wild.

Dan Lyons
Right. Yeah, it’s incredibly powerful. And it applies across all sorts of things. There’s research that I cite about working in sales, and how important listening is, talking less, asking questions, and then really listening. So, you’re not trying to sell something, you’re trying to figure out what the problem is that you can solve.

And there’s, like, a study where a company called Dong uses machine learning. They suck up, like, thousands of hours of sales calls, analyzed them down, and tell you your top performers, asked this many questions, speak this many words, or this percent of the conversation is them talking versus the other. Yeah, it’s phenomenal, like it crossed pretty much every aspect of your life. Like, for me, it’s more with my kids and my wife, but where I’ve seen amazing, amazing changes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so just keeping your mouth shut enables listening, although it doesn’t guarantee listening. Dan, can you share some pro tips on, once we’ve shut our mouths, what do we do in order to do great listening from there?

Dan Lyons
Right. So, there’s a concept that people call active listening, which means you’re not just hearing. You’re actually leaning in, you really have to listen, and it’s really, really hard to do. One expert says if you’re listening, really listening, for 30 minutes and you’re not exhausted at the end of it, then you weren’t listening hard enough.

So, yeah, it’s a skill, I think, you can develop, and there are exercises. Like, one is you and I would sit down and I think we pick three questions, and I ask you those three, and you answer them, and I think you speak for five minutes without being interrupted, and then we flip it. Maybe it’s just one question. Anyway, so we take turns.

And if you don’t use the whole five minutes, we still sit there in silence, like I don’t speak for five minutes, and we flip it around. And then you just talk about afterwards, like, “How did you feel when you were listening? How did you feel when you were talking?” So, you talk about the exercise.

There are other types, yeah, where it’s just pretty much a recall with the guy you mentioned, listen to someone talk for 10 minutes then write down everything he came up. Don’t take any notes while they’re talking, so you just listen, then you go write it down. And it’s amazing how little you remember, or you can get better at it. But I think it’s a skill you can develop.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, you just work it, there is practice.

Dan Lyons
You’re probably really good at it. I mean, to be a good interviewer, I think I’ve come to believe, I used to think it was about having great questions. I now think it’s about being a great listener, and then responding.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think the advantage I have in this context is we’re blessed to have so many incoming pitches, and we proactively seek out other folks, so that, by the time we’re talking, I am so fascinated by what you have to say that it’s like I’m chomping at the bit to get all that wisdom.

Dan Lyons
You know, I’m the same way. I used to be a journalist for a long time, and it’s what I loved about the job. If you go meet fascinating people, they would talk to me because I came from a magazine, so they thought, “Okay.” And, yeah, just hear their stories, and I go back and write their stories. But, yeah, it was fascinating.

I still like that. Like this book was really me just calling all sorts of interesting people I interviewed. I found a psychologist who works with prisoners in California, and the big problem they had was when they get up for parole hearing, they start and they’re okay, but then they get a little provoked and they start talking too much, and they will basically blow their parole hearing.

And so, she works with these mostly guys, and to teach them how to breathe and relax, and how to not lose it during an interview, and how to just stay calm and under-talk.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, when it comes to keeping your mouth shut, we got better health, better happiness, better relationships, and the opportunity to listen really impact folks in a cool way and strengthen those connections. Well, now can you share with us how do we know if we are talking too much?

Dan Lyons
That is a really good question. In my case, I just knew that I was annoying people. I would leave a party and say to my wife, “Did I talk too much?” and she’d be like, “Yeah,” because it’s mostly driven by anxiety. So, I’d get anxious in a party and I would start talking, and then I just keep talking. One way you know you’re talking too much is if someone tells you, someone just says to you, “Hey, you really monologue too much. You should let other people get a word in.” I think a lot of people who really talk too much, basically, knows. A lot of people have said to me, “Oh, yeah, I want to read your book because I know I talk too much, it’s like a problem.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, they already know. It’s not we have to look for some special clues in terms of the body postures or body language of the people we’re talking to. You just got to know.

Dan Lyons
Or, you see people trying to pull away, you know what I mean. You’re talking, you realize…

Pete Mockaitis
Their feet are pointed away.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, they literally start to turn their body, or they go, “Oh, I’ve got to meet…” There are clues, and that’s a problem. Some people are such compulsive talkers, like, they don’t pick up on those cues. And so, I actually have a part of the book, too, about how to escape an over-talker. And there’s another version of an over-talker who’s the interrupter. So, how do you break the habit of interrupting? And then, also, how do you deal with someone who’s interrupting you?

Again, it’s almost always men. Men interrupt women constantly. The stats are incredible, and there’s just lots of research, it’s not like it’s one study that found this. But, yeah, so then it’s a lot of times men aren’t aware that they’re interrupting constantly until you record a conversation, and then show it to them, and they’re usually mortified.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.  With the Gong Group that was doing that machine learning and data analyses on the high-performing sales folks, was there something like a magical ratio or range associated with questions asked or proportion listening?

Dan Lyons
The most successful sales reps asked 11 to 14 questions. Fewer than that and you’re not digging deep enough but more than that, and the call starts to feel like an interrogation.

Pete Mockaitis
And is that like in half an hour or what time are we thinking here?

Dan Lyons
They analyzed more than 500,000 calls. On the sales calls with the best close rates, where, one, in which reps knew how to keep quiet and ask questions instead of making a sales pitch, 11 to 14, they deduced the calls worked best and the questions are scattered throughout. And when a rep identifies three to four specific problems, no more, no fewer, that the customer needs to solve, the best reps made calls feel like conversations.

They spent 54% of the call listening, 46% talking. The worst reps talked 72% of the time. And I don’t have how long a call was to land those 11 to 14 questions. But, yeah, those are some interesting datapoints. I don’t know how prevalent the idea is. I think it’s an outdated idea that sales guys or salespeople just talk, talk, talk, they’re fast talkers, and they kind of twist your arms, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that my impression is that most sales folks are aware that they should ask questions and listen. And yet the common practice is often not as much that, even though that is the best practice that is published and known and promulgated. That’s my sense, anyway.

Dan Lyons
I think so, too. And I think that’s only because it’s really hard. Even if you know you should do it, it’s really difficult to do that well. And it’s a skill you really have to work on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say we’re after those benefits of talking less where we clearly understand, “Okay, yup, I am talking too much,” can you break down for us, Dan, some of the key practices or step-by-steps to successfully talking less?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I actually came up with five, that I guess you call them exercises, that I do. So, not every day, but I think of it like a workout that it’s, like, going to the gym and you don’t even have to do this all day every day. You might pick an hour or an opportunity to use one of these is how I view it. So, the first one I have is called ‘when possible, say nothing,’ which is very obvious, but it’s often very possible to say nothing when you’re checking out at the store. So, there are occasions where gabbers like me will start striking up a conversation with someone but you don’t really need to. So, that’s one I practice with.

Another one is mastering the power of the pause. So, it’s this idea that when you pause, it makes people uncomfortable, and can be uncomfortable for you to sit with a pause. There are some research that shows it only takes four seconds, a four-second break in a conversation for people to start feeling uncomfortable. So, if you can master that and live with that uncomfortable silence, you have a lot to gain.

Actually, even in public speaking, but in negotiations, for example, pauses are a really huge thing. And I interviewed a few master negotiators about just that, how to use a pause strategically in a negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Dan, that’s intriguing. So, four seconds of pause makes people uncomfortable. And so, are we saying, one, live with that yourself. But is it sometimes the right answer to, “Go ahead and have them feel uncomfortable in that pause”?

Dan Lyons
Well, no, no. Yeah, exactly right. So, like car salesmen, I think they’re trained to do this and to say, “Here’s the price,” and then sit. And according to one negotiator I interviewed, a woman in Boston, she’s brilliant, she’s like, “When they do this, people actually start negotiating against themselves. It’s often, too, with a job offer and a salary offer that you know it’s too low, and they’ll just sit there.”

So, if I hold ideas, you just do the same back, you go, “Well, hmm, I’ll think about that.” And she told me something evil, which is that, I don’t know if it’s all the time or at least once. She would practice on car salesmen because she felt like they were fair game, and they’re out there, and it’s like easy prey. They’re always available for practice. So, she would find, she’d get an offer for a bait-and-switch offer in the paper, or, no, flyer, “If you want to trade in your car, you can get this much and get this much of a deal on,” whatever new car it was, or some crazy offer you weren’t going to get.

And so, she walked in, and said, “Hey, I’m interested in this offer.” She told me, “I didn’t want to get a new car. I like my car. I have no desire to buy a new car.” She says, “Well, I saw this offer.” They said, “Well, you know, that’s…we can’t blah, blah, blah, we don’t have one of those. But what we can do blah.” And she was like, “No, I came in because there was an offer, so if you can give me this offer, I’ll buy the car.” And then she just waits.

And she said, “They’ll to, like, try stall you. They’ll go out back and talk to the manager. There is no manager.” Like, she worked in the car business, too. She’s like, “They’re not going there. They’re going to have a cup of coffee and just make you sit there.” So, she said, “I brought, like, a thermos and a book, and I would sit there and wait.” She’s like, “I picked a day when I’m just going to do this.”

And she said she knew it wasn’t going to end up in her buying a car, so it was really just sharpening her own skills, “Can I just go and sit with this quiet?” And, eventually, you go back and forth a few times, and they say, “Well, I guess you’re not going to get a car today. Bye.” But, yeah, so, using that discomfort. There’s a story, too, in the book of a guy who was making a big sale to, I don’t know, someone in charge of government in the Middle East to have a franchise to sell candy or chocolate in this country, and the salesman says, “Well, here’s the price,” and the guy says, “Hmm, that’s too high.”

So, the other guy just sat there. And the story goes, he sat there for 45 minutes, and then finally the customer said, “Okay, we have a deal.” Like, they just sat there. I like that. To me, it almost sounded like it can’t be true but, yeah. So, pauses are very powerful. I had other things where I tried to find, add silence to my life.

I found this stuff called forest bathing, which is you go out in the woods and you don’t really do much. You just sit in the forest, usually with a guide, which I found really good. I also think you should quit social media, if not completely, then almost, as much as you can. I think social media is creating mental illness at a societal level, which is also what pushes us all to talk too much. We live in this culture.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, there are some spooky data, especially with teen and pre-teen girls. Ugh.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, right. But also it just, if you think about it, the model they have is “We need to keep you on the site as long as possible so you look at many ads as possible. How do we do that? Well, if you’re just reading, you’re not going to stay that engaged, so we need to get you talking, and sharing, and retweeting, and getting in arguments with people.”

So, the best way to get you engaged is make you angry. “So, we put stuff into your feed, we figure out using machine learning algorithms,” they know collecting thousands of datapoints about you, like down to “How long did you pause over that photo?” Everything. So, they know exactly how to provoke you. But the problem is then that anger you experience online carries with you back into your real life.

So, you get on this dopamine cycle if it feels good, and then you stop and you crave the dopamine, but you’re also creating this cycle of just epinephrine just flowing through your bloodstream all the time which causes all sorts of health problems. Like, for example, you notice how angry people are now compared to 20 years ago? And what’s changed in 20 years? The internet. Social media. So, yeah, I think if you can stay away from it.

I, actually, think there’s a larger problem of information overload, where there’s just so much stuff. I have statistics on how many movies or how many hours of entertainment Netflix is going to make this year. The number is crazy. So, we just have a lot coming at us, and I don’t think our brains have evolved as fast as the internet has.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got some silence, we got quitting social media. Any other key practices?

Dan Lyons
Well, the last one was learn how to listen, which we already talked about. But I tell you, I also interviewed a woman who runs this thing called the International Listening Association. I couldn’t imagine there is a thing like that. They have an annual conference. And I said, “What is this, like people walking around, not talking?” And she said, “Oh, everybody makes that joke.”

And she and I had become friends since then, but she also is a professor. She teaches a course in listening, like the whole course is just how to listen. And it turns out to be very powerful in that you can be interviewing someone, I found. I interviewed someone who’s really, really shy, like almost couldn’t get on the phone to talk, like really, really has social anxiety, so I knew that conversation is going to be difficult.

If I go in rapid-fire questions, blah, blah, blah, like that just going to just shut it down. And so, I had to really take a deep breath, ask my questions and not fire off the next question, just listen, and it kind of worked. And I told this professor about it, I said, “You know, it’s amazing is this woman. The more it went out, she became really fascinating. When she was super shy and uptight at first and really uptight, and by the end, she was laughing, and telling me stories and about her life and growing up.” And I said, “She was the most amazing person.”

And my friend, the professor, said, “That, actually, that’s what happens when you listen to people. They actually do become more interesting.” So, I was like, “Wow, that’s really powerful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s the name of the professor?

Dan Lyons
Her name is Sandra Bodin-Lerner, that’s B-O-D-I-N dash L-E-R-N-E-R. I should introduce you. You might find her to be a really interesting guest. She first got a career, she was like a public-speaking coach for people in business. And now she does that, but she also does listening workshops in companies because they realize, “Oh, yeah, it’s not just about speaking well.”

At one point, she made, I think, it was really fascinating, and we talk a lot about sort of in companies now, of we need to have these difficult conversations. We need to have these conversations and reckon with big issues, but nobody ever tells us how to have a conversation. So, yeah, she’s a fascinating woman.

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

Dan Lyons
No, I’m all good. I appreciate you taking an interest in my book.

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

Dan Lyons
Well, along the lines of this, Winston Churchill’s mother was named Jennie Jerome, and she once described…this is about listening, a story about listening. She once described the difference between having dinner with William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, so two very big, important British politicians.

And she said, when she had dinner with Gladstone, “I left thinking that he was the cleverest man in England. When I had dinner with Disraeli, I left feeling that I was the cleverest woman.” And, to me, that always just summed up why listening works, what the effect it has on the other person.

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine she liked the latter more afterwards.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I believe so. Yeah.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, I think it would be Matthias Mehl’s research about good conversations and the immune system. It’s a remarkable report.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dan Lyons
I’ll just tell you what I’m reading right now, which is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It’s, like, an unbelievable book. It’s huge. I guess, as a writer, I admire it because it won the Pulitzer Prize. Just the writing is amazing. Just the amount of research he did, and how he shaped into a narrative, into a story. It’s phenomenal.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, at work you mean? Yeah, I’d become a big believer in notebooks. I got this while I was researching my book, reading Richard Branson’s book. And Richard Branson is a big believer in listening, and one thing he does is he always carries a notebook and a pen, and takes notes. And he says it’s one way to become a better learner, he forced himself to learn and write things down. And then also you have a record of every meeting you have. So, yeah, in the last two years, I’ve become really, really a believer in notebooks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be all the more awesome at your job?

Dan Lyons
I put sticky notes above my computer screen on the wall, and say things like “Quiet,” “Listen,” “Wrap it up.” I just put reminders not to talk too much. And that habit, it has helped me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Dan Lyons
Yeah, I think it is that the first beat of the book for me was talking less, listening more, speaking with intention, can do so much for you. It can make you happier, healthier, more successful, blah, blah, blah. The second thing I realized that I did not anticipate going in is that the real power of it is that you make the lives of people around you better. So, that’s the real ripple effect of this, and that was quite profound for me.

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

Dan Lyons
Oh, my website DanLyons.io.

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

Dan Lyons
Yeah, yeah. Next time you’re in a meeting, which will be tomorrow, you probably have eight tomorrow, see if you can listen more than talk. Oh, here’s a great exercise. If you’re on a Zoom call with one other person, if the person will agree to let you record the call, record the call, take the recording, send it to Rev.com, or something like that, have it transcribed.

Then print it out and you see, literally, in front of you, just in blocks of texts, how much you talked, how much the other person talked, and then keep trying to work on that so you’re less and less. That, to me, was like an eye-opening exercise and, yeah, I think a really good one to try. If you want to learn to listen more, talk less, that would be a great exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dan, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun as you keep your mouth shut.

Dan Lyons
Yeah, thanks for letting me talk for so long about not talking, but I appreciate it. Thank you.

842: How to Thrive in High-Stakes Situations with Carol Kauffman

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Carol Kauffman says: "If anybody is going to get in your way, please don’t let it be you."

Carol Kauffman reveals her secrets for finding your calm in the biggest moments.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The super question to ask yourself dozens of times a day.
  2. How to avoid being hijacked by stress.
  3. How to find the best approach in any situation.

About Carol

Carol Kauffman is known internationally as a leader in the field of coaching. Carol works extensively with global CEOs and their teams, also serving as an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, visiting professor at Henley Business School (University of Reading, UK), and a senior leadership adviser at Egon Zehnder. Marshall Goldsmith named her the #1 leadership coach, and Thinkers50 ranked her among the world’s top eight coaches.

Resources Mentioned

Carol Kauffman Interview Transcript

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

Carol Kauffman
Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to talk about your latest, Real-Time Leadership: Find Your Winning Moves When the Stakes Are High. But, first, I need to hear about your first job with a violent horse. What is the scoop here?

Carol Kauffman
Oh, okay. That’s my very first job was a pooper scooper, yeah, because we had an illegal kennel in our home when I was growing up, so imagine having 30 dogs, and I’m not understanding why 101 dalmatians is unusual. So, yes, my job was to, one, do pooper scooper, but also was to let the dogs out in the correct order.

So, we’d have two whites, two browns, an apricot, and chocolate, and then you do it again and again and again, and everyone just thought it was the same jobs, the same dogs. So, that was the beginning of my life of crime. The violent horse thing happened by accident, where there was just this beautiful white horse of every girl’s dreams, and I walked in because I was taking horseback riding lessons, and there was a lesson going on.

And I knew I wasn’t supposed to be in there, so I just sort of walked in, and there was a window and a bucket in front of us so I had to turn my back to the horse to look outside to make sure my lesson wasn’t happening. And what I didn’t know was that according to Monty Roberts, who was the original horse whisperer, when you have a naughty horse or a violent one, you turn your back on it by 45 degrees, which is exactly what I had done.

And when I did that, the horse came over and started befriending me. And then that was the beginning of learning about, first of all, nonverbal behavior, and how to relate to animals that everyone is scared of. But if you treat them right, they befriend you rather than attack you, which is what he did to everybody else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful to pick up from an early age. Good stuff.

Carol Kauffman
That was wonderful, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, talking about your book here, Real-Time Leadership, is there a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you made along the way here that really struck you?

Carol Kauffman
Well, that’s interesting. Probably the one thing, I’m not so sure it was counterintuitive, but what’s really striking is how a split-second intervention can make a big difference. And that’s almost cliché but it’s really powerful when you see it. So, I can talk about that a little bit. Marshall Goldsmith has kind of gone crazy with one of my questions, but it is really amazing. If you stop and make a space, even very quickly, it can be really powerful what happens as a result of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I just have to know Marshall went crazy with one of your questions. What was the question? And in what way did he go crazy?

Carol Kauffman
I’m not going to tell you, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Carol Kauffman
So, the question was, it was New Year’s one year, and you know how we all have the “What I’m going to do…” like my New Year’s resolution is always, “What am I going to do?” and this year, I’m like, “Really, I’m just going to do the same resolution, and it’s going to last six weeks and then be gone again.” So, the question came to me, instead of what I want to do, it was, “Who do I want to be right now?”

So, I’d love for you and people listening to try it and ask yourself that question 20 to 80 times, like today or tomorrow, like, the waiter is slow, and you’re really hungry. Okay, who do you want to be? Maybe someone has given you a project that they’re working on, and it’s really subpar, and you really knew they could’ve done better. Oh, at that, who do you want to be?

Or, you’re giving someone a report you’ve written, okay, who do you want to be? So, that is this very split-second kind of course-correction question. And why Marshall loved it is he felt, I’m not entirely sure why, but he felt…what he says is, “I’ve read 500 books on Buddhism and this is the best description of mindfulness I’ve ever heard.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There you go. Grab that quote.

Carol Kauffman
Yeah. So, that is really powerful. That’s probably one of the most powerful things that I think comes from the book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s good. That’s good. Well, I visited Marshall’s home, and it’s cool to see all the Buddhism stuff, so, yeah, maybe that’ll be inscribed somewhere in there over time. All right. Well, let’s hear about the book Real-Time Leadership. What’s sort of the big idea or main thesis here?

Carol Kauffman
Okay. Building off of that, the book, I love the quote by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, which is, “Between every stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our freedom.” Okay, so that’s good, making a space. But then, like, what do you do with that space?

So, the entire book is if you can stop and create a space, instead of having your default reaction or your automatic reaction, and you make a world of choice there, what we then do for the whole book, which is, as Marshall says, “It’s dense in a good way,” we literally go through, “What are four sets of things you can do when you’ve made space that are going to help you towards optimal performance but also towards being a better human being?”

So, it’s make that space for choice, and then have an idea of, like, what to do in that space.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, could you share with us an inspiring story of someone who did just that, maybe in a particular high-stakes, high-risk situation, or habitually, and saw really cool results from that?

Carol Kauffman
Okay. I think the first example that comes to my mind, now this was someone who wanted to be a CEO but it applies in any difficult interview that you’ve had. So, he was in front doing the first two days, the first day of the interview. He was really convinced that what it was he really needed to do was wow them. So, he didn’t make a space to consider if that was true or not. So, he was giving them lots and lots and lots and lots of information, and I think we all can do that when we’re applying for a job.

And we think that they just want to know how much we know, so we spit it all out. But he saw that he was sort of losing the attention of people, and then they were getting restless. And so, he just did more of it, and, finally, it’s crashing, and he just sort of tries to maintain good posture and dignity, and walks out. And, like, what is he going to do the next day.

What did he get wrong? That’s when we talk about. We have this acronym M-O-V-E, and the M stands for being mindfully alert. And mindfully alert to, “What are the external demands you need to meet?” In this case, he wanted the job, etc. “What are the internal challenges you have so that you’re able to meet that demand? And then, how do you need to relate to people?”

What happened was he left, then he called David and me, but also the head of the non gov committee, the nominating governance committee, called and said, “We think he’s out. We had somebody else.” So, then we talked to him, and really said, “Well, what is it that you’re really trying to do?” And that’s a question we don’t ask ourselves enough, like, “What are we actually trying to do? What’s your reflex? And can you make space and think about it? Like, hold on, what do you really need to accomplish?”

And in his case, it was to be making a connection with the board so they would feel safe putting him into this position, and to also take their perspective. So, his perspective was, “Let me throw a bunch of things at you.” Their perspective is, “How many things can I absorb?” So, one of the things about it is,  “How can you know what you need to do? How can you know who you need to be?”

And in this case, he had a lot of emotion regulation and was able to change course the next day, and he was able to also transcend his ego, so he could see, “Oh, I did that, and that’s on me, not on them.” And then he could interact with them differently. So, that’s one of the kind of core concepts of the book, and of Real-Time Leadership, and it also works at home, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear that story as well.

Carol Kauffman
Okay. I love this story. My son, Michael, who’s now a mechanical engineer, when he was 11, I walked into the dining room and there’s this, like, unholy mess on the dining room table. I walked in, and he says, “Okay, I’m done with my homework. Can I watch TV now?” Okay, so now remember the three dimensions of leadership: what do we need to do, who do I need to be, how do I need to relate. And we are leaders at home. We are leaders with our peers. We’re leaders in lots of ways.

So, the first question is, “What do we need to do?” And the reflex is, “Get the homework done.” So, you go over and, like, for instance, this unholy mess and there’s scribble marks everywhere. And I was working on the book, I thought, “Wait a minute. What is my actual goal here? Is my goal to just get this homework done? Or is my goal to help him learn how to be disciplined? Or is my goal to have him love learning? Or is my goal having him watch his parent be chill and talk with him under stress so that he can be more like that? Like, what is your goal?”

And we just assume it’s like, “Get the homework done,” the reflex. So, we’re saying, “Stop. Make a space.” Okay, so there’s that. Then, well, who do I want to be in that moment? It’s at the end of the day, have I done enough investing in my own emotion regulation so that I’m able to stop as opposed to, “I’m tired. I’m cranky. I don’t want this”? So, that’s my internal development.

And then, “Okay, what’s the best way to relate to Michael at this moment? Is it to get really involved and help him get the homework done? Is it to give him space? Is it to be nurturant? Or is it just pause and not do anything?” And that’s actually the second part of the model about your options. But, actually, the hardest one is to do nothing, particularly when you’re triggered and annoyed.

So, I, like, stop and did nothing for a moment. And when you do that, it’s sort of like it mimics in the shower or when you go running, and an idea hits, but if you can just pause, see what comes to you. And what popped into my head was a question. So, I just said, “So, Michael, I want you to ask yourself a question, and then, depending on the answer, you can go watch TV. I want you to just look at this and just ask yourself, ‘Am I proud of my work?’ And if you’re proud of your work, you can go watch TV.” And I left the room.

And he maybe spent two or three extra minutes taking a look at it and decided that he was proud enough and he maybe did something, but it had an impact on him in terms of me in that role, giving him space, trusting him, and then giving him an opportunity to be self-motivated.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, what happened in the end?

Carol Kauffman
Well, he stayed there about two or three minutes, and did a little bit. Then he went in to watch TV, but I have to say it did something very good for our relationship. And even today, now that he’s a grownup, he’ll often call me for coaching. And very often, he’ll ask me something, and I’ll say, “Okay, as your mother, the patent is yours, throw somebody else under the bus? As a coach, let’s think through what’s your real goal here now that you have got this patent and who you should share it with?”

So, I think that’s probably the big takeaway is it really helped our relationship, and he is a very much self-motivated learner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so let’s hear these four steps, the MOVE framework, M-O-V-E. Can you walk us through each of them?

Carol Kauffman
Yes, I can. Okay, so M, I’ll name them and then go through, and then you can sort of decide which one that our listeners would be most interested in. So, M is to be mindfully alert, O is to be an options generator, and there’s an article on that in Harvard Business Review this month.

Then V is to validate your vantage point. And E is you engage and effect change. So, we did a little on M already. So, M is being mindfully alert, mindful in terms of not prejudging things, alert like an athlete. Very agile, aware of what’s going on, and being able to respond. And a big part of that being the three dimensions of leadership that I talked about, “What do I need to do? Who do I need to be? How do I need to relate?”

Now, the options generator is when I work with people, and, again, this can be top of the house, this could be me, this could be you’re writing a report, you could be a novelist, you could be an engineer, anything. For any challenge, I want you to have four options available to you. And the options really stem from evolutionary theory and our four reflexes, which are fight, flight, freeze, and befriend.

And we all kind of have a natural one. Lots of us are naturally we sort of lean in and engage. Others of us kind of like look back and take the overview. Others go to nurturing, and others go to sort of reflecting. And we talk about these as the four stances. So, what is a stance you can take? And we translate that into, in a situation, “Do you lean in and really engage?”

You can engage with enthusiasm. You can engage with an edge. You can engage like a Rugby player or a ballerina. But do you lean in? Or, are you able to also make the choice to lean back, kind of look at the overview, get on the balcony, think about the data, rational-think it through, and then proceed with that?

Then the third one is leaning with, and that is sort of caring. And the idea of someone has done something to help you, you want to help them. Or, on a bigger scale, it’s your culture. But that third way is being nurturant. And the fourth way is to not lean at all. And that is when something is thrown at you, “Do you have the capacity to tolerate the silence? Do you have the capacity to not be triggered and just sort of stay in your space?” So, that’s the options generator.

The validate your vantage point, 75% of business failures are due to overconfidence, so you’re not validating your vantage point. And we have a number of ways to figure out, “Is my vantage point accurate? If I was going to see something incorrectly, what is it that I’m most likely to do? How does my personality impact what I see?” bunches of stuff, and then unconscious bias as well.

So, mindfully alert, options generator, validate your vantage point, and then how can you engage and effect change. And for engage, it’s really like, first of all, how do you just really connect to the people that you are leading? And it doesn’t mean you’re their leader, you can be their colleague but you’re trying to get something done. How do you send the right signals, hear back what people are reflecting to you, and then adjust?

And each one of those are all ways to make space. Like, you’ve got that space, what do you do with it? And you can take yourself through the M-O-V-E to get a sense of what’s the best way to proceed right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really cool. And I’d love it if you could share with us a few examples that illustrate that very clearly, “Oh, here we are being mindfully alert, and then generating options, and validating the vantage point, and engaging and effecting change.”

Carol Kauffman
Sure. I’m going to hop into one of my examples of the lean in and lean back. And when I came up with the idea, I was coaching this guy that I call Max. And Max, his very dear friend had become his boss, and this relationship had just gone to hell in a handbasket. She was micromanaging him. He had a whole fund that was going to be used for one thing, and she actually took it away. And it was so bad that at the end of the day, he would say, “You know, I would only make appointments for her at the end of the day, sort of immediately go home and have a martini.”

Okay, so lean in. So, he had, like, “I need to manage this,” blah, blah, blah, and I’m, like, right there with him. And he then says, “After she micromanages, and this and that, and then she starts confiding in me and telling me secrets, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness, like, she’s a sociopath. Like, this is so manipulative.’”

And just as I’m about to go with that energy, I’m like, “Stop. Make a space.” So, this, really, you can use this just for yourself as a coach as well as in a leadership position. So, I stopped and thought, “Okay, let’s lean back.” So, I then said, “So, Max, let’s pause for a minute. What might be going on in the overview? Like, what’s the bigger picture here?”

And then he could see how the leadership team over her was really, really coming down on her, huge pressure, and that, in fact, she was kind of passing that along because she was under such intensity, but it helped him to kind of be able to chill a little bit. Then I thought of the next one, which was, in this case, don’t lean.

I was actually afraid to ask him this because I thought he would get mad at me, which was, I said, “So, listen, Max, you get your way in the end, and you even got all your funds back. Why is her behavior even bothering you?” And that was sort of a curve ball question for him, and a good one for us to ask when we’re activated to really go, “Wait, why is this bothering me? Does this really need to bother me? Do I need to be triggered right now?”

That takes me back to, “Who do I want to be right now? What am I really trying to accomplish?” So, all of this, you can see they’re intertwined. But then, okay, so he’s like, “Well, that’s interesting.” And, again, it helped him make a little more space. Then the last one with him was to think about leaning with. And so then, I said, “So, listen, she used to be, like, one of your good friends, and you’re describing all this pressure that she’s under. What if your goal…” okay, remember the external goal, “What if your goal in the next time you met with her was just for her to feel better at the end of the meeting?”

And that was just a real shocker for him, and he remembered, “Oh, right, we used to be friends, and she’s under so much pressure.” So, what you could see was, if we linked this together now, so those were the four stanzas, but you can see how it’s connected to “What do I need to do? Who do I need to be? And how do I need to relate?”

But also, we were also secretly doing vantage point because it’s like, “Wait a minute, you have this perspective, your point of view is that she’s doing this on purpose, and that she’s something that rhymes with witch, and that this is, again, volition on her part, and it’s about power.” And his anger and his triggering had really clouded his thinking.

And we all fill in the dots with our hopes and our fears, and he was then able to see more clearly. And then, in terms of being able to engage and effect change, in this case, it was just, “Okay, I just want to engage with her as a human being,” and it got much better for a while.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, thank you. Well, now I’d love it if you could maybe share a top do and don’t for each of the four steps in the framework? Like, “Hey, when it comes to being mindfully alert, you probably want to do this, you probably don’t want to do that.”

Carol Kauffman
Okay, so here it is. Let’s say I’m going to have a difficult conversation. What do I want to do? What do I not want to do? So, if I think about being mindfully alert, and I’m about to have a difficult conversation with someone, first question is, “What do I really want to accomplish? And then what do I not want to accomplish?”

So, in this particular situation, someone had cost me a massive amount of stress and finances, and I was aware that when I was thinking about the conversation, part of me just wanted to, pardon the expression, just wanted to put her nose in the pee-pee, I mean, “Look what you did to me.” And it’s like, “No. Like, what really needs to be done now and what really is the ultimate goal, not what is it that’s going to make me feel better in this moment?”

So, do make a space to think about what you really want to do. In that case, for a difficult conversation, go back to the homework example, so there. And then, “Who do I want to be?” Well, what you want to be able to do is remember your strengths. You don’t necessarily want to, like, dive into all the ways you’re inadequate. It’s like, “Yeah, okay, I’ve got a lot of flaws but here’s the things that I do need to do right.”

Then, in terms of, “How do I need to relate?” what you want to do is what I call the platinum rule, and you do not want to do the golden rule. So, the golden rule, it’s a fairly low bar in some ways, which is, “Okay, so, Pete, we’re in a situation, and it’s, like, I should treat you the way that I want to be treated.” But what if it what works for you is not at all what works for me?

Let’s say I’m a super extrovert and you’re an introvert, and you’re having a hard time with something. Well, as an extrovert, I might think, “Oh, Pete, you need a pep talk, and this, and that, and this, and that,” and inside you’re going, “Oh, dear Lord, just leave me alone. I need to think.” So, you don’t do the golden rule, give to others, treat others as you would want to be treated. You do the platinum rule, which is treat others as they would want to be treated. So, that, if we just go through the M, those are some do’s and some don’ts.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with the O-V-E?

Carol Kauffman
Okay. So, with the O, what you want to do is remember you’re being mindfully alert. What you want to do is choose. So, when it comes to leaning in, even that tough conversation or you’re leading a merger and acquisition, like, “Do I lean in and get tough? Do I lean back and get the data?” So, the point is be aware of your default, that’s the do. The don’t is automatically go with your default because it’s the easiest thing to do.

So, be aware of what the four stances are, and then challenge yourself. So, you may be someone, for example, that when you do something, you like to go big, and you like to go fast, and you want to get it done. Well, like lean in, it’s like, “Well, wait a minute. What would it look like if I went slower and I was more careful?”

So, the point for me isn’t that you do the one that say, “I might think is better.” It’s that you could really visualize, “Here’s four different ways. I could go in strong, do something big. I could go in more gentle and do a series of smaller things. I could think about people first and not the outcome. And I could able to be more reflective.” So, I want someone to know what the four paths would be like and able to make space to choose.

So, the do is know the range of how you could be, and the don’t is go with your gut automatically. Although, sometimes going with your gut is the right thing to do, but it should be choice and not automatic.

Pete Mockaitis
And then when it comes to validating, are there any favorite approaches that could give you a boatload of clear validation or invalidation of your hypothesis for what’s up here?

Carol Kauffman
Yeah, so the don’t is don’t assume you’re right. Also, don’t assume you’re wrong. Don’t assume. Start out with, “This is what I think,” and then allow yourself a moment and space, and say, “Do I actually agree with myself? Am I seeing clearly? Do I have rose-colored glasses on, charcoal glasses on? Am I near sighted or far sighted?”

So, for example, near sighted, if you’re in a sort of subject-matter-expert role, you can see things up near really, really well but you may not have the hundred-mile view that a CEO does. But then, let’s say you’re CEO and you’re far sighted, but there’s stuff going on right under your face that you don’t know, you can’t see up close very well. So, it’s knowing what your strength is and how to balance it.

And then a big one for validate your vantage point is, again, know, “Do I tend to doubt myself too much? Or, do I tend to be overconfident? And then, what are my biases? And how can I begin to know what I don’t know that I don’t know?” The answer is ask people a lot and get over yourself. So, I would say that was the V. And the big thing is we do connect the dots with our hopes and fears.

So, one of the guys who helped with the book, my co-author, David Noble, was friends with him, was a retired four-star general. And I didn’t even know there weren’t a lot of four-star generals, he’s like, “Carol, there’s only been one five-star general,” which I didn’t know, like Einsenhower. There’s like two four-star generals. Really nice guy, really like small and very, very pleasant. But he’s like, he would be in charge of the Iraq theater, and he’s like, “You want to fight the war you have, not the war you want.”

And so, bringing that down to us, is we want to be reality-based with what’s really going on, not with our wishful thinking, and not hijacked by our fears. So, that’s sort of the V.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with engaging?

Carol Kauffman
With that, what you want to be able to do is send clear signals. And a big mistake we make, personally, one of my favorite mistakes because I make a lot, is I believe I have been achingly clear in what it is I’m asking, and others aren’t. So, I think I’m being very clear on my intent, and I now know that my automatic belief when I engage is I’ve got to be very clear on communicating my intent.

So, one example that we see a lot with leaders is they tend to think people can read their minds. Like, I’m having a meeting, so you and I and a couple people were having a meeting, and we’re brainstorming. And then I’m just stunned when I find out that you went out and did all those things because, hey, we were just brainstorming, but I wasn’t clear about that signal.

I didn’t say, “Hey, we’re just brainstorming now. For Pete’s sake,” pun intended, “For Pete’s sake, don’t go out and do anything. This is a brainstorm.” And how to kind of sign-post so people aren’t running around. But it’s amazing how unclear you can be when you think you’re being clear.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s a lot of good stuff, Carol. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Carol Kauffman
At the end of the day, what I’m really hoping for is that this material doesn’t just help you at work but it helps you at home and it helps you step into all that you can be, that it really can help you become an extraordinary person, and for you not to put blocks in front of yourself. As I say, if anybody is going to get in your way, please don’t let it be you.

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

Carol Kauffman
Well, of course, there’s the stimulus and response one that I really love.

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

Carol Kauffman
Ahh, so much. The one researcher that I love is a man named Richard Boyatzis, a neuropsychologist at Case Western Reserve. And you should get him on your show some time. What he’s done is really looked at what part of our brain is activated when we’re in an interaction. And, basically, it’s every interaction is neurological, that you’re activating the threat or the reward system of the other person.

And that’s the sympathetic is the threat, and the parasympathetic is the reward system. So, in any interaction, that’s going on. And if you want to have a positive influence on someone, you will activate the parasympathetic nervous system. So, even if they’ve messed up, you’ll say, “So, listen, we really wanted to do this, and this, and this, and we kind of missed it, but let’s figure this out together. What still went right even though…?”

So, how do you really create this very active psychologically safe and caring environment? And then when you do that, you can then challenge people with them still staying safe. So, it’s a combination of Richard Boyatzis’ and Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School. And she’s the one who’s done all the psychological safety work. And those two sets of research, I think, really guide me, they guide me a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Carol Kauffman
Favorite book, I’ve got a gazillion favorite books. For some reason, the one that I really loved recently was I read the book Circe. I can’t remember who wrote it now. It’s just a fabulous, fabulous rendering of the gods in a way that you’d never be able to think on your own. I’m also reading, of course, there’s Thinking, Fast and Slow with Danny Kahneman, and that’s one is great. And then the ones by Marty Seligman. Those are probably the ones that got me on this path to begin with. And I love historical novels. I’m reading historical novels all the time.

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

Carol Kauffman
I have a bunch of mantras. This one that really helps me a lot is, “I’m not in control of my destiny but I am in control of my probabilities.” So, “What is it that I can do to increase the likelihood that I’m going to be able to achieve what I want?” Not, “Am I going to achieve what I want?” because that’s linear and true success is much more kind of uncertain and nonlinear. So, that’s something that I keep in mind a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Carol Kauffman
A favorite habit. Probably the favorite habit is what I was talking about earlier of asking myself, “Who do I want to be right now?”

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, are there any other super questions that you go to a lot?

Carol Kauffman
I’ll tell you one that I really, really like, which is this. Say you’re thinking of doing something, if you knew you couldn’t fail, what would you want to do?

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Carol Kauffman
Yup. And one of the things we ask in the book a lot is something we call the ten of ten question, which is, “If I’m going to do something, if I was a ten out of ten, what would it look like?” And then I’d ask myself, “Okay, on that scale, what am I now?” Let’s say I’m a seven, and then the important question is to ask, “What am I doing right that I’m not a six or a 6.5?” And then, “What could I do over the next eight weeks to get from a seven to a 7.5?”

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a favorite quote of yours, something you share that really resonates with folks, they quote frequently?

Carol Kauffman
Well, I like some of my own quotes. I have a bunch of things called Carolisms. So, one of them is, “If anyone is going to get in your way, please don’t let it be you.” The, “I’m not in charge of my destiny, but I am in charge of my probabilities.” And what is the other? I guess it’s just people often ask me to give talks on confidence, and I say that’s fine except I don’t believe in it.

So, the other one is “Confidence is irrelevant. What matters is your purpose and what you’re trying to do because confidence is simply a pleasant subjective emotional experience, and it is not a requirement to do anything at all.”

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

Carol Kauffman
If you remember my name, Carol Kauffman, two Fs, one N, you can just Google me, Carol Kauffman, CarolKauffman.com. And if you’d like to buy the book, Amazon hardback, just Google “Real-Time Leadership,” and it’ll get you to Amazon.

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

Carol Kauffman
Make sure that whatever you’re doing, you really want to be doing it from the inside out, not from the outside in.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Carol, this has been a treat. I wish you many great winning moves.

Carol Kauffman
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, that’s the recording. Thank you.

837: How to Transition to a Better Career Future with Tricia Sitemere

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Tricia Sitemere says: "Take CONTROL of your future, ALTer your mindset, and DELETE all doubt."

Tricia Sitemere discusses how to prepare for and successfully execute a career transition.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The CTRL + ALT + DELETE mantra for developing your career.
  2. The toxic trait holding many professionals back.
  3. The telltale signs it’s time for a switch—and how to start.

About Tricia

Tricia Sitemere is an action centered Career Strategist and Consultant supporting mid-career professionals on their career transition and professional development journeys. She is a published author, an international speaker, an alumna of the University of Texas at Arlington, where she earned her degree in Advertising, and Simmons University where she earned a master’s degree in Communication Management. She currently resides in Dallas, TX but works with clients all over the world.

Resources Mentioned

Tricia Sitemere Interview Transcript

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

Tricia Sitemere
Hi, Pete. How are you? Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m doing great. Doing great. I’m excited to talk career, strategery, and mindsets, and finding great opportunities. But, first, I need to hear about you and the oboe. What’s the story here?

Tricia Sitemere
Oh, my goodness. Okay. So, I played the oboe for six years, and, initially, I wanted to play the drums. And I’m talking to my mom about it, and the first thing that she’s really thinking of is, “I don’t want this girl banging drums in my house.” And so, she was like, “Pick a quieter instrument.” That definitely backfired on her because the oboe is not really quiet.

And I would think that it’s kind of an acquired taste just from a sound perspective. And so, I played the oboe for six years, I marched in the marching band. In high school, I played clarinet doing that, and then spent two years in color guard, so I’m a band geek, and I absolutely love music.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I was going to say, can you march an oboe? But, yeah, all right, clarinet. I did marching band, four years saxophone, in high school. And at one time, I went to the Drum Corps International World Championships in Indianapolis just to see what that was about. It was just as cool as I thought it would be. So, I’m totally down. Totally down.

Tricia Sitemere
Nice. Nice. Yeah, I was at a parade just yesterday, and it was cool to see all of the bands assembled in their band uniforms, and I was like, “Oh, my gosh, that was my life once upon a time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, I remember we did the competitions, it felt like the most important thing is that we were going to make the state finals. I think at one point, I thoughtfully considered and said I’d be willing to trade a pinky in order to achieve that objective.

Tricia Sitemere
Oh, I don’t think I was that committed.

Pete Mockaitis
It was just funny because I didn’t practice all that hard but I’m willing to part with a finger, I was like, “I know my music, I know my spot, that’s right.” All right. Well, so that’s that story. Now, so your company, it’s called CTRL Alt Delete.

Tricia Sitemere
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I remember back in my marching band days, I would push Ctrl-Alt-Delete a lot on a PC back in the day. Can you tell us what is this organization? What’s your work about? And what’s behind the name?

Tricia Sitemere
Yeah. So, CTRL Alt Delete is a professional development and career coaching company. CTRL Alt Delete actually stands for take control of your future, alter your mindset, and delete all doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Tricia Sitemere
It’s kind of a…yeah, it’s a personal mantra of mine. It is the mantra that I share with my clients. It’s kind of a baseline for a lot of the things that I do. I think it’s very relevant when you think about your career that you do need to be the one that takes control. And sometimes you do need that change in mindset and how you think about things, and deleting the doubt, and being confident in who you are, your abilities, what you bring to the table, your leadership, your influence. Those are all very important to the clients that I serve.

And so, I coach folks one on one, specifically mid-career professionals around career transitions, career advancement and growth. And then I take a lot of the case studies and the things that I’m seeing, the trends that I’m seeing when I’m supporting my one-on-one clients, and I create training programs for HR teams so that they can set their managers up to success, to better support their employees, which, in turn, increases employee retention, employee engagement, those types of things. So, it’s a very rewarding work and I absolutely love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. Well, I love those three steps there. Can you tell us a cool story about someone who did just that, they took control of their career, they altered their mindset, they deleted doubt? Like, walk us through what did they do and what were the results?

Tricia Sitemere
I will take you back to where this all started, and I would say the first person that I know that had to take control of their future, alter their mindset, and delete all doubt was me. And I bounced around from a bunch of different careers. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. And I had a lot of interests but I was just kind of blowing in the wind. I was like, “Okay, I’m going to go back to school.” I got a Master’s.

And came back to Dallas, I went to graduate school in Boston. Shout out to Simmons University. I moved back to Dallas and was still kind of blowing in the wind. And the first thing that I did to kind of take control of my career and my future was a really deep self-assessment, like, “What do I like? What do I not like? What am I good at? What do I want to be good at? What do I want my career to look like?” And I just started putting a plan in place for myself.

In terms of altering the mindset around that, I studied communication management in graduate school, and I thought that I was going to go into, like, crisis communication, working for the Red Cross, managing communication strategy for natural disasters and terrible things. And that was not a space I wanted to spend my time in.

And for a while I thought I was stuck, I was like, “Okay, this is what I have spent the money for. My parents have already paid for this advanced degree. I have to stay in this space.” And it wasn’t until I started thinking about my situation differently and opening my mindset and being open to what my career was going to look like, and being open to having conversations, exploring different things, I continued to feel stuck.

And so, that was when I was able to alter my mindset. And then the deleting all doubt, I don’t think that this is an off-and-on switch kind of thing. I think deleting doubt is something that takes time. It’s something that grows within yourself as you continue to learn about yourself, as you continue to sharpen skills, and just kind of get to know yourself better.

And so, when I was diving further into, “What is my career going to look like?” I started in learning and development, and then I went into recruiting. It wasn’t until I had gotten used to the role, my confidence started to grow, and then I was really able to start deleting the doubt, like, “Hey, Tricia, you can do this. Hey, Tricia, you’re thinking about this in a really positive way. Hey, Tricia, you have some good leadership skills that are driving the team.”

And then, from there, I was able to have a wildly successful career in HR before transitioning into what I do with CTRL Alt Delete. And so, that’s a story that is personal to me because I lived it, and it was really something that I see in a lot of my one-on-one clients. When they come to me, they are often frustrated, whether they’re not fulfilled in their role, they’re feeling bored, there’s financial constraints.

And I help them put a plan together in place so that they can take control of their future. I always tell folks, “You need to be an active participant in your own life.” And taking control is the first step in doing that, saying, “Hey, I’m not just going to live simply off of the things that I am getting.” If there are opportunities, specific to CTRL Alt Delete, career opportunities, or growth and development opportunities that you’re interested in, you have to take control, and then the rest of the things, they kind of fall into place as you build out your action plan, but that’s an example for you.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. Well, can you share with us a few key actions that control alt deleters do or don’t do that many of us just kind of neglect?

Tricia Sitemere
Yeah, I would say toxic positivity and not being completely honest with yourself about different situations. Obviously, we’re talking about the career space, but I think one of the things that my clients are really good at is building that transparency and having those honest conversations with yourself, whether that is in terms of, “I thought I was really strong in X, Y, Z space. And after taking some time kind of digging into it, getting feedback, having conversations, maybe I’m not so great at this.”

That’s kind of where the confidence and that transparency internally kind of cross because sometimes you feel like you’re really good at something, and sometimes you’re not as great as maybe you think you are, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That gives you the opportunity to stop and say, “Hey, okay, this is how I want to improve,” or, “These are some resources or tools or connections that I have access to that will help me get to the point where I want to be, thus letting me do X, Y, Z.” You know what I’m saying?

So, definitely, having those transparent conversations, I will say, is something that I coach to. And for a lot of people, it can be a blind spot that can hinder your career growth.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the blind spot is that they just quickly put a positive spin or sheen on things as oppose to taking a hard look, and saying, “Oh, I’m not so good at Excel,” or copywriting, or facilitating meetings, or whatever that thing may be, and, thus, they don’t ever really get the opportunity to open that door and then begin improving because they’re unaware of the shortcomings.

Tricia Sitemere
Right, to grow.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tricia Sitemere
To grow, yeah. Another thing that I would say is you hear a lot about having a growth mindset, having an open mindset, and being able to look at all of your opportunities that are being presented to you, and it sounds nice. You’re talking about growth with your manager, your friends, family, whatever, you’re like, “You know, I’m really in a space where I’m allowing myself to grow.”

Well, there are certain things that you have to do in order to foster growth and to actually see the traction and the changes that you want, which include commitment and consistency. And so, it’s nice to say, “Hey, I’m doing all of these things,” but actually doing them and not just saying, “Hey, I have a growth mindset. I’m open to these opportunities,” without the action piece, because that’s really what is important and what is going to drive the change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very cool. So, then, I’m curious, when it comes to the deleting all doubt, are there specific practices, tools, disciplines that you engage in to do the actual deleting?

Tricia Sitemere
Yes. So, I talked a little bit about having honest conversations, being open to awareness around your blind spots, maybe where you’re not as strong. On the other side of that, there are things that you absolutely excel at, that when someone says, “Oh, my goodness, I need…” you mentioned Excel so I’ll just keep on going with that example, “I need an Excel guru.” If that’s you, that’s something that you can build on so that you can start deleting some of that doubt.

And so, I think looking at both ends is definitely something that will help you delete all doubt. Getting feedback is an activity that I have a lot of my clients do when they’re struggling in that space, and they’re really struggling to decide, “Okay, what are strengths that I want to continue to grow? And what are my transferrable skills?” I work with them to do a little bit of a self-assessment. And part of that assessment, it’s asking for feedback. So, I’ll have them talk to a manager, a colleague, so, it, one, helps them get an outside view of, “Okay, this is maybe a strength I want to work on,” or, “This is maybe an area of opportunity.”

But if they are really good in those things, hearing it from someone else, and having that little bit of external validation is it can be key because it’s like, “Okay, I thought I was good at this in my head, but now I’m hearing from other people who have the opportunity to experience how I deliver X, Y, Z, and they are also very confident in my ability.” So, that’s going to help over time, those check-ins with yourself and getting feedback from others to help you grow that confidence and delete all doubt.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I’m curious, when it comes to your clients, I imagine, often, by the time they find you, they might be pretty ready to make a change.

Tricia Sitemere
Oh, yeah. They’re like, “Tricia, we need this to happen last week,” and I’m like, “I get it. I understand 100%.” And the other part of that is sometimes career transitions, they take time. There are so many factors that are outside of your control, that we talk about this when we’re getting started, that we’ll take a little bit of patience.

And that’s not a favorite part of coaching, is having to coach to the patience piece but I see it time and time again, those that can be patient, who do the work and stay consistent, committed, there’s lots of opportunities and great things on the other side of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m curious, if we find ourselves in that position, where, “Okay, the job is fine. Maybe we should be thinking about making a switch,” can you walk us through kind of the step-by-step and then some of your favorite tactics or tools or tricks you use in each of them to really make a lot of progress fast?

Tricia Sitemere
Yes. The first thing I would say is not ignoring the signs. We know when there have been shifts in our mood and when we’re disgruntled or frustrated or stressed out about a situation, and people will make different excuses for why they may feel like they’re in that space. If you are starting to feel that, explore that, whether it is having a conversation with a friend or your spouse, or a conversation with a coworker as long as it’s nothing too crazy because they’re going to be able to understand some of those key players at work, some of those situations at work.

And then once you’ve kind of have gotten to a place where you’re like, “Okay, I think I know what this is. I think I know kind of where this is coming from,” almost like a root-cause analysis, I always empower people to ask for help. You don’t have to go through all of this by yourself, whether that is help from a manager, you’re like, “Hey, I’m kind of struggling with this space. What can we do in terms of support?”

Coaching. I’m not plugging coaching because I’m a coach, but I had worked with coaches, I have had coaches myself, but then I’ve also seen the impact that working with a coach can have. So, that would also be one of the things that I would recommend. And it’s almost like you have to kind of gather a bunch of information for yourself.

You go into this fact-finding after you’ve had these conversations, and now you’re asking yourself, “Okay, I know this isn’t what I want right now. What do I want?” and kind of dream it up real big, is what I tell my clients all the time. Dream it up real big and then move to, “Okay, I want to be an astronaut.” Obviously, for me, Pete, I’m not going to be an astronaut right now. What does it look like to get to that point?

And then in terms of getting that momentum going, and feeling good about the strides that you’re making, because we talked about patience being a key part of making the change, is giving yourself small digestible goals that will increase and kind of build into hitting some of those bigger goals that you have.

When you set a goal for yourself, sometimes you’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this goal is so far away. I’m never going to get there,” and that can cause some stress and it can cause some frustration. So, breaking it down into those smaller goals and celebrating the small wins, that’s going to really help you get the momentum, get the energy up, continue to keep the juices flowing, and it’ll also help you stay more consistent.

And then another thing that I would recommend in that space of doing that is share some of these things with people that champion and support you. And I’d talked about a supporting cast in my book, and it is really your supporting cast. Just like the lead in a movie, you have the supporting cast that helps make things happen. Sharing the things and the changes and the career aspirations that you have with your supporting cast, they are going to be able to lift you up when maybe you’re having a bad day.

Or, if you hit one of those smaller goals, or a bigger goal, it’s so great to be able to share and celebrate that with someone who is rooting for you. So, yeah, those would be a couple of my tips and kind of the walkthrough through the process. I love celebrating. I celebrate everything. I celebrate everything and, I tell you, it really does make a huge difference to be able to celebrate the person that you’re spending so much time working on yourself. What better project to work on and to focus on than yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, let’s say we’ve gotten past the soul-searching phase and we’ve got some specific companies, roles, positions posted that we’re eyeing, and going, “Ooh, that’s enticing.” I’d love it if you could share some of your favorite job-hunting tips, whether it’s on the LinkedIn side, or the networking side, or the resume, or the cover letter, or the interview side, what are a couple things that just work like magic that you’re a huge fan of?

Tricia Sitemere
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of LinkedIn. When I was coming up through HR, I used LinkedIn a ton, both sending messages but being recruited from my engagement and participation on LinkedIn. So, I coach to LinkedIn. It’s not the only way but I particularly really like it just because it connects so many people from so many spaces that you might not even cross paths with in your everyday life.

And so, in terms of, like, if you see a role that you’re really excited about, you can search the title of the role, and you can see other folks that are in that particular space, and you can kind of do a little bit of sleuthing, see what kind of things they post about. Oftentimes, they will talk about things that are going on within the company or within the industry, where their company has been in the news.

All of that information is intel that you can, A, use if you reach out to a particular person or if you’re in an opportunity to network, it shows that you know what’s going on. And, two, all of that information can be really, really helpful in an interview. It shows that you’ve taken the time to investigate and research what’s going on within the industry, within the particular company, or if it’s even a specific team that the role that you’re interested in is on. All of that are data points that you can use in your career toolkit to help you make those connections and build those relationships to get into the role.

So, I would say those are some of the things that I’d recommend for LinkedIn. Connected to LinkedIn, people do not like sending blind invitations or messages on LinkedIn, and I get it because I do get my fair share of, “This is an interesting message in my inbox” kind of thing, but there are ways that you can grab the attention of the person that you’re reaching out, whether it is mentioning something you guys have in common, or you guys went to the same alma mater, or the same school, mentioning something that they’ve recently posted.

There are different ways that you can reach out so it’s not just this spammy message that you’re sending to probably someone who gets a lot of messages similar to that. So, here on LinkedIn, it says, “Hi, I’m a hiring manager.” Some people may reach out to you about X, Y, Z jobs, and sometimes they’re maybe not the greatest message, they don’t really share any information, so there’s no incentive, I guess, on the other end for that person to respond.

And so, doing some of this recon on the frontend is going to help you craft your messages, and type it up, take a deep breath, and send it. Sometimes people won’t respond, but sometimes they will, and those can lead to some really, really great conversations. And then the other thing that I would say, or the last thing that I would say in terms of researching job and reaching out to folks and looking for work on LinkedIn, is following up.

Following up and showing up are huge. They’re so huge. If someone that you’ve reached out to reaches back to you, don’t wait a week and a half to respond. I get things happen but it’s all about keeping that momentum going, so respond to them. If you guys have something scheduled, show up. And that sounds a little elementary but I had spent almost 10 years with hiring managers, and I am always blown away by how many people just don’t show up to interviews and don’t communicate.

And so, I always feel like that’s something worth mentioning. And so, just taking that, building those relationships, having those conversations, sometimes there’s opportunities that are available more immediately, just like with any relationship, networking including, it takes a little bit of work. And so, don’t just completely disregard a relationship because it didn’t result in a job right away.

They might have something coming down the pipeline one month, two months, six months. We don’t know what that will look like. So, continuing to cultivate those relationships is also something that’s going to be super key.

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

Tricia Sitemere
Feel empowered to create the life you love. I think some would say that sounds corny or that sounds cheesy but I think it’s so important. We have this one life to live. And you should be able to live it on your own terms with things and people and experiences that you want to have a part of your life. So, that’s what I would say.

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

Tricia Sitemere
“Everything you can imagine is real,” by Pablo Picasso. And I think that ties in perfectly to what I just said about creating the life that you love. Everything you can imagine is real. And sometimes it does take that shift in mindset to start to bring some of those things to fruition or realize, “Hey, this isn’t exactly what it looked like in my mind but it’s exactly what I’m looking for.” Yeah, that’s my favorite.

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

Tricia Sitemere
It’s actually a case study, and it’s from one of my favorite books, Mindset actually by Carol Dweck. And it is exploring the impact of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset and a false growth mindset. And it’s a study and she’s working with children that are in elementary school. And so, it’s like she has one group who are told, like, “Hey, you can do anything. You’re great at all these different things,” and she studies how they perform versus another group of students who are kind of being coached or fed that, “This is not in your skillset,” and she monitors how each of the groups react.

And she uses this study to kind of talk through the importance of fostering a growth mindset and paying attention to the different things that we tell ourselves, and being transparent and honest with ourselves and some of the other things that I had mentioned. And I obviously work with mid-career professionals, but some of this stuff around mindset and feeling equipped starts so much earlier than when I work with them. And so, that wasn’t a study that I was thinking I would come across, and it’s really interesting. It’s in her book, Mindset.

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

Tricia Sitemere
Ooh, I’m a checklist girl, Pete. Do you like checklists?

Pete Mockaitis
I do, yes.

Tricia Sitemere
I’m a checklist girl. I’m a calendar girl. I keep a to-do list. I keep list of several different sorts actually, but in terms of being awesome at my job, at the end of every single day, I will review my list of deliverables, or tasks, or clients I need to follow up with, and just kind of put a cap on my day so that when I get started in the morning, I can hit the ground running.

Or, I can take a look at my list, and say, “Okay, this doesn’t exactly fall into place with what I thought my day would look like because there’s fires, there’s things that pop up,” but I use that as my guide. And then I’m also really big about calendaring and blocking time off to do different things, and that is so helpful. It helps me feel very organized and it’s like, “Okay, if things get crazy, at least I know I have dedicated time to focus and do my very best work on this thing because I’ve blocked out time for it.” So, those are my two biggest tips that I use, my two biggest tools.

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

Tricia Sitemere
CTRL Alt Delete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go, yeah.

Tricia Sitemere
Which, obviously, is a delight to me. I’ll run into folks, and they’re like, “What are you doing to take control of your future or alter your mindset?” And I’m like, “Let’s talk about it.” And they’re like, “Oh, my goodness, now I’m in a conversation with Tricia. This is going to turn into a coaching session.”

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

Tricia Sitemere
Yes, you can find me on my website TriciaSitemere.com. I’m also on YouTube under the same name, also on LinkedIn, and Instagram. I post a variety of different free resources, information, and tips on all of those. And I look forward to engaging.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. This has been a treat, Tricia. Keep on rocking.

Tricia Sitemere
Thank you. Thank you so much, Pete, for having me. I appreciate you.

835: How to Thrive amid Stress and Irritation with Dr. Sharon Melnick

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Sharon Melnick says "When you’re in your power, you’re the thermostat. You decide who you are. You control the situation. You bring others along in your vision."

Sharon Melnick reveals how you can set the tone and be the best version of yourself all day long, no matter what situation you find yourself in.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to deal with your stress response effectively.
  2. What do to when you’re emotionally hijacked.
  3. How to turn a “no” into a “yes”.

About Sharon

Sharon Melnick, PhD is the premier expert on being in your power as a leader, and an authority on women’s leadership, resilience, and power.

Her methods are informed by 10 years of research at Harvard Medical School, and field tested by 40,000 coaching/training participants at over 100 Fortune 500 companies, start-ups, and women-led companies. An international speaker and trainer, her presentations have created buzz at business and leadership conferences worldwide (and also at the White House, West Point, and the United Nations).

Selected as a Marshall Goldsmith Top 100 Coach, she’s an Executive Coach for women executives/entrepreneurs who hold the vision and drive results. She helps them have influence, prevent burnout, and end second-guessing. She advises companies how to advance and retain their multicultural female talent.

She is the best-selling author of Success under Stress: Powerful Tools to Stay Calm, Confident, and Productive when the Pressure’s On.

An avid runner, dance floor lover, and student of human evolution, she enjoys hosting the Power Shift podcast.

Resources Mentioned

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Sharon Melnick Interview Transcript

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

Sharon Melnick
Delighted to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off by sharing the story of the time you said, “No, thanks,” when the White House asked you to come on over and present your research.

Sharon Melnick
What a claim to fame. Well, it was early on in my career, and there was one of those multi-artists rock concerts, and I went down to Washington, DC where it was being held. And as I entered the stadium, there was a cluster of people over to my left, I looked, and there was one person who I recognized. It was Tipper Gore, she was the wife of the then Vice President Al Gore, and she was a champion for women’s empowerment and families.

Without overthinking it, I went right over, I shook her hand, “Hi, I’m Dr. Sharon Melnick. I do research at Harvard Medical School. I help people from difficult childhoods be confident and resilient and kind of have the adult contribution that they want to.” She’s intrigued, we start to talk, we’re having a little bit of an estrogen fest going on together.

At a certain point, she turns to her chief of staff, and she says, “Melissa, would you get Dr. Melnick’s contact information? We want to bring her down to the White House, share the policy implications of her research.” So, I go home, I write up a little something, I send it off. Several weeks later, I’m lacing up my sneakers to go for a run, the phone rings. It’s Melissa.

And she starts telling me about all the initiatives that Tipper is doing around the country, helping millions of families, and she pops the question, she says, “Will you come down to the White House to share the policy implications of your research?” So, Pete, I picture myself around that table at the White House, and then I respond, and I say, “No.”

Well, I don’t exactly say no, like, I said, “Well, you know, I’m still trying to figure out what the research says,” but, essentially, I declined an invite to the White House. Now, why? Why would I do that? Because, like I said, when I was picturing myself around that table at the White House, I was thinking, “Those people are going to judge me for not knowing enough.” I thought that they would think that I wasn’t smart enough, so I wasn’t going to give them the opportunity to do that.

What I did was I prioritized my own evaluation of myself over the contribution that I could’ve made for millions of people. In other words, I gave away my power.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s powerful. And it’s interesting because I think I’ve totally done that on different stages, different scales, daily, weekly, or monthly, in terms of, “Ooh, this is a cooler opportunity.” It’s like, “Oh, but…” Or, maybe I have an idea, it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s ready yet, if I’m worthy.” Or, even if I get a cool email.

I remember I think I was in high school, and there was a girl I met at Journalism Camp, I thought she was really cute and cool. And she sent me an email, it’s like, “Oh, okay, okay,” and then I wanted to really make sure to send her a very witty and clever and flirtatious and perfect email back, but then I didn’t have any good ideas. And so then, I just sort of let it slide, and then it would get weird, like, “Hey, thanks for your email a month ago.”

Sharon Melnick
We’ve all been there.

Pete Mockaitis
She called me, actually, it’s like, “Well, if you wanted to ‘stay in touch’ as you said in the card, then…” dah, dah, dah. So, yeah, that notion of you want to look good, to be awesome, be perceived well, gets in the way of doing some real good for folks.

Sharon Melnick
Well, what’s a real takeaway from your story, and I think mine, is that other people might really want to hear from us and really want to kind of get the best that we have to offer but what we are doing is that we are kind of being subjective, not objective. It’s all going through the filters of how we evaluate ourselves.

And another thing, I think, I hear in your story is all the angst that went into writing that email. We’ve all been there, right? And it’s so relevant, actually, because when we’re in situations that are stressful and, especially, situations where it feels like the other person is the one who can determine kind of our worth, you know what I mean, or how we should feel about ourselves, and however they respond to us is kind of like a referendum on our worth.

And it puts us into a mental swirl, and it has us kind of go over things, and over things, and then maybe even be paralyzed and not take action. And that’s a really good kind of example of what it’s like when we’re out of our power.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you, so that ties together. I like your story a lot better than mine for its illustrative power and relatability. But, maybe, could you kick us off by sharing, you’ve done so much research here, is there a particularly surprising, fascinating, jaw-dropping discovery or insight you’ve made over the years about what it takes to be in your power?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. So, I’m going to share two with you. The first is not my research, actually, but it’s a colleague of mine in the Marshall Goldsmith Top 100 Coaches, Ron Carucci. And he studied executives who rise into power for 15 years. And so, he studied power and how you use it and what it looks like. And his finding was that the biggest abuse of power is not using it.

And I say this, actually, because I think that we think of this idea of power as being kind of a negative, or selfish, or force other people, and manipulative, and all of that. And that’s really only the case when someone is in power, in a position of power but not in their power. So, then they might act toward other people in a way that tries to get that feel good or feel one up within their selves.

So, the theme of kind of what your story and my story, and what we’re talking about here, is the opportunity is, when you’re in your power, is to be able to be good in you, to have a sense of sovereignty, like you decide who you are, you have ways of kind of filling yourself up, or feeling confident and secure and valuable and worthy within your own self, and you don’t have to look to people, or get permission, or hope, or control them, or any of the things, you know what I mean, that we try to do in order to get them to act towards us so that we can feel that within ourselves.

And that’s really the essence of kind of being in your power, because when you know how to kind of get back to good in your or stay good in you and not react in a situation, then the way that you act can actually make the situation better, it can get you the outcome that you want. And not only make it better for you but for everyone involved, for all the families that I could’ve touched with my research, for the romance you could’ve sparked if you had reached out.

And I think that that’s what most of us want these days. It’s like we want to use our emotional energy toward making a difference, not spinning, wondering what other people are going to think about us, and trying to get them to think a certain way.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So, given all that, how would you summarize the big idea or core thesis of your book In Your Power: React Less, Regain Control, Raise Others?

Sharon Melnick
Yes. So, when you’re not in your power, and let me just give a little context here because any of us can get kicked out of our power kind of at any moment. It has nothing to do with kind of your level of accomplishment or anything like that. You could be a talented woman who feels overlooked or under-recognized in the workplace. You could be a leader of a team and you just can’t kind of get your people to live up to expectations. Maybe it’s in your personal life where you have someone who is really kind of selfish and kind of difficult to deal with.

And what happens in these situations is that you can get emotionally hijacked, you can get into that mental swirl, and the problem is that the way that you try to make the situation better often makes it worse and it kind of perpetuates the situation. So, that’s why it’s really important for each of us to have the skills to stay in our power because when you do that, then when you act, you can actually get unstuck, you can get the outcomes that you want, and you can make it better for everyone around you.

So, in my book In Your Power, I try to really break it down for people, “What are the things that you…what does it really look like?” It looks like a sense of agency, like you feel like you have control. It looks like a sense of sovereignty, like you decide who you are. And it looks like a sense of efficacy, so that when you act, when you say things, it lands, you move people, you make it better, and then you just kind of create a virtuous, a positive spiral from there.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was intrigued when you said that sometimes the way we try to make things better makes things worse. Could you give us an example or two of some common ways that materializes?

Sharon Melnick
Oh, so many of these. So, for example, I had a woman start coaching with me, and from the very first moment, she starts off by saying, “I can’t take it anymore.” So, she’s a very capable, competent person in her organization, and some of her peers are kind of not doing all they need to be, and everything is kind of rolling downhill onto her plate.

Her manager is reaching out and interrupting her from 7:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., and she’s responsible for making sure that people around the world are getting paid, so she’s in a very important position. So, she, prior to us kind of helping her to get back in her power, she was going to her boss, saying, like, “Okay, fine. All hours of the night, just come to me and I’ll kind of fix it.”

She felt like she had to prove herself 24 hours a day in order for her to be appreciated. She was kind of blaming her peers in her head and telling them they needed to do it differently, and nothing was changing. In fact, it just kept spiraling into more and more hours. She hadn’t had dinner with her husband in a year. So, this is an example of she wasn’t really kind of understanding what was the underlying problem in this situation.

So, just as an example, how she approached the situation is she brought all the people together who were involved, and she really helped them to understand what the underlying issue is, kind of the anatomy of the problem, so to speak. And, of course, when she had tried to get them to put things back on their plate, they don’t have a lot incentive to do that, so she just would be resentful and angry at them that they weren’t voluntarily kind of taking things back from her plate, but she didn’t kind of really understand how to influence them effectively, how to really put things in terms of what’s in it for them so that they would be motivated to kind of do these things.

But when she did actually bring everyone along, she created the solution. She suggested a reorganization. And, actually, they all went along with it. She was offered a $75,000 retention bonus, and the CEO of the company called her in a meeting, and said, “We’re putting you on the fast track for chief technology officer, so you got to get busy grooming yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful.

Sharon Melnick
And she was ready to leave, though, because she didn’t feel like she had any power in the situation but she had so much power to look beyond the finite problem, and to look more toward infinite solutions that were available if she could just see them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, in terms of how we get there, you’ve got 12 power portals: precision, perspective, physiology, purpose, psyche, proficiency/persuasion, partnership, protection, powerful truth, people, and position. You may have noticed, listeners, these all start with the letter P. I would love to get your take on a couple of these portals that is just the most leveraged or effective in terms of just a little bit of effort gets you a whole lot of results.

And for the results, I’m particularly interested in is reacting less, because sometimes it feels, I think that’s, in my experience, it really does feel like it’s outside my power, like I’m in less control of myself, not that I’m just screaming at people or flying off the handle, but it’s really interesting how, like, the body, just biochemically, naturally, you’ve got a stressor and then you’re different afterwards in terms of how you’re operating, some of that narrowing, or the fight-flight-freeze business.

And I recently had an insight, I banged my head on a light fixture that was hanging low because it was over a dining room table, and I was cleaning up. Anyway, I banged my head, and I noticed that even though I understood how that happened and it didn’t hurt a ton, my body was filled with all the stress stuff, and I was just mad at all kinds of things for the next 20 minutes.

And it’s, like, even though there was not an issue that I had to deal with or sort through, it was a very primal thing – head hurts, feel stressed, now irritable for the next 20 minutes. And I thought, “Geez, I’d love it if I could just take the shortcut and flip the off switch on this real quick.”

Sharon Melnick
Okay. So, let’s flip the off switch and then we’ll come back to kind of things that you can do maybe to prevent a reaction, but let’s take you in the moment where it’s too late, you’re already there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, whether you banged your head or someone sends you an email that you find offensive.

Sharon Melnick
Totally.           So, if you’re already kind of having a reaction, what’s really important is that that reaction is going to stay kind of swirling around you, like you experienced. You have to actively do something to move it through your system. You have to kind of complete the stress cycle, because what’s happened there is that the stress reaction has been activated, and then it’s doing its job to kind of swirl around in your body, and you have to move it through until its completion, and then you can get back to a state of calm.

So, there’s a few different ways that you can do this, especially if you’re really in kind of intensely emotional state, like you might’ve been, or if you’re offended by an email. Really, one of the best things that you could do is whatever it looks like for you to move it through your system, and I mean, like, you got to get it out.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say it, are you thinking, is there like a biochemical basis we’re talking about here, like cortisol? Or, what do you mean by it?

Sharon Melnick
Yes, that’s exactly right. So, there are stress hormones that have been activated because there’s something that was out of your control, or violates your values, or literally is a pain response. And so, it feels like we’re taken over, it feels like we can’t control, but actually there’s many things that you can do.

So, for example, each person listening needs to develop their own personal repertoire of things that you can do to move it through your system. So, one thing that’s really great, like if you’re working from home, is if in between Zoom calls, let’s say, is if you can do like a dance break and put on a rave song, and literally just get it out for two minutes.

And I have for listeners, if you go to InYourPowerBook.com, I actually maintain Spotify playlists for different emotional states, and you just pop in the song and it immediately puts you kind of in the state to dance it out, or whatever it looks like for you. Like, earlier today, there was a boxing gym, boxing bag in my gym, and I went down there and kind of just bruised that bag for just five minutes. Also, at InYourPowerBook.com, there’s videos there of where I have these energy techniques where you literally can kind of like push it through.

But whatever it is for you, go smack some golf balls, smash pillows, whatever is right. I had a client who had a really, really narcissistic boss, and just was having really needed to not have her boss’ insecurities kind of be moving through her, like taking place in her system. So, she went into her car and rolled up the windows, and like let it rip with a scream, and she goes like, “Oh, I feel way better after this.”

Like, literally, whatever it takes for you, especially if you’re angry. But you might be in a more kind of hurt or sad or grieving kind of place, that’s why you want a playlist that’s kind of right for the moment. But that’s really, really important because it brings you back to a sense of mental clarity. And, especially, when you get back in your body, that’s when you remember who you are, because when you’re having that reaction, it’s really going to skew and kind of see the situation through an emotional filter.

Another thing is kind of you want to have all of these feathers in your quiver, is to really allow that emotion to move through you in a way, like taking the analogy of a wave, and kind of surf the wave. And we know that the intensity of an emotion only lasts 90 seconds. So, if you can kind of allow it to move through you and not act on it or just know that it’s going to kind of dissipate over that 90 seconds even though it may take a few 90-second waves.

But to take yourself out of that moment, and to put yourself in the future of 90 seconds from now or in a few minutes from now when it will have passed, and do that and to do deep breathing, to reconnect to your emotional centers, which have taken you over, back with your thinking centers. That’s when you can have mental clarity.

And we can go to kind of our next topic of discussion, which is, “How do you not see that situation in a way where you take it personally and react?” So, very, very important to move it through your system until you have a sense of completion. Crying is a great example of this, and this can be fraught, especially for women. But actually, most women cry when they’re frustrated not when they’re weak. But after you have a good cry, you have that sense of, “Oh, I feel different, like I feel better. I feel in a different place.” That’s that sense of completion.

And always, always, after you’ve moved through kind of a negative emotion, you’ll always want to fill it back up with something that’s fun, pleasant, kind of gives you that sense of like you’re lit up in your body. And that’s why on the Spotify playlists, we also have songs that will do that for you within a minute after you’ve moved it through your system. So, these are really good ways, moving it through your system, filling it back up with good, and then deep breathing or anything that’s calm, that reconnects you with your thinking centers.

Pete Mockaitis
And this 90-second wave is the idea that there will be multiple waves that follow a 90-second arch of peaking and troughing?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah, sometimes it just moves through you in one 90 seconds. If it’s really an intense emotion or if you think of the situation again and rehashing it in your mind, you might get another wave that gets re-triggered. And then there’s also a whole suite of techniques, mind-body “techniques” that have been developed that really help.

Ones that I’ve used and recommended are, like, tapping, like emotional freedom techniques, or havening, or even for people who have particularly intense trauma-related emotions like EMDR, so there are things. It’s the state of your nervous system that really determines kind of whether you’re back in your power or not. And so, I think this is something that we’ve all learned in these times, is to really prioritize taking care of our nervous system.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it, so I know a little bit about tapping and EMDR. I do not know it all what havening means. And I think with your strong credentials, I would love to get your hot take on, well, one, what are these things? Two, is the research base pretty good behind them, or is it sort of way out there and, like, question mark, we don’t know yet, but some people love it, and maybe it’s placebo, maybe it’s not? Like, what are these things? And what is the state of research on their efficacy?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. I think these are all techniques that have been shown to help people who are in, especially, intense states of emotion because something has become activated in you. We call it triggered. And these are all techniques, and there’s others, that kind of work at a kind of physiological level to help you reconnect with a sense of calm, and to reconnect your emotional centers with your thinking centers so you can have more perspective and mental clarity.

And it kind of de-intensifies the emotion and helps you sooth yourself and come back to a place of safety in your own body, which we don’t always feel when we’re…especially if you’re facing overwhelming kind of stress. It can feel very activating of behavioral patterns or emotions that’s maybe longstanding that you felt before.

A definition of a trigger really is a situation that you, in which you feel out of control, that you’ve been in, let’s say, too many times before in your life, and it kind of reactivates that sense of feeling out of control, which can make people feel unsafe. I think, also, finding someone who is safe for you, who you feel comforted by, who can hold your emotion with you and not dismiss you or make you feel bad or less than for being who you are, or having the experience as you are. That person can kind of lend you a little bit of the calm that they have in their nervous system and can help to calm you down. That’s why we call the parasympathetic nervous system kind of the safe and social part of our nervous system.

So, these are all things. And I think the takeaway that I think you all want to have is that, in those moments when you feel full of pain or just emotion, it can feel hard to think beyond that moment, it can feel hard to remember that you will feel good in you again, or that you can have things that you want, or opportunities that you want, or success or abundance in your life again, it can feel hard to feel understood, or that you can connect with people and feel loved again.

So, these are all techniques that take you out of the crunch of that emotional reaction, and remind you who you are, and enable you to connect so that you can then experience that sense of abundance and infinity, not only just the crunch of the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us the step one, two, three if I want to do some tapping or some havening or, say, EMDR? How do I go about doing that?

Sharon Melnick
Yes. So, those are all really different kinds of techniques, and they’re all really specific. And you could Google any one of them. They usually all start with kind of being in a specific experience that you’re having and feeling emotional about it, and then takes you through a process of kind of dipping your toe in, or feeling the feeling that you’re feeling, and then through a process of kind of shifting that emotion to one where you can think about it in a way that has more perspective, and then starts to calm down your system.

So, tapping, taps on kind of meridian points. EMDR tries to integrate across your thinking and your feeling, to put those together. And havening is more just a directly kind of a calming, a self-calming experience where you immediately can just soothe yourself. So, they’re all kind of different modalities but all have a similar intent.

Pete Mockaitis
I remember I met, at Podcast Movement, Gene Monterastelli who hosts the TappingQandA podcast, and he’s a great dude. And so, do I need to be working with a professional to do these kinds of things or can I just Google it and take a crack at it?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah, I think it’s both, actually. I think it depends on kind of how much you’re really affected by the stress that you’re experiencing, how much it’s bringing up kind of old emotions and patterns. There’s lots of solutions that you could use. For example, there’s a free app called The Tapping Solution. So, this is something, like if you’re having a little bit more of a mild experience and you want to kind of check it out for yourself. Maybe you’re feeling a little anxious in a situation, you can definitely take yourself through. They have many different emotions.

But I would say, if something is getting re-triggered in you that’s part of a longstanding adaptation or pattern, and it’s kind of interfering in your life, you’re not able to have the happiness and relationships or the success in your work, then I would definitely seek out a professional who can help you, shepherd you through this process, create a sense of safety and continuity in your narrative, and work it out, really, at its foundational level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so anyway, those are responses to acute stuff, but you said that a big part of the mastery here is having a perspective or frame or context upfront so that we don’t get hijacked in the first place. How do we build this?

Sharon Melnick
So, there are many ways that you can kind of stay good in you and not react, not take something personally in a situation. I’m going to go through a few but I’m going to start with my go-to question. This is a write-it down. Definitely, get your pen or your computer ready.

So, when you’re in a situation where it just feels like things are not going your way, and you’re just, “Why is this happening to me?” the very first question that you want to ask yourself is, “Why might this be happening for me, not to me?” And that is an immediate gamechanger, it puts you in control of the situation, and points your attention toward, “What is the learning? What is the opportunity? What can I get out of this or kind of make out of this situation?”

So, just as an example, I had a woman in my group, a next-level leader coaching program, and she just got out of a conversation with her manager, and she had been passed over for promotion already, and then heard from her manager that her manager was promoting someone else who came in after her and isn’t half as skilled and hasn’t even gotten kudos from the CHRO, the chief human resources person, on all the good, like my client had.

And so, she was really upset, taking it personally, “Why is this happening to me?” in a funk. And when we asked the question, “How might this be happening for you, not to you?” she said it just immediately shifted her perspective, and she said she went from kind of victim in the situation to victor in the situation because she really then thought, “You know something, like this promotion that this other person was just put into, it’s kind of like a half-step up from a director to a senior director.”

But, Nikki, my client, well, she was really doing work that was like already at a VP level or even above. Like I said, she was presenting to the chief human resources officer and across the board to leadership. And that’s what she really wanted and was ready for, and so she came to see it as like, “Actually, we are not on the same timeline, me and my manager, or this company. And this is really showing me that it’s not even what I like. It’s like a promotion I didn’t get but that I didn’t even want.”

And she started to put herself on a track for even more elevated positions, which she got within several weeks from then. So, it’s just an example of she would’ve just really stayed, like feeling done to, resentful, blaming, feeling overlooked in that situation. But as soon as she asked that question, it was like it opened up a whole field of opportunities where she had control and she could do something about it. So, that’s definitely, “How might have this have happened for you, not to you?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And then as I’m thinking about, generally speaking, so-called “negative emotions” or I might call them unpleasant emotions, what are your thoughts with regard to, we talked about waves and letting them go through us? Different folks have different points of view in terms of, “Oh, you should just think of something positive and change the channel asap,” or, “No, no, these are important messages that you’re receiving from your ‘negative’ or unpleasant emotions. Don’t suppress them. What you resist, persists.” How do you think about this dance and game?

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. So, I would definitely recommend, number one, move it through, and just move it through and then you can get back to clarity. And once you get into clarity, then you can start asking yourself the constructive question. You can kind of appreciate that what was causing, usually what causes like a pretty intense emotional response like this is the story that you’re telling about the situation.

Every kind of negative emotion that you’re having, you can always trace back to the story that you’re telling about the facts in the situation. So, that’s immediately an opportunity that you have then to start thinking about the situation in a way that is objective and not subjective. Because, usually, if you have some sort of a doubt about yourself, then you’re going to be looking to people and situations and events that happen in order to kind of decide or get information about how you’re feeling about yourself.

And so, it’s going to predispose you to look towards other people and to kind of make up narratives about what it means about you. And that totally keeps you out of your power because you’re at the mercy of other people and what they do and how they act. So, just as an example in this situation with Nikki, the story that she was initially telling is her manager doesn’t respect her. And then she just was rehashing it in her mind and kind of getting retriggered over and over again.

But when we had a chance to really think it through, I required her to tell three alternative stories about the situation, and that’s when she realized that, actually, her manager wasn’t aware of some of the work that she was doing, or maybe her manager was threatened by all the good work and visibility that she was doing. And then to tell the story of, actually, her boss was promoting these other colleagues but it was into a position that she didn’t even want.

So, you could see that once she was able to get out of that kind of taking it personally, then she was able to be more objective, and she was like, “Yeah, actually, I don’t think this even is about me. Or, if it is, then I have different options in this situation.” And so, one thing that you want to appreciate is that each of us as human beings is that, from our experiences, we may have been telling these stories along the way, and Nikki was, and she had a belief about herself that she wasn’t worthy or that she wasn’t good enough.

And so, in this situation, it’s like she had this kindling, and then the boss’ behavior was like a match, you know what I mean, that alighted her kindling, and there she was not feeling respected, not feeling worthy. But when she was able to look at it more objectively, it was like, “You know, I don’t think really that that was going on,” and that enabled her to be intentional and to create a new path for herself going forward.

And every person who’s having a negative emotion can trace that negative emotion to a story that they’re telling about a situation, and it is within your power to create the narrative, and to tell the story that’s going to enable you to show up as who you want to be and make the contribution that you’re here to make.

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

Sharon Melnick
Well, another thing that I think is very helpful for people is a lot of times I’m hearing people are getting kind of a no or a non-response, and it’s very irritating. It makes us very resentful and it just makes us feel out of our power and done to. And so, before anyone kind of stays in blame and feels like, “It’s not going to work, and I just need to leave the workplace,” or the relation, or whatever it is, I would really encourage you to consider that it may be something about your approach as much as it is about the other person being defiant or not listening.

And I’ve found my clients had just turned around situations when they’ve been getting a no, when they were able to put things in terms of what’s in it for the other person. Like, just as an example, I coached a woman who came to me, she was in a sales role, and she said, “For six years, I’ve been asking my boss for these resources, and he always give the plum assignments to the younger men, and you know what I mean, and I’m not doing well in my sales, and this is concerning. And I’m starting to feel almost like a negative victim mentality when it comes to him.”

And I said, “All good. I’ll help you find another role but let’s give it one more shot in terms of influencing him.” And she said, “He’s all about him. He manages up. He doesn’t care about me.” I said, “Look, wherever someone has a motivation, you can leverage it.” So, we just took those same requests and we phrased it in terms of what was in it for him and what he wanted, and I got an email from her, like, the very next day, tap, tap, “I got every single thing I asked for and more because it was in terms of what was in it for him.”

So, before you feel kind of out of your power, and there’s no options, and you’re just all in a swirl, and thinking you have to leave, just do a double check and make sure that you’ve been impeccable for your 50% and you’ve really thought through how to phrase it in terms of what’s in it for them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Thank you. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote?

Sharon Melnick
Well, this is a lead into one of the early portals in the book, but I think, “It’s never too late to be who you might’ve been.” And that’s, yeah, by George Sanchez, a pen name, actually, for an early English author, woman author.

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

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. Well, there was a study that was conducted at Harvard. I’m sure that you’ve seen this, but they took a videotape of two teams who were playing basketball. One team was wearing white shirts, another team was wearing black shirts, and they had them passing the ball amongst one another, and intermingling.

Some of you might’ve seen this because they’ve done this with hundreds of thousands of people. And during this interaction, there was someone who was dressed up in a big kind of hairy gorilla suit who walked right into the middle of this interaction, and this was all filmed. And then they had people watch this videotape and they asked them, “Did you see the gorilla?”

And fully 50% of the people was like, “There was no gorilla. No, there was no gorilla. Like, stop.” You know what I mean? Like, “Stop joshing me. No, I’m telling you, I was watching. There was no gorilla in that.” And they were like, “No, really, there was.” And I’m telling you, literally, they’ve shown this to, I think, over a half million people.

And so, the point is, and they had the people, when they were watching the video, they were supposed to count the number of passes between the people with the white shirts, so they were calling their attention to something. And the takeaway here, and they wrote a book about this, is that when you’re putting your attention on something, you are blinding yourself, really, to the whole rest of the situation and what is available to you.

And I think that that really is relevant for this idea of being in your power. Because as long as we’re focused on, “That person isn’t treating me the way that I want,” or, “They’re overlooking me,” or, “They’re doing something that’s making me take it personally,” or, “I’m blaming them,” and all of that, we’re totally missing.

In any situation, you have all of these ways of thinking and feeling and solving the problem that if you would just kind of take your myopic focus, of the thing that you’re looking at, you would see that you have so much power in the situation. And this is important for each and every one of you, because when you’re in your power, you raise everyone around you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite book?

Sharon Melnick
I think a great book that’s really affected me recently is Be Your Future Self Now by Benjamin Hardy. And he talks about how we’re really guided by…we make decisions in terms of wanting to be the future self that we want to be even more than being kind of drawing our past into our current state. And I think that that gives us so much hope and shows us how much power that we have to create the life that we want to live.

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

Sharon Melnick
Yeah. Well, I think go now to www.InYourPowerBook.com because that’s where you can download right away those playlists to help you if you are in an emotional state to immediately move that through and get into a place where you’re good in you. And you can also find there, kind of the assessment. It’s just eight questions that are just going to tell you right away how much you’re in your power and exactly what you have to do to get back in your power. And if there’s anyone who resonates and really would like to do coaching with me, or bring me in to speak, SharonMelnick.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?

Sharon Melnick
Here’s the challenge that I want to leave you with. I want you to kind of reflect and think, as you go throughout your day, are you more like the thermometer or the thermostat? If you’re the thermometer, you’re someone who’s reacting to other people, and kind of going up and down all day long. You want to be the thermostat.

When you’re in your power, you’re the thermostat. You decide who you are. You control the situation. You bring others along in your vision. And that’s my challenge to you. Be the thermostat. Be in your power. You have more power than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Sharon, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in your power.

Sharon Melnick
Thank you.

818: How to Find Greater Clarity, Satisfaction, and Fulfillment in Your Career with Scott Anthony Barlow

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Scott Anthony Barlow shares powerful wisdom from many career changers on how to craft a fulfilling career path.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The massive costs of poor career fit
  2. Why you shouldn’t wait on clarity to act
  3. Three risk-free ways to get a feel for a career change

About Scott

Scott Anthony Barlow wants you to find work you freakin’ love! He is CEO of Happen To Your Career and host of the HTYC podcast, which has been listened to over 3 million times across 159 countries, and is the largest career change podcast in the world. As a former HR Leader, Scott has interviewed over 2000 people for jobs and completely rejects the way that most organizations choose to do work. He’s a nerd for self development, human behavior and ice hockey. Scott lives in Washington state with his wife and 3 kids.

Resources Mentioned

Scott Anthony Barlow Interview Transcript

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

Scott Anthony Barlow
Thank you very, very much. I am quite excited to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to have you as well. And so now, Scott, we’ve had a lot of conversations that were not recorded, maybe for the best.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
And one thing that I know about you is you are hardcore and inspiring when it comes to your goalsetting and you even have a nifty family goalsetting approach that involves your kids and a fun environment. Tell us the story here.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Well, here’s the story. My wife and I, we’ve set goals for probably approaching 15, maybe even approaching 20 years. I’m not even sure exactly when it started. I’d have to go back and do the calendar math. But all that to say we’ve been doing that for ourselves over and over again. And, actually, it originally started when we were trying to pay off about almost $400,000 worth of debt.

And so, we had this initial goal and so we started building skills around how to set and accomplish goals in order to get that nearly $400,000 paid down. And we eventually did that but then we realized, “Hey, this is actually working for us.” So, many years later after we had children and after Alyssa and I had started trying to focus on, “How do we be great parents? What do we want to instill in our children? What do we want to teach them?”

And after we started having those kinds of conversations, we realized, “Hey, we’re doing this thing over here, and, arguably, we’ve developed some skill at it, but we’ve taught our children almost nothing about that. Why is that?” And that’s where that question started. So, we eventually said, “Well, what would this look like? What would this look like if we wanted to take what we’ve learned about goalsetting and accomplishing some seemingly impossible things? And then how do we get our kids to want to do that?”

Because my kids now are teenagers, all of them are teenagers, and at the point in time we started doing any kind of goalsetting with the kids, they were, I think, nine and 11 and approaching teenage years, so they were at the ages where they don’t know necessarily want to do everything that we think is a great idea.

So, we said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to do it in a crazy environment that we wouldn’t normally do, something that seems so serious, and then we’re just going to try and make it as fun as possible.”

So, we said, “What would that look like?” Well, we had just ordered a new hot tub, so we said, “Okay, we’re going to take the duck, the rubber duck that we got as a gift from the hot tub company, and we are going to do hot tub goalsetting where we pass the duck around and we talk about each person who has the duck what they want to accomplish this year, and what would be fun, what would be amazing, what would be uncomfortable, and talk through those types of questions.” And that’s how it began, and now it’s turned into this regular thing where we meet each month in order to review how we’re doing against our individual goals.

And I think something that’s really wonderful and personally inspiring to me watching my kids go through and really take this and have fun with it and run with it is that they’ve done some things where they set it initially. Like, okay, here, my son, Grayson, my youngest said, “I want to break a world record.” And Alyssa and I did the thing that sometimes you do as a parent where you want to be supportive, we’re like, “Okay, Grayson, all right, that sounds amazing. All right. Fantastic.”

Where I’m thinking, “Okay, maybe we should start it with something else.” So, both Alyssa and I were able to successfully, in that case, suspend our beliefs about that, and say, “Okay. Well, how can you do that, Grayson?” He eventually, over about a two-month period, ended up researching what type of record he might want to break, decided on video games. He decided, “I want to be the first in the world to speed run this particular game.”

Pete Mockaitis
Which one?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Kirby. One of the Kirby games. It’s the most recent one, and, I, for some reason, it’s totally escaping me what’s it called.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so speed run a Kirby game. All right.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yup. So, he did that, and two months in, after he set the goal, he literally was the first person in the world to get this time on that particular Kirby game. So, he has the screenshot to prove it. It’s like it literally said, “You’ve accomplished a world record.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s nice to hear.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yeah, but here’s the thing about that. We started realizing that, “Wow, this is incredibly powerful, not just for us but even more so for our children,” because both Alyssa and I, we really didn’t honestly get into things like goalsetting or really figuring out what it is that we wanted to do, wanted to accomplish, what type of life or career do we want to live, and it’s quite powerful once you decide that you want to do something, figuring out the very best way that that can actually happen in reality.

So, Grayson literally broke a world record.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool. That’s so cool. And you have seen transformation with many people in your work, your organization, and podcast Happen to Your Career, and now book Happen to Your Career.

Scott Anthony Barlow
And now book, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, transforming folks. And you’ve seen a lot of folks set a career-related goal and go get it. Can you maybe orient us, generally speaking, what is it you do and know that’s fresh and unique?

Scott Anthony Barlow
I think that with the book, it was very much we wanted to be able to reach people a different way because, really, what we do as an organization is we are very focused on helping people find what their own personal version of extraordinary is, what does a wonderful fit look like for them as it relates to their career, and, ultimately, their life because, first and foremost, we can’t really separate out many of the decisions that we make for our career. They have a tendency to be inseparable from the rest of our life.

So, if we keep that in mind, then that means that anything that we are defining as extraordinary for our career is absolutely going to impact all of the other areas of our life. So, we get the opportunity every single day to be able to help people all over the world with defining what they want their life and career to look like, and then going and making that happen, going and getting it, this seemingly impossible thing, making that and turning that into their reality. And that’s what we do every single day both with the book as well as when we get to serve people as clients.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And so, I would love to get your take, when it comes to people and their careers, just what is at stake for professionals if their career is a great fit versus okay-ish fit?

Scott Anthony Barlow
We all only have so much time on the planet regardless of how you feel spiritually or what you believe. We only have so much time here, and I want to, personally, make sure that, for me, my time is spent in a way that I am able to contribute to other people in the way that I want and serve other people the way that I want, but also building the type of life and career that I want to live.

And I find that not everybody is looking at it that way necessarily. But the point that I would make is that if we’re all, or at least most of us, are going to spend arguably most of our waking hours doing some type of work, some type of service, if you will, then that means that we should probably find a way to do it in a way that is much more meaningful to both us plus the people that we get to work with, around, serve, and that’s how I look at it. I look at it as an opportunity to be able to do life completely differently.

Now, here’s the sad reality. So, although I can say that, and although I believe that, and I think a lot of people might agree with that, depending on which study, depending on which research you look at, it is someplace between half a percent and about 13% of people in the entire world that are just enamored with their work. And that’s dismal.

When I look at that and say, “Almost nobody in the entire world is really enjoying their work and finding it fulfilling in the ways that are wonderful for them, then that’s sad, and that needs to change, and that’s not okay.” And I know that you’re referencing a particular part in the book when you say, “What’s at stake?” We begin the first chapter and we tell a story of Michael. And in Michael’s case, he was working for a pretty large studio, one that most people have definitely heard of, a movie studio.

And that particular studio, he had actually had really a pretty wonderful career up until the last three years that he was there. And he found himself in a new promotion, new situation, that what was once a dream job for him was no longer that dream. It turned into a pretty terrible situation, one that was no longer a fit. And it became really bad, bad to the point in which Michael had considered self-harm, which is not a thing to joke around, but we’ve had many stories like that.

And in Michael’s case, he realized that this was bad for his mental health, it was bad for his physical health, it was ultimately just really a terrible fit for him. And by continuing to stay in that type of situation, he was possibly going to give up the opportunity to have any other type of life, let alone a life at all.

And so, this is a little bit of an extreme situation but it happens much more frequently. What I’ve learned in working with people all over the world is this is something that happens pretty frequently, where people’s health is severely impacted by what most people would look at, and say, “That’s an amazing job. That’s an amazing opportunity,” from the outside looking in.

And in Michael’s case, here’s the real thing that was at stake. If we fast forward about roughly a year to where Michael ended up making a career change, we got the opportunity to meet him and work with him. Alyssa, my wife and I, we had ended up actually meeting him in California and we met at this little diner down in Pacific Beach, and he was telling us, as we were eating banana pancakes, that it was the first time in his life where he had considered that work could potentially be fun. Like, that had never, ever even entered his mind. Like, literally, it was not a possibility for him.

So, he went from this situation where it started out as seemingly wonderful to him, he moved up the ladder really, really quickly, and arguably was good in a lot of very challenging ways. But then it became not so good, and, ultimately, he didn’t realize that was a fun possibility like that but it was something that if he stayed in that situation, it could be not a possibility. I guess that’s the word I’m looking for. I’m looking for a way to even describe that, like what he was feeling and the emotions that he was going through at that particular time. But imagine that if he had stayed. He literally never would’ve found that. So, I think that’s an example of what’s at stake.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful and an eye-opener that folks who may be listening, it’s like, “Fun, huh? It’s going to work for a reason. It’s a job. It’s not play.” And so, that could be a lightbulb for many, like, “Oh, yeah,” some folks really do have fun at work. They find it meaningful, engaging, and life-giving, energizing, so some groovy stuff. And, of course, I think it’s also fair to say, with realism, that no job is 100% euphoric 100% of the time. Is that a fair statement? 

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yes, I do believe that that is a fair statement. And I’m curious with your opinion on that, because there’s been many times where you and I have had pivots and how we personally think about work.

And I remember talking to you, and even our group at one point in time, where it’s like, “Hey, I have checked the box in many of the things that I wanted to work in for a while. My role has changed and this was wonderful, and it’s no longer wonderful anymore.” So, I think I point that out because even if there is a situation that is great, and even if it is a great fit, part of the challenge, part of the reason why figuring this career thing out, figuring out what extraordinary looks like, is so challenging is because it’s actually a moving target as we go through different seasons.

Like, you have three kiddos now, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Do you want the same things that you did when it was 10 years ago with no kids?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m not quite as interested in as much travel and hustle, and it’s like, “Oh, sweet, I’ve got 11 coaching sessions today.” It’s like, “I would not find that sweet were that to happen to me tomorrow.”

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yeah, and I think that’s true for everyone, and I think that that’s normal. The really interesting thing, the thing I find fascinating is that we have a tendency to beat up on ourselves in so many different ways. When that changes, we don’t realize our wants and needs have changed and we’re still trying to shove the, I don’t know, square peg in the round hole, insert your cliché here.

We’re still trying to do the thing, we’re still trying to keep going, we’re still trying to beat our head against the wall, and I don’t really hear too many people talk about, like, it’s actually okay to change and it’s part of the game. But, simultaneously, that’s part of what makes it challenging to figure out what a great situation, what an amazing situation, what we call the unicorn opportunity situation looks like for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about figuring it out. Clarity, we all want it. How do we get it?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Has anybody ever asked you for, or has said to you, “Hey, I’m looking for clarity in this particular area or that area?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Absolutely.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Okay. All right. So, we get that all the time, and the really interesting thing I found about clarity is that when we’re asking for it, we’re often looking at it as a destination. We’re often looking at it as a, “If I just figure out what it is that I want, then I can go and do the thing.” However, when we look into even the origins of the word clarity, we find that it has many of the same root words as declare, the same root word which is clarare, right?

And what that means, when you start to break down the history and the evolution of that word, is that it means to act or an action is required, the action of declaring, the action of declaring something as a priority is really what leads to any kind of clarity. So, so many of us think that we need to go and figure out the thing. We need to get all our ducks in a row. We need to go away and sit in a cabin for a month, and then we will emerge, and we will have clarity, and it’ll be amazing. There’ll be rainbows and butterflies. I’ve got a unicorn back here. It’s going to be awesome. And that’s not actually how it works, as it turns out.

Instead, what we find is actually true is that clarity comes from the simple act of declaring something as a priority for you, declaring something as more important, which obviously takes courage. It takes courage to be able to say, “My wife is more important than all of these other things.” I think many of us would say that but very few of us, I find, are willing to act on that in a way that takes courage. So, I’ll give you a quick example from my past.

Like, if my wife calls me right now, I’m literally going to pick up the phone. There she is right there on the phone. Not everybody can see that but if she calls right now, I’m going to pick that up because she is the most important thing in my world. Is that weird, as in socially kind of unacceptable? I would say so. Probably.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m going to light you up. Well, I wouldn’t because we’re pals.

Scott Anthony Barlow
It’s a good thing we know each other, right?

Pete Mockaitis
But, yeah, other people would say, “What the heck, dude? Seriously?”

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yeah, and that feels, honestly, when that happens, very uncomfortable for me. Also, if I’m going to behave like my wife is the most important thing in the world to me, then I should treat it as such. So, that’s a really small example but think about what goes into that. I have to think through, first of all, “What is most important to me?” And then I have to consciously make the decision that that is, in fact, the most important thing. In this case, the most important person, my wife. And then I have to be able to commit to that in a way that allows me to act as such.

And that’s part of what we’re talking about when we say, “What does it take to get to clarity?” Clarity allows you to be able to act, not action before clarity. Most of us think that we’re going to get clarity, and then we’re going to go do the thing. But, instead, it happens exactly the opposite way, “I’m going to declare what’s most important, and then that allows me to be able to make movement on whatever that most important thing is.” So, it is literally the opposite of how almost everybody in the world thinks about it.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to doing that declaring and then living as such in harmony, in integrity with those declarations, might you discover through a little bit of trial and error that what you declared was actually not the most important thing to you, it’s like, “Huh, actually now that I’m in it, I’m realizing,” not this to be the case with your wife, “I’m realizing that this is not as important to me as perhaps I thought it should be, or is, or once was. Things have evolved”?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yeah. Short answer is yes. I have many examples of that. But I’m curious, have you had that experience in the past? Have you gone through and realized that, “Hey, this thing that I thought that was most important one way or another, one area of life or another, is actually less important than what I think”? What are some of your examples? What are the Pete examples?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. I think that that has come about…well, it’s so funny, like being awesome at your job. So, we have a whole show on this. So, I think that’s pretty important but I don’t believe that’s the number one most important thing in life. And so, it’s funny, when I think about other podcasts, I think that I would say they’re sort of like a pecking order or a hierarchy that I would rather folks listen to my show than true crime or sports or news, like for their own edification, I think. We’re going to do more of that for you than those things.

But if someone is listening to a show about how to be more kind, or spiritual, or healthy, or solving like a really challenging thing that makes their life and others miserable, I would rather you spend your time listening to that because I think that is more important than being awesome at your job. And, in fact, many of our guests do have a little bit of a mental health slant because there’s a real rich carryover in terms of if you’re mentally healthy, then you’re making better decisions, and you’re energized, and you’re able to bring good effort to stuff, so it’s like Yin-Yang, like reinforcing virtuous cycle thingy going down here.

So, I don’t think it’s either/or but I would say that, for example, I used to think, I don’t know if you remember a show “Boy Meets World.”

Scott Anthony Barlow
I do. I do. 

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m about to drop a spoiler here.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Oh, dear.

Pete Mockaitis
But when Topanga gives up, I think, it was Harvard, her top dream school, to go be with Cory, I thought that was so dumb, I thought that was a horrible decision, I was like, “You’re young. What do you even know about love?” And I guess I think I’m high school-college age too when this comes about, and I just thought that was bananas because, at that time in my life, career really was sort of number one. And I hadn’t been in a relationship that serious, I suppose, as to make me think that I would give up such a career opportunity for a person. So, that was me then.

And now I think, “Well, yeah, if that’s like your soulmate, or the person you’re destined to be with, or someone who’s just really clearly the one, well, absolutely, you should probably give up just about everything.” So, that happened. I remember once I was at a Subway sandwich shop, and Kelly Clarkson’s “Miss Independent” was playing, and I started tearing up, it’s like, “What is even going on here?”

Scott Anthony Barlow
“What is happening right now?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think I was…like, if you listen to the lyrics, you hear sort of the story arc, and it’s about like that kind of a transformation. There is someone who is all about their career, independent, taking care of business, winning. And then she came to realize, “Oh, there’s something else that’s even more important.” So, yeah, I think that what you say about things being a moving target is dead-on in terms of there’s a time and a place.

And Ramit Sethi talks about this too in terms of like there’s a season where it’s like, “Growth, baby. Bring it on. More, more, more, more, more. I want the biggest stuff, the toughest challenge, and I’m just going to pour myself into work or whatever.” And then there’s a time where that season is no longer suiting you, and it might come back a little later. That’s the game.

Scott Anthony Barlow
First of all, can I just say that I love that you started that whole section of the conversation with “Boy Meets World.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you may.

Scott Anthony Barlow
And, second of all, I think that there is this stigma, at least in much of North America and some areas of Europe, too, but there’s this stigma that it’s not okay to change, or that one way is the right way, or the direction that we keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
“And you’re a flip-flopper. We don’t like our politicians flip-flopping. We don’t like quitters or flip-floppers.”

Scott Anthony Barlow
No, no quitters, yes. And so, interestingly enough, the main reason that I have this company now is because I quit and went from one thing to the next thing, to the next thing, to the point where, we counted it up the other day, I’ve had, in the last 20 or so years, I’ve had 20 different roles, and all of that set of experience of being able to go through many, many different things came from quitting. And, actually, for me, personally, I felt a long time, like that was an inadequacy in so many different ways because it felt like as soon as things got really hard, or whatever, then I would get bored and then I’d run off to the next thing.

And although there was some level of truth to that, that wasn’t necessarily the full reason but that’s the story that I was saying in my head for myself. And it was furthered by the fact that that is the message that we unintentionally put out in society. 

Pete Mockaitis
So, when it comes to clarity, you said one way we get there is we declare the priorities, and then act in alignment with them. What are some your other favorite questions, practices, exploratory activities that can yield oodles of insight for the time we spend doing them?

Scott Anthony Barlow
So, first of all, let me give you a high-level overview of the process we often use with our clients, and the reason that we do this is, I mentioned earlier that it’s really difficult to be able to separate out your career from other things. When you plug yourself in, if you think about plugging yourself into a particular career choice, whether that’s the people that you work with, whether that’s the organization that you’ve said yes to for a job opportunity, whether that is whatever you’re getting paid, all of those things impact other areas of your life from your schedule to the pressures that you feel or don’t feel, to everything else.

So, it becomes really important that we’re looking at all of these things as a whole. So, I wanted to be able to say that first, and that’ll give you some insight as to why we often are approaching activities that appear to be more holistic or addressing other areas of your life even though we often focus on career. So, one of those things is, initially, we try to help people create what we call an ideal career profile. And really just think about that as literally what it sounds like. It’s a profile of what makes up your ideal career.

Now, when I say that, often people are thinking about occupation, and I’m not talking about occupation. I’m talking about the things like, “How you are utilizing your strengths within your work opportunities? What amount of money do you need to make in order to satisfy your other goals that maybe aren’t even financially related? Who are the types of people that you want to spend your time around knowing that the choice that you make and plug into is going to impact who you spend your time with?”

So, starting out, we put together that ideal career profile, and I’ll give you a few questions here momentarily, but then what we’re going to do with it is we’re going to take that profile, which is an educated guess, and then we’re going to test it out. The reason we test it out is, generally, we find that when people come to us and they’re wanting to make some kind of career change, and they’re wanting to move to a better situation, a more ideal situation, then they also are simultaneously not wanting to take significant risks, because a lot of times they are not fresh out of college, if you will, necessarily. A lot of times, they may have already determined that, “The career that I’ve pursued is no longer a fit in one way or another,” so there’s an aversion to risk.

And one of the ways that we can avoid risks while still getting wonderful input is by creating a small series of experiments in order to determine, “Is that hypothesis, that ideal career profile, actually the right direction? Am I giving some road signs indicating that I am, in fact, headed in the right direction for me?” versus just making another career change, or going back to school, or putting all the time and effort in only to realize that the names and the faces have changed, but it’s the exact same situation. So, that’s no good for anybody.

So, here is a couple things that we use specifically. Number one, if we’re evaluating strengths, let’s say, let’s take that as scenario, one question that is my favorite, and maybe you can answer this, too, or we can answer it together, “What do you find yourself gravitating to that isn’t actually a part of your job but shows up over and over again? Now, is that I’m supposed to be doing these spreadsheets and these financial projections but I find myself wandering the halls and going and asking my neighbor what they were barbecuing the other day because I’m fascinated about what do people eat?”

Whatever it is, what do you find yourself doing over and over again? That’ll give clues or indications, especially if it’s not a part of your paid role. And what I find is that, as you dig into that type of question, often you start to observe some patterns. So, let me ask you that really quick. When you think about your past opportunities, roles, paid, unpaid, whatever else, what do you keep gravitating towards, Pete, that really didn’t have much to do with what you’re supposed to be doing at the time?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what’s funny is I’m think about consulting back in the day, I really loved recruiting, which was part of…all of us was supposed to have a part of recruiting, but I really loved being able to go to a career fair to being able to do case interviews or help people prepare for their case interviews.

Scott Anthony Barlow
I see where this is going.

Pete Mockaitis
Or more people-y stuff, like, where there’s an intern, I got to play manager just a little bit with a fresh intern. I thought that was really cool in terms of helping them learn stuff. And so, I was having fun with that for sure. And I think I also learned this isn’t just about skills or strengths, but just the environment. I remember, once I was so excited to be able to take a trip by myself to Kansas City where some very hallowed terminals where I could access some data that was, I guess, air-gapped from the cloud to go there and get the data.

And I was really stoked by this trip, I thought, “That’s kind of weird. I’m traveling somewhere alone to do a fairly manual repetitive task, and I’m stoked about it.” And what I was stoked about was the autonomy in terms of, “You know what, I can eat what I want when I want when I don’t have to check in with the whole team.” Like, “Hey, so you’re going to do lunch. Oh, okay, we’re going to wait. Okay, we’re going to wait for the senior people because they want to eat with us but they’re not ready to eat yet, so we’re just going to wait some more, but I really want to eat now but I can’t eat now. So, we don’t know how long this is going to take but it might be four minutes, it might be 40 minutes. I’m hungry now.”

It’s so funny. I don’t know, but being able to choose when and what I eat during my work day felt very exciting.

Scott Anthony Barlow
So, that’s kind of fascinating because now you have, in some ways, the ultimate set of choices.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, I like the autonomy and I like the people development. And go figure, here I am in a very autonomous role doing a lot of people development.

Scott Anthony Barlow
I am so shocked. So shocked. And by that, I mean not shocked at all. But I think that that is just one of many questions. And what I find is that none of these questions yield the ultimate answer. None of the questions yield the “magic bullet” or the “magic pill” or whatever. But they do all give clues, and those clues lead to a-has, those clues lead to being able to understand yourself and what you need in a different way.

And what I find is that a better way to think about uncovering the right type of career, or career fit for you, which may not be occupational, it might be about the environment, it might be about some of those other areas I mentioned earlier, is to think about it more as a CSI or detective-type of approach where you find one clue that helps you get a little further along but it leads to another clue, which leads to another clue, which leads to another clue. And, eventually, we solve some version of the case, which then leads to a new case.

And that is a much, much better analogy for how to think about your career in a healthy way where it’s going to continue to evolve, it’s going to continue to change, and just because you climbed up the mountain in one way or another doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over. It’s an ongoing, living, breathing set of decisions. And for some people, that can feel a little bit scary but I think that it can also be really, really empowering because, take your example here, like you probably, if we talked 20 years ago, would you have known all of those, “Well, I need people development or I need autonomy, and everything else”? I’m guessing probably…

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Not.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I might have some clues in terms of I really had a lot fun when I’m speaking to groups. And so, that’s true, I do, but the topic makes all the difference.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Oh, really?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. If I were talking about how to use a software program, that might be moderately energizing for me. But if I were talking about “Do this and you’re going to be way more productive and happy with your work,” that’s way more exciting for me to be talking about.

Scott Anthony Barlow
I agree. Me, too. I can only get so far. So, a topic for me makes a massive difference as well, but for some other people, it might just be about the act. For some other people, it might be about who they’re talking to. And for still other people, it might be about “Am I getting to speak with people one on one versus large groups, versus communities of people, versus any other way that you might slice that up?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I’m thinking about the nature of the impact, like, “Are you talking to…?” “I’m just helping rich people get richer,” and that really bothers you versus you don’t care at all. That doesn’t bother you at all, it doesn’t even occur to you, versus, “Oh, I’m really helping disadvantaged communities,” or whatever. So, the who could be, or it’s sort of like the elite students were really engaged and fired up with it and challenging, like that’s exciting.

Or, they are very much not elite students who, like, really need your help and you feel a great sense of purpose for having assisted them and really met them and made a difference that you feel more palpable. So, yeah, that who, I think, has all kinds of angles and flavors that provide cool clues right there.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Well, the important part is finding the right flavor for you because, in the book, we talk about what we call the seven keys to fulfillment, and there are areas that create more or less fulfilling careers, or feelings of fulfillment. However, if you’re talking about the who or how you work with people – is it in a one-on-one format versus large groups format – it’s a very different from a person-to-person basis. And finding that right variety, that right recipe is also very, very different from person to person.

So, I think that to go back to, say, how you contribute to others, as an example, the important part there is not just who you’re helping but, if we look at all of the data and the research, the real question is, “Are you helping people in a way that feels like you are helping people?” I know that sounds a little bit weird because, arguably, any job in the world is probably helping, like we can make a case that it’s helping people.

Whether you are at a movie theater, you are a VP of finance, you are taking out the trash, like in some way or another, it’s helping people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it feels like, and you can see a direct connection between how you’re helping other people, and that’s the real key. So, finding out how it feels, the right type of how for you is really what we’re after here.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, Scott, boy, we could talk for hours about this, but I want to hear, tell me, any top do’s or don’ts that we absolutely must hear from you before we shift gears and hear about your favorite things?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Absolutely. Absolutely. I think the number one do is run towards something. So many people are running away from something, running away from a not-great boss, running away from a situation that doesn’t feel like a great fit, but they haven’t actually taken the time to figure out what it is that they actually want. So, to be able to run to something, you really have to take the time, effort, energy to identify all of the areas and all of the pieces and parts that make up your ideal, otherwise, that’s going to be impossible. You won’t be able to run to something.

And the disadvantage, if you’re running away from something and not towards something that’s clearly defined, is you’re automatically going to be settling by default. So, run to something, that’s number one. And then, number two, experiment. We briefly mentioned that experimenting, or the idea of experimentation, however, I think that’s so critical as it relates to your career because it takes all of the risks, or at least most of the risks and perceived risks out of the equation.

So, so many people don’t career-change because they’re like, “Well, it feels so risky,” and in some ways it is. However, if you take small steps and a small amount of work to validate that you’re heading the right direction through a well-crafted experiment, that doesn’t even have to take a significant period of time, then once you get those road signs indicating that you are heading in the right direction, then it can reduce a significant amount of that risk. So, I think that’s thing number two.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Now, well-crafted experiment, can you give us a couple quick examples of what that might look, sound, feel like?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yeah. We have helped people craft hundreds of different types of experiments but there are some that are more common than others, and I’ll give you a couple just really quick examples. One is the social Goldilocks, another is what we call the volunteer, another is the paid researcher.

So, the volunteer is what it sounds like, where you’re actually volunteering your time or energy either with another organization or even, potentially, inside your organization, and that’s where we might move into the paid researcher. Now, the benefits of doing either of those are getting to trial out the work without necessarily a full-time commitment, and understanding the feedback from that experience about whether or not you’re heading the right direction.

Now, the side benefit from that, and I think this is part of what makes a well-crafted experiment, in my opinion, is it’s not just for the feedback. But a well-crafted experiment also allows you to experience multiple benefits. Quick example, we had…personally we were working with…her name is Stephanie, and she volunteered at a marketing organization. She thought she might be interested in marketing, and volunteered with a local chapter of a marketing organization, met a lot of people and two things ended up coming from that.

One, she was able to land a copywriting gig, a small contract-based copywriting gig that didn’t take a lot of her time but allowed her to experiment in a paid way, and that’s what we call the paid researcher. A way you can do the paid researcher. And the other side benefit from that was she discovered she didn’t really like marketing by volunteering for that particular organization.

So, she eliminated an entire area that she suspected that she wanted to move into, and, instead, another area she was exploring at the same time was organizational communications. And some of the connections that she had made through that marketing organization ended up causing her to be introduced to other people that led to communications-type of experiences. So, there’s a quick couple examples.

Social Goldilocks, I mentioned that one at the beginning, that’s the idea of…well, you’re familiar with Goldilocks, of course, like, “This chair is too big. This porridge is too cold, too hot. This corner office is too large,” whatever. But the idea of the social Goldilocks, instead of doing what people call informational interviews, how can you identify either roles or organizations or other types of opportunities that might be a good fit?

And go talk to people in those roles, or in those organizations, for relatively short periods of time, even as little as 10 or 15 minutes, and learn about what makes them enjoy the role, what they think are relevant experiences to be successful in that role. Learn about what they love about their organization, what they don’t love about their organization.

And the idea here is not just the interaction itself, but that you can string together many different types of interactions with, say, 10 or 15 or 20 people in a relatively short period of time, and then you have a set of feedback where you can start making decisions from, “Should I dive further into this strategy-type role that I suspected that I love? And now I talked to three different people, and I’m getting similar feedback. And I think that it might be worth diving further in.”

So, these are all really quick examples of ways to do two things – get that feedback, and, simultaneously, build relationships at the same time, which, at this point, we don’t have very many computers hiring people. It does happen occasionally, but for the most part, it’s still people that hire people and make those hiring decisions, so relationships are critical when it comes to that. So, there’s a few different examples.

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

Scott Anthony Barlow
This one gets attributed to Da Vinci a lot of the time, and I’m assuming it was not originally in English, but the English translation comes out to be something that, “I often observe that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and allowed things to happen. Instead, they went and happened to them.”

And although it gets attributed to Da Vinci, I believe it actually, as near as I can tell, comes from Da Vinci’s mentor, and Da Vinci ended up repeating it many, many times and that’s in some of his books.

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

Scott Anthony Barlow
There is a huge body of work around strengths, and what Martin Seligman originally called signature strengths now. And so, this is not one particular set of research but the body as a whole has really expanded over the last 30 years, and it is fascinating.

When you get to spend as little as one or two more hours a day working in your strengths and operating in your strengths, there are so many benefits from smiling more in a given day, all the way to be more productive, to having health benefits, or being able to avoid health risks.

So, that’s fascinating to me, personally, and it’s really interesting, some of the lengths that have nothing to do with what people perceive to be strengths, and, in some cases, nothing to do with what people perceive work but that impact overall quality of life when you spend very small amounts of time more, comparatively, to what you might be right now focusing on areas that fit your strengths. So, that’s my favorite body of research as a whole.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Here’s one book that changed my mind on quite a few different things. It’s called 80/20 Sales and Marketing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, Perry Marshall. He was on the show.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Yeah, Perry Marshall. Okay, so this was useful even if you care not about sales and marketing whatsoever. The idea behind 80/20 and something that tipped me off to a different idea that I don’t think that was said in that book but it sparked a lot of things for me, because the quick bit of 80/20, where it originally comes from, and now it’s pretty popularized, I would say, but the Pareto Principle is another thing that it’s called, where the idea of having 20% of the inputs produced 80% of the outputs.

So, Pareto saw that when he was raising peas way back when. He noticed that some of the peapods on certain pea plants had very few peas, and on 20% of the plants, they actually had roughly 80%. They produced 80% of the peas. And he started observing this all over the place in nature, this natural phenomenon.

However, what doesn’t get talked about that the book turned me onto is if you take that top 20%, it has its own top 20%, the 4% that produces 64% of the results. So, that idea is fascinating to me, and I’ve spent the last, almost seven, eight years really trying to figure out, “What is the 4% that really moves the needle so that you can just let the rest go in so many different areas of life?”

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

Scott Anthony Barlow
Superhuman, which you turned me onto.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. It’s all good.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Oh, my goodness, love Superhuman. We have it for almost my entire team now, yeah. Are you still using it?

Pete Mockaitis
I am.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Oh, my goodness. Thank you for that. Like, lifechanging in so many different ways. A whole different way to do email.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Scott Anthony Barlow
I think my favorite habit recently is fasting till afternoon.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I tried that and really didn’t like it.

Scott Anthony Barlow
Well, it’s not for everyone.

Pete Mockaitis
Glad it’s working for you.

Scott Anthony Barlow
And I really didn’t like it until maybe, I don’t know, probably after a month in. Then now it’s actually become a wonderful thing that adds energy, where the first probably two weeks, I’m like, “This is terrible. Who would do this?” So, not for everyone but that’s my current favorite habit.

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

Scott Anthony Barlow
The idea of identifying what you want so that you can then go and ask for what you want, and I find that people who ask for what they want are very often more frequently getting what they want.

So, that really simple concept has changed my life in so many different ways, which means that I need to have ownership and understanding around not just where I’m running to, which we mentioned earlier, but what it is that I, in fact, want and what’s great for me and my highest priority, which we mentioned clarity earlier, too, and it all ties back to that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to connect or hear more about you, where should they go?

Scott Anthony Barlow
Well, certainly, HappenToYourCareer.com, and we have, of course, a podcast by the same name, Happen to Your Career, in all the places where podcasts are played, so certainly over there. But I think that for people that really want to get started in figuring out what could be a next amazing step, what extraordinary could look like, and utilizing much of the concepts that we just talked about, go to FigureItOut.co where you get an opportunity to sign up for an 8-day email course where we send you an email each day, and it asks you a few questions that will begin to allow you to figure out what truly is your north, what is your compass.

We’ve had almost 50,000 people at this point through that particular course. And we’ve got so many people sending emails and feedback over the years that it’s helped them get started in figuring out what they want.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and success as you’re happening to your career.

Scott Anthony Barlow
I appreciate it.