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KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness

Jul 10

462: Increasing Your Self-Awareness to Improve Your Leadership with Pamela McLean

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Pam McLean says: "Our presence is an intervention."

Pamela McLean reveals how your inner landscape helps and hinders your leadership capabilities.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The most common obstacle to developing your leadership potential
  2. How to address self-limiting beliefs
  3. The most critical internal areas to develop

About Pamela 

Pamela McLean is the CEO and cofounder of the Hudson Institute of Coaching, which provides consulting to organizations worldwide. Working in the arenas of clinical and organizational psychology, and leadership coaching and development, Pam has worked with hundreds of organizational leaders and seasoned professionals inside organizations and in solo practice to deepen and strengthen their coaching skills. Pam is the author and co-author of several books, articles and whitepapers focused on coaching, human development and transformational learning. Her titles include: The Completely Revised Handbook of Coaching and LifeForward, Charting the Journey Ahead.

Resources mentioned in the show:

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

Pam McLean
So happy to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. And I, first, want to hear a little bit about your fondness for birdwatching.

Pam McLean
That’s great. Well, I’ve been a birdwatcher for a long time and it is interesting that there are a lot of birdwatchers in the world. It turns out, I grew up on the prairie right on the border of Manitoba up in the corner of North Dakota, Minnesota, and when one grows up on a farm on a prairie, the appreciation for wildlife is accentuated. And I’ve just carried that through all of my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And so, can you identify the birds then readily, “That’s a yellowtail, blue belly…”?

Pam McLean
There’s always room for improvement, but I do have a repertoire that I can identify, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, birdwatching, it seems like a relaxing hobby as opposed to, I don’t know, bungee jumping.

Pam McLean
Much more relaxing and it’s everywhere. You don’t have to go find a bungee jump. There are birds everywhere so it’s a wonderful thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m intrigued. So, you’ve also done a lot of human watching and observing and coaching and training of coaches. Boy, there are so many things I want to dig into but I’m just going to start to dig and ask. Coaches really have a privileged way of a view, I’d say, of the human condition and how we really operate deep down. So, I’d love to know what have you found is the most surprising, or striking, or reliable insight into how we humans tick that you’ve discovered from all your decades of coaching and coach training?

Pam McLean
Great question. Definitely a broad one. There are several things that come to my mind. One is in the world of coaching, especially leadership coaching, which is really what I have spent the last 30 years in here at Hudson, one theme is that almost all leaders want to do their best work. They want to be at their best. So, that’s quite something to work with people who are willing to continue to grow and develop. That is, I think, one of the unique features of leadership coaching.

Another one that is interesting, Pete, and I spent my first half of my career as a clinical psychologist and then now as a leadership coach, or running a leadership coaching organization. One of the other things that I see as a theme is that change is hard for all of us. That to make a change, even what might seem like a small change, takes a lot of conscious effort, and that is part of what makes coaching valuable, to have someone walking alongside you and helping to look at how you can build some practices and continue to make some shifts that are really going to matter for you.
But it strikes me,

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m reminded of the oddest things sometimes in the podcast interviews, and now I’m thinking about an old Dane Cook, a comedian, joke about someone in the bad romantic relationship, and her friends are saying, “You should just get out. You should just get out of there. You just get out. Just go.” And she’s like, “Well, it’s not that simple, Karen. My CDs are in his truck.” And I just think there’s so much truth to that. Like, “Yeah, there’s a few changes that have to happen, and that’s hard to do.”

Pam McLean
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, yet I find that reassuring. So, my last person I interviewed was a Navy Seal, and so he’s sort of speaking likewise about how, yeah, that’s a scary thing to do, standup comedy for the first time as he was venturing into this or that. And so, it’s reassuring that even sort of like the toughest and most elite among us also struggle with doing change. And I guess I might want to get your take on why do you suppose that is? Is it just habit and comfort just…has a pull on us?

Pam McLean
Well, yeah, I think that’s right, that it does have a pull on us, and we know from the neuroscience as well that we build these, we could almost think of them as like grooves in our brain that we’re on autopilot when we’re in habit. And so, if I’m going to shift my way of being, here’s a kind of common one that might come up in coaching. I’m just thinking of those.

You know, as an early manager, here’s one that can be common, that someone goes, “Oh, gosh, I don’t really want to get my person feedback because it makes me kind of uncomfortable. I’d like to be liked. I haven’t really done much of it before.” And so, to rewire to see that providing feedback to someone that you’re managing is actually an important part of developing them, and everybody wants to grow. That’s quite different then, the mindset that, “I might make them feel badly,” or, “That would be uncomfortable for me to do.”

So, it takes us quite a bit of time to deconstruct what gets in the way, to really look at what the underlying obstacles are, and to pay attention to them. There’s this tendency that we have when we want to change something, and we look at, “What do I need to do? What do I need to do? Just give me the answers. Tell me what to do.” And what we know in coaching is that what we need first is to notice how we are now, “How I’m showing up now, and to really develop a heightened awareness for the habit that I’m

Here’s one that I hear often, is people talk about how often they say yes before even thinking. And we often talk about, in working with coaches and development, that when we learn to say no, we know how to set a boundary and that becomes important for us in our work with others. But it’s not as simple as, “Boy, I say yes all the time, so let me just start saying no.” First, we have to notice, “How many times in a day do I say yes? And what happens? What’s the cost of that? What triggers that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, it really is because, I think, it’s dead on in terms of, “Okay, what do I need to do?” is a natural question and, particularly for me, one of my top strengths is Activator, it’s like, “Let’s go do it. Make it happen.” And so, but that awareness strikes me as really a potent means of accelerating change because you start to get emotional and visceral and real about it. It’s not like, “Yes, I say yes too much and that’s bad and I should say no more.”

That’s one thing intellectually, as opposed to, “Oh, my gosh, I have taken stock at how this is devastating my life.” And, not to be overdramatic, it really can. It’s like, “I have no time to rest, to do what’s important to me. I’m always serving everybody in every way and urgently and frantically and distractedly with mediocre quality because I haven’t said no enough to prioritize and focus and deliver excellence on those things that really matter there.”

So, I really like that because some might say awareness, they can sort of brush it aside, like, “Yadda, yadda, yadda, those coaches would say that. They can book some more hours and they drudge up your past and the awareness.” But, really, I see it as a bridge to getting that emotional stuff going.

Pam McLean
Well, you make such great point because we can’t think ourselves through change and we have to have the head and heart connected to make those connections, so we have to be in the moment with ourselves, paying attention to ourselves, noticing what triggers us, so you’re spot on there, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I really want to dig in. So, in your book Self as Coach, Self as Leader, you sort of lay out six key dimensions to think through with regard to yourself and how that shows up as a leader and enriches folks. So, I’d love it if maybe you could talk us through a little bit of each of the dimensions, like what is it, why is it important, and how do we get better at that?

Pam McLean
Yeah, happy to. And I might start by giving it a little bit of context to say that, in the life of a leader or a coach, we know we have skill-based competencies that are must-haves. It’s kind of like our IQ is the cost of admission, that’s just a must-have. But often, most often,  And I use this phrase, “Our use of  We do many things at Hudson, working inside organizations, providing coaching services, and we also have a yearlong program where leaders come and go through this process of developing coaching skills.

Often, leaders will say, “Oh, I just want the tools. I just want the tools and I think I’ll be good.” And we go, “Oh, here’s the deal. ” So, our ability to use our self…

Pete Mockaitis
How dare you?

Pam McLean
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
You want to be a tool?

Pam McLean
It requires that we cultivate our internal landscape. And some of us are more inclined to do this, some fields of study bring us into this territory more than others, but it is in that cultivation of our internal landscape, whether we’re a coach or a leader, that really allows us to show up in a way that maximizes our ability to work with others, to inspire others, to lead others, to develop others.

So, one of the things I start with in the book is I talk a bit about this notion that, well, in coaching our work is not the same as in psychology or psychotherapy where we might naturally go back and take a look at the family of origin and do some deconstruction and some reconstructing. And, yet, what is true is that all of us human beings have some kind of a family of origin, and that who we are is so significantly impacted by our early years.

And so, it’s helpful for us, as leaders and coaches, to understand what has shaped us into our adult years. And that, of course, parallels some of what we do, certainly what we do as a coach when we’re working with someone. If you just imagine that some people might call our ways being, we have self-limiting beliefs. You hear this, right? And others might say that we have narratives that we live in. Or I often talk about stories that we have. And I talk in the book about how a story that I have, that is a lifelong story, I grew up on a cattle ranch in a very rural area. There was a lot of positive strokes for being strong and absolutely, extra credit, for never asking for help.

And so, that was a story. It worked so well as I was growing up. And that’s how we develop these. We’re smart, resourceful, little people, and we figure out, “What do I need to do? Maybe if I go small, it’ll work better in my family. Or, maybe if I talk a lot, it’ll work better. Or, maybe if I cry.” We figure out what ways of being we need to develop in order to, “Make life work as best it can in my family,” because all families have some level of dysfunction, right?

So, my “be strong and extra credit for not asking for help” was clever when I was growing up, but as a leader of an organization, which is a role I’ve been in for over a couple of decades now, it’s not an effective strategy. And so, it has required me to really be attuned to that old story and to do my work noticing how often that can show up in order that I can expand my capacity, in order that I can see the value of asking for input, asking for help, and I can see the cost of going it alone.

And so, that is a starting point for the  And in those six dimensions that I write about, they are really lenses into our internal landscape. We’ve talked for a long time, in the earlier book I wrote, I talked about this notion of self as coach, but I really dig into it in this book. And so, these are dimensions of self. It’s more than EQ. EQ is about knowing our emotions, managing our emotions. But these are dimensions that include our presence.

I have this colleague that says this wonderful phrase, “Our presence is an intervention.” Now, imagine that as a leader or as a coach. The very way I show up in the first moments with you is an intervention. And so, to hone my presence, for most of us, and certainly in the world we’re living in today, requires a lot of practice. And it’s not just closing the screen, putting your cellphone away, it’s paying attention to the chatter that’s in my head, the biases or the assumptions that I might bring with me into a particular conversation as a leader or as a coach.

And so, it has many layers to it and it requires for us practices that allow us to strengthen our presence. And it’s not surprising that neuroscience has taught us that mindfulness practice helps us tune in to the internal chatter, helps us learn how to settle and to be in the moment, and to be  And I don’t know, Pete, if you have a mindfulness practice, but every time I’m with a group of people, and I ask, “How many of you have a mindfulness practice?”

First of all, the number of people in any number of settings has grown so much over the past several years. Then, when you ask the next question, “How has that changed you?” It’s quite compelling to listen to people talk about how a practice that might only take 5 or 10 minutes a day, you don’t have to sit on a pillow, you don’t have to have your meditation room, or a candle burning. You can do it at your desk with the door closed. You can do it as you walk if you’re able to do that. That it changes our attention to self and our ability to be there more fully for another. So, that’s one area, is

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. Thank you. And with the mindfulness practice, I mean, there’s many such practices. But if you were to make a recommendation for folks who have none, by the way, what percentages are you seeing these days? What proportion of folks are you saying that have a mindfulness practice?

Pam McLean
So, I may be working with many people who are quite invested in their own development. So, when I say 40%, that’s probably higher than the average, but I’m always impressed by how many people are taking this on. And there are some really great apps on the phone that are helpful for those who want to just dip into it. And I don’t have my phone sitting right here or I would tell you a couple. I think one is Calm, but there are three or four that are quite well known, quite effective. Some of them cost absolutely nothing. Insight is the one that I think I like, but they are a great support.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. So, that’s the presence side of things, just how you show up can impact folks, be an intervention, whether you’re frenetic and frenzied or calm and listening and that sort of thing. So, let’s shift over from presence to empathy now.

Pam McLean
Yeah, so empathy is such an important one, and in coaching it’s our glue. In the field of psychology, you often hear about the term, “a working alliance.” We have to have this connection with the person that we’re working with in order for anything to happen, for conversations that matter to unfold. It provides that safety, it provides that sense of being seen, and it is bedrock in our work.

And what I talk about in the book is that we could imagine there’s a continuum. And on the one end of the continuum, I am almost disconnected from the human being in front of me. I don’t see, when you’re having a difficult moment, or maybe tearing up, or getting frustrated, I just don’t clock that, I don’t connect in that way. The far end, the other end of the continuum, when you feel badly, I feel badly. When you’re upset, I’m upset.

And so, this empathy requires a calibration because neither end of that continuum allows us to be at our best with another. But I use this phrase, “The ability to walk in someone’s shoes without wearing them.” So, the ability to imagine what this experience is like for you without taking it on, without taking it home, and at the end of the day continuing to think about it, worry about it, wonder about it.

And so, to take another’s perspective, to walk in their shoes without lacing them up and staying there, that is where we want to be, calibrating our  And it’s so interesting for people to explore this, and to notice where they might be, and where the recalibration might be. And there’s, for some, a natural inclination to want to take care of others.

I, sometimes, say it’s like handing someone the box of Kleenex, and you start to feel badly, or you’re upset. And if I hand you, metaphorically, a box of Kleenex, I really am now drawn into your story, and you’re not able to fully share all that you might want to share.

Pete Mockaitis
You say the handing of the box of Kleenex, is it like a distancing?

Pam McLean
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “You take care of yourself now. Tidy up.”

Pam McLean
“That’s enough. That’s enough. That’s enough,” right? “Now, get yourself together,” or, “Everything is going to be okay.” We’ve all been in those situations where we’re going through something that’s hard, and even good friends will say, “You know, you’re really strong. You’re going to be fine. Oh, I know that you’re going to get through this.” And it’s a conversation stopper because that’s not where I am at that time.

And so, having that ability to stay with, to connect with, and be with someone wherever they are, in many ways, is a bit of an art for us and certainly requires that presence, that mindfulness to maximize

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really helpful there in terms of don’t say, “Everything’s okay. You’re going to be super strong,” or hand them a box of Kleenex in terms of sort of shutting it down. But do kind of imagine what it’s like to experience that and to be there but without taking it home or to own those shoes. So, I get what we’re going for here in terms of, okay, avoid those extremes, utterly disconnected, and complete unity of feeling. But how do you recommend one adjusts? Like, if we need to notch it up because we’re heavily disconnected, or we need to notch it down because we’re crying and wrecked for the rest of the day because we’ve had such a conversation with someone, how do we do that?

Pam McLean
Well, I think we need input from others. So, getting feedback and perspectives from others is always helpful. But there’s a very interesting bit of work that is useful in empathy, and that is the notion that when we are able to take good care of ourselves, it increases our ability to be empathic. And it makes sense when you think about it.

So, as I’m more mindful of my, and connected to myself, able to pay attention to what my needs are, it seems to impact our empathic

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that makes sense both in terms of, okay, you’re exercising empathy to yourself and to another, as well as just the actual results of your self-care.

Pam McLean
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
One of my favorite studies is about the seminarians who were learning about the good Samaritan bible story, and then they placed a Confederate person who was coughing and in need of help. The seminarists didn’t too well with regard to helping out this person like you might hope even though that’s going to be their jobs.

And the main variable they’re testing was those who were told they were behind schedule had to rush and hurry up and get their assignment turned in, helped far less than those who were in a calmer place and felt less stressed, and more resourced to help out when someone was in need. And so, I think that’s sort of a double whammy with regard to that self-care.

Pam McLean
Yeah, and it’s a great comment because you’re really connecting presence and empathy in that story. I often say there are 5 minutes and there are 5 minutes. It’s just a matter of the way that we show up and get present and connected, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so good. Those who are reading the transcripts are not going to capture the power of what you just said, but it’s hitting home for me. Thank you.

Pam McLean
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, awesome. So, we talked about presence and empathy. How about range of feelings?

Pam McLean
Yes, range of feelings is an interesting one that connects back to how our early years were. And this notion that most of us—here’s a story I tell in the book about, I have a colleague whose early years, she’s Italian, her parents were immigrants, they came to this country, opened a café in an urban area, an Italian restaurant, and a large family, a lot of yelling and screaming and getting angry and getting happy. And these emotions just came and went, and it was all part of the general course of any day.

And I grew up in a northern European family. My grandparents came from Scotland. They were pretty buttoned down, never too happy, never too angry. And so, these ways of being, the way that we grow up impacts our repertoire of feelings and the way that we judge some feelings.

I like to say . And, as a coach, and as a leader perhaps as well, in order to work with a broad range of people, we need to be at ease with a broad range of feelings. If I am uncomfortable with anger, and I am working with a client who’s angry, I will not give much space for that to show up or I’ll be very uncomfortable when it

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Pam McLean
And the same can be said for tears, or whatever it might be. So, the work of a coach is so different than the work of a dentist or an accountant. We have to have this work invested in expanding our repertoire so that we can work with as many different sorts of people as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
That totally makes sense. And I guess I’m just thinking about all kinds of situations where usually I’m visualizing, stereotypically, I guess, a man who’s strong and quiet, and then they encounter crying, it’s like, “There’s no crying in baseball.” Or, it’s sort of like there’s no internal comfort with the feeling and, thusly, when an outside person is emoting in that, it’s just uneasy, like, “Uggghh, I want to get out of here immediately.” So, yeah, how do you work on that?

Pam McLean
One thing I think is helpful is, again, back to self-awareness, is to do some monitoring around what my go-to feelings are, those ones I’m naturally at ease with and those that are on my no-go list that I just don’t like to go to. I think, first, building awareness of what my range of feelings is and where I might extend myself, and then finding those safe, small, little steps to step into that territory is at least a good

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, I’d love to get your quick take on the menu of feelings so that we might do a little bit of a checklist inventory there. I’m thinking about the movie Inside Out now. But how would you lay out the array of feelings to see how our repertoire is?

Pam McLean
Yes, so here’s a general way. I think of it as, again, a continuum where perhaps at the lowest level of feelings, or near that edge, I might be working in that sphere of, you know how people used to talk about mad, sad, glad? And as we go along that continuum, I’m really able to build a repertoire that’s much broader than that. And, more importantly, I’m able to understand and experience the reality that I can have two almost diametrically opposed feelings simultaneously, that it is possible for me to feel deep grief and joy at the same time. We’re able to do this.

And, as well, as I build my repertoire, I’m able to see and experience the reality that there are different levels of intensity of any one feeling. So, when someone says, “I’m angry,” that will mean something for you that might be different then for me. So, we have to know, “What does that mean? On a scale of 1 to 5, how strong is that anger, or that sadness, or whatever it might be?”

So, I think that in the world of coaching, and certainly in leadership as well, for us to have a depth of understanding about the range of feelings, the intensity of feelings, the possibility that feelings that seem contradictory can actually be overlapping and simultaneously experienced, that ability to really have a rich collection of accessible feelings

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, just for kicks, could you name a few?

Pam McLean
Well, I think that on the list of feelings that we feel comfortable with, it’s all of the – I’m speaking cultural-specific perhaps here – it’s happy, it’s joyful, gleeful, all of those kinds of things. And that feelings that’s so often we don’t like to go to are the anger, the rage, the grief, and the ones in between, are the frustration, annoyance, right? The vocabulary is expansive in this area.

I think what is most helpful for us, if we want to take this on, is to pay attention to, “What my repertoire is, what my go-to feelings are in my day and day out life.” And that helps us see, “Where might I expand? Where might I grow more

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And so, thinking about the fourth area there, the boundaries and systems, how should we think about that?

Pam McLean
Perhaps I’ll just talk a little about systems, and we can have some fun with that. The notion that in the work of coaching and leading, to have a sense of our boundaries, how permeable our boundaries are, what happens when they’re too tight or when they’re too porous? I have a wonderful friend, Pat Adson, who talks about this metaphor that goes like this. Imagine that we both have a garden, and your garden has a fence around it and a gate, as does mine. Yours has weeds, flowers, vegetables, as does mine. And that I look at your garden, without asking permission, I walk in your garden and I start doing your weeding for you. I have now lost my boundary, and I’m lost in your story.

So, imagine as a coach, you come to me and say, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just up against the wall. I just found out that my whole department is being eliminated. I don’t even have enough money for rent for next month. What am I going to do?” And I go, “Oh, let me just think about this. I think I know someone who can do…” I’m doing your weeding for you as opposed to being able to step back and go, “So, let’s just stop for a minute and see what’s most important in this,” and be able to see this experience through the other’s eyes, and help them see it, as opposed to getting in and rescuing or colluding, or whatever we might do when we walk in someone else’s garden without permission.

And this area is very subtle for a coach. For a leader, I think it so often comes in the form of hearing about a situation and, instead of stepping back and asking some questions and thinking alongside someone, you move into telling someone what to do, just giving them your answer, and without any regard for what’s unique about this for them. So, this notion of boundaries turns out to be really critical in our ability to help someone do their own growing as opposed to wanting to do it for

Pete Mockaitis
So, many of these boundaries are just for your own behavior.

Pam McLean
They are. They are. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to, “I’m not going to allow you to cross this boundary.” It’s like, “I’m not going to cross this boundary.”

Pam McLean
Yes. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, that’s right. You know, I was talking to someone the other day in the field of drug and alcohol, and we were having this great conversation about it. It’s so glaring in this that so often what becomes the biggest hurdle is in the family system, that collusion, that continually rescuing someone. And if someone can hold from a boundary and resist doing that, it allows the other to take the steps that are either going to lead to growth, or maybe take them to where they need to go, before they decide that they’re ready to make a

So, yeah, it’s powerful territory for us. And some of us are more inclined than others to want to help, to want to rescue. Some of us are very uncomfortable when we see someone suffering, and in order to manage ourselves, or to help ourselves feel better, we run in with our cape, and rescue instead of stepping back and helping someone see themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, in that alcohol context, what are some of the behaviors of family members that are counterproductive even though they think they’re helping out?

Pam McLean
Well, I suppose it can take many, many forms. Coming to the rescue, often I think coming to the rescue with a financial aid, or any number of things, that simply facilitate through that kind of collusion, no

Pete Mockaitis
Right. So, you sort of prevent the feeling of consequences, ramifications, rock bottom, unpleasantness that can be the force for change.

Pam McLean
Yeah. And so, we could go all the way back to that story I told earlier about the early manager who has a hard time giving feedback, that because their boundary is not yet developed, and they’re worried they’re going to hurt their feelings, or something. So, when one’s boundaries gets stronger, we have the ability to stay in our own garden and help someone observe themselves, or share observations, or offer feedback knowing that this is a part of how we help people

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Then how about embodiment?

Pam McLean
Yes, so this wonderful woman, Wendy Palmer, who wrote a book called Leadership Embodiment, and she says, “The way we sit and stand changes the way we think and feel.” And I love that. The notion that, back to our earlier stories, that if living in my family was smartest for me to play it small, and I bring this all the way into my adult years, and I want to have, people often talking leadership development, about executive presence, and yet my chest is a little caved in, and I’m just not showing up as fully there, and strong, and standing tall, and taking up all of my space. They are embodiment, our ability to embody that which we are as coach or leader is a powerful source of strength for us and a way to center ourselves.

We’re not living, although many of us try from the neck up, right, we have an entire body. And so, to be able to fully experience our body, to pay attention to the somatic triggers that show up, that help inform what might happen next, and to center ourselves fully in the moment. It helps us in every way that we’ve just talked about, it helps us be more present, it helps us connect with the other, it helps us tune into our own feelings, and it helps us hold boundaries that are going to be more helpful in our

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love it if maybe you could lay out, again, a couple menu options, if you will, in terms of, boy, embodiment A, B, C, D each create dramatically different yet helpful emotional states from which to operate.

Pam McLean
Yes, and I think that one can have a lot of fun experimenting in this area, so certainly even some of the martial arts can be a great way to explore your body and to learn how to live in your body from the head down to your feet, or yoga might, or a regular even a breathing exercise that we engage in. Three deep breaths that go all the way down to the belly, and that you slowly exhale is a way to get closer to what’s happening with all of us, and to get out of that tendency to be in our head. So, the wonderful thing is that our body is always here, right? And so, to be able to really center ourselves fully is at our disposal every

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, courage, we’ve talked with a few guests recently about courage, but I want to go six for six. What do you have to say about courage?

Pam McLean
Well, I think that in the work of a coach or a leader, courage is one of the big differentiators and it connects to, in many ways, it’s the culmination of everything we’ve talked about. So, in coaching, it might be the courage to share an observation that is a little bit uncomfortable but that you know the other cannot see. In leadership, it’s certainly back to that early manager and all the way to a senior leader, the ability to share feedback, to share observations that are going to help somebody grow.

So often we live in a world that shrinks away from being courageous. And people often say, “Well, how do I build my courage?” And I think we look at what are small acts of courage that we can engage in in our everyday life. Pick two or three and build a practice around  The people that come to leaders, who come to coaches, come to coaches because there’s something that they know is not working as well as they wanted to, or there’s something that is important for them to shift that they haven’t been able to do on their own.

And the reality for all of us is we can only see, we only have this, the view of ourselves is a limited one. And in our work with another, what a coach can bring to that work is that which I can see. And when I am willing to share that, then something of meaning happens in this relationship. So, if, for example, I’m coaching someone who wants to be recognized, who feels that every time they sit down at a senior team meeting, they’re not taken seriously as they want to be taken, or they’re not listened to, or that when it’s their idea, nobody says anything, but when somebody else does, they’re, “Oh, fantastic

And what you notice in the coaching, in the dynamics of the relationship is that this person is, at every turn and every conversation, highly deferential, “Well, I’m not sure this might be…” And so, for the coach to be able to say, “Oh, I want to stop for a minute and share an observation. What I notice is how often blah, blah, blah,” right? And so, that takes some courage for us. And that is one of the ways, as coaches, that we can really provide value for that leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Pam, this is so much good stuff. I want to make sure that we don’t have an uber long episode in responding to my listener feedback. So, tell me, is there anything else you really think is important for professionals to know about your world of coaching expertise before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Pam McLean
No, I think maybe in my final comment might be that what we’re really talking about here are kind of meta skills that have an enormous impact on how we are able to effectively show up in our roles as a leader or coach, and there is no destination. This is a journey. We’re always in development.

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

Pam McLean
Well, here’s one. I have a colleague in the U.K., Edna Murdoch, who has a quote, she says, “Who you are is how you coach.” And that just speaks so much, gets to the heart of this work on self as coach. Who we are is how we coach, it’s how we lead, it’s how we show up. And so, we need to know who we are.

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

Pam McLean
Well, so many different areas. I think that in the world we’re living in today, the work that’s happening in neuroscience is particularly relevant for us to understand that the science of the brain, the science of the body, is more important than ever. And so, I definitely dip into that regularly.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Pam McLean
A couple that I’m crazy about recently, there’s a book Tasha Eurich wrote, INSIGHT—

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, we had her on the show.

Pam McLean
It’s fantastic. I think she just hits it on the nail that we have to have this input from others to see all of our self. Another one—who would be great on your show—is James Hollis who wrote his most recent book Living an Examined Life. Fantastic, a short read,

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

Pam McLean
Oh, my goodness. I don’t know that I have a favorite that comes to mind, but I am pretty disciplined, and anything that holds me accountable is helpful in the area of tools.

Pete Mockaitis
And what does hold you accountable?

Pam McLean
I have a practice, at the beginning of each week, and I do a sort of an uber practice at the beginning of each month, to really spend time getting focused on what is most important, high level, and kind of medium level, and then in the weeds. And I stay attuned to that as I go through my week to make sure that I accomplish what’s most important.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Pam McLean
My favorite habit these days is I’m a very early riser. Of course, the sun is coming out earlier this time of the year. I love to go for a walk. I live at the kind of peak of a canyon, and so I go up to the very top and get to look out on the Pacific Ocean, and walk all the way down. And that’s just a beautiful habit.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your audiences?

Pam McLean
I mentioned before this nugget that a colleague, Dorothy Siminovich, gave me years ago, and that is that  I do think that people resonate with that, and that it reminds us that the way we show up in the first few seconds is that is how we’re seen by others. So, that one is one of my favorites.
Pete Mockaitis
And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Pam McLean
Our website is www.HudsonInstitute.com. There is, as well, when you go to that website, there is a special resource center for Self as Coach, Self as Leader that has videos and worksheets and all sorts of resources.

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

Pam McLean

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pam, this has been so much fun. Thank you for sharing this and bringing yourself. It’s just been a lot of fun, a lot of enrichment, and I appreciate the time.

Pam McLean
Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Jul 03

459: How to Make Work More Sustainable Through Reinvention with Diana Wu David

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Diana Wu David says: "We really have to take agency over our own careers and our own job, and think about how to constantly improve it... the value it provides to us."

Diana Wu David shares how to future-proof your work-life with approaches for reinvention and re-framing.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Approaches for taking agency over your own career
  2. How to recognize the “treadmill of self-sacrifice” and get off it
  3. The right way to ask for what you want at work

About Diana 

Diana Wu David is a strategist, innovator, entrepreneur, and the founder of Sarana Capital and Sarana Labs. Her companies transform how executives work and prepare companies for the future of work, invest in Edtech and HRtech, and support innovative education initiatives across public and private sectors. Her diverse, global career includes assisting Henry Kissinger and leading executive education initiatives for Financial Times. A superconnector of people and a sought-after speaker, Diana lives in Hong Kong with her husband and their three children.  

Resources Mentioned in this Show:

Thank you sponsors!

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

Diana Wu David
Thank you, Peter.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ve done a lot of research on you and I’ve seen you’ve had a cool variety of experiences. But I want to go way back to your youth where you did some barrel racing and rodeo parading. What’s the story here?

Diana Wu David
So, it’s not an interesting story for where I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, but now that I’ve spent 20 years living abroad, most people can’t believe that I was in the rodeo parade and I used to ride horses and do barrel racing. In Hong Kong here, now, I’m surrounded by a lot of people who like horses but are very much into dressage and show horses, so it’s a very unusual thing to be a rodeo queen in Hong Kong.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is funny to just imagine. And just so we’re on the same page, what precisely does barrel racing refer to?

Diana Wu David
You get on your horse and they have actual barrels, and it’s like a slalom. You race around the barrels as fast as you can on horseback.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds a lot of fun to me.

Diana Wu David
It is. It’s very fast, and I have had some brush ups against the fence and so it’s dangerous, but it was super fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds like a good time. I grew up in Danville, Illinois, which is the central part of the state, and it was quite common that I would have friends showing cattle for these kinds of things, a fair, so respect.

Diana Wu David
I’m glad I have your respect. It’s a good way to start the podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we’ve reminisced about our past, so let’s segue into the future. Your book Future Proof has a lot of good stuff in there. Maybe, could you start us off to get the intrigue flowing? What was, maybe your most surprising and fascinating discovery as you were researching and putting this together?

Diana Wu David
I think that the most surprising discovery is that I was thinking people who I interviewed were looking for some kind of work-life balance, but instead what I found is that they were incredibly ambitious to live life on their terms. So, many of them went off to do something a little bit offbeat or entrepreneurial. Many of them started side hustles. A lot of them are still in their jobs but just approaching things a bit differently. So, they’re super ambitious, they’re not taking a step down, or really focused on balance so much as living life on their own terms.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, it sounds like if they weren’t pursuing balance, then they were going after something with gusto and experiencing some imbalance and being fine with it.

Diana Wu David
Oh, they were just so excited to be successful on a broad basis, and oftentimes that meant learning, that’s sort of insatiable curiosity.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. Well, so that’s surprising. And what would you say is sort of like the main theme or big idea within the book Future Proof?

Diana Wu David
I think the main idea is that we really have to take agency over our own careers and our own job, and think about how to constantly improve it, not just the job as it relates to the value it provides to the company, of course that’s important, but even the value it provides to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good. And so then, what are some things that we tend to overlook when we’re not looking at things that way?

Diana Wu David
Well, I think there’s a sense that we’re sort of narrowly-focused, so we’re looking for companies or positions to provide for us and we’re dumbing from one to the other, looking for things, but just re-focusing on yourself as a person. One of the huge drivers of this has been the idea of disruption but also longevity.

So, if you’re looking at a career over a hundred-year life, you’re definitely going to outlast your job function. You’re probably going to have multiple careers. And based on the SMP lifespan of a company now being 12 years, you’ll probably outlast your own company. So, it’s about looking at yourself and thinking about, “What are the narratives? What do I need to learn next? What do I need to do to be flexible to build my skills? How can I frame this in a way to learn from it and still be super excited and add value?”

That’s something that I think has been lost a little bit. There’s a sense of going to a company, “Oh, we give them our blood, sweat, and tears. And they give us money and they should be giving us more.”

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So then, it sounds like there’s a little bit more kind of onus and responsibility upon the individual worker to really take stock of what’s most important and to proactively assess and evaluate whether a given opportunity is going to deliver on those means and with an eye toward the future as well.

Diana Wu David
Absolutely. And those change all time. I think sometimes it will be balanced. And I remember in my own life when I had super little kids, I wasn’t insanely ambitious to spend all my time at work and progressing, but as that changed, my priorities changed. So, it’s a longer life, pace yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And so, you got a great turn of a phrase, which I guess would be the counterpoint to that, you say we’re pacing. You used the phrase, “The treadmill of self-sacrifice.” Can you unpack that a little bit in terms of what does that look like in practice and how do you know when you’re on it and it’s a problem?

Diana Wu David
That’s a great question. I think that you can feel it when you’re treading along. And it was the basis of my TED Talk, and also a sort of personal genesis for the book that after many years at my company I just felt like I wasn’t learning, and just going in every day, and you just feel that weighty sense of burden. And I think it was a turning point for me when it was maybe the third restructure at my company, and I just felt a little bit lost and sort of a “What’s the point?” feeling.

And I remember also that the HR director had said after we had to let some people go, I had to let some people go, and she said, “Well, you know, it’s really up to you.” And I was incredibly offended that this family feeling in our company had been disrupted by somebody telling me I needed to sort of pull my pants up and take care of myself.

And she got me a coach and I told my coach about all the injustices that had been foisted upon me, and how much I had invested, and how I just needed to have her help me find a new job. And the coach said…

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m being paid by the company.”

Diana Wu David
Well, you know, that’s in a separate conversation. I do think that the coaches, who are really good, can help you find a different way and help you be happy and awesome at your job. And this coach did that. She was like, “Look, you’re not going to quit, and I’m not going to help you. You’re going to turn this situation around.”

And I hated her. I’m still not sure I like her to this day. But she said, “If you’re really at that point, if you’re ready to just quit,” she said, “A, you have an opportunity to turn this around, to really learn from this, to figure out what you want and advocate for it. And the reality is, if you still want to quit, you’re still in the same place. Nothing to lose.”

She said, “And, furthermore, you’ve got such a bad attitude that nobody is going to hire you anyway. They’re going to see it. They’re going to smell it.” So, I think, you know, you see engagement scores at companies, I think people get that, and it’s not just the sort of bad day that everybody has at work. It’s that sense of just, “Ugh.” So, that’s a treadmill of self-sacrifice.

And the reality is that, oftentimes, it’s just about a manner of re-framing and also learning, which I think, as women, we’re particularly bad at learning what we are, one, advocating. And the company doesn’t foist things upon you so much. It’s a negotiation. And if you’ve never had the conversation, then it’s really, you know, the onus is on you to figure out what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful in so many ways. Like, when you said, “Ugh,” like I really know exactly what you mean. And I’m thinking about our transcriptionist, Jane, how she’s going to handle that one because it’s such an important word that we’re sharing here that makes all the difference. Because I know that sensation and I think that’s wise. It’s almost like, I guess I’m wondering, why do we put up with that? Why do we get there?

It’s almost like you’re making some assumptions that this is just what’s necessary, or, “I just have to,” or, “It’s right,” or, “It’s appropriate in order to be hard worker.” Could you go there for us maybe? Like, what are the assumptions or the inaccurate self-talk that’s going on that get us to assume, like, “Oh, this is just how it is and what I have to deal with”?

Diana Wu David
Well, I think in the case of a lot of the people I spoke to, they were very successful and we’ve done a lot of the right things, managed to get into a position. And, oftentimes, things start out well, but then they start to, I guess, misalign. So, I do know, for instance, that when I was growing up that my father used to say, in the very early years, “You can work harder than anybody else. Like, that’ll be the way you get ahead.”

And, often, there is that sense of status almost, we’re busy, “Oh, my job is so intense. Oh, I have to do all these calls.” There is definitely an aspect to that which, if you can let go is fantastic because you can actually put some boundaries in that make your life livable. I think that some of it is that aspect.

There is a story in the book, though, of Lale Kesebi who was a Globalcom’s head for a company called Li & Fung. They basically started out as a sourcing company and probably sourced, at one point, 80% of the things in your house for huge brands in the U.S. And she loved her job, as did I after the coach beat me up a little bit, and she said, “I love it. I definitely have so much that I put into it. It’s been great for experimenting, but I just feel like I have so much more to give.” And I think that’s sort of a better way to think of it. And figuring out for yourself how you can give all that you can, and also be recognized for it.

Pete Mockaitis
I really like that. I have so much more to give. And then that notion of, “Oh, boy, I’m really swamped. I’m working. I’m doing all this stuff.” It reminds me we had a previous conversation with Rahaf Harfoush who termed this kind of umbrella of statements, “performative suffering,” which I thought was a good turn of a phrase.

Diana Wu David
Oh, I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of, it’s like, “Oh, boy, I’m really swamped. Oh, I’m going to burn the midnight oil again.” And like that sort of a badge of honor or something that you should be praised and rewarded for, where there’s some sort of camaraderie effect, I don’t know, “Hey, we’re all doing this suffering together.”

So, I like what you’ve shared there with regard to just really having some thought to the situation and identifying what’s really important to you and taking a stand. So, could you maybe give us some examples of particular things that people that they need, and they kind of forget to ask for, and how they ask for them with great results?

Diana Wu David
So, yes, absolutely. After my coach told me that I was being a big, fat baby about my situation, she, herself, said, “Okay, write down all the things you want and what title do you want. Obviously, there’s a lot of volatility in the company. What kind of things would make your life more palatable? Is it less travel? Is it more? Is it a seat at the strategy table? Is it new projects? Within reason, I mean, start with the big brainstorm and then go from there, and think about how you can frame them in a way that’s attractive to the company.”

And that’s something that I did, and I was so surprised by how willing they were to negotiate and to open-minded it and think about those things. And I positioned it all from the benefits that they would get, but I completely transformed my position, did some of the things I knew needed to be done as well, and left thinking that it was the best job ever, and I still work there part-time. So, it really does come down to the individual.

I think that time boundaries are one. I think we foist that on ourselves, “Oh, I just have to do it.” You never say no. For example, me living in Asia, you never say, “Gee, I have three kids and I like to put them to bed at night. Can we do the call in a slightly different time?” And sometimes you can’t, but if you never ask, you’ll never get it.

So, Lale Kesebi, likewise, she was working in this huge position, and she decided that she would ask for a couple of interesting projects. And so, she had started to work on a case with a business school on some of their innovations, and that opened up all kinds of interesting opportunities to speak about the innovation they were doing across the world. And those are some of the little things that, they either allow you to set some boundaries, or allow you to continue learning and progressing, and just experiment a little bit so that you can, in that longer life and longer career, find what’s interesting, what inspires you, and new ways to progress.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s a lot of good stuff there. And I really like how you won’t get it if you don’t ask for it. And when you ask for it, you did so wisely and strategically with regard to framing it in the benefits for the organization. So, could you give us a couple of examples of, “Okay, here’s a need, and here’s how you ask for it with the frame of how that would be beneficial for the organization”?

Diana Wu David
Well, I don’t want to talk all about myself, so let me talk about one of the folks in the book. Steve Stine was a very senior executive search person. And, likewise, he was doing an executive search. He really wanted to have his girls go to a place in Bali, which is in Indonesia, called the Green School. So, he and his wife decided that’s what they wanted. He was living in Singapore, which is maybe four hours away, and Bali is kind of like moving to a fabulous resort that is not particularly your any executives.

And so, it was an ask, but he basically said, “Look, this is important to me, and I will do the travel to ensure there is no problem. I will ensure the Wi-Fi is fantastic.” And they said, “Sure. You’ve put in some time. Your relationships are great. And we’ll try it for a six-month period, and if it doesn’t work, then we’ll have to find something else, or you’ll have to live in Singapore, and your family can live there, and you can commute, or whatever it is.”

So, now, you really can be creative about it. He also later decided that his love for storytelling would be well-served by doing a podcast. So, he went off, A, did a course in mythology and storytelling, and then, B, launched an Asia Inside podcast based on all of his incredibly senior relationships, and it was great because he’s an executive recruiter, and he could have conversations with people that he wanted to keep in touch within his network without necessarily there being an active search going on. So, he also negotiated to have that with his company so that they understood the benefit it had both to him personally but also to the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s really cool, and I like that notion of, “Hey, we’re going to try it out for six months and see how it goes,” and you’ve actually delineated a few particular tools of experimentation, collaboration, reinvention and recalibrating success to improve careers. Could you maybe give us an example or a pro tip for each of these tools?

Diana Wu David
So, experiment is really about learning, and I think that people find themselves kind of locked into whatever they’re doing and feel like an experiment is either, “I have to quit my job,” or, “Move to a new town.” But I think that working the muscle of experimentation, on taking small bets, and understanding the feedback that you get, and using it to learn, is really an important thing for future of work. You have to be constantly trying things out.

And as a corporate entrepreneur, and somebody who’s been doing disruption work since 1995, it’s an innovation tool. It’s sort of taking the small bet, seeing where it goes, pivoting, going on. And you can do that in your own career like Steve did and like Lale did.

And reinventing is really about thinking about what your story is and what kind of adjacencies you can have. So, if you look at companies, Netflix started as a company where you would have a VHS tape, and it would be sort of mailed to you, or a DVD mailed to you through the mail. And now, look at them, they’re a content producer, they’re streaming.

So, thinking about how you can take all of your core assets, and skills, and talents, and character, and think about adjacencies, “How could I reinvent? What if my job changes or my company changes, what else could I do?” And this is very much about also thinking, “I am not an accountant. I am Diana, and I’m good with numbers, but I’m good with people. And what else could I do with those unique things? I live in Asia, so I have Asia experience.” It’s sort of collecting all of your assets, and thinking about how you can package them for new things.

Collaboration is something I feel strongly about because I think that people are not trained in this, and we’re all about our network now, being strategic, being culturally sensitive. And I say that from outside of America where I have spent the last 20 years running teams of people with two people in Singapore, and somebody in China, and somebody in Japan, and different countries, and my boss in the U.K., and my other boss in the U.S., so virtual cultural networks and working.

And, finally, focus, which is sort of the fourth key in terms of the actions in the book “Future Proof” is just, what’s your story? What’s your priority? And really making time for that.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to hear a little bit more about collaboration. You say we’re not really trained in it, but it’s really important. What are some of the key things when it comes to collaborating that most of us could do better?

Diana Wu David
Well, I think that many of the people on your podcast are in the U.S., and I think that a lot of times it’s an assumption that everybody on is sort of coming from the same place. And I found over the years that that can be very different. And so, a lot of it is taking our social graces and applying them online, or on teleconference, you know, conference calls, or Zoom, or video conference, so part of it is just getting to know people.

I’ve studied a lot of teams and companies, and many of them have tried to make time for watercooler chat, or one-on-one getting to know you, or “What’s the rhythm of your life?” And that’s something that’s becoming ever more present. And I find, as an American living abroad and working abroad, that we tend to be very efficient and very direct.

And so, in my early years, not to apply my foibles to my entire nation, but this drive for efficiency was always about, “Okay, who’s next and what do we do? And, okay, are we done? Can we check that off?” And I do a lot of work with boards now, and I see the same thing where we’re just rushed and we don’t make time to form some of those personal relationships with our teammates, think about walking a mile in their shoes, setting clear expectations, and really putting effort into bringing everyone together in a team to get something done.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. Well, do you have any particular, I don’t know, icebreaker questions? But are there any kind of particular questions or conversations or activities or things that just are really great for getting to know people in that way to boost collaboration down the line?

Diana Wu David
I think asking, “What are you excited about right now?” is a good one. Because, at this point, for instance, if you’re calling a business process outsource center in India, and you ask somebody, “So, I just went to Hawaii, I had this great trip. Where is your next vacation?” Maybe they don’t have a vacation. There’s sort of a lot of things that take a step away from your own experience.

And so, that one I feel like allows people to really talk about what their passion is, and it could be anything. And I use that in person as well because I think that the perpetual networking, “What do you do?” which implies work is all.

Pete Mockaitis
Are you useful to me?

Diana Wu David
“How can you be useful to me?” is maybe less interesting than what people are excited about.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. What are you excited about right now, Diana?

Diana Wu David
Turning the tables! I am really excited about the course that we’re about to pilot. A lot of people, I mean, this book is me having 80 coffees with people saying, “What should I do, Diana?” And me thinking, “I don’t know. Let me ask some other people, and I’ll put it in a book, and I’ll send it to you.” And the next one is people saying, “Okay, so I see the book, but I don’t know how to get started. Can we sort of get online together and really go forward, and work some of these things through in a collaborative manner?” And so, we have a beta course for future proofing coming up soon. And I’m having a great time putting things together and working with people to find out what’s useful to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you.

Diana Wu David
Yeah. What are you excited about?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so funny. I guess I’m just thinking about the short term. As we speak, I’ve got a Sufi steak going right now. My wife and I, we’re going to celebrate that we found a great nanny when my wife returns to work after her maternity leave period, and that was quite a search. And we’re thrilled and we have chosen to celebrate in this way. So, we’re going to, short term, that’s what I’m excited about.

Diana Wu David
So, you can smell the steak you’re cooking.

Pete Mockaitis
So, there’s that, you know, and I’m excited about just the growth of the podcast in terms of it’s really going places. And we’ve got a survey going out at AwesomeAtYourJob.com/advice to get all the more useful feedback on who would be the best guest in episodes to be even more on target for people. And I’m excited to reach out to former guests, so you’ll be getting an email from me, Diana. Like, “Hey, who’s really a great person to interview?” I’m excited about we have more staff to be able to process all the thousands of incoming pitches and really find the true and the best fits.

Diana Wu David
I think what you’re doing is amazing. I wish you started this earlier.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too.

Diana Wu David
It’s great. I mean, really, nobody teaches you in school, and I think that’s part of the issue is sort of they teach you how to be awesome at specific tasks, math or even coding. But nobody teaches you how to be awesome at your job, and that is a totally different thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. Well, thank you. I’m honored and I appreciate it. So, yeah. Well, another great thing about that question is it just puts me in a great mood, right, because I’m thinking about those things. And then you can relate to some of those things and so we are more bonded as a result. And it’s a heck a lot more fun than, “What do you do?” It’s like, “I run a small research training company called How to be Awesome at Your Job that helps develop the universal skills required to flourish at work.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s cool. We might talk about that a little bit.”

Diana Wu David
Cool.

Pete Mockaitis
But there’s more of an emotional visceral stuff going on with like the steak and the nanny and the growth trajectory.

Diana Wu David
And it’s like the exchange.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Fun. Well, thank you for that. Well, let’s see, so you have a boatload of tools and suggestions for transforming your career for the better and being future proof. But if you haven’t already covered, I’d love to make sure that we do get your take on what do you think are some of the actions, the practices, the tactics that really offer the greatest bang for your buck in terms of career satisfaction and future proofing per, I guess, minute of thought, attention, and effort?

Diana Wu David
I think that most of what I have distilled I put into a checklist from the book. So, I think that that gives you a huge amount because thinking about all the things you could do can be quite daunting, and this allows you to focus. So, I have that on my website at DianaWuDavid.com.

And going in to ask yourself questions about, “Now, where am I lacking? And what do I already have? And what are some of the things that I could do to kind of close that gap?” I think is probably the best bang for the buck. So, it really does go through and talk about your family life, and your relationships, and what kind of professional relationships you have that you could either go to in a crisis or with a problem, or to celebrate. I think that that kind of audit is just quite useful to take on a yearly or a quarterly basis, and then the tools that you might use can follow.

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

Diana Wu David
I think that people can really change the way that they approach work by just reframing what the opportunity is, and by really finding the things in their job that may not be part of the job description, but that really jazz them, and that may change over time. So, even though the strategic part of my job had changed and become little bit old, before, I remember one of the evolutions was realizing, “What is it?”

Ask yourself, “What is it that gets me out of bed in the morning?” And for this particular moment in time, it was my team. And even though my big job description said, you know, X15% growth, topline operations, etc. for the P&L, I thought, “Yeah, the team is it. Making sure they progress in their lives and professionally for the next 12 months, or six months even, that’s going to be my focus. And the other stuff I know I can do, but my job now is to help them grow.”

And then when that is something that’s sort of taken care of, or we’ve progressed enough, maybe it’ll be something else. So, I think that reframing can allow you to perpetually reinvent within the same function, or same team, or same job. It’s not always about progress up a ladder.

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

Diana Wu David
So, this was from one of the interviewees, Emma Sherrard, who is CEO of Quintessentially Lifestyle concierge, and now has progressed into being the global chair person. And she said, “Yeah, all you’re saying is about don’t settle for the life you’ve been given. Work hard for the life you want.” And that’s like a motto now for me. It’s a mantra when I think, “Oh, I’m working so hard.” And I’ll go back and say, “Yeah, this is what you wanted. You got to work hard for it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And how about a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Diana Wu David
One of the books that had the most impact on my thinking was The 100-Year Life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we interviewed Lynda on the show.

Diana Wu David
Yeah, I thought that totally changed the way I viewed my career, what I did, in what time sequence, etc. It really changed. And I referenced it quite a bit in my book Future Proof.

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

Diana Wu David
My favorite tool is SaneLater. I believe deeply in sanity and SaneLater basically delivers all of your emails at a preset time so that you don’t spend your entire day checking your email. So, at 3:00 p.m. every day, I get all my emails delivered, I go through them, and there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I also use the SaneBox and I am an enthusiast just because there are so many newsletters that though they’re genuinely interesting and like I would enjoy reading them, but in a way that’s too tempting. I don’t want them popping up into my inbox because then I’m going to jump in and take a read, and then, it’s like, “Oh, shoot, I meant to be doing something totally different during this moment.” And so, now they’re kind boxed over to the side. Much appreciated.

Diana Wu David
It’s like having a giant bowl of M&Ms on your desk, all those emails.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And, now, instead I have a butler bring me the M&Ms at the appointed time.

Diana Wu David
There you go. In a small bowl.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And how about a favorite habit?

Diana Wu David
My favorite habit is writing. I think the good, the bad, and the ugly, it all gets resolved with a few minutes with pen and paper or on the keyboard. It’s just been throughout my life every morning.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers, listeners, folks you’re working with?

Diana Wu David
Yeah, I think that there’s a lot of fear about the future. And so, one of the quotes in the book that seems to get highlighted a bit is “The future of work is not a clarion call for our demise. It’s a magic portal to more balance and rhythm in our lives.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Diana Wu David
People like magic portals, what can I say?

Pete Mockaitis
You’re bringing back a lot of video game memories for me when you shared those. And, Diana, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Diana Wu David
On my website, DianaWuDavid.com, and they have the checklist up there, and also Future Proof, /futureproof has the information on the book, and two chapters that people can download for free.

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

Diana Wu David
Yeah. Based on that, conquer your fear of the future, be awesome at your job, and live your dreams.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Diana, this has been a whole lot of fun. I wish you tons of luck with the book, Future Proof, and all of your globetrotting adventures.

Diana Wu David
Well, Pete, it’s I think 13 hours ahead, so I’m already in the future. It’s already Friday morning. So, thank you. And I wish you a fabulous dinner, steak dinner, with your wife and a wonderful celebration.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Diana Wu David
You’re welcome.

Jun 10

449: Leaning Out with Marissa Orr

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Marissa Orr says: "What makes more sense: rewiring women and their personalities and what they want... OR rewiring a system to better meet the needs of a more diverse workforce?"

Marissa Orr shares fresh, actionable wisdom on the workplace gender gap and reframes how alleged weaknesses can actually be strengths.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The problem with the ‘lean in’ mentality
  2. How power and money trigger value judgments when it comes to gender differences
  3. Why strengths depend on context

About Marissa

Marissa Orr began her Google career over 15 years ago as a founding member of Google’s Sales Operations & Strategy team, after which she worked as Vertical Marketing Manager at Facebook. She has conducted talks and workshops for thousands of people at diverse organizations across the globe. Originally from Miami, she now lives in New Jersey, with her three children.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

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

Marissa Orr
Thanks, it’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your perspectives. I think it will be provocative in a fun thought-provoking kind of a way. But maybe before we go there, let’s hear about your love for reality TV.

Marissa Orr
It’s a great way to start out in terms of setting my credibility, but that’s okay. It’s my escape. I actually have – I don’t watch it as much as I used to. Years ago I lived on Bravo – a steady diet of Bravo TV, Real Housewives of New York, New Jersey, Atlanta, LA, wherever. I’ve always been a big fan of The Bachelor and things like that.

In the past few years, my time has been crunched and I haven’t gotten to watch nearly as much as I would like to, but I’m still a fan. I’m not going to lie. I’m not ashamed.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, my brother loves The Real Housewives as well. You articulate from your world view and preferences and values and such, what is it that you dig about the show? No judgment. I genuinely want to understand you.

Marissa Orr
Yeah, yeah. No offense taken. Like I said, no shame here about it. I think if I’m really kind of digging into why these shows appeal to me so much – and I don’t mean to turn it into something highbrow because it’s certainly not – but I have always just been fascinated by the drama of humanity. These women on the show are such caricatures of people that we all know in some way that I just find it fascinating in terms of even just like observing people and how they act.

For example, on The Bachelor, I also love to guess based on what I’m reading from The Bachelor and the contestants or whatever, their body language, what they’re saying, it’s fun for me to guess who’s going to make it on to the next round it sharpened my ability to sort of read people’s behavior. When you’re right, it feels great and when you’re wrong, you learn something. That’s really The Bachelor.

But Real Housewives is just an escape. It’s drama. It’s kind of like why do people like to watch sports. They’re not participating in the sport. It gives them a little kick to root for a team. I think it’s a similar thing. It gives me a little kick. It’s fun. I find these people crazy and hilarious. I work so much. I make so many decisions every day. It’s fun to just watch other people and kind of laugh at them or with them.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. Sometimes at the end of the day it’s like, “I want to do the opposite of thinking.”

Marissa Orr
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What is that?

Marissa Orr
Yes. There’s nothing wrong with it I think as long as it’s in moderation I suppose.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I want to hear about your book, Lean Out. What’s the big idea here?

Marissa Orr
Lean Out is really, quite obviously, a counterargument to lean in, but really a counterargument to most of modern-day feminism because we have been throwing the same solutions at the gender gap and at women at work for 20 years and virtually nothing has changed in terms of the numbers.

The first part of Lean Out really explains everything that modern feminism and conventional wisdom, frankly, has gotten wrong about women at work. One of those things, a broad theme, is that equality doesn’t mean we all have to be the same. We don’t have to like the same things, want the same things, get the same things. After all, diversity is about diverse set of interests, talents, strengths, perspectives and experience.

That’s one of the big themes. There’s a lot more underneath that, but I don’t know if you want me to go further or-

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. Well, we’re going to talk about all kinds of things.

Marissa Orr
Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say one of the themes in your book is you say that there is a systemic dysfunction in our workplaces. Can you kind of paint the picture there? What is it that is broken?

Marissa Orr
Well, let me set that answer up first with a little bit more detail around the difference in the premise lean in and lean out. The general premise of lean in really pins the blame on women for the gender gap.

The prescriptions for success hinge on women acting more like men, so being more ambitious and assertive, whereas lean out really pins the blame on our institutions, which have not changed since the Industrial Age, at a time when there were no women – virtually no women in the workforce. Since then, our entire economy has transformed and the composition of our workforce, but these structures, these competitive hierarchies have remained exactly the same.

One of the things that I ask in the book is what makes more sense, rewiring women and their personalities and what they want or rewiring a system to better meet the needs of a more diverse workforce?

Part of my problem with lean in and that whole school of thought is that it dismisses women’s wants and needs as a product of culture. I think instead of dismissing them as needs, we should embrace them because men and women a lot of times want different things at work. We should embrace those differences instead of sort of dismissing what women’s concerns are and attributing it to a product of cultural oppression.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right, there’s so much good stuff to dig into here. First, I just want to get really clear on terms here. When you say ‘the gender gap’ what are we talking about here?

Marissa Orr
I refer to the gender gap to explain the fact that there’s four percent of Fortune 500 CEOs for example are women or a highly disproportionate amount of the C-suite and executives in corporate America are men. It’s a great question because at the beginning of the book, I really define the scope, which is corporate America, which has very different dynamics than small businesses or-

Pete Mockaitis
Education.

Marissa Orr
Education or even things like being a doctor or lawyer. One way to look at that is through the lens of academia, which you mentioned. Women dominate academia. They have for many, many years. A big question is why doesn’t that dominance last after graduation.

The conventional wisdom, again, points to culturally reinforced behavior of women bodes well in school, but not in the corporate world, whereas, my argument is that that’s not the explanation. What’s really happening is in school, performance is graded objectively. You get 94 out of 100 questions right, it doesn’t matter what your personality is, it doesn’t matter how long you study, you still got a 94.

In the corporate world, especially in today’s knowledge economy, it’s really hard to tell who’s doing a good job. We don’t have grades, so we grade instead of on competence, we grade on visibility, who is talking about their work the loudest and the most and all these really visible behaviors that correlate more highly with men.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting how the grades go. When it’s subject to a human interpretation like, “Oh, I like that behavior,” “I don’t like that behavior,” then that can work against women in your worldview.

I guess, now I’m intrigued I guess when it comes to sales. That’s one of the grand sort of fair zones of performance. It’s like, “How many sales did you make?” We’ve got a number, so we can compare that there. Do women fair better in sales? I don’t actually know that answer.

Marissa Orr
I don’t actually know that either, but I think – it’s a good question – but I think there’s so many kinds of sales and so many industries. I think the context is really important, but it’s a really interesting question. I haven’t looked at it through the lens of just sales.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so I’m with you. That is intriguing. I remember when I was at my cousin, graduated from high school a couple of years ago. I was beholding all of the valedictorians – and I was a male valedictorian in high school – but they were outnumbered like four to one. It was like 80% of the valedictorians were women. It was like interesting.

Marissa Orr
It is interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Then the numbers in terms of colleges, in terms of getting into college and then not flunking out of college are also more so in favor to women. I guess I’m really intrigued. We talk about the systemic dysfunction. You had a great video in which you shared some statistics associated with how many men versus women want to be the CEO. Can you share that piece for us?

Marissa Orr
Yeah. One of the statistics that I cite in the book is the fact that only 18% of women aspire to sort of executive or C-level roles versus 35% of men. I think what you’re talking about – is it when I said that means that the majority of the population doesn’t want to be CEO.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Marissa Orr
Why don’t we look at what’s wrong with the job instead of all the people who don’t want it?

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed. I think that’s a compelling point there. So what is wrong with the jobs and the systems and the hierarchies and the competitiveness? You say it’s old. It’s from the Industrial Revolution. What about that is suboptimal here now today?

Marissa Orr
There’s just so many things to talk about with respect to this, so if I go off on a tangent on any of them, just rein me back in.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure thing.

Marissa Orr
But I did want to dovetail off that earlier point quickly because it is obviously relevant. Of it is not just the systems, it’s how we’re measuring female progress because obviously one of the measurements that we use is positions like CEOs and corporate executives.

Only 18% of women desire to be a corporate CEO. That means the majority of women don’t want to be one. If we push them to do it anyway and they get the corner office, but they sit there sad and alone, can we really call that success? I think that goes back to what I mean about embracing women’s stated desires.

If we did a study on how many men want to run their household and do the majority of chores and domestic tasks, I wouldn’t think it would be much more than 18% either, but we don’t sort of make nationwide campaigns to push up those numbers. We judge sort of what women do in a way – or what women want in a way that we never really do with men.

Pete Mockaitis
That is intriguing. You talk about the campaigns and I’ve sort of wondered we’ve got sort of the gender wage gap with I don’t know the number of cents now – 72-ish cents on the dollar – but sometimes I wonder about the gender child time gap, like men only spend 41 minutes on the hour with their children as compared to women. But I don’t see that campaign being made.

Marissa Orr
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
So I think you’re really onto something. Discrimination and bad behavior totally happened, but you’re saying, “Hey, let’s take a look at what people actually want as a way of evaluating things.”

Marissa Orr
Yeah. What a revolutionary idea, right? Actually measure female progress based on what women say that would make them happy or make them sort of improve their wellbeing, which is a whole other chapter, which is in the book called Well-being Versus Winning, measuring female progress on wellbeing instead of winning, how we’re winning against men or in the corporate world. But should I go back to your question about what I mean with-

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please go. Please continue.

Marissa Orr
Okay. I was going to go back to the original question, which is I think how the systems are broken. One of the ways is what I mentioned about grading on visibility versus competence because in a knowledge economy – and anyone who works in a big corporation knows that it’s really hard to tell these days who’s doing a good job.

When your job is to create marketing campaigns and strategies and even service customers, most people don’t even agree on what success looks like, let alone know who’s achieving such success or making an impact. We talk about creativity and imagination, but those things are really hard to see and measure.

One of the ways that it’s broken is that we really use these subjective and emotional measures, which are riddled with biases, to determine who’s doing a good job and we default to these proxies.

But another way is the reward system. Once you get past a certain level of management and make a certain salary, the only reward really that’s there to motivate people to climb higher and higher up the corporate ladder is power, more power over more people. But-

Pete Mockaitis
Right because you’re saying money – you’ve already got more money than you need, so it doesn’t do much for you to go from two million to two and a quarter million.

Marissa Orr
Exactly. When you look at what’s driving those people to keep going, it’s power. Research is fairly conclusive that that kind of power – power has a lot of definitions, but I’m talking about professional authority, power that’s based on your position in a hierarchy. It’s not universally motivating. A lot of women are less sort of unsatisfied.

It seems so obvious. We learn in kindergarten, everybody likes different things, but at work there’s only that one thing, so naturally the winners are going to be the ones who like that one thing more than anybody else. If you-

Pete Mockaitis
Power lovers get the power.

Marissa Orr
Well, I mean, yeah. What kind of – one of the things I joke about, but have you ever seen a corporate CEO that is kind of more like a hippy than a Gordon Gekko? No. The profile of winners are always going to be the same if you’re only motivating a very narrow subset of your workforce.

One of the things I talk about is increasing the variety of incentives. There’s other ones too, but I’ll pause here if you want to go in a different direction or have a-

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool, yeah. It’s a good point. Just while we’re there, what are some of the other incentives that should be on the menu?

Marissa Orr
Well, research also shows that women have less – their life goals are – fewer of them are focused on this kind of power. They have more life goals and they’re more varied. Some of that is balance. I would have traded 50,000 dollars’ worth of my salary for increased flexibility.

But those things in the corporate world are looked at as let’s say weakness. If you’re not in the office as much as somebody else, you’re not going to get the work assignments, the recognition and the respect if you’re only there part time. It’s not only just the incentives; it’s really how those incentives are viewed, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Marissa Orr
That’s one example. The truth is when I talk to women who’ve read the book, one of the things that really resonates with them is a part where I say that people say women lean out or don’t want to lean in once they have kids or childcare and all that stuff. That’s all very true, but I think there’s another reason.

[18:00]

I think when women start having kids and get into more of their middle to later 30s, with their time squeezed, they have dramatically lower tolerance for the office politics and BS frankly. So many women I know want to go to work and do a great job and they want work that’s meaningful, but there is just so much politics and bureaucracy and stuff that really doesn’t matter.

I think that’s another big reason that you don’t see women wanting to climb higher and higher. It’s just not – good, competent work is not rewarded, so what is left there for women at the office, but these power games that they have no interest in playing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. That makes sense, especially if you have less time, your opportunity cost is increased and you see that junk, you’re like, “Why am I spending my life in this way?”

Marissa Orr
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
“I can do something else.” That makes sense.

Marissa Orr
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Then let’s share a bit about strengths that are more often associated with women and more often associated with men.  I want to get your take first of all just because some folks aren’t even on board with that notion that men and women are different. In fact, I found an American Psychological Association brief entitled Men and Women: No Big Difference. What’s your take on this one?

Marissa Orr
Yeah. That’s interesting. I have so many things to say on this point, but with respect to that study, I have to look at it and see what that headline really captures because sometimes there are nuances, but I think what it’s probably referring to is the fact that men and women largely are the same when it comes to personality traits. I think it’s something like 60% overlap, so yeah, that makes sense.

However, at the extremes – and 40% is not insignificant – there are differences. After all, testosterone is proven to run – we all know that that – men have more and women have more estrogen and that those hormones influence our behavior, so I don’t think that we can sidestep that sort of biological fact.

But the other thing is we all – I don’t know – I have two boys and a girl and everybody talks about freely, “Oh, boys are like this. Girls are like this.” There’s certain elements of their behavior and personality that are different. We joke about it. If you say to your mom friend or whatever, “Oh, my boys are so wild. Your girls play so nicely. Girls are – they’re not as rambunctious, whatever,” nobody accuses you of being sexist for saying that. It’s kind of something we all intuitively see with our own eyes.

But the second you put an element of power into the equation, people go crazy and take a lot of issue with that. For example, when the book Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus came out all those years ago, I don’t recall that being a controversial thing. It was focused on the therapeutic and communication aspect to it. We accept that in a way.

But when it comes to power and money, I think people really take issue because they believe that if we say men and women are different, that it’s implying one’s better than the other or one’s weak and one’s strong. If you say, “More women like red and more men like green,” there’s nothing offensive about that.

Pete Mockaitis
How dare you, Marissa.

Marissa Orr
Right. People would accept that without an argument if that’s what a study said. People wouldn’t bat an eye. But it’s when you put in things like, “Women don’t want professional authority as much as men,” people start to see that as – they start making value judgments on it. I think that’s really people’s issue is the value judgment.

When you report on things like this, if they perceive that one is better than the other, it makes people defensive. But when I say women don’t want professional authority as much, I don’t mean women don’t want power. Power is a much broader concept and that’s just one kind of power.

I think women wield incredible amount of power in this world. They just – it’s not the power through a male-world view. Men have a very different relationship to power. The power men and women wield are different in a lot of ways. The only reason that would be offensive is if someone’s making a value judgment on one being better than the other.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s an interesting perspective there. Folks tend to get really riled up when it has to do with power, but if it’s about boys and girls and what they do on the play yard or color preferences, then it’s no big deal.

Marissa Orr
Or if you say, “Men like sports – watching sports more than women. Women-”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s outrageous.

Marissa Orr
Right. Nobody cares when you say it on things that they don’t believe is superior.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s intriguing. When you talk about sports, now if we’re talking about consumer activity, now these are just facts that every marketer knows. Well, yeah, this product is interesting for women or for men, which is why we’re pursing advertising in particular channels because those are also consumed disproportionately more so by women, more so by men. Fun fact, the vast majority of my audience is women.

Marissa Orr
Hi girls.

Pete Mockaitis
Isn’t that interesting?

Marissa Orr
Hi ladies.

Pete Mockaitis
But we also have about a quarter of gentlemen, so hello to you as well.

Marissa Orr
Hi men.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so with that being established, then what are some of the research findings about the strengths that show up at work that are more so tend to be represented more frequently in women and then more so represented among men?

Marissa Orr
Yeah. Something is a strength only in context because let’s take the corporate world, which is mostly competitive. At Google and Facebook it was a zero-sum game. It was very intensely competitive. We think of these companies as sort of progressive, new wave organizations, but their structures are exactly like any other corporation. These are very intense zero-sum games.

If my teammate gets a promotion, it means I didn’t. Even performance scores are graded on distributions, where you can’t be equally amazing as your peer. You have to be a little more amazing or a little less amazing, so it’s all very intensely completive. In that context, some of the strengths – some of the common behaviors and traits of men show up as strengths.

Men are more motivated by competition. Research shows that in competitive scenarios they perform better. In the corporate world you see that as a strength.

But research also shows that women are more collaborative and they are not as satisfied or motivated by these zero-sum games. They prefer win-win scenarios, but in the corporate world there’s not many – you don’t come by much of that. In that context, even though collaboration is a strength in many respects, in the corporate world it becomes not a strength.

Research shows that women perform worse in competitive environments. Their performance suffers. They become less creative. Then the opposite happens when it’s collaborative. That’s what I mean by strengths depend on the context.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s an outstanding example. Could you lay it on us? What are some other strength representations that we see more so with men versus women and vice versa?

Marissa Orr
There’s a thing I talk about in the book, a story, there’s a book called The Confidence Code. I really sort of try and unravel its premise, but one of the stories from the book that I talk about that they have is there’s a women giving a presentation in a room. She sort of starts to hesitate before she moves on to the next point. She tries to get a temperature of the room so she knows which way to go next in her presentation.

And a man – it was I think her manager – was a man talked to her afterward because he saw that hesitation as lack of confidence. He said, “These things hurt women. They show up as less confident.”

When I read that story, my first thought was she’s demonstrating empathy. More women have a talent for taking the temperature of a room, building consensus. That was my interpretation of what she did there. If the goal was to really build a consensus as a team moving forward, she was doing great. If the goal is to act like you know everything and that you have this infallible certainty and are decisive, then she failed at that.

“What do we want from people at work?” is the question. But that consensus building is another strength that, again, can be interpreted as weakness depending on your perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Give us some more of typical men’s strengths, typical women’s strengths.

Marissa Orr
Let’s see, another example. Again, context. There’s times when you need a really authoritative voice, where certain situations call for a display of dominance in a room to align people towards something. Research shows that men communicate with the intent to establish sort of authority. In situations that call for it, that comes out as a strength for many men.

I want to make one thing clear too, when I say men are like this and women are like this, I’m obviously not talking about all men and all women. A good portion – could be upwards of maybe 30% of men have some strength that’s female dominant. These aren’t black and white things. I just talk about them that way because if I created all those nuances are conversation would be ten hours long.

It also doesn’t mean that men should behave one way and women should behave another. The goal is to behave authentic to who you are. These are just more reports of – observations on patterns of behavior. That’s an important distinction. Maybe it’s obvious. I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s handy. Sure. Thank you. What else have we got there?

Marissa Orr
Wow. Let’s see. Empathy, cooperative, consensus building, win-win for women, that’s a lot, no?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Marissa Orr
There’s more in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
… for men. Do men have …?

Marissa Orr
Oh, oh, I mention-

Pete Mockaitis
Competitive, authoritative, dominance.

Marissa Orr
Yeah. Assertiveness, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, then given that how do we go about leveraging these strengths optimally, both to get great results as well as to look good doing it, to get our props and advance?

Marissa Orr
Yeah. Well, there’s a few things. One is just how we frame this conversation. First we need to stop measuring women against what men have. We need to stop thinking about female progress in terms of winning and really kind of reorient to wellbeing because then we’re serving the largest issues for women for people who need it most. It’s really about how we measure it.

I think also people are diverse by their very nature. The reason that diversity is not reflected at the top of the corporate world is because it rewards a subset of that behavior. I think first, we need to recognize that our institutions, as they are today, are limited. They’re not built to fulfill lots of people’s needs.

For women, I think the first step is always to turn inward and really kind of untether yourself from how your company defines success and how your peers define success and really better understand how you as a person define it. What is most important to your wellbeing?

If a promotion is going to get you a rung higher, but you’re playing more politics, which you hate, and you’re working longer hours, which you don’t want, that is not your definition of success and it’s okay to set the terms for what you need and what you want.

A lot of this is really on an individual to learn more about what their own strengths are, how they can put those to work in a corporate setting while understanding that that setting might not be designed to capitalize on those strengths. A lot of is about figuring out how your institution/organization can meet your needs, how they can’t, and then how you, yourself, can fill the gaps.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, I dig it. Well, then when it comes to some of the stuff that’s broken, do you have any kind of short-term tactics like, “Okay, you’ve got a broken system?” What are some maybe self-defense tactics or things that you’ve got to do just to make sure you don’t get an unfair shake?

Marissa Orr
Yeah. Well, I go into a whole chapter about this in the book. There’s so many things to say to all these great questions. But I think ultimately we have to own our own path and our own success. For people suffering – can you be more specific so I can give you kind of maybe a personal story of how I handled something of that nature?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, so for example, if there’s tons of subjectivity going on and you’ve got the right stuff. You’re bringing it and delivering good things, but it doesn’t seem to be kind of noticed/appreciated/rewarded, what do you do?

Marissa Orr
Yeah. Well, I think people need to get really clear with their management team or their direct manager about how their success is being measured. It’s a conversation we rarely have with our manager at the beginning of performance season. We talk more about – or at least in my experience at Google and Facebook – we really talked much more about what our goals were more so than what success looked like.

Pete Mockaitis
So your personal goals as an individual professional.

Marissa Orr
No, no, your work goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, the work goals.

Marissa Orr
For example, if you talk with your manager at the beginning of every quarter about what your goals are for the quarter. Let’s say you have five of them. Let’s say we build this new order entry system and we get 50% there by the end of the quarter. That’s your goal.

One important question to ask is how are you measuring if we get to 50%. What does 50% look like? What does 100% look like? What does a bad job on this specific goal look like? It’s a question we rarely ask, but at the end of the quarter, if you get a bad grade, if you haven’t asked how you’re being measured, you don’t really have anything to stand on.

But if your manager at the beginning of the quarter says, “Well, if we get X, Y, and Z in place, then we’ve reached 50%,” then at the end of the quarter you can show whether or not you’ve reached X, Y, and Z. That’s a much more objective way of communicating how well you did that quarter. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Right, understood. So you want to get crystal clear on okay, these numbers, what’s the numerator? What’s the denominator?

Marissa Orr
Or what the expectations are. What does success look like? Paint me a picture. What are the five things that need to be sort of very clearly accomplished for me to exceed expectations this quarter? I think the more specific and objective things that you can get from your manager, the easier it is to make a case for your performance.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. More tips like this please. Lay them on us.

Marissa Orr
Yeah. Well, it’s hard though because in most positions in corporate America, your manager has absolute power over you and your livelihood. Even when you get a bad grade and you don’t deserve it, there’s really no recourse. Sometimes all of this advice is meaningless because you are basically – your career is at the whim of this person with total power over you. It’s kind of like tyranny by another name.

I think until our corporations have better systems in place to – like checks and balances on some of that power so that if you did do those five things and you still got a bad grade, there’s something in the company that you can – a team – HR is really mostly there to serve the people in power. I would say HR, but they’re not set up with any real authority to help.

I think part of the onus is on the organizations to rebalance that power a little bit to the employees so that if you do a good job and you do get a bad grade, if you have these objective measures – I don’t want to say a court, a trial, but there needs to be some recourse. Showing these objective metrics helps that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool.

Marissa Orr
I just want to be real about it because so much business advice that people give in theory is great, but when you’re in a power structure under somebody with total power over you, it kind of doesn’t matter.

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

Marissa Orr
Nope, I think we covered it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marissa Orr
I hoard quotes. It’s a little like asking to pick favorite children, but one quote that I love because I think it has a lot to do with kind of the story of me and my work life and how I came to write this book, it’s a proverb, “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Marissa Orr
One thing that’s in the book that I love is research showing that disagreeable people, so people that are not very likeable let’s say – and disagreeableness is one of the – or agreeableness one of the five big personality trait categories. So disagreeable people are more likely to get ahead in business than agreeable people, so people that are – agreeable people are more warm and likeable. It’s actually a detriment to getting ahead in the business world.

Being unlikeable, being disagreeable is a better predictor of who rises to the top. By the way, the authors of these studies always say it doesn’t mean they’re better in that job, it just means they’re more likely to get it.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, I can just think of so many examples in which folks who were less agreeable are just all the more comfortable demanding the thing they want or the goal is, whereas I’m pretty agreeable.

Marissa Orr
I am too.

Pete Mockaitis
Where sometimes I’m just like, “Well, okay, I guess we can do that your way.”

Marissa Orr
Yeah, I’m actually-

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to “No, this is not optimal per the objectives. Fix it now.”

Marissa Orr
Totally. Absolutely. By the way, in every person – I’m like the highest on the continuum of agreeable that you could possibly be, which says a lot about why I never made it to the top in that world, but it is what it is. I’m happier now.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. How about a favorite book?

Marissa Orr
Again, it’s hard. One book – can I say two books?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Marissa Orr
One book that gave me sort of some of my best foundational understanding of behavior is a book from the ‘80s from a psychologist called Nathaniel Branden. The title is terrible, clearly needed some marketing help, but it’s called The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem. It really opened my eyes and was a paradigm changing book for me. I understood myself and people in a totally new way, so I love that book.

Then when I was going through a hard time at Facebook, I read this other book that really got me into sort of another paradigm shift and it got me into meditation and changed my life in other ways. That is called The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Marissa Orr
You’re welcome.

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

Marissa Orr
Does meditation count?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Marissa Orr
I would say I wouldn’t have been able to write the book without meditation because it was a foundation for me to learn discipline and a host of other life skills that I wouldn’t have been able to write the book without.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite nugget, something that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks and they say, “Yes, that is so right and wise. Thank you, Marissa.”

Marissa Orr
Nothing I ever say to my kids that’s for sure because that’s never their reaction.

I would say that if you really get the fact that at the end of the day all people want is to be heard, I think a lot of problems in this world would be solved because we’re always trying to – we speak to other people, we listen with the intent to sort of control them or control the situation and everything is about control. Things work in the exact opposite way.

When you try and control people, they rebel in ways big and small, but if you really try and understand people, things have a way of working themselves out. When people feel heard, they are empowered. They’re empowered to fix their own problems and whatever. I think that’s a very underestimated concept when it comes to communication.

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

Marissa Orr
They can find me on Twitter at MarissaBeth. It’s M-A-R-I-S-S-A Beth B-E-T-H Orr O-R-R, @MarissaBethOrr, on Medium, it’s just @MarissaOrr and LeanOutTheBook.com, but also it’s on Amazon for preorder, but LeanOutTheBook.com is the book’s site.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Marissa Orr
Turn inward. Know who you are and hold on to that regardless of what those around you are doing or saying. Just be you. How’s that for a clichéd ending?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it was fun. Well, Marissa, I wish you all the best. Keep on doing the good work and have fun with it.

Marissa Orr
Thanks so much. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Jun 07

448: Rejecting Nine Common Lies About Work and Embracing Human Individuality with Ashley Goodall

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Ashley Goodall says: "Get really fluent about your strengths. Get specific. Get detailed."

Ashley Goodall debunks deeply-embedded misconceptions about work and how fostering human individuality provides valuable possible solutions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How deeply-rooted misconceptions about work lead to inefficiency
  2. Why you should focus on being “spikey” rather than well-rounded
  3. How systematizing can remove the human essence from wor

About Ashley

Ashley Goodall is currently Senior Vice President of Leadership and Team Intelligence at Cisco. In this role he has built a new organization focused entirely on serving teams and team leaders—combining talent management, succession, coaching, assessment, executive talent, workforce and talent planning, research and analytics, and technology to support leaders and their teams in real time. Previously he was Director and Chief Learning Officer, Leader Development, at Deloitte. He is the co-author, with Marcus Buckingham, of “Reinventing Performance Management,” the cover story in the April 2015 issue of Harvard Business Review. He lives in Montclair, New Jersey.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

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

Ashley Goodall
Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your book Nine Lies About Work but first, I want to hear a little about your musical talents and performances.

Ashley Goodall
I started playing the piano when I was six years old, and it’s one of those funny things that I can’t remember very much of my mind as a six-year old, but I remember pretty clearly that there was this thing in the front hall and it had keys and they made noise and I wanted to play it, I wanted to learn how to make sound from it. And then that turned into playing the violin, and then I finally found these things called symphony orchestras, and they were fascinating, and so I took up the viola to be able to play in a symphony orchestra.

And then, after a while, I thought, “Well, there’s this guy in the front waving his arms around. That looks something like something I should give a go and looks sort of interesting.” So, when I was an undergrad, I finished up conducting a couple of student symphony orchestras. And that led to, I suppose, a fascination with how people play together, I mean literally, of course, how do musicians play together. Because, while you have the score, if you like, which tells you sort of basic bits of the performance. There’s a lot more to a performance than what’s written in the notes.

But, also, then of course more broadly in the world in which I finished up, in the world of work and leadership, how do people play together on teams, how do we play together at work, what is the essential magic that happens between a group of people when they get something done together? So, the music sort of led into that fascination which I think is going to keep me going for years and years.

Pete Mockaitis
And you made a number of discoveries about how people play together when it comes to the workplace, and you have documented those with your co-author, Marcus Buckingham, there, in the book “Nine Lies About Work.” I’m so intrigued. Well, first, what’s maybe the most shocking or startling discovery you made as you’re putting this together?

Ashley Goodall
Well, of course, the listeners can probably guess by the title. We uncovered a lot of things which are problematic in the world of work. There was one, I don’t know whether this is the most surprising, almost fascinating, but it certainly was surprising and fascinating. And, actually, it didn’t make it directly into the book, so maybe this is a fun nugget.

Pete Mockaitis
Too hot for “Nine Lies.”

Ashley Goodall
Or maybe too geeky. Let me explain it first and then you can tell me. I came across this thing I hadn’t come across before called the extrinsic incentives bias. Now, you tell me how exciting that sounds.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess it all depends on how you apply it.

Ashley Goodall
Right. And what it tells us, the research is good, a number of different experiments, and the experiments always looked like you had to say, each subject had to say how they thought other people were motivated or incentivized, and then say how they thought they were motivated or incentivized. And the fascinating, for me at least, fascinating thing that comes out of this is, time and time again, people will go, “Okay, the other people are motivated by extrinsic things. Other people are motivated by money, by power, by promotion, by big titles, extrinsic motivations. I, on the other hand, I’m motivated by intrinsic things. I’m motivated by learning, by growth, by making my mark on the world, by living my values.”

And this happens time and time again. Whenever they do the study, the more distant somebody is from me, the more I believe that they are extrinsically motivated. Other people I believe are extrinsically motivated. I, however, am intrinsically motivated. Now, that might sound like that’s just a sort of fascinating and weird asymmetry of human reasoning until you think about the world of work. Because we’ve designed the world of work in many ways on the assumption that those other people are extrinsically motivated.

So, we design bonus schemes, and we design promotion schemes, and we do an awful lot of things which overlook the fact that if it we were designing it for ourselves, we would design a workplace that allowed us to grow as much as we can, that allowed us to express what we value the most, that allowed us to do the things that energize us the most. So, weirdly enough, this bias, I think actually explains a lot of what’s wrong with the world of work is that we’ve designed it for what we think other people need, and we haven’t designed it for what we need because we don’t think that we are a good representatives of the other people in the world, but actually we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s beautiful, and worth thinking about it for a good while. Well, maybe could you line up a few of the top intrinsic motivators that you and, by extension, just about everybody really respond to a lot?

Ashley Goodall
Well, I think there’s always something about, “I want to do things I value,” which is why purpose is so important, and talking about purpose and meaning is so important. But there’s also something about, “I want to grow. I want to get better at what I do.” And what that means is if there’s a system of work that tells me, “Here’s what you’re not good at,” I’m not nearly as interested in that system as I am a system —and by the way, this system very often is a human being —a system that says, “Here’s where I’m powerful, here’s where I can increase my impact.”

So, if you think about work as a system of attention or as a system that’s focused on individual growth, or individual strengths, or individual energy, or the things that we have in ourselves that we are happy to contribute and motivated to contribute, so much of that is ignored by the way that we’ve designed our world. It’s a little sad, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s intriguing, and thank you for sharing those. And so, then I want to dig into some of these nine lies to get at least a little bit of the overview of all of them, and then a little bit of depth on a couple of them. But, first of all, why are we calling them lies? They’re not just misconceptions or mistakes or boo-boos, but lies. What’s that about?

Ashley Goodall
Well, they are held to be true very strongly by the world of work . And we’ll get into them in a second and your listeners will maybe hear what I mean. But let’s pick one at random. The lie that “people need feedback” is very strongly believed in the world of work. Very, very strongly. So, firstly, because they’re strongly held to be true, we wanted a strong word to push back against them, and the antidote to that is just call it a lie and not to just say, “Well, it’s a little bit off.”

There’s an old quote, I’ll have to find out where it’s from, that “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has got its pants on.” And so, these things are lies very much in that sense, in that they zoom around, they don’t get looked at particularly skeptically. They are almost universally accepted. And before anyone can clear their throat and say, “Well, hang on a second, the evidence points to a very different thing,” all of a sudden, these things are halfway around the world, if you like. They’re the sort of fake news of work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s dig into some of these lies. Maybe you can share with us, first, a quick overview in terms of what’s the lie and the antidote, maybe a couple of sentences for each, and then we’ll have some fun with our favorites.

Ashley Goodall
One of the ways I thought we could quickly go through the lies is I’ll read them out and then I’ll just turn each one into a sentence with “because” and that maybe won’t reveal what the truth is, but it’ll give maybe listeners a little insight into some of the things that we’re talking about here.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds like maybe you’ve done this before actually.

Ashley Goodall
Well, there has been a lot of conversations about these lies, but it’s fun to think about different ways of sharing them. So, we’ll give this a go and if everyone thinks it’s horrible then I’ll shut up.

Okay, so lie number one. “It’s a lie that people care which company they work for because work doesn’t live in a company, it lives somewhere else.” “It’s a lie that the best plan wins because plans move too slowly for the real world.” Lie number three, “It’s a lie that the best companies cascade goals because people actually need to know the why of work more than the what.” “It is a lie that the best people are well-rounded because, well, have you looked at the best people?”

“It’s a lie that people need feedback because brains don’t grow when they’re threatened.” “It’s a lie that people can reliably rate other people because evidence, an awful lot of it.” “It’s a lie that people have potential because it doesn’t exist and, at any rate, we should figure out how to invest in everybody, not just a select few.” “It’s a lie that work-life balance matters most because balance is stasis, and health, on the other hand, is motion, and actually because there’s some other reasons too.” “It’s a lie that leadership is a thing because there aren’t actually any leaders who have it.” How about that?

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. There’s so much to say here. All right. So, let’s jump into “The best people are well-rounded.” Tell us, what are the best people if not well-rounded?

Ashley Goodall
So, what I just said was that “Best people are well-rounded because, have you looked at the best people?” And this is what’s so interesting. So, first thing, where does it come from?

Pete Mockaitis
I think college admissions is where it comes from.

Ashley Goodall
Yeah, or maybe even earlier. I mean, I think we start this one in school. There’s a classic experiment, a research that was done where they go to parents and they say, “Your kid comes home with an A, a C, and an F. Which grade merits your most attention? Which one merits the most attention?” And, of course, 75% of parents say, “Well, it’s the F, isn’t it?”

Now, the point is not that the F merits zero attention, but the question is, “Which merits the most?” And the question for the hypothetical parent is, “Is your kid going to build a career on the back of the F turning into an E, or on the back of the A turning into an A-star, if you like, or an A+? Where is that kid going to make their way in the world?” And, of course, it’s never going to be about turning the F into the E, so the F gets a bit of attention, but the A should get most attention.

But, yet, we’ve constructed the world of school in a sort of remedial way which is to say that, and we do this at work too, of course, we like to measure people against a number of different things, and then we say, “Well, the things you should focus on most are the things where you are most broken, if you like, where you have the biggest deficit,” because then, by implication, you’ll be good across the board because the best students are well-rounded, and the best people are well-rounded, and the best employees are well-rounded, and the best team members are well-rounded.

So, whenever we encounter anything that starts off by saying, “Let’s measure you against a number of different elements, and then let’s use the gaps as the motivation for your development,” we are encountering this lie. That’s what it looks like in practice. And, funnily enough, we can do all of that without ever really pausing for very long to study the best people. And if you study people who are brilliant at what they do, you find out that they’re the antithesis of well-rounded.

They’re not well-rounded. They’re, in fact, spikey. There are a few things that they’re brilliant at and they figure out how to make those things more and more and more powerful for them, which is to say that growth isn’t really a question of adding ability where we don’t have it. It’s a question more of adding impact, growing impact where we already have ability.

Now, the example we give in the book of this is the soccer player, Lionel Messi, who is profoundly left-footed, uses one foot over the other more than any other soccer player that we encountered in hundreds of hours of watching YouTube videos of people playing soccer, and counting.

Ashley Goodall
So, that’s the work is all about.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it was a labor of, well, I don’t know.

Ashley Goodall
Working hard, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
It was hard to do until I discovered that YouTube has a slow-motion button which plenty got a lot easier. But, anyway, you watch Lionel Messi and it’s all left foot, left foot, left foot, left foot, left foot, left foot. Now, if you lived in well-rounded land, you would say, “Lionel, oh, my God, we’ve got work on your right foot a little bit. You’re only using the left. What’s with that? You’ll be predictable. The defenders will know that you’re always going to go left. You’re always going to go left and you’re giving up half the possibility so maybe it’s twice as easy to tackle you.”

That’s not what he does. He hones and hones and hones his left foot until it is the most brilliant weapon arguably in the world of soccer today. The defenders still know that he’s going with his left foot, he’s just so good at it that they still can’t stop him. And the lesson from that is that excellence is really, really spikey. It’s a few things done brilliantly well, not a whole bunch of things made sort of well-rounded and rounded over. That’s not what the best people look like at all.

Pete Mockaitis
And, now, when we talk about an example of a spike, so the left foot is one. Could you give us some more? Because I think, in a way, some people would say, “Oh, mine is my communication skills,” but that kind of sounds pretty broad in terms of a strength or a spike of excellence. So, could you maybe give us some examples of particular spikes so we can get our arms around what are we talking about here in terms of how narrow versus broad the spike is?

Ashley Goodall
Yeah, and you’re good to call that out. It’s a sort of good test is that if you think your spike is the sort of thing you would find on a competency model or a development plan, you haven’t defined it nearly precisely enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, even if you’ve got a Korn Ferry, what are we at, 37 nowadays, in the latest one?

Ashley Goodall
But if it’s a thing on a competency model, if it’s communication skills, or political savvy, or strategic thinking, and you say, “That’s my spike,” you are not nearly precise enough to be able to build on it. I’ll give you a few from leaders in history, maybe that’s an interesting place because we all know these people. If you think about Kennedy, J.F. Kennedy, his spike was making the future a morally uplifting place for all of us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ashley Goodall
Okay. That’s not on any competency model. You don’t get feedback on making the future a morally uplifting place for all of us. If you look at Winston Churchill, his spike was being incredibly stubborn. That’s not a thing on a competency model.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like never give up.

Ashley Goodall
That doesn’t show up at all. But if you look at Churchill as a strategic thinker, he wasn’t actually very good. He got chucked out of government in the ‘20s and ‘30s because none of his plans worked particularly well. But there came a moment where Britain needed somebody to stand their ground, and they found the guy who was probably the world’s most stubborn person, and he was brilliant at being stubborn. And, of course, it was more than just saying no. It was inspiring resistance. But I think stubbornness is somehow at the heart of that.

So, you might think, “Well, how do I articulate what my spike is?” And it’s a process, at least it has been for me, of thinking about, “Where am I most energized and what do I always run towards?” that’s if you like a strength. “What are the things I would do if I weren’t paid to do them anyway?” And then you have to hone it. Under what circumstances? What does it get used for? Does it matter if you’re doing it in this context or in this context?

And it’s a process of self-reflection and self-observation until you can write a sentence that says, “This is a spike of mine,” and you’ll know if you got it specific because it won’t feel like something that anyone else in the world could particularly have.
Pete Mockaitis
And so, Ashley, what’s yours? Or, if you have a couple, how many spikes do we get?

Ashley Goodall
Mine is looking out into a messy future and explaining to the rest of the world what I see clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ashley Goodall
And, again, that’s specific. There’s not a model that says that. And if you were coaching me, you would never say from a standing start, “Well, Ashley, let’s talk about looking out into a messy future and explaining to the world what you see clearly.” That’s not a sentence anyone ever says. But if you look at the book I’ve written with Marcus, my goodness me, it is an extended essay in looking out into the messy future and trying to explain what we together see clearly. So, it does show up in places.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s good. And do you think that we, as humans, professionals, have one, two, three spikes? What do you think?

Ashley Goodall
I don’t know. I think it’s not 15, and it’s probably not six either. It’s interesting when it gets to leadership because actually there’s a connection between these spikes and leadership. It turns out that what happens in the world of leadership is that people hook onto your spikes, that’s what they see. And the spikes help them feel better about the world that they’re facing. They know what you’re going to stand for and where you’re going to go.

When you look at leaders, most leaders with any sort of renown, you come down to more or less one spike. Now, that might just be because we’re seeing it from a distance so we the one that’s the most powerful, or maybe there are another couple of things going on there as well. But, as I say, I don’t think it’s six.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s helpful. Thank you. Intriguing. So, now let’s talk about the feedback picture. So, what’s the story here?

Ashley Goodall
There is an awful lot of conversation in the world about how to give people feedback. And, recently, it’s taken a little turn for the sort of, I don’t know, the chest-thumping, if you like. We have to give people radical feedback, and we have to be super candid, and we have to be unvarnished, and all these words that somehow make this an exercise in macho truth-telling, which is just weird. I think we should just call it weird.

But, behind that, is this ongoing question of, “What’s the best way to give somebody feedback?” And what’s presumed in that, of course, is that giving people feedback is the best way to help them grow. Now, by feedback, what I mean is, and it’s worth clarifying, when I say feedback, I mean the sort of standard approach where it says, “You did this. I would’ve done this, or you should’ve done it this way. Or, it’s where I tell you what I think of your performance.” That’s what we could call feedback, right?

And we’re spending a lot of time saying, “Well, what’s the best way to do that? And should it be 360 and should it be anonymous? And should it should be on your phone and how frequently should it happen? And how radically candid the whole thing should be?”

But if you actually ask the underlying question, “How do people best grow?” you find out that as soon as the brain feels threatened, as soon as the brain feels that judgment is about to arrive, it measurably shuts down. It goes into fight-or-flight mode. And that’s not the mode of brain system, if you like, that’s not the brain system where neurological connections get made.

So, at a biological level, if someone feels threatened, they stop learning. And if your read the research on this, the research actually say that that brain state is best described as impairment. So, in all our efforts to help people grow, we’re actually impairing their learning, so that should give us pause. Then you say, well, as we’ve just been talking about, “Gosh, the best people are spikey, and the spikes are different from one person to the next.” So, it’s very difficult for me to tell you how you should move towards excellence because your version of excellence will be different from mine, and I can’t possibly guess what’s going on inside you, what your definition of your spike, or your growing edge might be. So, that makes it a little bit difficult.

And then, thirdly, if you look at the science in learning, and you discover that learning is actually an emergent thing. I can’t force you. I can’t compel you to learn. What I can do is give you some ingredients when your brain is ready to hear them. And, from time to time, you’ll find a different way of assembling, with some input from me, or mainly input from you, and you’ll go, “Oh, right. Oh, that.” But that moment is not what I told you to learn. It’s you figuring out an insight for yourself. So, learning is actually an emergent property.

So, given that, given that I’m a horrible judge of other people, which is another thing the science is very clear on, so I can’t judge you. You learn it idiosyncratically. Your excellence is idiosyncratic. And the second I start telling you how to do something and you perceive that as any sort of a threat, your brain shuts down. That would mean a lot of this feedback isn’t achieving an awful lot.

It’s okay for risk mitigation where you’re not worried about learning, you’re not worried about growth, you’re worried about, “Don’t do that because it will cause harm.” Okay, that’s one case where we can go, yes, by all means tell people how to do it differently. Just don’t expect them to learn a lot. Don’t expect them go get anything above adequate of the task you’re talking about because brains don’t work that way.

And then you find, “Okay, if we’re no longer in the getting to adequate business, but we’re in the fostering excellence business, what should we do, given all of this?” And what we should do is give people our attention to what works really well. We should help them realize and reflect on their moments of excellence so that they can build on those patterns in their brain and make them more pronounced and more powerful.

What that looks like in a nutshell is that when we say to somebody, “Good job,” we think today that’s the end of the conversation, right? Good job means, “You did it great. Well done. It’s not a risk for me because you’re good at that, so I’ll go back to figuring out where you’re next going to fall down and giving you all sorts of constructive,” as I suppose we call it, “or negative feedback.” But, in fact, good job is the beginning of a conversation.

And the conversation continues something like this, you start by sharing your reaction, okay, “So, Pete, good job. The thing, the way that you phrased that question really captured something important for me. Now, then, where did that come from? What were you thinking? Have you asked the question like that before? Could you take the thought that led to that question and inform different questions with it? Could you do that again is essentially what I’m asking?”

If I do that for you, some of the time a little spark will go off in your brain, and you’ll go, “Oh, yes, I could do it again. It would look like this. Or I could do it over here. Or I could do it maybe, when I‘m not asking questions but when I’m writing. Or I could do it here, or I could do it here, or I could do it here.” And, lo and behold, you have growth, and you have growth towards excellence, not merely remediation towards adequacy. So, people don’t feedback. People need attention.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. And so, then if you are in a spot where something needs to be corrected, what do you do?

Ashley Goodall
What you do is you talk about facts, steps, and outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, say more.

Ashley Goodall
So, very easy to say, “Hey, you did that and perhaps you didn’t know about this fact. Perhaps you didn’t know about this thing which is a factual thing in the world.” You can always point that out. “Maybe you hadn’t read this research paper when you wrote that article,” something like that. So, you’re going to want to say that.

When you have a process with a series of defined steps, there’s a series of defined steps, for example, for taking off in an airplane, or for giving a safe injection, and somebody misses a step. Then, by all means, you can say, “Oh, my goodness me, you missed a step. These are the required steps. Don’t miss that step again. You will create risks.” And that’s why, of course, we have checklists in the world. And two of the places we have checklists are in operating rooms and in airplane cockpits, because if you miss a step, you’re in trouble.

Most of the world of work, certainly the world of knowledge work, by the way, isn’t like an operating theater or a cockpit in that there isn’t a prescribed list of steps that everyone would agree to. So, the facts and steps things are a little limited but it’s worth just saying that those are real things. And then the other one is the most effective way I found to remediate performance is to say, “You missed on the outcome. The outcome we were after was,” I don’t know, “to close the deal, and you didn’t close the deal. Let’s talk about why.”

Now, in that, you’re still remediating but at least you are trying to talk about not, “Here’s what’s wrong with you through my eyes, which will get you, believe me, nowhere at all.” But at least, instead, you’re trying to say, “We missed. You missed. Let’s explore.” You don’t get a lot of growth by doing that because as soon as you say to somebody, “You missed the outcome,” their brain is already trying to get out the door pretty quickly. But you can at least come up with a plan for not missing again.

And so, what you get is, of course, “The deal might close next time.” What you don’t get is, “Is it a great deal?” So, there’s a difference between, as I said, there’s a difference between adequate performance and great performance. You don’t create a transporting piece of writing by fixing the grammar which is not to say that you can’t fix the grammar and that you shouldn’t fix the grammar. But it is to say there’s a big difference in the real world between getting the basics down and real unique excellence.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. All right. Thank you. Well, tell me, Ashley, so given that these lies are around and they are pervasive, if you are, say, a rank-and-file professional, maybe you don’t have any direct reports or just a couple, what do you think are some of the top things that we should start doing right now that can help us get better results at work given that these lies are all over the place?

Ashley Goodall
Yeah, I’ll give you the one that’s absolutely top of the list for me the whole time, which is, “Get really fluent about your strengths. Get specific. Get detailed.” There are a couple of things that sort of lead us to that, if you like. The first is that, “No one else really cares about you as much as you care about you. No one else really cares about your strengths,” and by strengths I don’t mean what you’re good at. I mean what energizes you, what gives you, what you run towards. “No one else really cares about that as much as you do. And no one else is going to do the work for you. And, anyway, nobody else can because they can’t see inside your head, and they can’t see how it feels to be engaged in an activity when time is flying by, and you can’t wait to do it again.” So, firstly, no one will do it for you.

Secondly, we are very strangely and, to my mind, sadly much more specific about our weaknesses, about the things that drain the living daylights out of us, than we are about our strengths. It’s a sort of oddity of the way we’re put together as people, I think. And the example, of course, is if you say to somebody, “Name an activity that drains you.” Most people will think for four seconds and then talk for about three minutes. And the three minutes is a rant, “Oh, my goodness me, when they make me fill in this form, and then this has to happen, and then this have to happen. I hate that.” And they can give you enormous detail, they can tell you precisely when it last happened, they can tell you exactly what drains them about it.

And then you say, “Okay, very good. Tell me about what strengthens you, what lifts you up.” And a lot of the time, people will lean back in a chair, and they’ll smile, and they go, “You know what, it’s people. I’m a people person.” And that is woefully inadequate. Which people? Where? What are they doing? What are you doing? What’s your relationship with the people? Are the people professional people? Are they family people? Is it at work? Is it outside work? Do you know them? Are you reaching out to them for the first time? Are you forming long-lasting relationships with a few people? Are you forming light-touch relationships with hundreds and hundreds of people? Which people? Not, “I’m a people person.” More, more, more.

Because until you know those answers for yourself, you can’t do anything with them. And no one else, as I said, is going to do it for you. So, the piece of advice I would give for anyone in any walk of life is get really, really specific about the activities that give you joy, the activities that you love, because on that will be built, with luck and with effort, a great career and a great life. But if you don’t know what those building blocks are, you can’t get there from vagueness. It won’t work. If you’re going to find your winning edge, you need to get really specific about what it is that lifts you up.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And is there anything that you recommend professionals stop doing, you know, they just cut it out right now?

Ashley Goodall
We over-rotate. I mean, it’s the flipside of what we were just talking about. We over-rotate on weaknesses and we beat ourselves up about not necessarily the things that, in the proper sense, the things that drain us, but certainly things we can’t do very well. And we can sometimes obsess over these and get very, very focused on trying to make ourselves more well-rounded, if you like. But you only have to think, and human kind are probably thousands and millions of things that a human being can do, and most of us suck at most of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Ashley Goodall
We tend to go all sort of narrow. But if you think about, when I think about the things I can’t do, goodness me, metal work, field hockey, also ice hockey, paragliding, I can’t paint. There’s an enormously long list of things that I can’t do. I can’t ride a motorcycle. I can’t speak Chinese. My Latin is very remedial these days. Okay, the list of things I can’t do is infinity things long practically.

The list of things I can do is very few, so I better not spend my whole time wallowing in, “I can’t do this, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do this,” because, as I said, that’s not where a career and a life is to be forged. Those are the wrong raw ingredients to start with. We come into the world with certain patterns of thought and behavior, and those only become more pronounced over our lives. They don’t change very much. They just get more and more clearly defined.

And the question is, “Are you accelerating the definition of yours or not?” And the place to start, therefore, is, “What are my patterns of behavior and thought? What do I run towards?” as I’ve said. Not, “What are some of the millions of things I can’t do?” So, it’s not that, “Where I don’t have a skill, I shouldn’t have a bother acquiring it,” but it’s the, “I shouldn’t hook my future to things that, seem very distant from my current field of endeavor, and I shouldn’t say that that’s the most important thing for me to focus on.” The most important thing for me to focus on is, “What works? And how can I do it more?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you. Ashley, let me get your take. So, we had an overview of the nine lies, we had some depth on a couple of them. Would you say there is an overarching theme, or kind of underlying set of forces that draw all these together? Like, what are the nine lies have in common other than they’re all over the place and that they’re wrong?

Ashley Goodall
There is, and I think it’s been sort of hovering around our conversation today, Pete. And, I suppose, it’s got a couple of angles. Particularly in the workplace, we tend to focus on what doesn’t work and we miss giving at least as much attention, or properly much more attention, to what does work. So, we’ve sort of got the world of human prospering and human flourishing, we sort of got it backwards.

And the other thing that runs through the lies very, very strongly is that we think that the human individuality is a bug, not a feature. We think that human diversity is something to be rounded out, something to be made to conform. This is why we cascade goals so that everybody is singing off the same songbook, if you like. This is why we round people out. This is why we give people feedback against the prescribed model. This is why we sort people into categories of potential or not.

We’re trying to put people in buckets. We’re trying to make people conform. We’re looking for one-size-fits-all. And, as a result, we lose sight of humans at work, which is particularly ironic, because human is all there is at work, but we lose sight of it, and we lose sight of the beautiful and precious fact that what we prize most about the people we share the planet with is not how they’re the same as us, it’s how they’re different. It’s what they add that we can’t do. It’s what they see that we don’t see.

And the world of work, I think, as described through these nine lies, the world of work is, in its funny sort of way, annoyed by that, frustrated by that. Wouldn’t it be much easier if all the people were interchangeable, if they were all the same, or at least if we could describe their differences in a list of eight competencies? And then we could measure you all up against that and we could decide whether you’re an A, a B, a C, a D, an E, an F, a G, and we could treat you like that.

It’s wrong on the evidence, it’s not useful according to the science, and it’s also, in some way, immoral. So, I think the book, if you like, is a plea to get back to a world where we appreciate the local, the local team, we appreciate the weirdness of other people, and the wonderful weirdness of other people. And we put the human beings back in work because we’ve lost them.

Pete Mockaitis
This has kind of reminded me of Henry Ford had a famous quotation, and I might not nail it but it’s something like, “Why is it when I hire a pair of hands, I have to get a brain and a mouth as well?” Or something like that, in terms of, “Look, I’ve got a great system here. So, just don’t mess with it. Don’t bring your personality and your ideas and all of your complicated humanity into the equation because that just makes my job more difficult, and I just want to see my system run and get things cranked out the other side.” In a way, that’s kind of the whole industrial revolution in action.

Ashley Goodall
You’re exactly right. And that’s almost where it begins. I mean, by the time you’ve thought about Taylorism and you thought about Henry Ford, they’re all about the same era. And there was almost an explicit attempt to purge the humanness from work. And, yet, you look at work today, and most of us aren’t making cars step by step by step. Most of us aren’t at the Bethlehem coal factory, or wherever it was that Taylor was counting people moving wheelbarrows of coal backwards and forward. That’s not most work for most people most of the time.

We are talking about a world where our edge at work is innovation and creativity and collaboration across enormous complexity, using technologies that are more and more and more complex and sophisticated and incomprehensible by any single person, and all around the world with people, we sometimes know very well and sometimes we hardly meet at all. You can’t thrive in that if you think that the essence of a human being is a problem, not in fact the only thing that you have going for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Ashley, tell me, any key things you want to mention before we quickly hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Ashley Goodall
Gosh, I think we’ve covered a lot. I suppose the one thing that we did, the one thing maybe we didn’t talk about a lot is, “Where do these lies come from?” And it’s interesting to talk about Ford and talk about Taylor. Some of the old lies start out as a small good thing, which then turns into a big bad thing when we make it into a system.

So, I suppose one of the morals of the book might be beware of systematizing stuff. And when anyone comes to you and says, “Can we scale that?” be very, very cautious because sometimes in scaling something, you wring the human essence out of it altogether. The best example I can think of that’s in the book is this idea of goals.

And, of course, we’re all very familiar with goals, and we’ve all had the experience where we set our self a goal about something we want to do, and it’s very helpful. And so, you go, “All right, goals. If I set one for myself voluntarily, that’s a useful way of expressing how I want to get stuff done in the world and what I value.” But then, of course, what we do is we go, “Well, if it’s good for one, it’s good for many.” And we’ll turn it into a goal cascade and, all of a sudden, you’re being told to set goals, and you’ll also being told what sorts of things go in them.

And in taking the beautiful, precious thing of “Ashley and Marcus set out to write a book because they felt they needed to express some ideas in the world”, and turning that into “There’s a great big cascaded-goal system, and Ashley is down at the bottom of it, and he’s got to fill in a form”, you lose everything that is valuable about the first sort of goal by turning into a sort of cascaded goal.

And there are other examples in the book of things that start out really small and really local and beautiful and well-intentioned, but then by the time we’ve turned them into a system, we’ve taken all the goodness out.

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

Ashley Goodall
I came across this one years ago, and if you hear rustling, I’m just going to grab my book of Richard Feynman. And Richard Feynman, I’m sure your listeners will know, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, but also, towards the very end of his life, was asked to put his feet in the inquiry into the Columbia, the Challenger disaster, the Space Shuttle Challenger. And as he went through the inquiry, and he pushed deeper and deeper into the workings of NASA, or at the time, he found a lot of cases where people were assuming that something would work a particular way because they really wanted it to, and they were turning away from the evidence, and were sort of buying their own PR, if you like.

And when the Challenger Report was published, he asked to write his own appendix, which people can go look up today. And if anyone is after a wonderful, wonderful, super rational, detailed, humble evidence-based analysis of something that’s happened in the world, go and read Richard Feynman’s appendix to the Challenger Report, and he ends it with a sentence that I have always adored, “For a successful technology,” he says, “reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Nature cannot be fooled.

And it connects to some of the ideas in the book because what we’re trying to do is, we’re saying, “Look, this is what the evidence is.” And the evidence doesn’t care whether you believe it or not. The facts don’t care whether or not who believes in them. They’re just going to hang around being facts. Nature will not be fooled. So, if we’re smart, we figure out what’s knowable about the world and build on that. We set aside our misconceptions and we reject the lies.

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

Ashley Goodall
I have, for years and year and years, I’ve used a particular propelling pencil. How funny is that?

Pete Mockaitis
Propelling?

Ashley Goodall
A propelling pencil, you know, an automatic pencil.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ashley Goodall
And I got it a few years ago. When I annotate a document, which I do a lot when I’m writing, I like to scribble on it by hand, and for some reason I’ve always liked to do that in pencil. It feels, to me, a little less judgmental than ink.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re not ready.

Ashley Goodall
Exactly. Pencils work on planes. Pencils don’t explode in your pocket if you take them on a plane, so they’re practical. But I’ve just always loved this particular pencil. And, actually, the one I have right now is the second identical one I had because I lost one, and I had lost one on a trip. And the second I got home, I went straight to the store and just bought exactly the same pencil again because I can’t live without it. So, there you go, my automatic pencil.

Pete Mockaitis
You got me so intrigued. What is the make and model of this pencil?

Ashley Goodall
Well, I think it’s German or Swiss. It’s Graf von Faber-Castell, and it is just this little beautiful…I mean, it’s a good question for a podcast, isn’t it? How would you describe a pencil to somebody who can’t see it? And so far, I’ve managed to say it’s a pencil and it’s silver.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s awesome.

Ashley Goodall
And it’s propelling. And it’s Swiss or German. I don’t know. I guess we’ll finish up being lame and saying we’ll look it up online. But that’s the one that fits my hand. I like the way it works beautifully. And I can’t live without it.

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

Ashley Goodall
So, if they’re interested in the book, the book is available on Amazon right now, anywhere books are sold. If they want to connect with me, I’d love to connect with anybody on LinkedIn, and there’s a bunch of us having a whole bunch of fun and debate over there on some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today.

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

Ashley Goodall
My final challenge would be don’t short-sell you. You’re awesome. Figure out how to share that with the world because we need you to.

Pete Mockaitis
Ashley, thank you. This has been such a treat. I wish you lots of luck with your book, the “Nine Lies About Work,” and all your other adventures.

Ashley Goodall
Pete, thanks so much.

Jun 03

446: Making Fear Your Friend with Judi Holler

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Judi Holler says: "Scary things don't get less scary, but you will get stronger. Keep going."

Judi Holler makes the case for exercising your bravery muscle and making fear your friend—one challenge at a time.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The small things we do each day that slow our long-term progress
  2. Why technology is a great servant but a terrible master
  3. How to deal with fear when it never goes away

About Judi

Judi Holler is a keynote speaker, author, and a professionally trained improviser and alumna of The Second City’s Conservatory in Chicago, Illinois. Judi is a past president of Meeting Professionals International, Chicago Area Chapter, and was named one of the 40 under 40 in the meetings industry by Connect magazine in 2015

Judi’s book on Fear, titled “Fear Is My Homeboy: How to Slay Doubt, Boss Up, and Succeed on Your Own Terms”, was recently endorsed by Mel Robbins calling it: “relatable, relevant and most importantly ACTIONABLE!” Fear Is My Homeboy came out last week.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

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

Judi Holler
I am honored to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun. Well, I am honored to have you here. And I think we’re going to have a lot of fun digging into some cool stuff. But I got a real kick out of your fun fact, which is you do some karaoke performances from time to time, and you’ve got a go-to “Caribbean Queen.” What’s the story here?

Judi Holler
Okay. So, Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen” is always my go-to karaoke. I have a few. I have a bag of tricks. But, you know what, listen, I always loved karaoke. Who doesn’t want to be a rock star? Who doesn’t want to be Beyoncé for just a minute? And I can’t sing to save my life, so karaoke, it’s just a great way to sort of play rock star, crack people up, improvise, which we’ll talk about later, and improv background, and just be goofy.

And so, Billy Ocean really kind of became one of my favorite songs because nobody sees it coming. It’s super old school. I’ve got a thing for yacht rock and like old R&B, and my mom used to like clean the house to like Lionel Ritchie and Billy Ocean, and so I kind of grew up listening to that song and I know all the lyrics, so it’s just great because no one sees it coming.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really fun and what that reminded me of is that song, I remember when I was a kid, all the time there’d be this TV commercial for an ‘80s compilation CDs called “Totally ‘80s” or something like that.

Judi Holler
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, my buddy Ronnie and I like knew every word to this commercial because it was on so much. And our favorite part was when they show you one sample and move to the other, they didn’t really transition very well, so it was like, “Everybody wants to rule the…” “Caribbean Queen.” And I was like, “Do they want to rule the Caribbean Queen because that’s what it sounds like when you splice it together?” Oh, you brought me back, so thank you, yeah.

Judi Holler
That is amazing. Oh, yeah, Billy Ocean, it’s just old school, so there might a lot of people listening and they’d have to Google it up to find out who the heck he is. But that’s why I love it because no one sees it coming and, yeah, like ‘80s R&B.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m wondering if you’ve ever bumped into any Caribbean women, like, “I’m the Caribbean Queen”?

Judi Holler
Well, you know what, okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, in the bar or so when you’re there.

Judi Holler
Totally funny caveat to that. My husband and I honeymooned in the Caribbean, and they had musical performances in our hotel lobby, and we got to know the band because they were there a couple nights in a row and I’m not a shy sort of person. And I said, “Hey, do you guys do any Billy Ocean? You got Caribbean Queen?” And they were like, “Well, yeah.” These were American performers. And so, I’m not kidding you, we have a video footage of me doing “Caribbean Queen” in the Caribbean, the Caribbean as they say it, and it was just epic, and it was just amazing and people were kind of clapping, also awkwardly wondering what was happening. It was just magic.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s lovely.

Judi Holler
So, there you have it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it sounds as though you have, indeed, lived out the title of your book, Fear Is My Homeboy because it seems like you have befriended those sensations that, “Oh, I don’t know if I wanted to go up there and do that, and everyone is going to be looking at me, I don’t know.” So, could you sort of share with us kind of what’s the main idea behind this book here?

Judi Holler
Yeah, so the big idea behind the book is this, if I could have one page in my book, literally, one page in my book, it would say, “It doesn’t get easier. Scary things don’t get less scary, but you will get stronger. Keep going.” The big idea is that when you choose courage over comfort on purpose, almost every day you will start fearing less, which is how you pick up momentum, which is how you get stuff done, and it’s how you start succeeding in and outside of work the way you really want to succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, yeah, that sounds great and I’d like to have some of that. So, maybe could you give us a little bit of a picture here when it comes to what are some of the ways that we frequently choose comfort and not courage to our detriment, particularly in a career context?

Judi Holler
Yes, so I really believe it’s all the small stuff we don’t do every day that ends up holding us back in the long run and really leads to regret. And I’m sort on a mission to remove the word “regret” from the dictionary because we’re too brave, we are too busy dancing with our fear. This means we’re getting stuff done.

And the main reason we’re not leveling up personally and professionally is because we’re afraid. We’re afraid to raise our hand in the sales meeting. We’re afraid to speak up in a meeting. We’re afraid to sit in the front row, or go for the promotion, or ask for the raise, or to promote ourselves, to talk about ourselves online, to toot our own horns.

So, I’m on a mission to stop that, and I think there’s a lot of unique things you could do to get uncomfortable every day to sort of mix up your routine to make sure that you’re staying in the driver’s seat of your life and not your fear.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s really interesting is that what this makes me think about is sort of all the little ways that we choose comfort instead of courage. And it’s like, in a way, I think I may have become, at least temporarily, a little bit less courageous than before only because I’m married now, you know. And my wife is awesome, and our kids are awesome. But there was a period of time in which I was, you know, meeting a lot of people and asking for a lot of dates, and I kind of got into a groove where I didn’t have that momentum such that I felt kind of bold and able to kind of ask for and do all kinds of things because I was in that regular habit.

Whereas, now, I’m kind of settled in and mostly working from home. And so, it seems like it does take me a little bit more of a push to think, “Okay, I’m going to send that email to ask for that opportunity. All right, we’re going to do it. Okay, I’ve put this off a couple of times, now is the time.” And it seems like that’s crept in a little bit more, which would follow your theory, that I’m kind of had fewer moments of choosing courage on a day-by-day basis and all kinds of other contexts.

Judi Holler
Well, think about it like this, Pete, like you just nailed it. Here’s the deal. If we don’t work that fear muscle, we will not work the fear muscle, just like when we go to the gym. We go to the gym and it’s hard at the beginning, right? But we keep going and we keep showing up and then we get stronger. And when we don’t go to the gym, we get weaker, right?

So, I look at it that way, like we have to be working that brave muscle. And so, when you’re not dating, and you’re in a relationship, right, you’re not out there doing that scary thing anymore but you, and I can bet my bottom dollar, doing all kinds of other uncomfortable things to move your life and your business forward, and that’s the real big idea.

We have to be doing something every day. Maybe it’s just something as simple as taking a different way home from work, right? Or, asking for a discount in a coffee shop, or just like taking a selfie of yourself in public to get better and not carrying what people think. But we have to work the brave muscle and, I tell you, this is how we fear less.

We shouldn’t be chasing the unrealistic goal of fearless. Because if you really think about it, if we were fearless, we would never pay our taxes, we would never go to a doctor, we’d walk down alleys at 4:00 in the morning by ourselves, at night, we would eat poisonous foods on purpose. Like, the goal shouldn’t be fearless because fearless could be dangerous in some situations.

So, the goal should always be brave. And how do we fear less? Well, the way you get to the other side, the way you fear less is by working that muscle, and you have to use it or you’ll lose it, so doing those small scary things every day. And sometimes, maybe some days, it’s a big scary thing. Maybe you’re leading a toxic relationship tomorrow, maybe you’re literally moving to a new city, maybe you decided to quit smoking. There are big things you could do for yourself as well, but it’s all those little small things that add up over time that really end up causing a lot of the problems, so we’ve got to work that fear muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it there, you provided a few examples in terms of little things you can do every day to work that muscle, from asking for a discount in the coffee shop. And that came up with Jordan Harbinger, and a little bit of Ruth Soukup as well in those conversations. So, loving the reinforcements.

Judi Holler
So cool.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what are some other key things you recommend as means of working the fear muscle? You call it, is it the fear muscle or is the brave muscle?

Judi Holler
I guess you can say it either way. There is no wrong way to work that courage muscle, or fear muscle, or bravery muscle, whatever that looks like for you. I could give you an example of someone, and this could apply to your audience if you’ve got someone who’s leading a team, or maybe there’s someone in your audience and they’re working for someone else. I bet you have a little bit of both.

I have a client, who lives and works in downtown Chicago. She’s leading a team of about three or four people. And so, remember, the idea is to get uncomfortable, to mix up our routine. And so, she found herself really overwhelmed, and really stressed out, and exhausted and crabby and irritable. She just wasn’t succeeding the way she wanted to succeed. She wasn’t leveling up.

So, she started a fear I proposed in my keynote. I work primarily as an author and a keynote speaker. And one of the things I proposed in my keynotes is this idea of fear experiments, doing something small and scary and brave every day to advance yourself and get stronger. And so, I told her about this idea, and she said, “Okay, I’m going to try something on my own. I really need to get in front of my schedule.”

And I talk a lot about focus. And this can feel scary because it requires us to do things we’d never done before in our schedule and in our work lives. Most of us sit down and we literally, the first we do, maybe sometimes before you even get out of bed is we open our iPhones and we look at our email. It’s what we do, right? Or we’d check out social media.

So, she says, “I’m going to do a fear experiment, and I’m going to take the first, I’m not going to look at email until 9:00 a.m. every day. No emails.” So, she’s getting up at 7:00, she’s not looking at that phone, she’s not looking at her email, but she’s taking the first 60 minutes of her work day from 8:00 to 9:00 to move one small thing forward for herself or for her work first, and she started small with that first 60 minutes, just that first hour for a day. And you can even go as small as 30 minutes.

And what happened for her is she immediately started triggering momentum in her life because she started actually moving things forward which made the dopamine in her brain happy and it gave her confidence to keep going. And so, she saw it, she said, “Oh, okay, if I can do this in 60 minutes, what could I do if I did 90 minutes, if I grew this?”

And she didn’t look at email for 60 minutes, she didn’t take a phone call, she didn’t sit in meetings, again, advancing a goal before she was fine to the rest of world. That 60 minutes grew to like, I said, an hour and a half to 120 minutes. And today, most days, because there’s no perfect world, no perfect day, she doesn’t look at her email until noon.

And let me tell you, she is working in corporate America, she has a boss, she has a team, but she started small, bird by bird, and it took guts because she did not ask for permission. She just took the action and monitored her results because, after all, you are the CEO of you. And let me just tell you, Pete, what she did in a year.

So, because she started with this hour, and then it grew to like a 120 minutes, I don’t think she got to noon until like the second year of doing this, but in her first year of just protecting that first 90 minutes of her day, she lost 50 pounds because she started going to the gym in the morning, she read 19 business books. She was reading zero books. She reduced her staff turnover by like one person left in an entire left. They had had a really bad problem with turnover.

She got the certification that she had been trying to get for a long time. She grew tradeshow revenues at that organization by 25%. She watched like over, I could get this number wrong, 45 or 50 TED Talks. And she found herself happy, healthy, and this really bled into her personal life, so she was leveling up at work, leveling up at home, she got herself a promotion, she was making more money. And watching all these talks and reading all these books gave her a lot of great information to be able to have cool conversations at work, with her leadership, at the dinner table, at the networking event, sending them an email, to clients.

So, again, she started small but that took courage. It took her getting uncomfortable, literally not looking at her email, to open up a whole new door. I mean, she got a promotion on a video.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that example, too, because when we talk about fear, I think sometimes it’s natural to think about big, dramatic, scary fears, like, “Oh, I’m terrified of public speaking,” or heights, or you can sort of fill in the blank there. As opposed to, I don’t imagine she was terrified of not checking her email but it was uncomfortable. It was a little bit uneasy, like, “Oh, what if there’s something really important, and someone is waiting for me, and they’re like, ‘Hey, what’s the deal? How come you didn’t get back to me?’” As well as it’s a habit, it’s a groove that you’re in, so it just feels kind of off when you sort of reject that and don’t engage in it the first few times.

Judi Holler
And here’s the kicker, and this is new data, we are spending 6.3 hours a day on email. A day on average. The average worker is spending 6.3 hours a day on email. And you wonder why we’re not getting anything done. And we wonder why we feel stuck and irritable, and overwhelmed, and I’m doing air quotes here, “crazy busy,” right?

So, if we want to get out of this cycle of suck, we have to have the courage to try something new, to break a pattern, to flip the bad habit, and the more you do it, the better you get at it, and you’re going to start seeing results which welcomes momentum into your life party, and that’s really where all the magic lives.

It’s some staggering stuff, 55% of us are checking email after 11:00 p.m., 81% of workers are checking email, work email, on the weekends, 59% of us keep up with our work email while on vacation, you know what I mean? So, we wonder why we’re overwhelmed, and irritable, and crabby. We’re not turning off the machine, right?

When you hit the pause button on human beings, we actually start. It’s the opposite. So, we’ve got to be getting in control of this, and it takes courage to break some of those habits that are important. We need to be engaged. We need to be connected, certainly. But how do we make sure that we’re the boss? Technology is an incredible servant but a terrible master.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, intriguing. So, all right, well, that’s quite a case study in terms of tremendous results possible when you just sort of unplug a little bit from the technology. Sort of reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer stops drinking.

Judi Holler
Oh, my gosh.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, geez, all these phenomenal things.

Judi Holler
That’s hysterical. Perfect analogy.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s good. All right. So, anyway, I think we talked about a few things to sort of challenge yourself and to grow the muscle. I’d love to hear a few more things. So, that’s a great idea, is maybe you start with a few minutes away from the technology and maybe in the morning, and it’s high leverage there. What are some others you’d recommend?

Judi Holler
So, I would say it’s looking for, you know, and I think you’ve got to think about it mentally, too, because you’ve got to, I believe, when you’re managing fear and working with fear, knowledge is power. So, understanding, this is a big thing for, I think, everyone to understand. If you want to get better at fearing less, you can make more bold courageous moves in and outside of the workplace, you have to understand all of the sneaky ways that fear shows up. Fear is a trickster. It hides on purpose to trick you with the number one goal of getting you to stop, right?

Because if you keep going, if you do these new things, you become a version of yourself your fear has never seen before, and so fear doesn’t know what to do with that. So, understanding, I think, for me it was really big. I have a background in the improv theater, and I started to realize all of the sneaky ways that fear showed up to get me in my head as an improv performer. So, self-doubt is fear. Self-sabotage is fear’s way of stopping you.

Let’s not forget about procrastination. Just understanding, when I understood that procrastination is a way that fear shows up to stop you and block you is a powerful thing to get. For example, I was trying to finish a really meaty chapter of my book, and I was putting it off because I was afraid to sit down and do the work. So, I found myself for, literally, about 60 minutes, 45 minutes, organizing all of the drawers in my desk. I was on a deadline. I needed to finish this chapter of my book. But, boy, my office was clean, right?

And then I realized what I was doing. I was procrastinating instead of sitting down to do the work. So, the reason I shared this is because understanding that procrastination is sort of one of fear’s best friends is really a good thing to know so that you can move through it, right, and say, “Oh, hello, fear. I see you. I appreciate you. Do you ever take a day off? I don’t know if you do, but right now I don’t need you because I’m in control. I’ve got work to do, so have a seat on the other side of my desk and come back when I’m done, right?”

So, that was an a-ha moment for me, understanding that that’s just one of the many sneaky ways fear shows up. Perfectionism. Excuses. If you have someone on your team, someone in your life, that is making excuses for why they can’t do the thing, instead of getting frustrated and upset and trying to control, ask them what they’re afraid of because nine times out of ten there’s a fear on the other side of that excuse, you know, blame, gossip, jealousy, all of those are fear-based behaviors. So, just a few ways that fear mentally shows up. And I share them because we’ve got to be aware. Awareness holds our power.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’d love to get your take then, when it comes to this procrastination story, so you were avoiding writing a chapter of your book, and instead organizing your desk. So, what exactly was the fear there?

Judi Holler
Oh, my gosh, the fear of impostor syndrome creeping in, doubly fearing that, “I’m not good enough. I’m not smart enough.” It was a chapter that’s been, it was meaty. It was the chapter that is now chapters three and four. We actually ended up combining it into two chapters. But I was just afraid to start because I knew that if I sat down to do the work, I would have to sit down and do the work, and I would probably face a few things that I wasn’t comfortable with in building out and beating out that chapter. But a lot of it was impostor syndrome, worried that I wasn’t good enough.

And, by the way, once I finished the chapter, oh, my God, we’re moving forward, we’re moving forward, we’re putting a book out into the world. And so, there’s that. So, it was probably a combination of things mentally for me. And I think we all find our own internal demons, but there’s always usually something there. There’s always usually a reason. Anxiety. You know, you’re anxious and feeling fearful because maybe you feel that what you have isn’t good enough or whatever that may look like. But there’s usually always something living there.

If we’re procrastinating, okay, what are we afraid of? What is it? For me, it was about not being good enough, of not being smart enough, of not having a good chapter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. So, now, but you were not aware that that was what was going on at the surface level, it sounds like, at first.

Judi Holler
At first, I wasn’t, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, how did you get to that level of awareness?

Judi Holler
Well, in my research, and in really studying all the different things I was studying about fear, and then realizing that fear’s job is to stop you and to block you, and that self-doubt is a way it does that. Certainly, we self-sabotage, and procrastination is a form of self-sabotage. And that’s when it clicked, I was like, “Oh, my God, I’m sabotaging myself here. My office can get cleaned anytime, right? So, what am I doing here? It’s just busy work.”

And I, still to this day, do it. My husband always says, “You know when you’re stressed out,” because I’m either doing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, doing the laundry, mopping something, sweeping something. I do an activity, right, when my mind is filled with stress about something else. So, just understanding that stressors are triggers, right, to stop us from really sitting down and do the work.

So, I’ll give you a hack. If you’ve got someone listening that finds himself procrastinating, or not able to start something, what I did, and I write about this in my book, is I set a timer for 10 minutes because I believe so much in the magic of momentum. Because once we get a little juice, it helps us move forward.

So, I set a timer for 10 minutes, and I do this sometimes with working out as well when I don’t necessarily feel like it. I set a timer for 10 minutes, I say, “Okay, let me just do 10 minutes of the thing. And if I hit that 10 minutes and I don’t feel like it anymore, then I am not in the right mental space, the energy, the vibe isn’t right, and I stop the work. But if I have caught a vibe, and I feel good,” and nine times out of ten you will because you just welcomed momentum into the party, you just keep going, and then you keep going.

So, I find just even it’s the starting, that’s the problem. And sometimes 10 minutes can get you out of a funk. Just sit down to do the work for 10 minutes. Go sit on the bike. Go for a walk anywhere. If you’re not feeling it after 10 minutes, stop. And if you are, which most times you are, keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so now, I want to dig a little bit into your mindset and your title Fear Is My Homeboy. So, how do you think about fear in terms of befriending it as oppose to dominating and destroying it and you’re subjecting it to your fiery will of superiority? So, it sounds like that’s a different kind of a feel in terms of fear is your friend versus fear is something you were to punish and minimize. So, how do you think about that?

Judi Holler
Certainly. And here’s the deal, we have to work. I dance with my fear. I work with my fear because I realize that in my community, we call ourselves fear bosses because I’m the boss of my fear not you. Fear is never going to go away. Fear isn’t going to go anywhere. But I choose to dance with my fear. I choose to work with my fear. And in our community, we’re called fear bosses. This means we’re the boss, not our fear. So, I call the shots. And fear isn’t going anywhere.

So, fear, well, they’re very different for you at the age of 20, they will for you at the age of 50, what you fear, the things you fear, what keeps you up at night. And men and women, we internalize and externalize fears very differently. So, I got really awake to this idea that we’re never going to be able to get rid of our fears. This idea, this notion of fearless that everybody is telling us we need to be. I go back to that because it’s unrealistic.

So, why am I wasting my energy, my precious energy, trying to outrun something I’ll never be able to get rid of? Let’s work together. And, yes, I may feel fear. I may be afraid about whatever it is that I need to go to do, whether it’s going to a doctor’s appointment, or it’s making a phone call, but I know, yes, I’ll feel afraid, and I’ll never not feel afraid of things I feel afraid about, but I know because I know that fear is my homeboy. That if I keep going, if I keep doing small scary brave things every day, I will get stronger, and those scary things won’t be as bad. I’m now actually start fearing less, that’s the big idea, right? We’ve got to work with it. We dance together. We dance with our fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, then. So, you just sort of given up the idea that fear will ever be completely absent.

Judi Holler
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, in a way, yeah, it seems like fear is both your friend and your slave or colleague, I don’t know, if you’re the boss of it how you see that.

Judi Holler
What do they say? Keep your friends close but your enemies closer, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, there you go.

Judi Holler
So, there you go, right? It’s this idea like, yeah, fear is not the best thing to have around. It can really destroy so many beautiful things that can happen for you. Yet, keeping that enemy close is a powerful way to get to know it and dance with it a little bit. So, that’s an analogy that may help people sort of mindset to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so now, we’ve covered a lot of different potential things to do when it comes to fear. But I’d love to hear what do you think is just the most reliably outstanding, efficient, effective means of advancing when you are experiencing fear? Like, what is the thing you think is just the best?

Judi Holler
The thing. Action. Starting action. Action. Making the decision to go, and to do something, and to stop overthinking, and to stop self-doubting, and to stop overtalking. Just go do it. There are so many ideas and dreams and goals living inside of people all over the world and they’re waiting. They’re waiting for the right time, they’re waiting for, “Someday when the kids are grown. And someday I’ll have our money, and someday when I’m older. Oh, if I was only younger,” any excuses we make. So, starting is the hack, right? If you want a hack, that’s the hack.

So, momentum, again, I’m going back to that 10-minute timer. Just doing it, right, and propelling yourself into action. Mel Robbins has a great book The 5 Second Rule, right? That’s what the book is all about. It’s action. It’s starting. It’s momentum, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. And so, what would you say, on the counterpoint to that, is sort of like the most frequently arising mistake? Folks, they’re trying to do the stuff you’re saying, but they are kind of flubbing it. What is sort of the obstacle that’s popping up for them?

Judi Holler
Yes, I have one. It’s probably the number one question I get asked, this idea of, “Listen, I want to be more brave. I want to put myself out there. I want to promote myself and take more risks, and all of those things. But I don’t want to look like I’m bragging. I don’t want to look like I love myself. I don’t want people to judge me or make fun of me or not like me.” We get so worried about what other people are going to think. We’re so worried about publicly failing, or embarrassing ourselves, or people not liking us.

And here’s the hard, real truth, and this is a massive a-ha moment for me, and this will help you manage fear, and I hate to break it to you, but people already don’t like you. People are already judging you. And people are already making fun of you. So, the question is, “Who are you living your life for? Who are you running your business for? Who are you living for? You or everybody else?” So, the number one mistake people make is worrying way too much about what other people think. They’re already talking, you might as well give them something to talk about.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that’s really interesting perspective. I thought you were going to say, “Hey, for the most part, people are just aren’t paying much attention to you and they don’t really care because they’re wrapped up in their own lives.”

Judi Holler
It’s true.

Pete Mockaitis
But then you took it in the direction of, “They’re already making fun of you.”

Judi Holler
Right. I mean, I’m not saying everybody is making fun of you every day, but people are already talking about you, right? Look, we can’t control that or stop that. And people don’t care about you as much as we think they do, but we’re already being judged, right? It’s already happening, so live your life. That’s the point, right? Live your life.

Pete Mockaitis
And I really appreciate that when it comes to I think I’ve had an a-ha moment recently because we had a previous guest, Mindy Jensen from the Bigger Pockets money podcast. We talked about sort of money things. And she was just making a point how she just doesn’t care at all about what other people think with regard to her money decisions or if they think she’s a total cheapskate or whatever in these certain ways. And what I found interesting is that folks are going to judge you no matter what you choose in terms of like, so, it’s funny. We have two kids and we don’t own a car yet, right? So, hey, you’re in Chicago, so you know it. It’s not so essential especially when we’re really close by a Brown Line stop.

Judi Holler
Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s on the list. We’re going to get to it pretty soon.

Judi Holler
So good. So good.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I sort of thought people judge me or imagine me to be foolish or, I don’t know, a bad dad, or broke, like, “Oh, Pete’s business must not be doing very well. He can’t even scrap together to get a used minivan or something.” So, whatever. And so then, I sort of just imagine that to be the case, I was like, “You know what, I’m fine. We’re going to wait till the time is right, till we get just the right vehicle.” And then I mentioned this to someone, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we’re going to get a car pretty soon, that’s long overdue.” And then that person said, “Why do you need a car for? The train lands right there.” That’s like, “Wow, you just judged me in the opposite way. I assumed everyone else is judging me.” Therefore, my assertion is that people will judge you good or bad whatever you choose.

Judi Holler
It’s so true.

Pete Mockaitis
Therefore, that’s not a useful or valid or helpful decision-making criterion, they’re going to do what they’re going to do.

Judi Holler
Correct. It’s a waste of time or energy. We can’t control people, places, or things. So, all we could do is control ourselves. So, when we take action, the courage to take action, and just to trust ourselves, I mean, that’s what the improv theater is all about, just really trusting ourselves. So, I love that your guest said that, like, “I don’t care what people think.” I learned that so big and clear in the improv theater at The Second City because there is so much power in looking silly and not caring, and just doing you. And it’ll inspire other people to want to do that as well.

And that’s what need more of in the world, to get a little woo-woo here. We need more people being themselves and doing things that light them up, right? So, yeah, it’s like a brave movement. We love watching people do brave things and be themselves because it makes us want to do more of that ourselves.

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

Judi Holler
No, I think that’s it. Like I said, if I could have one page in my book, it doesn’t get easier. Scary things don’t get less scary but you will get stronger. I think a big consequential mistake people make is they do one brave thing and then they stop, and they think that, “Okay, now I’ve done it. Now, I’ve got that brave thing going.” That’s how we miss opportunities and end up with a mediocre life. We’ve got keep going and it’s just consistent action little by little every day. We don’t need to do big scary things. We can start small and just still be very effective. So, that’s it in a nutshell.

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

Judi Holler
Yes. I would say I love the Steve Martin quote, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” Love that.

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

Judi Holler
I would say, ooh, this is a good one. I recently read a study that showed, it was on happiness and laughter, that babies laugh about 400 times a day, and adults, we laugh, about 4 times a day. And that just certainly made me sad but it inspired me to bring more joy and laughter into my life. And I think joy and laughter is coming back into the workplace. And if we’re not having fun, what’s the point? We’ve got to sit at that fun table because we’re not laughing. We’re not a baby anymore, I get it. But laughter, for 400 to 4, how do we increase that laugh factor every day? And I loved that study.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, that is intriguing and I have thought that to myself, it’s like, “I would like to have some more laughs.” And, from time to time, I make a discovery, like, “Oh, my gosh, the TV show A.P. Bio is hysterical.”

Judi Holler
So good, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I binge all of those, it’s like, “Okay, now what do I do?” So, what do you do to bring in more laughs every day? I mean, you got your whole improv posse but outside that, yeah.

Judi Holler
You know what I do? I tell you this is brand new and I love this idea. I actually need to put it in my newsletter because it’s such a fun little hack. Because of this study, I have started watching on Netflix Stand-Up Comedy Specials, and I’ve been watching a lot of like “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” with Jerry Seinfeld, and those were like 15-20 minutes long. And I’m telling you, I watch about five of those “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” the other night while I was eating and making dinner because it’s all kind of in the same room. And I didn’t look at my phone once. I even forgot about my email. I forgot about the book launch. It was just so lovely to just sit there and laugh.

And so, that’s an easy thing someone could do. Just start like watching comedy specials and just let yourself laugh at the world because there is a lot of serious stuff going on, but if we’re not having fun, what’s the point? So, that’s a way to start laughing more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that is fun and I’ve turned on the Spotify Comedy originals in there as I’m like taking a walk or whatever. And that’s great, yeah, because you don’t really need to look at it, you know. You can mostly listen to the Netflix Comedy Special, maybe you pop on some Bluetooth headphones.

Judi Holler
Correct. In your car, yup. Or, your, not car, your iPhone.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you just mix your ingredients.

Judi Holler
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. So, how about a favorite book?

Judi Holler
Favorite book, oh, my gosh. That’s a hard question. I have so many, but what I would say for this audience, I think what shifted me in a professional way, from a professional perspective, which really just changed the way I work, it’s a book called Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, we interviewed Greg.

Judi Holler
Oh, God, that book changed the way—you know that client I was telling you about, the first 60 minutes of her day, those ideas inspired a lot of those changes that she made and I made, and we just really all started working together to get in front of it and living like essentialists. So, that book is a game-changer. If you haven’t read it, go get you some.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about favorite habits.

Judi Holler
That’s definitely it, but I would say I use a goal-focused planner. I use a planner called the Volt Planner by a company called Ink and Volt. It is the number one tool in my business from a productivity standpoint that helps me living work like an essentialist, so I couldn’t live without it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers and listeners?

Judi Holler
Yeah, I think my book comes out May 28, but there are a lot of folks that have had advanced copies, and one of the retailers are shipping early, and I think the quote that’s kind of getting tweeted a lot, and shared a lot, and have come up a lot even on podcasts is this one, “You can be a victim or you can be a badass. The choice is yours.”

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

Judi Holler
I would point them to, first and foremost, my website which is JudiHoller.com from a social media perspective. I am most active on Instagram, so @judiholler on Instagram, certainly on Facebook. And then I think those are the best ways to get in touch with me. And we’re doing a little freebie. I’ve got a little gift for your listeners. Do you want to share it or do you want me to share it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yup, tell us.

Judi Holler
Okay. So, if you want to get to know a little bit more about me and kind of test drive my book without buying the book, we’re going to give you chapter one, in the beginning of the entire book, for free. And I’ve also included a couple of downloadable freebies. Most importantly, most specifically, my secret weapon which is my morning planner page.

And the way you get it is you text the word BRAVE to the number 474747, and you’ll get texted a little link, you click it, and then all of the downloadable freebies will be sent to your email once you enter your email.

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

Judi Holler
Just trust yourself. Trust yourself. What you have is good enough. And in the improv theater, we’re not trying to find the best thing, but we are always looking for the next thing. So, it’s all about momentum and moving the scenes forward on stage, you’ve got to do that for yourself. It’s about doing small things every day that are going to move your life forward. This is how you achieve results, fear less, and, of course, make fear your homeboy.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Judi, thanks for this. Good luck with the book and all your adventures.

Judi Holler
Oh, my gosh, thanks for listening.