Tag

KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - Page 2 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Sep 15
0

1093: How to Become Powerfully Likeable with Dr. Kate Mason

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Kate Mason shares how to be both powerful AND well-liked.

You’ll Learn

  1. The common phrases that undermine your influence
  2. How to ask questions while boosting your credibility
  3. How to overcome the fear of saying no

About Kate

Kate Mason, PhD is a communications expert and world-champion debater who has spent her career working with founders and executives from tech startups to major global brands. She coaches executives on actionable skills to become the leaders they wish to be, and to amplify their voice, reach, and impact at work. Kate lives in Sydney, Australia.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Kate Mason Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kate, welcome!

Kate Mason
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to be chatting, and I want to hear, first and foremost, about you being a world champion debater. What’s the world champion of debate look, sound, feel like?

Kate Mason
Well, it’s a nerd convention that I went to when I was in high school, and I continued debating in university, and it’s basically the best people in the world come together and debate together. It’s brilliant.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And so, I’m thinking, back in high school, I did some speech individual events and I thought it was a ton of fun. But world sounds so hardcore because I didn’t even make it to the state finals. So, what do world champion debaters, what’s the vibe like when you’re in their midst?

Kate Mason
It’s pretty intense. You tend to study up on global affairs and lots of issues in the months preceding debates, and you know that there are going to be different categories of topics. So, there’s one like on sports and one on politics and one on social justice.

There’s usually categories and then you just practice as many at-bats and practice debates as you can in the lead up. And then it’s actually just a ton of fun. You meet people from all over the world and you get to of compare and contrast your different cultural styles and ways of doing stuff. It’s really fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it’s a fascinating backdrop to, we’re talking about your book, Powerfully Likeable, in terms of being a world champion debater. That’s something that seems pretty helpful there because you need to be powerful. Like, you’ve got very persuasive points, they’re hard hitting, they are data-driven, they are logically sound and cogent, they fit together, and they got some oomph. But, also, there’s human beings and judges that you kind of got to win over and have think, “You know, I like this person.”

Kate Mason
Absolutely. So, debate is always marked on your matter, so what you present; your manner, how you present it; and your method, the way you’ve structured and made your arguments sort of cut through. And I’ve always taken that perspective through all my corporate work as well. Even though it’s not marked in exactly the same way, I think about those same components always operating together.

And you can feel that, too, if you’re in a meeting that’s really well-run by someone. Chances are they’ve structured it really well, they’ve said something really well, but they’ve also said it in a way that’s persuasive or sort of spoke to you. So those are the three things I always keep in mind and have always been pretty ingrained in me for a long time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, being powerfully likable sounds like something that I want and many of us want. Can you share with us, for starters, a particularly fascinating discovery you’ve made about humans who are powerfully likable? What’s going on there? Any key surprises that you’ve uncovered?

Kate Mason
Yeah, so I think when you think about leadership, or when many of us think about leadership, it feels like you can only choose through two options, right? It feels like there’s the powerful one, where I can be high authority and no friends, or I can be the likable one, which is low power, or low authority, and maybe lots of friends.

And I think I often work with people who feel a little bit stuck between those two doors, or it feels like that’s a one-way choice, right, that once you make it, then you’re sort of bound to it forever. And what I wanted to do with this book was to say, one, those doors and that artifice doesn’t really exist, but, more importantly, there’s tons of ways to show up in between those.

And, in fact, sometimes bringing those two seemingly dissonant ideas together can make for a much more generative interesting version of leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you perhaps paint a picture for what a powerfully likable person might look, sound, feel like in person when they are presenting some things?

Kate Mason
Yeah, so one of the things I think about a lot when I’m coaching folks is, “Where does your own power or your own energy feel highest?” So, it’s going to look really different for all of us. So, annoyingly, I don’t have one answer for you in this, but I encourage you to think, “Where are those moments where I think I come out of a meeting or an interaction or conversation, and think, ‘That went exactly as I hoped it went. I really landed my point or I really made able to convince somebody else of something.’”

Those are the moments in which we feel that there’s something going on in our connective or relational currency, there’s something going on with our own power, and we’re probably cottoned on to our likeability in the sense that we’re feeling people resonate or come with us. That’s the moment for you where you’re probably embodying that.

And why I say for you, is that it’s a little bit subjective, it looks a bit different for all of us, but I think you know it when you have that feeling of like, “Yes, that went exactly as I hoped it would, and it resonated with the people in the way that I hoped it might.”

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds super. Well, could you share a story of a professional who saw transformation along these lines? They used some of your stuff and became more powerfully likeable and they saw some cool results in their side.

Kate Mason
Yeah, a lot of people either come to me, they come to me on both ends of the spectrum. So, they either come to me saying, “I kind of need more quote ‘executive presence.’ I’ve been told I need to be more confident,” or they come to me at the other end of things, which, “I’ve been told I’ve been, I’m too abrupt or I’m too aggressive or too transactional.” Feedback I’ve certainly received both ends in my career as well.

But I’ll give you an example of someone who came to me from the lower end, right, “I want to step into my power and I’ve been told I need to work on that.” She was using a lot of really undermining language, really subconsciously. She wasn’t sure making, she didn’t intend to. But it had the impact of making her own work and, by extension, kind of herself not seem very important.

So, she would do things like she would often minimize what she was saying by saying things like, “I’m not an expert, but…” or, “I’m not an engineer, but…” so she would give these caveats. She would say things like, “It’ll just take two seconds,” or, “No worries if not,” or, “I’ll just pop by your desk,” right? Everything was very small and minimal.

And what she was, by extension, saying, like if someone says to you, “Pete, can I grab two minutes?” it’s probably, you’re not expecting that I’m going to tell you about some epiphany I’ve had, right? Like, it doesn’t seem very important. She was sort of couching her language in these ways that were subtly undermining her own importance and, by extension, I guess the work, the importance of her work.

So, we sort of did a bit of an audit, like, “Hey, do you notice these things are going on?” She often uses the phrase, “Does that make sense?” at the end of everything she said. She would often explain something to me perfectly, super rationally, super intelligently, and then say, “Did that make sense?” And I said, “What you’re actually asking for there is consensus. You’re asking.” Or, “Are you ready to move on?” or, “Have what I said actually made sense to you?”

And so, we worked on a number of these, and she started eliminating some of them. And, over time, she said it would really change the way her team saw her. They gave her feedback like, “We really appreciate how decisive you’re being.” She was getting feedback that she said she hadn’t actually changed the direction of her work. It was just the couching of her language was slightly different and it was landing really differently too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really interesting. The small minimizing, undermining kind of language there. I’m reminded of, I think there’s a lot of little vocal pauses in this department, “kind of like,” “sort of,” “you know,” that really diminishes it. And my buddy, Connor, and I, we have this joke. I remember this is one of my first work experiences. I was at an internship and we were all out to dinner and it was kind of fun, like, “Ooh yeah, corporate money. Yeah, this is fun.”

And I remember someone said, “So do you guys want to get some appetizers or…?” and he trailed off with an ‘or.’ But the people were kind of in conversation, no one was really tuned in, but I sort of noticed him, and I was thinking, “Well, I very much want lots of appetizers because they’re free,” and I am still in college and I’m unaccustomed to this experience.

Kate Mason
This bounty.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. But I didn’t want to speak up because, yeah, I didn’t quite know the rules of the game here. And then I noticed he said it again in the exact same way, “So do you guys want to get the appetizers or…?” And I just thought about how trailing off with an ‘or’ really diminishes the power or the vibe of what you’re saying.

And so, my buddy, Connor and I, we used to joke about, like, what’s the most powerful sentence you could say and then undermine with ‘or’ such as, “So are you guys are inspired by my vision, or…?” And, “So, are you guys are ready to go into battle and put your life on the line for freedom, or…?”

And so, it’s just sort of a little joke, but I think it calls into stark relief how we are often saying some fairly high-stakes things for people with regard to lots of investment or lots of time people are spending on a thing, and the little minimizing words and phrases are out of place.

Kate Mason
Yeah. Well, they’re just not doing us any service, right? And so, if they’re not helping us or, worse, they’re undermining us actively, I think it’s worthwhile thinking through what they might be and, whether you might want to change them or at least play around with it, right? You might experiment and think, “What about I don’t use this thing? Or, what about I use this other thing?” and see if there’s a shift or a change in the way that you are feeling at work, which I think is really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
And I want to zoom in on “Does that make sense?” because I’m thinking about consulting. I remember I heard that a lot from our team. I even commented once, like, “Boy, it feels like we say that a lot when we’re in these client meetings.” And someone joked, “What we’re saying is, ‘Do you got it or do I have to slow down for you dumb-dumbs?’” It was like, “Ha, ha, ha.”

Kate Mason
Yeah. I mean, that’s another point, which I think a lot of people take rightly some umbrage at that, which is like, it can sound really patronizing, right? Like, “Does that make sense to your small, infantile mind? Or, you know, like, because I’m so brilliant.” So, it can be kind of offensive in a number of ways.

But I think what the person is trying to say is, “I’ve just given you a lot of information. Are you with me? Like, are you ready to move on?” Or, you’re asking for a show of understanding in case you’re not getting any audience feedback. If you’re not getting a lot of nods and smiles, for example, sometimes you tend to ask that, “Does that make sense? Have I gotten through to you?”

And a great way to do that is you can just pause and, say, you’re presenting to a group, and you can say something like, “I’ve just gone through a lot of information. Does anyone have any questions before we move on?” And it’s just a very different way of saying the same thing, or having the same meaning come across, but not look like you’re sort of either insulting everybody else’s intelligence or undermining your own, because we assume you make sense, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Kate, I love these quick little swaps like, “Say this, not that.” Do you have any more for us? So, instead of, “Does that make sense?” we’ve got, “Hey, we’ve covered a lot of information. Before we move on, are there any questions?” I love it. Any other instant substitutions you recommend?

Kate Mason
There’s tons. So, a great one, or a common one I often hear, is someone will say, “Can I just pop by your desk?” or, “It’ll only take two seconds.” And this is a really interesting one because what you’re trying to say on your side when you’re asking it is, “I don’t want to cause any trouble,” or, “I promise this won’t take long. This won’t be painful.”

But what it actually says to me is like, “My work isn’t that important. I’m not that important.” If it’s only going to take two seconds, it must be some sort of irritant. So, you could actually say, “Hey, Pete, I really want to walk you through,” whatever it is, “I’m going to put 30 minutes on your calendar next week. Feel free to move it around if that time doesn’t work.”

By extension, you’ve sort of said, “This is important and I want to take time and sit down with you.” And you’re being warm and friendly by saying, “Find a time that actually works.” So, I call the feeling of not wanting to make those impositions, imposing syndrome, that we, it’s not so much imposter syndrome that’s the problem here, which we’re all pretty familiar with, but it’s imposing.

We don’t want to make it imposition, and so we sort of shrink down the ask. And, actually, sometimes the ask is usually a very valid and legitimate one, so I’m really encouraging folks to make the ask.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Okay. Any other substitutions you recommend?

Kate Mason
A really common phrase that people often use in that same vein of not wanting to make an imposition is that they’ll ask for something. So, “Hey, Pete, would you be able to get me those notes by the end of today?” And then they’ll end it, even though they’ve made a perfect ask, they’ll end it with, “No worries if not.” Right? And it’s such a common one.

And we find it’s coming out of our mouths before we even thought about it. And, “No worries if not,” sometimes there actually is a worry, sometimes I need those notes by the end of today, like, “Our boss needs it,” or, “I need to send it to someone else.” So, the, “No worries if not” is a really one I get people to just catch and say, like, you could just actually say what’s true, which was like, “I appreciate it. It’s such a tight turnaround. Thanks so much in advance. I have to get this to, you know, so-and-so by this evening.”

So, you’re actually explaining what’s going to happen or, like, the reason that you need the thing. And, like, “Thanks again.” Again, it’s subtle but it’s important when, if I see a “No worries if not,” there could be a feeling of, like, “Oh, maybe it’s not that important if I get back to them today.” And, in fact, it often really is important.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s good. I’m also thinking about the use of the word “obviously,” which can be a bit of a crutch or a self-confidence thing that I find kind of problematic.

Kate Mason
Give me the context. Tell me about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so someone says, “Well, and obviously these numbers include something, something, something.” And so, I’m thinking, “Well, if it’s not…” I guess I’m just like, I mean, I’m a former competitive speech person, too, so maybe I’m just really judgmental and critical. It’s like, “Well, if it’s obvious, I suppose it didn’t need to be said. So that’s unnecessary.”

But, also, I think it’s potentially offensive in the case of, “Oh, well, that was not obvious to me. I guess I’m just an idiot.”

Kate Mason
Right, “Now, I feel stupid because I’ve got to clarify what you mean.” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But I think most often people say “obviously,” kind of from a similar place of diminished confidence, they’re like, “Okay, I’m saying this thing, but, I think, maybe that people are going to say, ‘Well, duh.’ So, I’m sort of trying to head that off at the pass.” So, I bring that up because I feel like it’s coming from a similar place of, well, Kate, you tell us. Like, what is this psychological place of smallness? What’s up with that?

Kate Mason
Yeah. Well, no one wants to say the stupid thing, do they? Right? Like, there’s that feeling of. And the other way you might hear it, “obviously” is a great example, but the other one you might hear or be familiar with is someone saying like, “You’ve probably already thought of this,” or, “This is probably something that someone’s already said before,” right? They’re giving that preemptive caveat to say, “Please don’t hate me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, “Please don’t hate me.”

Kate Mason
And, oftentimes, it’s like a perfectly reasonable thing to say. And it may be, “I have thought about it before, but that’s fine for you to tell me again.” So, yeah, just thinking through, and I don’t want people to get paranoid about all of their language in every single word.

But if you’re noticing, take a little audit, right? Just through the week, “Oh, I noticed I’ve said this. Oh, I noticed somebody else said this. What was the effect of it? How did it feel? Is there a substitution here I could make that maybe gives myself a little more credibility or I liken myself a little bit more? It could be interesting.”

Pete Mockaitis
I think your “Please don’t hate me” is the perfect articulation of what seems to be, from my perspective, a little bit of a psychological root of all this stuff. It’s almost like a fear of stepping on toes or being seen as dumb or rude or inconsiderate. So, what do you recommend we do to just kind of get our mindset and our heads right with this whole thing?

Kate Mason
Yeah, so, exactly what you’re talking about is one of the threat responses that we can exhibit when we feel under threat communicatively. And so, if you think about those, there’s four of them I talk about in the book, but one of them is fight, so someone gets really aggressive.

One of them is flight, they want to leave the conversation or sometimes you see people on stage halfway out of their seat, right? That’s a flight response. A freeze response, they go blank or they don’t know an answer. And the one we’re talking about here is the fawn response, right, to make yourself small in the face of, like, a threat.

And it’s so fascinating, because once you start recognizing these patterns, either in yourself or others, it’s a really helpful code almost or a language that you can start realizing, “Oh, I need to kind of bring them down or deescalate that threat.” They’ve perceived something here and we need to kind of help them regulate or work out how to be more normal in the face of something that feels threatening.

So. in the sense of that smallness one, there’s often a sense of like, “I’m not worthy,” or, “I’m worried about something,” or, “I’m afraid of this not being good enough,” and just thinking through and isolating exactly what that is, and just interrogating it a little bit can be a very helpful way through that to work out, “What is it that I’m actually afraid of?”

Most people are afraid of looking stupid in front of somebody else. And, actually, asking a clarifying question or a powerful question in the face of not knowing an answer is often very helpful to the rest of the group. It’s often not, you know, annoying to others in the way that you might think it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that a lot. So, these diminishing words and language are part of the fawn branch of a stress response — fight, flight, freeze, fawn. And then when you phrase it that way, we could see that there are other folks who will just go very differently. They’ll fight, they’ll get defensive, like, “Well, that’s because we didn’t get the information in time, and so our team wasn’t able to…” And so, they’re going off in another direction.

And that also doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence in terms of, “Now here’s someone who’s really on top of things and a rock star professional.” So, it seems like part of the game is just really getting clear. Like you said, interrogate what’s up in terms of what is it that we fear, and how are we manifesting that in terms of, maybe we’re defensive on the fight.

Maybe we are just like, “Get me out of here. I don’t want anything to do with this project or this person,” on the flight. Or, the freeze, they just sort of say nothing, over the course of the meeting.

Kate Mason
Or, you blank on an answer or something.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. So, how do we get to a place beyond the interrogation of our fears and worries, where we’re able to say, “Yeah, it’s quite possible that I’m going to embarrass myself or someone’s going to hate this idea, and I am not bothered”?

I find that fascinating. That seems to be like some people seem not at all troubled by saying things that are false or offensive. And, in a way, I don’t want to be like them. I’d like to be accurate and I’d like to be respectful. But I also kind of envy, it’s like, “Man, you really just don’t give a flying F about how you’re coming across right now. I would like a little bit, but not a full portion of what you have.”

Kate Mason
Yeah. Well, that’s it, right, “God grant me the confidence of a mediocre person.” Like, there’s some sort of liberation there. I think part of this is self-aware folks are usually the ones making these sorts of questions of themselves. They’ve thought so deeply, and, in fact, their own awareness of their perceived, say, likeability, is so high that that’s why some of these threat responses come in, because they’re so deeply concerned and mindful of their place in the organization.

So, it’s usually people who are already pretty self-aware that are having these questions. And they are, for better or worse, and I think it’s better that they’re the folks that I tend to work with, because they’re the ones who are like, “Oh, I think I’d like to work with a communications coach.”

I think the thing that is really interesting to reframe, if you ask somebody who’s feeling like, “Gosh, I would like to ask this question but I’m worried about it,” or, “I’m new to this team,” I have a whole section in the book talking about repositioning questions which can feel deferential or junior in there because we ask a lot of questions when we’re starting out at a job, to think about asking a powerful question.

So, there’s a range of different powerful questions you could use in those sorts of situations, which is like, “Am I right in thinking we’re looking at the X versus the Y?” or, “I want to get up to speed quickly here. Can you just clarify the acronym here so that I know we’re on the same page?”

These are ways of actually asking a really smart question or just showing your engagement on something but getting the information you need. And you don’t need to cave it with like, “Ugh, I’m such an idiot. I don’t know what this acronym means,” but you’re just being mindful and moving things forward. And I think most people appreciate that trajectory and that pushing forward.

When I was debating, I was in a team with this wonderful guy, and it took me a long time to realize, but his code for when he didn’t know something, and we were in a prep room together, his code was, “Talk me through,” whatever the topic. And for a long time, I’d be like, “Oh, great. Well, this is how that works.” And it took me a long time to realize, “Oh, he’s actually saying ‘I don’t know anything about this topic.’”

And it was such a funny realization to me because it always felt very authoritative, and he said it in a way that was very unruffled, very calm, but he meant that, “I need you to talk me through and I need you to help me understand this issue.”

And so, there’s different ways that we can ask for that information, still get what we need, but not necessarily be like, “I’m so sorry for being an idiot,” and “Mea culpa” our way into sort of a deferential position if we didn’t really want to be there.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s also handy when you’re new just to list all the questions. I remember being in some meetings where I felt so clueless, but it was so handy to just write down all of my questions and then I could find out a chunk of them via, whatever, Google, ChatGPT, internal documents, and then only a few were left and that felt great in terms of I am getting up to speed very quickly. And then that just builds natural confidence.

And the questions that you have left, typically are pretty good. It was like, “Yes, of course, it would make sense that you’re asking that. And, in fact, you seem smarter because you’re asking that and you’re being proactive and taking care of things.”

Kate Mason
I think you’ve come to a really interesting point, which is like, I’m saying asking questions can be powerful. Asking thoughtful questions can be powerful. Like, the fact that you’ve done your homework and tried to get as much of it together yourself is really great demonstration that you’ve got in some way there.

I think if it’s like a question like, “What’s this meeting about again?” or something that demonstrates that you just don’t care or haven’t been listening at all, it’s probably going to work in the opposite way. So, I love that, that you’ve gone and sort of done some homework and then come back with the remainder is a great way to think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, this reminds me of grade school. I’m thinking, when you can ask a great question of a teacher, and they really appreciate it. And they say, “Oh, thank you so much for that. I guess I wasn’t so clear the way I explained how this scientific concept works.”

But then when, I remember, some people would ask the question, it’s not even a question, it’s just like, “I don’t get it.” And you could tell, you could see the teacher’s frustration, it’s like, “I don’t…Well, what is it that you don’t get?” It’s like, “I don’t even know where to begin with this.” So, yeah, you can upgrade your questions, certainly.

Kate Mason
Yeah. I still remember someone who, I don’t know, maybe three semesters into learning Latin, asked the teacher, “Where’s Latin?” And that was a revealing moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, yeah. Certainly. Yeah, and they probably asked that to someone else elsewhere, is the best move there. Well, I want to get your perspective as well on when we need to be all the more powerful in terms of, we’re pushing back or disagreeing or challenging folks but they’re worried that we’re going to seem like, “Oh, we’re difficult. We’re not a team player. We’re not really committed,” what are your pro tips for dealing with that situation?

Kate Mason
One of the ways, I think, is to demonstrate what part of you is aligned before you’re talking about what’s difficult. So, you could say something like, “Pete, I really want us, I know both of us want to make sure that we can launch by Friday.” So, you’re emphasizing a shared goal.

Or, “I know we both need to get these numbers ready by end of week,” or whatever it is. “In order for us to do that, I’m really going to need, like, this is the area that I’m really going to need help on,” or, “I have found it really challenging to be able to get this data from your team. Is there any way we can work together and work out a way or a better process for doing that or something?”

Emphasizing that shared goal at the beginning, and then sort of showing that you’re actually aligned together to try and do the thing, is a really nice way for that person to not feel like you’re sort of pointing them out and like being, “Pete, your team has let me down again.” But really that like, “I’m in this with you, and I’m trying hard to work with you, not against you.”

Again, it’s quite subtle but it can be received so much more generously than sort of finger-pointing or, you know, bulldozing your way through. And, of course, it depends on the context and all sorts of other things but I think, as a general principle, that shared goal is a very, very good strategy in those sorts of situations.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about when we just need to say no?

Kate Mason
Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of sorts of Instagram wisdom, right, “No is a full sentence.” And it’s like, no, that’s actually just not true at work. Right? No is very rarely a full sentence at work. Like, if someone asks you to take something on, you really can’t just turn around and say no, and expect to be respected collegially.

So, I think one of the ways, and again, it depends who’s asking and what it is. So, if it’s, say, your boss and you feel pretty beholden to do that, one way is just thinking through, “How do I show the transparency of what I’m currently working on? So, my boss has asked me to take on this other thing,” and you say, “Great. Here are the other four things that are on my plate for this week. How would you like me to prioritize that in relation to those?”

As in, “I’m just, again, reminding you that there’s a lot happening,” and then they might say, “You know what? Actually, it’s not that important compared to the other four. Put it here or put it number one,” and it gives you clarity but you’re also showing visibility and transparency about what’s happening.

If they then say, “Look I want you to do all five,” and you still don’t think that’s going to happen, then you say, “Look, I’m going to need to be able to drop one of these to get it all done by Friday.” So, like that’s a good way of sort of just showing capacity.

Sometimes it might be somebody from another team sort of putting something on your team or where you don’t really report into them, but they’re trying to push something onto you. Sometimes that’s really simple as, well, it’s not simple in practice, it feels really hard. But the simple rule could be like, “That’s just out of scope for our team. We don’t handle those types of issues. That’s probably better with this other function for these reasons.”

So, saying no is something that we often really fear because it feels like we’ll be unlikable or difficult or all of those things. But I’m much more about being clear about your capacity and being very transparent about that. What’s a goal and a non-goal is actually, ultimately, quite a likable quality because people understand and kind of see what your capacity is and can also demonstrate to build trust because you will deliver on the things you say you’re going to deliver on.

Pete Mockaitis
And your chapter four is called “Kill Your Confidence, Find Your Power.” Confidence is one of the top things we want. So, what do you mean by kill your confidence?

Kate Mason
Yeah, I’m trying to be a little deliberately provocative with that one. But I think when you tell somebody, “Hey, Pete, just be a little bit more confident,” it’s supremely unactionable and unhelpful advice to give anybody, because it’s a little bit like saying, “Just be healthier,” right? We sort of know what it looks like in the end as an outcome, but we don’t necessarily always know the process or what we need to do to get there.

And, counterintuitively, when someone’s told to work on their confidence, they immediately become deeply self-conscious because they’re hyper-aware of it and wondering, “Am I sitting in a confident way? Did I say that confidently? Did it look confident?” So, it takes them out of the actual interaction and makes them an observer of themselves, which, for many of us, can be quite debilitating.

So, what I say in the chapter is much more about, if you are concerned about your confidence and if you want to be more confident, the best way of doing that is focusing on your connection and your relational abilities. So, thinking about in that meeting with the person you’re about to show up with, “Are you actually listening to them?”

We say we’re listening, but we’re often sort of thinking about what we’re going to say next. So, are you actually listening and connecting? Are you being of service to them? Are you working out what they need and working out how you might be able to help them? Are you calm? Have you regulated your own threat responses that we talk about in the book such that you’re ready and open and creative and sort of nimble in those sorts of conversations?

If you can do all of those things, you’re actually ultimately demonstrating a confidence, but you’re not hung up on, “Is this confident? Was that a confident meeting?” and all those types of things. So, you’re actually doing, not thinking about. And that’s a very liberating thing for a lot of folks who actually find a lot more power in doing that.

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

Kate Mason
I think that’s a great summary. Really, this book is very much an invitation to try out different strategies and tactics. It’s filled with stories and anecdotes and my own experiences. And the idea is, if you see something there that feels like interesting or that resonates with you and might change your own way of leadership, to give it a try and see what works if you try to incorporate it.

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

Kate Mason
My favorite quote is by a British artist called Rob Ryan, and he did an artwork many years ago that I have a copy of, and the quote is, “My adventure is about to begin.” And I think of it all the time because it seems to be relevant daily, right? There’s always something else that’s happening and beginning and feels exciting.

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

Kate Mason
I often find myself quoting the potential and gender promotion gap research, which shows that women are promoted on experience, what they’ve actually accomplished, and men are often promoted on potential, what they might be able to achieve. And I find myself quoting that a lot to my clients and talking about what that means.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Kate Mason
That’s like asking me to choose a favorite child, but one of my favorite books is In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje.

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

Kate Mason
I would probably say I have an AI email assistant that helps sort email, which is extremely helpful at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us all about that.

Kate Mason
It’s Fyxer.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ve got Sanebox and I’ve got Superhuman, but Fyxer is new for me. So, thank you. That’s exciting to check out.

Kate Mason
Nice.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Kate Mason
Probably, trying to be healthy, trying to move my body.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share, a Kate original quotation that folks are really vibing with and they quote back to you often?

Kate Mason
Yeah, I often share that good communicators can impart information, but gifted communicators can change the room that they’re in. And what I mean by that is that they can really influence and persuade and change the feeling of a room really effectively.

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

Kate Mason
Yeah, KateMason.co is my website, and you can find a link to my Substack or my socials from there.

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

Kate Mason
I’d love to think about doing a bit of a communications audit, right? Where did you get energy this week? Where did you spend it? Why might you want to mitigate the bad areas? And what might you want to do to amplify the way you’re feeling good?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kate, thank you.

Kate Mason
Thanks so much for having me.

Aug 07
0

1082: How Driven People Can Achieve Success and Inner Peace with Gino Wickman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Gino Wickman reveals how high achievers can find inner peace while still maintaining their drive.

You’ll Learn

  1. The foundational disciplines that lead to inner peace
  2. How to teach your ego to chill
  3. Why to shift to thinking in 10-year timeframes

About Gino

Gino Wickman is a renowned entrepreneur, speaker, coach, teacher, and author, best known for founding EOS Worldwide and creating the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS®), a comprehensive framework that has impacted over 250,000 businesses worldwide. Gino is also the author of the award winning, best-selling book, Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business, along with seven other books. 

Gino is deeply committed to helping entrepreneurs achieve their vision. Through his books, coaching, and the EOS® framework, he has equipped hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurial business leaders with the tools and insights needed to get everything they want from their business and life. The five pieces of content that Gino created helps entrepreneurs and leaders wherever they are on their journey—from start up to sale to inner peace.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Gino Wickman Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Gino, welcome!

Gino Wickman
Thank you, Pete. I am thrilled to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m thrilled to be chatting. I’ve heard your name many times and you have done a lot of stuff, written a number of books, and I’m fired up talking about your book, Shine. And could you kick us off by sharing any particularly surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about humans, professionals, leaders while putting this together?

Gino Wickman
Well, the big idea is that it is possible to be driven and have inner peace. And so, what we teach are 10 disciplines that will maximize your energy, impact, and inner peace. And we teach three discoveries to help you free your true self. And so, you and I were talking a little bit before we started, and so a great word is, you know, how to stay in flow, how to be more productive, make more of an impact on the world while experiencing more peace.

And you use the word flow, we actually have a word in the book we call “flowt,” which is spelled F-L-O-W-T. It’s the combination of two words – the word flow and the word float, because the reality is, when you implement what is in this book, you will be in a better state of flow while working and making the impact and doing the stuff that you do in your work-life, while, at the same time, feeling like you’re floating through life, and that’s that inner peace. And it’s this beautiful combination of making an impact while having inner peace.

Pete Mockaitis
Gino, that almost sounds too good to be true.

Gino Wickman
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, tell us how’s that done?

Gino Wickman
Yeah, you bet. All right. Well, let’s do that. I’m going to create a big picture context and then I’m going to follow your lead in terms of how deep you want to go. But the big picture context is this. It starts with understanding these 10 disciplines, and these 10 disciplines have evolved. They started with what I call an outer-world focus.

And so, in this conversation we’re going to have, we, human beings, we all have an outer world and we have an inner world. And those two things are very different from each other. And so, when I created the 10 disciplines originally, it was all about outer world focus, being more successful in your outer world, only to discover, over time, they also help you in your inner world.

And so, what the 10 disciplines are is they create a foundation that allows for time and space to do what I call inner work, which then takes us to the three discoveries for freeing your true self, which is where the real fun work goes, it’s where we really go inside. And there’s one of the discoveries that I’d really love to focus on in our time together. But, again, they’re called the three discoveries for freeing your true self.

Now what I’d like to do, that’s the big picture, I just want to take it down a little bit and just get really specific in terms of what the discoveries are and what the disciplines are so that there’s a high-level understanding because then I’d love to just kind of drill down on one or two with the limited time that we have.

But, very quickly, the 10 disciplines for maximizing your energy, impact, and inner peace are, number one, 10-year thinking; number two, take time off; number three, know thyself; number four, be still; number five, know your hundred percent; number six, say no, dot, dot, dot, often; number seven, don’t do $25-an-hour work if you want to make six figures; number eight, prepare every night; number nine, put everything in one place; and number 10, be humble.

So, that’s a mouthful, but I wanted to share those because I want to put as much out there as possible. But when you implement those 10 disciplines in your life, you create this incredible foundation, like I said, that creates space and time to then do the inner work, which is where flow really happens. And those are the three discoveries.

And so, again, the three discoveries for freeing your true self, discovery number one is, “I am driven.” And so, for us driven people out there, it’s a blessing and a curse. It’s important to understand exactly what we are. Discovery number two is that all decisions are made out of love or fear. And we take you to the root of fear- and love-based decisions. And that’s where I’d love to kind of drill down on today with your audience.

And then discovery number three is where we started. And that is, that it is possible to be driven and have peace. And so, there’s the big picture, if you will, and we can drill down on any of that wherever your gut is taking you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, with regard to the flow, which of these 10 disciplines or discoveries gives us the most of that?

Gino Wickman
So, I wanted to start with discovery number one, which is 10-year thinking. And with each one of these discoveries, I always love to do three things. Number one, I’m going to start with a bold statement, that if you’ll just give me blind faith and do this, you will get all the benefit from the discipline. Second thing I want to do is share all the benefits. Third thing I want to do is give you an action that, if you do this, you will start to get the benefit.

So, with 10-year thinking, the bold statement is, if you just do this, and that is, shift your mind from short-term thinking to thinking in 10-year timeframes. Now the benefits. If you do that, time will slow down for you, a peace will come over you, you make better decisions, you will actually get to where you want to go faster, you will have more clarity, more alignment.

And then the action I urge is a great little exercise to get the neurons in your brain to shift, because that’s what it’s all about, is to simply write the date, your age, and a goal 10 years from now. So, write the date 10 years from now, how old are you going to be, and what’s the number one most important goal. And just doing that starts to shift your brain.

But then there’s a fun little secondary exercise, is when you look at that goal, think about all of your actions and decisions right now, here today, and are they all in alignment with that goal? For most people walking the earth, we’re short-term thinkers.

We want everything now, now, now, now, now. And if we can shift that to thinking in 10-year timeframes, I discovered it at 35 years old and it changed my life, all of a sudden, like I said, time slows down and, ironically, you get there faster. And there’s a great quote that says, “We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years.”

So, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we can accomplish in one good decade, we just got to shift our mindset because we tend to be making short-term decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us an example of someone who was doing some short-term thinking, they shifted to a 10-year horizon, what that 10-year goal was, and how that ended up being transformational for them?

Gino Wickman
I think about myself, all through my twenties and my early thirties, and I just was very impatient and I wanted everything immediately. And I set way too many goals and I wanted everything really fast. And so, as a result, I was making bad decisions. I was making these short-term decisions.

So, for instance, in its simplest form, if you want to be healthy 10 years from now, today, if you eat that piece of cake or drink that soda, that’s an action that is not in alignment with where you want to be. And so, the shift to that is exercising, eating well. And so, you want examples, and I’m trying to give you the best ones I can, but when I shifted to what I really wanted out of my life – relationally, physically, business-wise, income, net worth – I started making decisions today.

So, it’s as simple as how much I saved every single day, week, month in the short term. Again, how I took care of myself, how I treated my loved ones. So, if I want to be in a great marriage, if I want to have great relationship with my friends and family, today, that thing I’m about to say, I say it a little bit better, a little bit different than I would have just kind of living in the now and short-term thinking. So, does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, you can see more, I guess, weight, importance, consequence, implication of your action when you are beholding the compounding, aggregated, multiplicative effect of the thing over many years.

Gino Wickman
Exactly. Yeah. Well, I’ll stop there, so I think you’ve got it, but please ask if you want to dig deeper.

Pete Mockaitis
So, then when it comes to the flow, tell me more.

Gino Wickman
And so, we’re talking about energy and managing energy, which is certainly flow. So, like I said, when you shift to 10-year thinking, all of a sudden, your body calms down. You’re no longer having angst and feeling that urgency and that impatience, because now you realize there’s a lot you can accomplish in 10 and 20 years. When you lengthen that time horizon, all of sudden, your body calms down.

And in that calm state, just imagine what that just did to your energy. Now, all of a sudden, you’re making better decisions. You’re thinking better. You’re clearer. So, just the difference between feeling that urgency and feeling a calm in that state of calm, you are making much better decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s interesting. And sometimes I can think about these states just naturally arising when I’m trying to crush the email inbox, you know, like all these messages, “Let’s go, go, go, go, go. Move, move, move. Send, send, send. Archive, archive, archive. Forward, forward,” all that. So, there’s that state, which is fast, rapid, and can conjure up some angst along the way.

As opposed to if you’re at a strategic planning retreat and you’re just staring out the window and pondering what are the strategic goals and visions to be done over the years. And so, I could feel that emotional contrast and it is more fun and enjoyable to be in the big dreaming vision, strategy retreat, setting.

I guess I’m wondering, it could be easy to fall into old habits. And in the heat of battle, in the moment of urgency, do you have any pro tips on pulling it back up?

Gino Wickman
Well, actually, your example that you just gave was perfect in helping me give a clearer answer about that. Because, when I say shift to 10-year thinking, I’m not talking about going to a strategic planning retreat and sitting there staring out the window.

I’m talking about when you are sitting and ripping through those hundred emails that sucks, quite frankly. Two mindsets. One mindset is you are short-term thinking, you’re worrying about all your short-term problems, you want everything now, now, now, now, now, you are not looking past next week, compared to you are thinking in 10-year timeframes.

You clearly know what you want your life to look like 10 years from now, and you know you can get it because in 10 years you can accomplish anything. When you rip through those hundred emails, the answer, the response, the tone, the quality of the answer will increase with long-term thinking than short-term thinking.

So, that email is a great example, but now let’s go to every interaction and touchpoint between all the people you interact with on a day. Your friends, your family, your loved ones, your coworkers, your boss, whatever it is, when you are thinking in longer-term timeframes, when you get your body to calm down and see life in a longer timeframe, you respond better to people. You make a better decision in that moment, just like you would in answering those emails.

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose I’m thinking about the actual internal physical state there. It’s good to have that perspective, and that does influence the state itself right there. I guess I’m just saying, it seems that it’s quite possible to get caught up in the moment all the time, any kind of context, whether you’re talking to somebody or you’re irritated by something.

Gino Wickman
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m not talking about something you’re going to snap your fingers in one minute and shift to 10-year thinking. This is a discipline. That’s why they’re called disciplines. You’ve got to change your neurons. Ninety-five percent of the planet’s neurons are only capable of thinking short term. And so, they’re making all these short-term decisions that most of them are not great.

To shift those neurons to thinking in long-term timeframes, you’re going to make better decisions. The other thought that comes to mind is, like, when I’m sitting in a meeting, whether that’s on Zoom or live or wherever it is, I just have this ability to cut through everything and see everything so clearly because I’m so calm in the moment. I’m not feeling any urgency. And for some reason, better answers come.

You’re tuned in more to everything going on because, again, you’re taking a long-term outlook. You’re not feeling like you have to accomplish everything right now. And so, it’s like, I feel it in my body right now, both sides of it. For the people that sit there in angst, feeling so hurried, they’re just not making great decisions for the long-term.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s a lovely statement there. It’s like, “I feel no urgency,” which is wild to hear from Gino Wickman, because I think a lot of us in entrepreneurial world, we think, “That’s one of the top things a leader entrepreneur needs is sense of urgency in order to execute and make things happen.” And you’re saying, “Well, quite the opposite.”

Gino Wickman
Yeah, exactly. And so, I like the word driven. So, you’re still going to be as driven as ever and you actually become more driven when you find this inner peace and have this calm. But absolutely, you don’t feel that urgency. And I get that it’s hard to believe if you’re sitting there in an urgent state right now, but I’m here to tell you, it’s possible and that’s why it’s one of 10 disciplines. There’s only 10, and when you apply all 10, look out, baby, because they have a synergistic effect on each other as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, do you have your pro tips, sort of like a stop, drop, and roll? If you find yourself getting hooked, sucked into the urgency, how do we shake it off?

Gino Wickman
Step one, take a deep breath. Just take a deep breath. It takes less than 10 seconds. Number two, remember your 10-year thinking. Remember your 10-year vision. Remember what you want. And then, all of a sudden, the right answer is going to come out. So, take the deep breath and shift to 10-year thinking and the right answer is going to come out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. Well, let’s talk about being still.

Gino Wickman
You bet. Well, so this is a nice little tie to the deep breath I just talked about. So, driven people, by design, most really struggle with being still. And so, the discipline is being still. It’s discipline number four. Again, I just want to start with that bold statement, then the benefits, then the action. And so, the bold statement, if you will just simply sit in silence for 30 minutes every day.

The benefits, you will get more energy, more clarity, more creativity. more ideas, stuff comes up and down, I like to say, I’ll explain that to you in just a second here. You get downloads, you shed layers, you experience true freedom, calm, and your nervous system calms down. And so, the action is simply do it tomorrow morning.

So, tomorrow morning, we urge you to just maybe start with 10 minutes if you really struggle with this, but this is really hard for most people. Because, when we get still, when we truly get still, now this is one of four things. It’s meditation, it’s contemplation, it’s prayer, or it’s journaling. Those are the four we recommend. There’s a hundred other ways to do this, but start with one of those four.

For me, it’s mostly meditation, but I do all four of them, but it’s just being in stillness. And so, in meditation, in silence, the reason it starts to get uncomfortable for people is when we get still, all the stuff starts to come up. In other words, our bodies start to talk to us. So, the angst that we tend to feel, there’s stuff going on inside of us that happened through our life. It’s trauma that we’re carrying around.

And so, for me, most of them, when it’s in my chest, it has something to do with the past. When it’s in my stomach, it’s something about the future, but you will have sensations that come up, and your job is to pay attention to those sensations. Your body’s telling you something, and things will come down. I call them downloads.

When you really are in stillness and it’s a practice, you will get downloads. You will get answers to problems you’re trying to solve. You will hear things, see things. You will literally get downloads. And the net effect of all of it is your central nervous system calms down. Now we’re back to that flow state, being more calm when things are very intense, you’re making better decisions, you’re seeing everything where most people aren’t.

And so, I’ll shut up and let you ask your questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. So, sitting in silence, 30 minutes, prayer, meditation, contemplation, journaling, so I suppose, let’s cover all the things that we’re not doing. I suppose we’re not looking at any form of a screen along the way.

Gino Wickman
You got that right.

Pete Mockaitis
And we are not eating. We’re not talking to another human. So, that’s the idea, is that there is silence and we are, in a way, we’re mostly not doing much at all.

Gino Wickman
Right. Well, you’re not doing anything. So, yes, yes, yes to everything you said. So, total stillness, total silence, uninterrupted, so you are locked in some room that is silent and quiet. It’s okay if you’re hearing birds chirping or wind blowing, things like that, but, yes, you are uninterrupted. This is time for you and yourself to connect to your body in a big way. But, yes, yes, yes to every statement and question you just asked.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then do you start with a question, or a prompt, or an intention, or it’s just nothingness, just blank-slate opening.

Gino Wickman
Yeah. And it depends on which form of stillness. So, let’s take them one at a time, okay? So, meditation, you know, there are a thousand meditation apps. There are a thousand meditation books. So, meditation, there are so many ways to do it. So, I’m going to give its simplest form, but just know there are many ways to do this.

But meditation is all about, again, sitting in silence, sitting in a chair, whether your back is leaning against it or sitting up, that’s okay, you’re going to hear a lot of different philosophies around that, but it is absolutely silencing your mind. And so, for me, it takes about 10 minutes for my mind to stop racing and go ultimately completely calm. And I get to a place where I can literally go 20 minutes without a single thought.

So, that’s where you want to get to. But believe me, if this is new for you, your mind is going to race for a while so just stay with it. So, yes to your question there because it is absolute nothingness in meditation. The goal is to have no thought, and when thoughts come up, you just stay aware of those thoughts and they pass. They come and they go and they pass. You’re just observing those thoughts. So, that’s meditation.

Contemplation is different because contemplation is you’re really contemplating something. You might be trying to solve a big problem. When I’m doing writing or solving, I will spend time in contemplation. A lot of great answers will come to me. In prayer, you’re talking to a higher power, whatever you believe in. So, yes, you’re saying words either out loud or silently.

And then in journaling, you’re sitting there writing. And the goal there is to just, it’s called hot-penning is just to write. You don’t want to do too much thinking, but you’re just literally writing. So, that’s where they’re each very different. And it’s, ultimately, about finding your own formula. I spend the most time in stillness and meditation, but I absolutely contemplate, pray, and journal when necessary.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued, as we talk about flow, I’m thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and finding that balance associated with not being too lethargic, low energy, bored, dragging, and not being too anxious, hyped-up, whatever, as well as finding an appropriate difficulty, like, “This is not so easy, I’m bored. And not so overwhelming, I’m freaking out.”

So, we talked about a couple of approaches here along the lines of taking the 10-year perspective, taking a breath, having some silence to sort of bring it down, which is probably more necessary as you’re working with a very driven entrepreneurial population so often. I’m curious about the times when we need to pump it up. It’s like, “Oh, we’re feeling sleepy. Not into it. Just one of them days.” It’s like, “Ah, there’s a hefty dose of I don’t want to,” going on for whatever reason. How do we crank it up if we need to?

Gino Wickman
Well, if we’re still on the subject of stillness, because I can give you a couple other answers, but I want to stay on stillness with that, is sit silent for 30 minutes. So, when the race horse is burnt out and tired, sit in stillness for 30 minutes. It will, literally, recharge your batteries. It will re-energize you. You are burnt out.

Now, all of the 10 disciplines applied to your life will avoid all the burnout. So, I want to be careful not to teach all of them in answering your question about feeling burnt out, but start with 30 minutes of silence, and just do that for the next seven days, and you are going to feel your battery recharged. You’re burnt out because you’re going so fast and hard and you’re not taking a break. The 30 minutes of stillness is that wonderful break that recharges your batteries, and again does so many other things that I’m describing but it will recharge your batteries.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Gino, tell me, any other top do’s or don’ts you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Gino Wickman
Well, I would jump to the three discoveries now. Discovery number two, all decisions are made out of love or fear. And what I want to teach there, it’s a very deep, heavy topic, but it’s so powerful and simple when you understand it, and it gets to what I was just talking about. And it’s understanding that our egos have been trying to protect us for a lot of years. And as a result, it has created protective layers that are not serving us well.

And so, every decision, emotion, thought, feeling we have is coming from love or fear. And that angst that I talked about, most of my decisions were coming from fear. Most of them now come from love because I went to the root of what was causing that. And what is at the root is to understand that your ego is hanging onto stuff from the past, protecting you from it ever happening again, and you can shed that.

It’s simply known as an energetic block inside of you that you need to remove. And when you remove that block, you start making better decisions because you don’t feel the need to protect yourself anymore. And so, it’s all about getting the ego to relax. Again, very deep topic. It’s the lengthiest chapter in the book, but a very, very powerful concept to remove the angst and to start to shift to more love-based decisions.

And then we go back to the emails you talked about, and the meetings that you’re in, and all these things going on. When all of those responses are coming from love, you are going to have a better life. You are going to have people that want to follow your lead. You’re going to get a better response from people in your life. And so, that would be the last little nugget I would throw out there.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s a nice sort turn of a phrase, the ego relaxing, like, “Hey, chill out, dude. It doesn’t need to be all about you and being impressive, or winning, or shining, or performing, or dominating, or standing out, like, whatever, so just chill.” So, that sounds very useful. I’m curious, do you have any top perspectives, prompts, pointers that can get that ego chilled when it’s flaring up?

Gino Wickman
You bet. So, we offer 30 resources for shedding in the book. There are thousands of resources for shedding, as we call it. And so, again, now that you’ve grasped the concept that our ego has us hijacked and held in a prison, and it’s just simply trying to protect us, so, please, its intentions are good. It is still trying to protect us from saber-toothed tigers because it thinks every threat now in business and in life is a saber-toothed tiger, so it’s trying to protect us. Its intentions are good.

And so, great disciplines are to be aware. So, just be aware. That’s the final root of that second discovery that I’m talking about. When you start to become aware that this decision, thought, feeling, emotion came from fear, or this thought, feeling, emotion, decision came from love, it’s just an awareness thing. And when you notice the ones that are coming from fear, you can start to chase it back to what’s really going on.

And so, awareness is the first thing I would suggest. This takes practice. But, you know, assuming talking to your audience out there, on average, you’re going to be around for another 40 years. Invest a year in this. Invest a year in just being aware of watching your ego operate, and it will start to relax. Become aware of when it’s trying to protect you.

When you find yourself being reactive to someone else, something they said, that is your ego. You should never react to anything. You should and can respond to things. But when you’re reactive, then they’ve got a hold of something going on inside of you. So, just be aware. That would be the first tidbit I would offer.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear a little bit about your favorite things. Can you start us off with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Gino Wickman
Yeah, so my favorite quote is, “You get everything out of life if you help enough people get what they want.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Zig Ziglar, very nice. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Gino Wickman
We talked about stillness. And there was a study done with hundreds of people that would go into a room and there was a button that, if they hit the button, it would give them an electric shock that hurt. And so, what they were told to do is sit in stillness and silence for 30 minutes.

And if they didn’t hit the button, they receive some financial reward. And so, in that study, most people hit the button, and they all received the shock before the study so they knew the pain of the study. So, all agreed they do not want to feel that pain again. But sitting in stillness for 30 minutes, most hit the button because it was more painful for them to sit in stillness, like we talked about where things come up.

And one particular, I wish I could remember the number, but one particular subject, hit the button something like 63 times. I mean, some ridiculous number. So, just that really powerful insight in how we human beings struggle with being with ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Gino Wickman
Letting Go by David Hawkins.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Gino Wickman
My legal pad. I’ve been running everything in my life from a legal pad for 37 years.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Gino Wickman
Favorite habit is we talked about, is stillness meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget that you’re known for, a Gino sound bite that gets quoted often?

Gino Wickman
Probably the most common one is “Vision without traction is hallucination.”

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

Gino Wickman
Yeah, I would say two directions. So, if you love what you heard and Shine is appealing to you, I would pick up the book Shine. You can get it at any retailer. But if you go to our website, The10Disciplines.com, you’ll find out about all things 10 disciplines. But you could also go to my website, which contains all of my content that I’ve created, GinoWickman.com.

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

Gino Wickman
Well, what I would suggest is go to the website, The10Disciplines.com, and just download the free chapter and read those first 27 pages and see if it pulls you in.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Gino, thank you.

Gino Wickman
My pleasure.

Jul 14
0

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

By | Podcasts | One Comment

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Kathy

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

  • Strawberry.me. Claim your $50 credit and build momentum in your career with Strawberry.me/Awesome
  • Plaud.Ai. Use the code AWESOME for a discount on your order
  • Rula. Connect with quality therapists and mental health experts who specialize in you at Rula.com/Awesome

Kathy Oneto Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kathy, welcome!

Kathy Oneto
Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kathy Oneto
And your stage of life as well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Can you elaborate?

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kathy, thank you.

Kathy Oneto
Thank you so much, Pete.

Jun 16
0

1067: Better Decisions through Neuroscience with Emily Falk

By | Podcasts | No Comments

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Emily

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Emily Falk Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Emily, welcome!

Emily Falk
Thanks so much for having me, Pete.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
“Speed? Who cares?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say learning.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so defensive reduction happens regardless.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Pickleball.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Emily, thank you.

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

Jun 12
0

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

By | Podcasts | One Comment

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Tasha

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Tasha Eurich Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Tasha, welcome back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tasha Eurich
And yet it is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tasha Eurich
Yup.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tasha Eurich
Better is great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tasha Eurich
We have.

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

Tasha Eurich
Whatever, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tasha Eurich
My favorite habit is drinking water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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