Tag

KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - Page 20 of 23 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Apr 09
0

284: Boosting Your Work with Mindfulness Practices with Dr. Leah Weiss

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Leah Weiss says: "You can influence a lot more than you think if you take responsibility for how you are thinking."

Stanford instructor Dr. Leah Weiss discusses how mindfulness training can translate to tangible results in the workplace.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to practice the intentional use of your attention
  2. Pro tips for taking productive breaks
  3. Handy tools for setting your personal purpose

About Leah

Leah Weiss, PhD, is a researcher, professor, consultant, and author. She teaches courses on compassionate leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is principal teacher and founding faculty for Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Program, conceived by the Dalai Lama. She also directs Compassion Education and Scholarship at HopeLab, an Omidyar Group research and development nonprofit focused on resilience. She lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband and three children.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Leah Weiss Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
 Leah, thanks so much for joining us here on “How to be awesome at your job” podcast.

Leah Weiss
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
 Well, I’m excited to talk to you. And it seems like of all Americans, you have a special connection with the Dalai Lama. Can you tell us a little bit about the story of how that relationship evolved?

Leah Weiss
Well, I think for me, he’s been an inspiration since I first encountered his speaking and writing when I was a teenager and I’ve had the fortune to work closely with interpreter, Thupten Jinpa for the for the last seven years or so of my career. It’s been a great opportunity to get to work in ways that are supportive of the Dalai Lama’s vision for secular effects in a world where we all bring the values and compassion to do our lives and our work.

Pete Mockaitis
 Do you have any sort of fun facts or any thoughts or exchanges that leave to mind when you reflect on time with him?

Leah Weiss
I have the opportunity to fly across the country with him when I was nine months pregnant with my second child and that was amazing. I was also concerned that I was going to go into labor, which luckily, I did not. But when he saw that I was pregnant he started telling stories about how his mother had told him that he used to kick a lot when she was pregnant with him, which I really enjoyed hearing. And you know, just any opportunity and even brief moments or being part of a large group, he’s still so inspiring and I think on point. Imagine people in the audience, you’ve read or seen something of his, he just fosters that connection wherever he goes. I remember the secret service on the plane with us were talking about how their lives were changed by being on this assignment.

Pete Mockaitis
 That’s awesome. So, well, can you tell us then a little bit about the story behind your course at Stanford when it comes to compassionate leadership? How did this get born and what does the student learn when they’re enrolled in this course?

Leah Weiss
So, I’ve been teaching this class for about six years now and it’s always white listed. It’s evolved over the years. I think the quickest snapshot is what I teach is really captured in the book. The book was an attempt to share their experience to the broader group of people that I have worked with at Stanford and in organizations. But really what it boils down to is learning the skills that fit within our emotional intelligence quotient that are mindfulness and self-awareness and purpose and ability to forge strong connections even with people we dislike and are irritated by our workplace. And it’s really … and so it brings together research from all across positive psychology and combined with the long contemporary practice traditions and including my own training. I spent most of my twenties doing 100-day and six-month meditation or treats. So I’m really distilling that down into what I learned in those retreats as well as the research.

Pete Mockaitis
  Well, I’m so fascinated. What do you do over the course of 100 days of meditating on a retreat?

Leah Weiss
Well, the Tibetan curriculum as you’re doing a lot of different things and it follows a trajectory. So from the first year, you do a set of practices, visualization, some of their practice would be physical and some would be more along the lines of what you might think of when you hear the idea of meditating. Then the next 100-day retreat does a lot more with the Tibetan yogas which are different than what most of us probably think of when we hear yoga. It’s a different system not unrelated in goal but approached differently. When you’re at Tibetan up in the mountains and you’re doing yoga, one of your primary concerns generating heat and so there’s a whole way of approaching our bodies and actually researchers have fascinated by and have documented changes in our metabolism and our ability to increase the body temperature.  From there there’s different in depth visualization worlds basically that you learn to create in this mantle to learn how we reconstruct our reality in day-to-day lives. That’s kind of the sampling and a lot of looking into how perception happens. So it’s more active than you’d think and more varied than you would think there’s a lot of different types of practices.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay. Well, that’s cool. So, let’s talk about some of these skilled development elements. First, could you share with us? So you’ve got the course and then your book, how you work sort of lays out for a broader audience how to develop these skills. Could you maybe first make a bit of the case of the “why” behind these skills in terms of just in case we were to have a hardcore skeptic, “Greed is good. Cash is king results” to our paramount listener? And we’re usually nicer than that character, but if do have such a listener, could you paint the picture for how do these things tie into performance, results and that sort of thing?

Leah Weiss
Absolutely. Well, I love getting into it in a practical mentality. Because I think if we can’t understand where the rubber meets the road then what is the point of doing this work? So I’d say the starting place I would have is if you’re interested in productivity, you’ll know that the first place that we are challenged in our productivity is in our ability to pay attention particularly in this day and age whether there’s information overload and technology designed to grab our attention. And in this chronic time, people don’t understand, one in three people could tell you what their job is, meaning two in three people can’t actually tell you what their work is and why.

Pete Mockaitis
 That’s fascinating.

Leah Weiss
So, of course they can steady on point and be productive, right? I mean, that’s terrifying and that means if you employ six people that four of those don’t exactly know what they’re doing or why and you could scale it up for there.

Pete Mockaitis
 Could you zoom in on that just a little bit? That’s boiling my mind. I can understand how sometimes people are like, “Oh, my gosh! It’s complicated. I don’t want to get into what a python framework is and how I’m coding.” Blah blah blah software code talk, but you’re saying to two of those folks just cannot master the sentences for this is what I do.

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean let alone like getting in the weeds with, here’s with type language from coding and why it was selected, but like here’s why we’ve created this program and our end goal to serve our company or our customers rather is, they can’t answer that question.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh, the “why” is where it’s tricky. It’s like, well, I filed these reports. I can tell you that but the “why” where.

Leah Weiss
So, what their role is there for.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay. What their role is there for.

Leah Weiss
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay, understood.

Leah Weiss
So even if you know what you’re there for, you’re going to be challenged in paying attention. So, and which is why people are describing our time now and the business world is the attention economy because everything comes back down to our ability to prioritize and make good choices for our ourselves, for our team and for our organization. And you know, mindfulness is not like some hippie dippy thing that we’re just doing in California. It’s a 1.1 billion dollar industry and 22% of companies in 2016 had mindfulness programs and that number was projected to double in 2017 and they’re still analyzing the data from that period of time. But the reason people are investing in it isn’t because the hippie movement is back on the rise. It’s because it directly translates into dollars and hours spent in productive ways. Company like … measure it that, 62 minutes per employee of additional productive time per week, $3000 per employee a year of increased productive time when an employee has been through mindfulness training.

Pete Mockaitis
 Intriguing! So then you define, what is mindfulness and how do we train it?

Leah Weiss
So my preferred definition of mindfulness is the intentional use of attention. So we can do that anywhere, there’s nothing in that definition that says close your eyes and meditate or do it during your break or lunch time. It’s we should be doing it right now while you and I are talking and whoever is in the audience listening. It’s so simple but if you start to pay attention you notice that you’re way more distracted than you ever realized and quickly that becomes the impetus for people to say, “Wow, this is a big problem. I’m super distracted and everyone around is as well. What can we do about that?” And then the good news is you can do a lot actually.

Pete Mockaitis
 So I’m intrigued. So the intentional use of attention, and we had at Dan Harris on the show some time ago talking about 10% Happier and Meditation and such. So he used an interesting analogy for meditation that he said, “It is like a bicep curls for your brain.” And so I’d love to get your take when we talk about the intentionally use of attention. Because I’m thinking I cannot quite intentionally use my attention nonstop for nine hours. So how do you think about that sort of the dynamic between intentionally using attention verses hey, chilling out and taking a break? And does taking a break mean let your mind want or whatever the heck you want? I’d love if you could frame that up a little bit in terms of this notion of intentional use of attention. Is that like a muscle or does it have effort that gets tired? How do you frame that up?

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean, I think if you want to play with that metaphor or since it’s valuable of looking at meditation like a way to train your mind, which is the wrap is returning your attention to what you’ve chosen them to your anchor. So you can increase your strengths meaning you can do it for longer and you can do it better. But just like following on this training metaphor that doesn’t mean you go to the gym and you start doing bicep curls around the clock if you want stronger biceps. You need to train properly, which includes a different kinds of exercise and learning how the complimentary muscle groups work. And that’s how I think of responding to your question around what about rest, and I couldn’t do it for nine hours. No, nobody could focus in a formed a kind of way for nine hours. What I recommend to people is to use permadrols or setting an alarm for different style for 25 minutes bursts of multitasking than having a break. This is recognizing how attention works so that we can leverage it. And I do think that there’s a lot to be done with improving how we take our breaks and doing them in ways that are relaxful as opposed to just a distraction or kind of false break.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay, Yes. Well, so I’d love to hear then, if we’re talking about doing reps or training, what are some of your favorite prescriptions in terms of enhancing our ability to have intentional use of our attention?

Leah Weiss
So I think you need to have clarity on what your goal is in any period of time. So if you’re approaching your day, you need to be aware of what the priority is and also defacto what the priority is not. You need to know what your likely distractions are going to be. This is all consistent with the best thinking on behavioral change.  You need to know where you’re going and you need to know what’s likely to make you not get there so that you can preempt. So you want to structure your time if your goal from the day is to get focused or work done, you’d approach it differently than if you’re at a networking conference and you want your goal for the day is to connect with as many people as possible. You need to have your targeted outcome. So if you are moving through a number of different activities, you would want to structure your day work with how your habit or focus work. So if you’re like, I know I’ve got four hours for this work to get done and I’ve got some calls I’ve got to make. Then I’ve got just a bunch of tasks that don’t take a lot of brain power but they will take time. Then create the plan based on how our attention functions so that we do the bursts, the focus energy interspersed by the breaks of the less high maintenance kind of tasks and we’re aware that we’re not calling ourselves multi-taskers along the way, that we are uni-tasking and taking breaks or we are switching intentionally in between tasks. Because as we know from the research, there’s no such thing as multi-tasking. There’s only task switching which has costs. You can’t actually be on a call and emailing both at the same time. You’re moving your attention back and forth between them doing neither of them particularly well.

Pete Mockaitis
 Understood. So that’s kind of clever when it comes to the alternation between intense focus, task and then tasks that does not require intense focus. And so I’m wondering, if all of your tasks require this focus, what’s sort of the best practice in terms of taking an optimal break?

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean, I definitely live in that world where it’s writing, it’s grading and it’s a lot of highly focused work. So the way that I structure my time is knowing that I need to not fall into habits of thinking that social media is consumption as a break. That’s not a break. Getting up, moving, taking a walk could be a break, getting a drink could a break and taking the 20 minutes. Today, I have my grades due tonight. So there’s just like a lot of reading and backlog. So it’s making the decision that instead of having 15 minutes of unproductive time, I’m going that take a real break for 20 minutes and do a quick workout. And what I see in people who are performers is lots of time with great care. They know when they’re having their calls, they know when they’re having their emails and it’s like they’re architects of their time in a very proactive sense and you don’t hear the same overwhelmed from them that you do from some many other who are kind of approaching their calendar like happening to them rather than they’re making choices about how to structure it.

Pete Mockaitis
 That’s a great distinction. So social media is not a break, I think that is a rallying cry. Can you expand upon that for the skeptic?

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean, I think for the skeptic, I don’t think you need to believe anything, skeptics. I think what you should do, this is my humble opinion is pay attention when you try different things like if you’re not sure if you believe that then try it. Take your breaks tomorrow and have them be breaks on social media. Then the next day say my brakes are not going to be on social media, they’re going to be getting up and taking five-minute walks a bunch of times through the day and see how you feel.  You don’t need to believe anything including me or the research. What you need to do is pay enough attention to what happens when you experiment and take that data and trust that data and that’s very much what I encourage my students to do. I’m not a big believer person. I’m just a person who has tried practices and seen that they work. And also some of them don’t work for me, but then I figure that out, put them aside and go with something else that does. So I encourage all of you to do the same.

Pete Mockaitis
 All right, thank you. Well, let’s talk a little bit about self-awareness. I have seen some research, which I think I do believe as we were talking about what we believe and don’t with regard to most of us are not as self-aware as we think we are. So could you pack a little bit of what you mean by self-awareness and how can we get more of it?

Leah Weiss
Self-awareness is such an interesting term. So one of the ways we talk about self-awareness often is when we hypothesize about what we would do in a given situation. We say, well, you know if I were in that fill in the blank from a newspaper article we’re reading or movie we’re seeing or just a friend situation we’re hearing from our imagination about what we would do. So our take on who we are and how we would behave is notoriously wrong. It is like completely the choices we think we would make are not the choices we actually make when we’re in a situation. So that’s one big way in which we don’t know ourselves and there’s a lot of ways to unpack that, sentiments the perspective of condiments work that he won the Nobel Prize for understanding that there’s fast and slow thinking and that there’s responses that are rational and that there are responses that are emergent or intuitive or embodied.  There’s a lot of different ways you can describe that. So this is one of the places where economic theory breaks down if you want to say that we are all rational actor. We are people who make post hoc descriptions of our choices in rational ways but those were not the actually drivers. So I think that’s another way where mindfulness practice relates. Because we can actually get much more clear on the emotional kinds of drivers that are influencing in our behavior and the behavior of people around us that we are most likely to overlook otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay, so are there any particular practices that you recommend in terms of getting a boost in terms of getting mindfulness?

Leah Weiss
One that I think is really simple and really powerful is to start getting clear when we are analyzing and interpreting a situation. How much is data that’s observable and much of it is conceptual overlay or interpretation that is highly subjective? And those tools that I write about in the book where I talk about how you can go about doing this from like take a piece of paper and say an event that you’re thinking about or meeting you had that went sideways and you’re trying to figure out what happened. So on one side of the paper literally writing out like things that happened and on the other side of the paper, the interpretations you made about all the things that happened. And it sounds so of simple but we bundle those together and when we do then we’re very quick to say, well, she coughed and that was an indicator that she didn’t like my thinking. It’s like, well, maybe what we know here is that she coughed. We don’t actually what that meant, but we do these projections and conceptual overlays so quickly and then we react to what we’ve constructed. And often its misinformation and incomplete information and it leads us down the path of interpreting another person behavior and reacting in that behavior and all these ways that are just wonky. So what I recommend is just getting back to the basics like what do we actually know? What is the interpretation? If its interpretation, is there another possible interpretation? Can we get ever more precise and then bundling this mess that we can make when we’re projecting motives when we don’t actually know what they are?

Pete Mockaitis
 I like that. Thank you. Will you likewise share some of your favorite tools for hitting the purpose side and the connections with the other side?

Leah Weiss
So one of the ways that I’ve really fallen in love with thinking about and training in it comes from a student I had at Stanford Business School an officer in the army and he comes from a military family. His father with a General of the Engineering Corp. The metaphor that he brought that I’m in love with comes from his father, which is something that they grew up with and what it is, is pretty simple. It’s a puzzle and a puzzle box top. But the story behind it, I love and why it is so helpful I think is really powerful. So the story behind it is from the time they were little they would do puzzles as a family. As they got older the puzzles would get harder and as they got even older and there were about to leave the home their dad would take away the box top. So they had to try to figure out how to solve the puzzle without having that clarity about what they were building.

So this becomes the metaphor for leadership. That is our job and there is no box top out there. We view it as leaders and aspiring leaders need to be awesome at clarifying what we’re doing and why and continue making sure that everybody is clear on that. And then this is where I think it gets even more useful is if use that metaphor then that means we ourselves, we work with our instrumentals towards that vision because you can’t solve the puzzle with just one piece. That won’t work. You have to actually value the role of the other pieces. So I think when leaders take a metaphor like this, it is inherently causing them to take a more strength based approach to understanding the people around them, lifting them up and building stronger relationships and building their own career in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
 Yes, so in practice if there is no box top you’re continually reflecting and reiterating the vision of what we’re up to here.

Leah Weiss
Exactly. Every time you make some sort of change, people need help updating it and making sure that they’re up updating in a way that it’s systematic with the rest of their team in the organization. So this becomes an ongoing aspect of leadership that we need to take really seriously, not waiting until like the retreat next year when we talk about the purpose. But this comes closer to what we were talking about with crazy highly engagement epidemic and the lack of engagement that we have. It comes back as purpose. There’s no box top and so without that box top 2/3 of your employees don’t know what they’re building.

Pete Mockaitis
 Right. And I’m wondering, if you find yourself in a box-topless world and you’re maybe not the leader and you would like to get a clearer vision and purpose connection to what up to what we’re up to. What are your tips for the person those shoes in terms of asking the questions or maybe even formulating your own purpose?

Leah Weiss
I love how you just framed that. Actually those two clauses in your question are exactly what I work with my students on that your ability to ask questions actually differentiates you as being valuable. I can’t tell you how many times CEOs visit my class. We just had Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn come in a few weeks ago. One of the things that students were talking to him about is, what can I do if I’m not like you and I’m not running this company? What I heard him say in response to that was you prove yourself valuable by showing the inconsistencies and by asking the questions. That’s you any good leader wants to surround themselves with. So it’s actually a great way instead of trying to be “the know it all” be the person who’s asking me the real question in surfacing what is not known but needs to be known. So that’s piece of it and then you exactly alluded to how I would refer to cultivating purpose.

No matter what the box top is for the organization, you also have to have your own individual purpose and you need to have clarity about how it’s fitting together with your organization so that you can be in the situation ideally where it’s a calling or at least a career for you. And it is a meaningful trajectory because what the organization sees you as valuable for providing is also valuable to you. So you need this as continual work that needs to happen. And I think the good news is, it’s doable work and it’s actually really inspiring work. You know, this is one of the reason. I think when I’m going and doing off-sites with organizations and working with teams. More and more them are recognizing the need to spend time together really understanding what makes each other tick so that we can work well together particularly when things get stressful, which they will.

Pete Mockaitis
 And I like that, I think it is a pretty powerful reframe there from Jeff Weiner in terms of, we need to ask those questions. It’s helpful and a great leader will want that. I think that maybe there’s just a lot of not so great leaders or there’s a justified fear that if someone’s thinking, I am kind of curious how this connects, how this helps a customer, how this ties into our strategic plan or vision or whatever. But I’m concerned that asking that question could put on the defensive like, “Oh, he’s trying to torpedo what I just talked about” or make me look dumb like, “Oh, I’m apparently not sharp enough to connect the dots on my own” or it would just be annoying because this meeting has already been going too long and we want to wrap it up.

So that’s intriguing because I think any number of these elements of doubt or resistance can creep in. It’s so encouraging to hear that at least one person’s take that no, no asking such a question is highly valuable and does not make you a pain but makes you look awesome.

Leah Weiss
Well, and you to have to be smart about it as your point is exactly getting to like you don’t want to do it at the all hands meeting when everybody is like, just been told the department is shutting down. You have to be sensitive to context and when and how but creating those opportunities, seeking them out and getting more comfortable and just experimenting with it, I think goes along way so we can take the risk to ask a question certainly where we’re on the fence about it and see what the responses.

And I think you’re exactly right, it doesn’t mean that the group is there to serve our needs. We need to make sure the way that we are asking the question is of service to bringing the group along. And I think we can all tell when other people are doing that, that’s the difference between a good question and someone being really annoying.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh yeah. Isn’t it true that this thing I know makes me awesome?

Leah Weiss
Totally. Yeah, like that’s what not to do because that’s not actually trying to get at your organization or your role or purpose or your team’s function. That’s just going to irritate people, don’t do that. But find a way to ask a question that will be of service and there’s an honest question. We have really good sniff tests for when people are being authentic. So if we really want to understand and being aware of our environment, I think that it’s a good risk to take and see what happens. You’re not going to get fired for asking a question. You might get better at when and how, those are learnable skills and way better than be learning them than to just throw the whole exercise out the window.

Pete Mockaitis
 Very good. Thank you. Well, Leah, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to highlight before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Leah Weiss
I love your questions, even asking you’re good at this. You’re clearly a pro.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh shucks, thank you.

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I think the one thing I haven’t really talked about over that might be helpful for the skeptics is understanding and let’s talk about a topic like compassion again for a second. It might sound, “Oh, that’s so soft and we’re here to compete and we’ve got beat everybody else out.” Worrying about this just seems like a waste time. Look at it from the perspective of organizations are groups of people or people have challenges. We suffer, we have families who get sick, we have illness ourselves and we have things that happen in life.

So it’s inevitable in our organizations that the challenges of life are going to come in. When people see not just that their own challenges are met with compassion but the challenges of the people around them are responded to, they increase their royalty to the organization, they become more engaged. And this could is following on the research, this isn’t just my opinion. They miss less days of work, they stay with organizations longer, and they are more invested while they’re at work.

So I think there’s an important way of understanding that it’s an organization’s need to respond to the human element and that we can also do that in small ways even if we’re not at the top of the work chart or if we’re just a person working in an organization. We can still create within an our team and department an environment where we understand what’s going on at least to some basic degree in the lives of the people around us and demonstrate that we care. That will improve our relationships and will make it easier when we need to get stuff done. People will be more likely to help us if they know that we demonstrated care for them.

I think there important way of framing this that I would want to share with the listeners to think about and reflect in your organization what you’ve seen happen in terms of responsive to suffering and challenge. Often times an organization fails on that, what does that end up doing to morale and retention and all those things?

Pete Mockaitis
 Sure. I think that’s powerful because just the innate human experience and need for reciprocity that just sort of baked into to us as well as suffering really can be kind of kind of mild. I remember one time I was working late and someone asked me if I wanted a milkshake from Pot Bellies. It really did alleviate suffering and I thought that guy was the coolest for having done that. So, that’s awesome.

Leah Weiss
Great! Just like we would in relationships outside of work. I love that example, it’s so human. Like you’re working late, you’re hungry or just having someone care about you as a person that it would make you feel delighted to have this shake like that is a very human moment in the thick of it and it couldn’t have been like a company policy. It had to happen because this person saw you and cared about you as the person and wanted to make you smile. It was sincere, it was customized and it was appropriate. They didn’t like buy you a car.

Pete Mockaitis
 I’ll take that too.

Leah Weiss
It could’ve been cool.

Pete Mockaitis
 You’re having trouble getting around Pete. Here’s a car. Excellent! This is fun. So now, can you share with us a favorite quote that you find inspiring?

Leah Weiss
The quote that I love and come back to again and again is from Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in he wrote about out his experience in the concentration camps in the holocaust. He says, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” If he can say that about the concentration camps, the thing I love about that is then I can deal with that annoying co-worker. I can remind myself why I’m there, why we’re are both there even they’re chewing with their mouth open or the interrupt me when I don’t like it. If I can get really clear on that common why, that goes a really long way. So that’s one of my favorite inspiring but also highly practical quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
 Excellent! Thank you. And how about a favorite study or a bit of research?

Leah Weiss
I love Allie Crum’s milkshake study. She now at the Stanford Psychology Department. And one of my favorite studies of hers is looking at what the impact is of our beliefs on our physiology. So she started out asking questions about placebo. And so this study, what she does divides people into two groups, one group gets told this milkshake is healthy, nutritious, low calorie yada, yada. The other group gets told this is indulgent high calorie treat. Depending on the message that they got, their hunger hormones responded in kind.  So if they were told it was the light low calorie shake, they would get more hungry again more quickly and their hormones would actually respond accordingly. If they were told it was the very fattening dense shake, then their bodies would respond in kind. The thing I love about this study is that it shows us how much our beliefs matter. We know the placebo effect has impact but how are we really leveraging that in our day to day lives and the way we’re approaching our work and our relationships so that we can be healthier and happier.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh, lovely. Thank you. And how about a favorite were book?

Leah Weiss
I’m going to go with The Lorax. I just reread with my youngest child who’s three. And I have to say Dr. Seuss now more than ever, we really need to understand the impact of our organizations on other humans on the environment. Got step it up before it’s too late or we’re going to end up in a… I think we’re already seeing where we could end up. So that book, it’s impactful. I actually wrote a piece on it recently saying why I think this is a vital leadership text for our time.

Pete Mockaitis
 All right, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Leah Weiss
I think what I want to go with is knitting needles because I think that it’s really important to have practices. And for me knitting is one of them, of getting back in our bodies and doing something for those of us who are knowledge workers and live in our head seeing something physical that we can build with simple materials and dedication and a plan for me is endlessly inspiring. So I’m going to say my knitting needles.

Pete Mockaitis
 Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, the personal practices of yours?

Leah Weiss
I loved one that I started when in my oldest child was about two, so this is five years ago. She loves making decorations like lots of little kids and I was struggling with transitioning from work to home. I would come home and be preoccupied with what I needed to finish or college just had, you name it. I would come home and I’d be preoccupied with the call I just had or something I needed to get done. And so we would put up decorations on the front door for the holidays and they would constantly be shifting because the holidays would shift and they would grab my attention because they were changing. So it was became my prompt, my cue to notice. I’m coming home I want to be present to my kids and to my family and transition and with care from one of rules to another and dock my technology and take my shoes off and enjoy that precious time with my family. So the decorations on the front door for when I’m coming home.

Pete Mockaitis
 Thank you. And can you share, Is there a particular nugget that you have been teaching that really seems to connect and resonate with students and they quote back to you time after time?

Leah Weiss
We really do a lot with David Foster Wallace’s This is Water and that fundamental idea that he shares in it that if we don’t choose then we’ll fall into our negative default. But if we choose to pay attention to how we’re mentally constructing the world around us particularly the people around us and experimenting with seeing them as fully human as valuable giving them benefit of the doubt, imagining the suffering that they might be going through that I don’t know about that’s driving this behavior that I’m not a fan of in this moment. And the students talk about that and I’m just grading final papers right now and it comes up again and again as reaffirming this commitment to choose to be more aware and compassionate in their lives. And also with the humility of like that’s going to be a lifelong trajectory, but it’s one worth being on.

Pete Mockaitis
 Excellent! And is there a best place that folks who want to learn more get in touch with you? Where would you point them?

Leah Weiss
My website is the best place you can sign up for my newsletter and I share out the most current research and all of that kind of material and lots of tools for mindful meetings and exercises you can do in the thick of it at work and in your life, in your busy life.

Pete Mockaitis
 All right, and do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Leah Weiss
You can influence a lot more than you think if you take responsibility for how you are thinking or talking about approaching your time and your relationships at work. So own that and use that and benefit from that.

Pete Mockaitis
 Beautiful! Well, Leah, thank you so much for taking this time sharing the goods. Please keep on doing what you do in cultivating the compassion and all you’re up to.

Leah Weiss
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such of pleasure.

Mar 05
0

269: Why Willpower Doesn’t Work (and What Does) with Benjamin Hardy

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

 

 

Benjamin Hardy says: "It's not confidence that leads to success, it's successful behavior that creates confidence."

Medium writer Benjamin Hardy makes the case for why and how to shape our environments to support success.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to use the sunk cost fallacy to your advantage
  2. The definition of a forcing function and how to apply them at work
  3. Why pen and paper beats digital journaling

About Benjamin

Since late 2015, Benjamin has been the #1 writer on Medium.com. Ben’s writing focuses on self-improvement, motivation, and entrepreneurship. His writing is fueled by personal experiences, self-directed education, and formal education. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Clemson University. His research focuses on the psychological differences of wannabe entrepreneurs and actual entrepreneurs (dreamers vs. doers).

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Benjamin Hardy Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ben, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Benjamin Hardy
Thank you, Pete. Very glad to be here with you, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so you’ve got a pretty cool claim to fame, and it’s that you are the number one writer on Medium. I guess we measure that in page views by the tens of millions. So, congrats. That’s really cool.

Benjamin Hardy
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
How does that happen?

Benjamin Hardy
I mean, a lot of luck, a lot of good timing, and a lot of things. I mean, I started writing online in 2015 shortly after becoming a foster parent of three kids, was in a PhD program, still in that program actually. I’m almost done. It’s organizational psychology, so I have lots to talk about because it’s psychology of the workforce, how to keep people motivated and whatnot.

But, yeah, I mean, after I became a foster parent it kind of really put a lot of external pressure on me. I’d been wanting to be a writer since 2010, had spent from 2010 to 2015 reading, reading, reading, reading, and I’ve always been an intense journaler. But it was when I became a foster parent actually did that pressure kind of really forced to like think about – think things through.

And then that led me to investing some money into a domain name, an online course that taught me how to write viral articles, and then seeking mentorships. And then just pumping out lots of articles in my spare time and getting lucky and, I mean, I could tell you as much as you want to hear as far as, in my opinion, what makes good writing but, yeah, having lot of…it’s been a fun ride.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would be intrigued if maybe there is a key principle or rule of thumb or mantra that you keep front and center that contributes, you think, to the success there.

Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, yeah, I mean, as far as the marketing, you have to get really, really good at writing headlines and structuring articles in a way that is very easy flowing for people to read. As far as writing, the three components are being very good. You know, you’ve got to be a very good communicator. Being able to weave concepts, principles, stories, so you have to communicate but not just communicate head knowledge.

You have to have the head knowledge which is expertise or something on a topic because if you don’t have that then you just sound like you’re sharing your opinion and it’s not credible. But if you just have the head knowledge, if you’re just writing facts then it’s not compelling and it’s not persuasive. And so I think kind of the triple threat is knowing your stuff so well but actually knowing when it… and then understanding it kind of at the heart level, the emotional level, and being able to speak from experience in a communicative way and a persuasive way.

So kind of emotions, expertise, and good communication is what I think really makes it powerful because when you can speak really persuasively but then you’re backing your stuff up with like, you know, tons of science or compelling or very credible sources then not only is it emotional for people, but they’re like, “Oh, wow,” they believe it’s true because you’re backing it up over and over and over. And so that’s kind of some keys, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. Well, I appreciate that. It wasn’t just like, “Well, the key is to put a number in your headline,” and then it’s like the eight reasons willpower doesn’t work, “You won’t believe number six.” That’s all there is to it, you know.

Benjamin Hardy
That’s all you need, my man. That’s it. Now you can go be famous.

Pete Mockaitis
I had a hunch like each of those things sounds hard in the sense of, “That’ll take some time to develop that capability just like real life.”

Benjamin Hardy
Oh, yeah, it’s not an overnight thing, you know what I mean? So you can apply some strategies overnight that make a big difference but at the end of the day you’ve got to be good at what you do. Like Cal Newport says, you’ve got to be so good you can’t be ignored.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I’m excited to see you have put some of these skills to work in crafting your book here Willpower Doesn’t Work. Tell us what’s this all about?

Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, Willpower Doesn’t Work is kind of, I mean, I don’t know I’d call it a manifesto but it’s like a countercultural punch in the face to Western culture. So Western culture, especially in the self-improvement world but also like in the pop psychology world, is very individualistic. That’s just our culture. We’re a very individualistic society. We’re very focused on ourselves.

And so when we’re talking about self-improvement and stuff like that, we’re always talking about, you know, we’re always focused on the self, you know, have more willpower, have a better mindset, how to set better goals. I mean, it’s all about you and there’s no focus on the context around you. There’s no focus on the environment or very little because in our culture we kind of downplay how much the environment truly shapes us.

So what the book is all about is it’s all about, first off, how important our environment really is, the fact that you’re a different person in one situation than you are in a different situation, and how environment shapes your identity. And then, really, ultimately how to shape the optimal environment so that you can succeed.

And there’s a curt quote that comes from Marshall Goldsmith. He wrote the book Triggers, and the quote is, “If you do not create and control your environment, your environment will create and control you.”

I go into a lot of science and research since I study organizational psychology, but there’s been a big shift over the last 50 years in the research. So back in like, well, really, it’s been a long time coming, but in the 1920s and 1930s, all of the research on leadership, for example, was focused on men. So the first core leadership theories were the great men leaders, great men theory of leadership. I mean, it was like it all about how leaders can only be men.

And then we went to the trait perspective where it’s like, you know, you could only be a six-foot tall man. And, ultimately, we were all focused on traits and stuff, and even personality types. I mean, it’s so popular. We’re all so focused on these fixed traits. And, in my opinion, the science at this point it’s pretty clear that it’s all about the environment, and about creating that environment, that’s why companies like Zappos are so popular.

But all the research in organizational psychology is focused now on, “How do you structure environmental settings so that employees can be successful so that leadership can happen?” So, really, this book is just all about, “How do you setup the environment so that you can win?”

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, so maybe we should back it up a little bit when you talk about winning. I guess that really starts with a decision to commit to a particular goal, result, outcome to begin with. So what’s your take on where it all starts and how you arrive at a point of conviction that this is the thing that I shall pursue?

Benjamin Hardy
I love that. So it actually directly relates to my research. And so throughout my doctoral research, and I know that we’re not going to be talking about entrepreneurship specifically on this video or on this episode, but I actually do study the difference between wanna-be entrepreneurs versus actual entrepreneurs but it relates to everything. Really it’s the difference between dreamers and doers, you know. What is the difference between those people who can never reach that point of conviction versus those people who become fully committed?

And, ultimately, kind of what I’ve included after studying all sorts of people on this topic is that, yes, you have to have some internal desire, but that’s too focused to get on the individual. You have to ultimately do something in the real world. And so there’s a few components but I think the main one is that once a person starts financially investing in themselves, in their skill development, in their relationships, once they actually start investing money in what they want to do, then all of a sudden they become hyper committed.

Like there’s a lot of research in economic stuff called escalation of commitment where like once you commit, or once you start investing money, dollars, into something you become very committed to it, almost so committed that it becomes hard not to commit. It kind of goes along with the idea of sunk cost bias where you become so…have you heard of sunk cost bias before?

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Certainly. It’s like you’re trying to justify what you want, you know.

Benjamin Hardy
Hundred percent, yeah. Almost all the research on sunk cost bias points in the negative direction, it becomes an irrational commitment. But, it’s the same level of commitment that leads to success. The only reason people think it’s irrational is because often it ends in failure. You know, if you think Elon Musk, he was so convicted in his companies that he sunk all of his money into it. And because he succeeded, we all think he’s a hero. If he had failed we would’ve called him irrational.

But the same principle applies. If you start investing money, you become very committed whether that’s to an organization, whether that’s to a goal, whether that’s to a relationship, whether that’s to your skills, once you become invested, you become committed, and as you get committed then you start to wrap your identity around that thing. You start to change your identity and believe that you are that thing, whether that’s entrepreneur or leader or writer, and you start to go from wanting to be that thing to actually being that thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s intriguing and powerful. You know, this is bringing me back to Robert Cialdini talking about commitment consistency in his book Influence and those sorts of principles. Now when it comes to money, is it important that it be a sizable sum of money or do you really get the ball rolling if you spend 12 bucks on an Amazon book in the direction that you’re pursuing, like things are happening already?

Benjamin Hardy
I, a hundred percent, think it can definitely start small. I mean, I have been coming to grips with this principle, and, by the way, I love Cialdini. I’ve spent so much time studying his work in commitment and stuff, but, yeah, it always starts small. Like when I was first starting my PhD program, when I was like really starting to say, “I want to start this whole writing thing.”

As a PhD student you’re making 12,000 bucks a year. You’re getting about a thousand bucks a month plus you get your tuition paid for. And so for me it was like, “Okay, I need to buy a website,” and that domain name costs 800 bucks. That’s more than $12 but I bought an online course for $197 that taught me how to write viral articles or viral headlines.

And so I do think it can start small, it can start with books, it can start with really what needs to happen is that you see yourself moving in the direction you want to go. Like if you watch yourself buying and reading books on a topic, you’re like, “Oh, I’m observing myself performing these behaviors.” That’s how people develop their identity, it called self-signaling in psychology.

Basically, what it means is that we, ourselves, we don’t really know ourselves as much as we think we do. We judge ourselves the same way we judge other people. It’s based on our behaviors. And so if you start watching yourself behave in certain ways, you’ll start to believe it, and that’s how confidence develops. You know, confidence is the product of successful behavior, and so once you start behaving in a certain way, and you start to kind of developing some consistency, all of a sudden you start to have confidence, then you can become passionate about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s cool. I like that. And so, then, when it comes to the environment, you know, I dug your quote from Marshall Goldsmith. It also reminds me of one by Churchill who said, “We shape our dwellings and then our dwellings shape us.”

Benjamin Hardy
By the way, Marshall McLuhan also says we shape our language and then our language shapes us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. We got a full-blown theme here.

Benjamin Hardy
By the way, the whole book is about how your environment shapes you, and that the only way to proactively become the person you want to be is to shape the environment that you know will shape you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that’s compelling. So let’s hear it. How do we go about taking those steps to shaping such an environment?

Benjamin Hardy
I mean, first things first. You have to somewhat – I mean, you kind of have to know what you want. You don’t need to know all of it because a lot of the change happens once you’re in the environment. Or I think there’s so many layers to this question. I think, for the starters, I’ll talk about, in the book I talk about two types of optimal environments.

So I call them enriched environments, and that comes from a lot of theory and organizational psychology about basically how people have been structuring jobs. They call it job enrichment which is basically all the stuff that Dan Pink talk about in his book Drive, I believe, about creating jobs where people have more autonomy and stuff. I mean, that’s all based on research in organizational psychology.

But, basically, the two types of optimal environments that I talk about in the book are environments of high stress and then environments of complete rest. And, basically, it’s the idea that you need to be fully engaged and absorbed in whatever environment you’re in. So in order to be fully absorbed in, let’s just say, like a flow state, where you’re totally engaged in what you’re doing, you’re totally focused, there’s got to be several factors.

You’ve got to have high level of responsibility, there’s got to be consequences for performance. Ideally, you should be doing something that you’ve never done before and that somewhat above your skill level. I mean, it needs to be challenging and difficult, and there needs to be feedback, you know what I mean? It’s basically like the equivalent of being at the gym with a personal trainer. It should be very difficult and you should be having to rise to an occasion, rise above what you’ve done before so much so, and very few people work environments are like that.

Most people are in a semi state of distraction, there’s tabs open on their stuff, there’s notifications popping on their phone, there’s very low consequence for bad performance, it’s mundane, it’s routine. And so step one is, “How do you create an optimal environment that’s high stress?”

Then step two is you can’t do that all day, it’s not about being busy, it’s about being productive. And so you need to, have an environment for rest and recovery where you fully detach from work and where you, then, just focus on whatever it is you want to do at home whether that’s to be with your family or whether that’s like rest and recover in some other way.

There’s a lot of research in organizational psychology that talks about a concept called psychologically detaching from work. And, basically, it means that in order to fully be engaged while you’re at work, you need to fully detach and be engaged in life and rest, and let it go. And there’s like all sorts of negative effects if you don’t ever detach from work, like you have a hard time fully engaging, you burn out quicker.

And so I think, kind of just bringing this together real quick, there’s a quote from Dan Sullivan, he’s the founder of Strategic Coach, but he says, “Wherever you are that’s where you should be. Wherever you are make sure you’re there.” And so the idea is when you’re fully resting, like actually rest and recover. Almost all of your best ideas are going to happen while you’re resting. And then while you’re at work you can fully engage at a much higher level. You can be much more proactive, you can take on more responsibility.

And so I think that, first off, understanding those two types of environments and kind of assessing yourself how often are you in those types of environments. Like when you’re actually home, are you actually resting? Or is your environment setup for failure? Like do you have a TV in your bedroom? You know what I mean? Like, is your environment setup to fail?

And so I think, first off, is assessing how often are you in a flow state and knowing that flow is purely based on your environment is number one. I don’t know if you want to just talk about that first and then we can talk more about how to actually structure those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. So I would like to hear about how one constructs both a high stress and a high recovery environment. And so it sounds like the antithesis to high stress was, “Hey, you know, we got a lot of bad distractions, we’ve got not a whole lot of really high stakes,” in terms of if you succeed or fail  in a given day, it’s like, “Well,” you know, you’re probably not going to be fired or promoted or get a fat bonus or whatever kind of, on most days. So how do we go about putting an environment in place in which we do have this stress so that we could be totally in and rocking? And then afterwards let’s talk about the recovery side.

Benjamin Hardy
Totally. Absolutely. So there’s a concept I talk about in the book called forcing functions. And forcing functions are basically a simple way to kind of manipulate your environment so that basically desired behavior is the norm, it’s the automatic. I mean, a simple forcing function literally is just leave your phone away from your person. Like if you’re not required to use it, like while you’re at work, for example, don’t have it around you. Leave it in a bag or something.

Basically, just put constraints in place so that you’re not going to do something stupid. That’s basically what a forcing function is.

Other forcing functions, and this is more relevant to just like self-improvement, but I think it could be related to the job site. Like Ramit Sethi, for example, he’s like an online entrepreneur, but he invests like a good amount of money every year into a personal trainer. And when he does that, and it’s almost the same principle we’re talking about before, it forces him to go to the gym. You know what I mean?

And so let’s just say a person has a goal, whatever it may be, get a promotion or get a better job. A lot of it is thinking what you want and then embedding these forcing functions to make it happen. I mean, a very simple interesting forcing function just for high productivity is, so one of the people I talked to, he purposefully, if he’s going to go work for a few hours, like let’s say at the library or something, he purposely leaves his power cord at home for his laptop because he knows that now his laptop only has three hours of battery. For him, it forces him to be more focused because he knows that his battery is going to die in three hours, then when it’s dead, and he’s got to go home. Those are really simple low-level things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d like some more. So we talked about, hey, leaving the phone, leaving the laptop charger, paying some money up front for a personal trainer. I’d love, if you got it, a smorgasbord to spark some inspiration.

Benjamin Hardy
So is this all straight up in the context of being at work?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it’s okay if we drift a bit in terms of things that boost your general productivity and effectiveness and energy but, yeah, if you got some office-specific tidbits those are great to prioritize.

Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. For me, in what I’ve seen, a lot of it has to do if you’re in a job, for example, like how can you take on more responsibility? A very simple forcing function is literally just applying Parkinson’s Law which is tell your advisor whoever it is that you need to report that that you’re going have something done very soon.

Like if you tell them vocally that you’re going to have their report back, or whatever it is that you have to give them, if you give them a very short timeline on where you’re going to have it back and you’ve made it verbal so that now they’re expecting it, all of a sudden you’re going to get to work. Parkinson’s Law basically is work fills the space of the amount of time you give it.

And then asking for more responsibility, like seeking greater responsibility, actually trying to –  I mean, a lot of these are very simple and basic.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fine.

Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, you just want to – and say it like how it is. If your job is not setup so that those things are in place, I’m not saying go quit. I’m saying you might have to have some conversation so that you can be in a position where it does matter. That may require that you seek more mentoring or something. A lot of it is just taking responsibility for your job and for your situation.

If you need to have a conversation with your boss and say you want more work, or you just need to show up more. A lot of that is just being proactive. That step is not necessarily about tweaking the environment but it’s more about tweaking the expectations around the environment. And there’s a lot of research that talks about how you rise or fall based on the expectations of those around you, that’s called the Pygmalion Effect. And so if you have leaders that don’t expect much of you, sadly you’re probably going to drop to those expectations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s potent stuff. Now let’s talk about the flipside of it then when it comes to building out the high recovery environment or any, why it’s forcing functions to be implemented there.

Benjamin Hardy
Totally. So to the extent you can, and I think Greg McKeown, who I know has been on the show, one of the things he talks about is literally just asking for specific things with your job. I mean, if you can ask for certain days off or certain types of schedules, asking if you can work from home. But if you can’t, asking for certain amounts of time off.

So, basically, the idea is this. The best creative insights are not going to happen while you’re at work. The research that only 16% of creative ideas happen when you’re sitting at your desk. And so, you need to be very focused when you’re at work but you also want to optimize for rest and recovery, you want to optimize for being away.

And so there’s a lot of research and a lot of cool ideas around sabbaticals, around mini retirements. If you think about Bill Gates, he did his think weeks where two weeks a year he would leave. He would totally detach, he was very inaccessible, and he would just spend time reading articles thinking. And he said that’s where his best ideas came from.

And you can apply that at a really small scale. A lot of people talk about having a disconnected day where you leave, where you go away for a day and you just rest. You don’t have you phone with you, you’re unreachable, like you just go and have a you day where you’re just resting, or you’re maybe listening to an audio book or writing in your journal, or going on a hike.

The more of those types of days you can embed into your life, or weekends, or mini retirements where you’re doing maybe like a five-day weekend, like once every month or two, the power of leaving your routine environment is very important because when you’re outside your routine environment, when you allow yourself to actually rest and recover, then you start to get some really good clarity, and there’s strategies around getting that clarity and connecting with your why.

Like I would talk about writing in your journal in specific ways, and I talk about that in the book. So there’s a lot of kind of research around the idea that the power of a decision is based on the emotional state that you make that decision. And so a lot of people, they don’t make powerful decisions because they’re not in a very powerful mental place when they make that decision.

When you get out of your routine environment, when you can kind of see the forest of your life for the trees because you’re kind of outside of it, you’re not like staring it in the face, you can kind of take a breath, you can look at life, you can kind of reconnect with who it is you want to be or with your core values or whatnot.

The more of those days you can take, especially if you’re spending time in self-improvement, like reading audiobooks along the way, or writing in your journal and thinking about your goals, it’s making powerful decisions in those states that allows you then to come back into your environment, into your life, at your job, wherever you are and live in a much higher level. And I think everyone who’s listening to this podcast, regardless of where they are in their career, they’re probably listening to this podcast because they want to upgrade themselves and they want to continue to upgrade their career.

And so I think spending plenty of time resting and recovering, first off, so that you can psychologically detach so that you can come back and be in flow while you’re at work so you can be super productive while you’re there, but also giving yourself plenty of time to totally just detach and reset and reconnect with yourself, and then make powerful decisions outside of your environment about who you want to be, what you want to do, and then jumping back into life, and actually living that out, that’s how you upgrade yourself, that’s how you become successful regardless of your career path or your job. You can become successful in any field if you give yourself plenty of time to self-improve. Stephen Covey calls that sharpening your saw.

Pete Mockaitis
And so when you talk about a powerful state for a powerful decision, so it sounds like you’re sort of contrasting that, as opposed to a state in which you have very narrow shallow distracted attention and feel constrained to not have a lot of time, energy, focus, attention to having that time, that rejuvenated space to rock and roll.

So that sounds like what you mean by powerful state because, well, I got Tony Robbins in my head right now. I was like, “Make your move chest,” you know, powerful state, peak state, jump up and down. So are you talking about a powerful state in the sense of, “I am so freaking excited,” as well as, “Hey, I’ve got sort of time and resources to apply the thought”?

Benjamin Hardy
I would say it’s slightly a blend of both. So there’s a really good book called The Power of Moments that recently came out by Chip and Dan Heath, and they talk about powerful moments whether they’re peaks or like pits. Pits are like hard moments where you’re facing hard truths, or just transition moments. Those are the things that generally are most memorable. Like when you think back on your life, you’re generally thinking about highs, lows, or transitions. Those are the kinds of things that are most potent in our memory.

Like with the Tony Robbins like how you get yourself into an elevated state so that you can make bigger decisions, there’s some good stuff in there but a lot of it is mostly just getting clarity, getting clear on what you want, reconnecting with what you want. And so I would say it’s kind of a blend of both.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So I would like to talk a little bit about this clarity and this journaling stuff here. So we talk about giving it the time, energy and attention and space required to touch base with what’s really important and what matters. But it sounds like you’ve also got some particular prompts or questions that you suggest pursuing in order to really zero in on that.

Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, definitely. Giving yourself the space to do it is important. For me, when I’m journaling, and read plenty of books on this. A really, really good one I would recommend is called Write It Down, Make It Happen written by some English professor of some sort. She was great.

But, basically, journal writing has been found to be helpful for a lot of reasons, one of them being emotional regulation. So a lot of people have a lot of suppressed emotions of some sort, you know, suppressed trauma. One of the best books on the topic that’s staring to get a lot of steam is called The Body Keeps The Score. It’s written by an amazing medical doctor.

But, basically, a lot of the reason people are stuck is because they have suppressed energy or emotions that they just don’t want to let come back up. And one of the main tools for writing in the journal is just to emotionally regulate, writing about what you’re dealing with, getting kind of understanding your emotions. There’s a lot of really cool research talking about it.

Well, so another one of the kind of myths that I try to slam in this book is the idea that you don’t necessarily have what I would call a fixed personality. In Western culture, because we’re so individualistic, we think that the personality you’re born with is the personality you are for the rest of your life, and that’s why we’re so focused on personality tests and stuff like that.

From kind of combining a lot of the stuff in the medical field about trauma, what usually happens when a person goes through a traumatic experience or even just stress, is that they start to – basically it’s what they would call, your personality becomes frozen. You stop living in the present, you stop integrating new experiences, and you kind of get stuck. Or you stop creating these peaks, pits or transitions, these challenging moments that gets you.

And so kind of going back to journaling, one of the reasons, so you want to write in it to break through some of those emotions, but you also want to write in it to purposely create some of these life-altering experiences. They don’t have to be these high-high peaks like the Tony Robbins style, although that’s what they call them is peaks. Tony didn’t make up that word. He just used it in his own ways.

But peak experiences come from Abraham Maslow. But, ultimately, I think you want to create those. And so in my journal, not only am I writing about the emotions and stuff that I’m dealing with, but also you want to think about what are the experiences you want to create that would allow you to continually upgrade as a person and so you want to strategize in your journal.

Not only write about the stuff that’s difficult but you want to write about the things you want to actually do and why you’re writing. Because what’s cool about writing pen and paper is that it allows you to focus on the topic but it also allows your mind to wander at the same time. And when your mind is wandering, it’s able to make connections to distant places in your memory or in your brain or just based on where you’re located in the environment.

And so while you’re writing you actually end up getting a lot of a-has and insights, or at least you come up with ideas that are things that you can then attempt to do, whether that’s you may get the idea to call your advisor or your boss and make a recommendation, or send that email, or an idea to maybe be more productive or proactive at work, it maybe an idea of how you can help a colleague.

It’s basically giving yourself the space to think and then maybe developing the confidence to actually try stuff you haven’t been trying so that you can actually do stuff to get different results.

Pete Mockaitis
And so that’s intriguing when you mentioned the pen and paper situation is helpful because you’re focusing on the thing, and yet also wander. So you’re saying you don’t get the same effect in a digital writing environment.

Benjamin Hardy
Nope. Not at all. No, writing with a pen and paper is so slow and kind of tedious that it allows you to wander in random places, that’s why journal writing is inherently random, you know what I mean? Often, for most people, it goes from topic to topic is because not only are you slightly focused on a topic but your mind is also like roaming around, and so it picks things up that you couldn’t pick up if you were so – I think it’s a better tool for creativity on a brain level for most people than just writing in an app.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, thank you, that’s a great distinction to tuck in here. Well, Ben, it sounds like we could cover a whole lot of goodies here. You tell me, is there anything else you really want to make sure to highlight before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Benjamin Hardy
No, we can just shift gears.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sure. Well, can you share with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Benjamin Hardy
Sure. I think I’ll just probably repeat the one I did before just to emphasize, “If you do not create and control your environment your environment will create and control you.” I guess another one that goes with that is just, “Willpower is for people who haven’t decided what they want to do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Benjamin Hardy
I really like Ellen Langer’s work honestly. She’s my favorite psychologist. She’s a Harvard psychologist. She wrote two really good books and has spent several decades studying. Her research is really non-conventional but her two books are called Mindfulness, and she’s kind of the godmother or the queen of mindfulness which her stuff is so different than the pop stuff that you see online these days.

She wrote a book called Mindfulness and she wrote a book called Counterclockwise. And her Counterclockwise study is so interesting. Basically, what she did was she took – do you know the Counterclockwise study?

Pete Mockaitis
I really don’t. Let’s hear it.

Benjamin Hardy
Okay. Okay. Cool. So she took a bunch of men in their 70s.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay. Go on.

Benjamin Hardy
Yeah, you know it?

Pete Mockaitis
We’ll see. We’ll see.

Benjamin Hardy
This study actually happened in the ‘70s, in the 1970s. So she took a bunch of like eight men in their 70s and took them to a place that they designed to look like the 1950s. And so it looked like they had old pictures, old magazines, and basically what she did was she had the men get dropped off by their families and then they spent the time reminiscing as if it was the 1950s.

And so they couldn’t talk about anything after the year 1958, and I think that this study actually happened in 1978, so it was like 20 years earlier. And so they had to pretend like they were the 50-year old version of themselves, and they had to pretend like that that’s who they were, so they had to talk about current events of the time as if it was real. They had to talk about their job as if that was who they were, and they spent five days doing this.

And then when the five days was up, and what’s interesting is that a lo of the people who came when they’re getting dropped off by their kids, they were coming in on canes and stuff, they had to, you know, they could barely – so they came in, some of them can’t even really walk. And what Ellen Langer and her team of graduate students did is they treated them as if – it kind of goes this whole idea of actors but it’s very different.

They treated them like human beings and gave them the context to act differently than they would’ve been expected to act because there’s so much interesting research about how, you know, I already talked about the Pygmalion Effect about how people respond psychologically based on the expectations of the environment, but their biological metrics also kind of are altered by the expectations of the environment, that’s a new and emerging field called epigenetics.

But, basically, what happened with the study was after like five or seven days, it was time for the study to be over, and these men scored totally different on their dexterity, their vision was better, their memory was better, some of them who had walked in on canes like walked out on their own two feet. It’s a very compelling study, and it’s called the Counterclockwise study, Ellen Langer.

Basically, that kind of opened the door for a lot of her research in studying how context and environment and expectations, and all of these things relate to identity. And so one of the big a-has that I would hope that anyone that hears this ideas takes is that who you are in one situation is not who you are in a different situation.

That is kind of a Western perspective and it’s a very fixed and rigid mindset and it totally ignores the power of context. So who you are in one situation is different from who you are in a different situation. Your personality is not fixed but it’s fluid, and it’s also based on environment, and your identity is not singular but it’s based on your situation.

And so once you kind of get those things then your level of responsibility becomes shape the environment that shapes you, or as Churchill would say shape the building, or whatever, shape your home that shapes you. That’s kind of, I think, ultimately where the responsibility comes when you start to understand these things.

And my prediction, because now that the fields of epigenetics and stuff, and neuroscience are becoming so popular and they’re realizing the power of environment, my prediction is that you’re going to see a big shift in a lot of the self-improvement writing, and it’s going to start to focus a lot more in environment because the science that’s been around in psychology for three decades is staring to become very compellingly clear in other fields now.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, intriguing. Thank you. And so you’ve list a few but could you also share with us a favorite book?

Benjamin Hardy
I think I’ll just stick with the recommendation I gave about The Body Keeps The Score, that’s a really good one right now for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And how about, is there a particular nugget or piece that you share that seems to really connect and resonate and get folks sort of quoting you back to you?

Benjamin Hardy
Yup, definitely. It brings all these ideas together. So, number one, it’s not your personality that shapes your behavior, it’s your behavior that shapes your personality. And, the behavior that leads you to certain environments, so that’s one key is your behavior shapes your identity. Number two is it’s not confidence that leads to success, it’s successful behavior that creates confidence. I think that those two are nuggets that people can internalize, they can actually make some big change in their lives.

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

Benjamin Hardy
I would point them to my book Willpower Doesn’t Work. they can read all my articles on Medium.com, they can check out BenjaminHardy.com, but, yeah, my big ask or my big challenge would be go check out the book Willpower Doesn’t Work.

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

Benjamin Hardy
Try as hard as you can to create these two types of optimal environments in your life, or what I would call enriched environments. And I think that it’s really good to really assess how much time you’re spending in these types of environments. Because your environment is either pushing against you or it’s pulling you forward. And if your environment is not pulling you forward, and if it’s pushing against you, then you’re going to have to use willpower.

So I think it’s easier actually initially to start with the rest and recovery environments. Like when you’re home, be home. Leave the distractions alone and actually do something engaging at home and disconnect from work, and then with those insights and rest that you’ll get, like actually make your job high level, make it high demand, take on more responsibility, create consequences through publicly saying when you’ll have stuff done, take on more responsibility.

I would say just create more enriched environments in your life through forcing functions like we’ve talked about or just through making your life more engaging. Those types of environments are very rare in today’s society. Most people are very distracted, very few people are fully on or fully off. And if you can create those environments it’ll allow you to do that. It’ll change your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, Ben, this has been so fun. I hope that book is a smashing success, and I wish you lots of luck in your writing and all you’re doing here.

Benjamin Hardy
Thank you, Pete. Seriously, thanks for being so accommodating and for taking the time. It means a lot.

Feb 28
0

267: Managing Self-Doubt to Tackle Bigger Challenges with Tara Mohr

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Tara Mohr says: "Playing big is being more loyal to your dreams than your fears."

Tara Mohr offers deep insight into how our fears and inner critic operate–and how to optimally respond.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The key drivers behind fear and self-doubt
  2. A handy Hebrew distinction for thinking about fear
  3. How to consult your inner critic–and inner mentor–wisely

About Tara

Tara Mohr is an expert on leadership and well-being. She helps people play bigger in sharing their voices and bringing forward their ideas in work and in life. Tara is the author of Playing Big: Practical Wisdom for Women Who Want to Speak Up, Create, and Lead, named a best book of the year by Apple’s iBooks and now in paperback. In the book, she shares her pioneering model for making the journey from playing small–being held back by fear and self-doubt–to playing big, taking bold action to pursue what you see as your callings.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Tara Mohr Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Tara, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Tara Mohr
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I learned something fun what about you, which is that as a child your dreams were analyzed each morning with your parents along with breakfast. What’s the story here?

Tara Mohr
Yeah, I think I was very fortunate to grow up with a mom who was very interested in psychology and self-improvement, and believed she could start conversations about those things with me as a young child. And so, at a very young age she would say, “Did you have a dream last night?”, and then she would ask me about it and she would explain to me that the different characters in the dream could be different parts of myself, or they were symbols. And she would get out a yellow pad and we would diagram it, and she talked to me about architypes. And that’s how I grew up; that was just one example of how she brought the kind of conversation you have on this podcast. I was really lucky to grow up with that as an everyday matter in my house.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool. Tara, last night I dreamt that I got shot by a gun twice in different places. One was in just a value priced hotel, and the other was in my childhood home, recovering from the first gun shot.

Tara Mohr
Okay, that’s very interesting. We could really dive into that. And how did you feel in the dream after that?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I didn’t like it. Actually I woke up at 4:30 am against my will, and I was a little riled up. It took a while to calm down and fall back asleep.

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Have you ever heard the Buddhist phase “the second arrow”? Have you heard that?

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, no. Tell me about it.

Tara Mohr
So it sounds very much related to what happened in your dream. So there’s this idea of, in life there are things that wound us, or there are feelings we have that are hurt, and that’s the first arrow. But then we often impose the second arrow of our reaction or the story that we make up about what happened, or the shame or guilt we have, or the self-judgments we have for having the feelings we have. So, that whole idea of being shot twice is interesting, and of course I would ask did something that hurt or wounded you, and then you went back in your literal childhood home or kind of in your family self? Was there something in the recovery process that wounded you further? That would be the first place I would look.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, nothing is leaping to mind, but I’ll definitely chew on that and see what happens as I explore, because we could spend a full conversation on that alone.

Tara Mohr
We could. And that’s actually dream interpretation, although part of my childhood is really not the center of my work now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us about your most recent book – Playing Big. What’s the main idea here and why is it important?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, I found when I went into the working world, I had come out of graduate school, I had had the benefit of a good education, I was an academically-oriented and achievement-oriented person, and I was very surprised to find that I didn’t feel confident in those first years in the working world, I didn’t feel comfortable sharing my ideas or my voice, and I also wasn’t really going for what I really wanted with my career. I was kind of in a job that was fine but not great, but didn’t really relate to the creative dreams or the entrepreneurial dreams that I had for myself.
And I was really curious about why I was getting so stuck around that. And then I knew I wanted to do work in the personal growth world, partly informed by how I grew up, and I got trained as a coach and I started coaching people just in the early mornings before I would go to work, or sometimes in the evenings, on the weekends, around my regular job. And I saw again and again actually at all stages of career my clients grappling with the same thing – self-doubt, not trusting their ideas and their voice, not really going for what they really wanted to do and believing there was some reason they couldn’t.
And I got really interested in this question of why do we play small and how can we play bigger? And my definition of playing big is it’s being more loyal to your dreams than your fears. So it’s whatever that means to you. It’s not necessarily anything that would look “big” in the eyes of the world, but you know it’s the real challenge, the real work for you to live that life or do that work. It’s an individual matter of discernment. And so I started to make that the focus of my coaching practice – how can people play bigger in that way, what are the tools and ideas that help us?
And I found there really were a set of things that made a transformational impact. And so that became kind of an arc that I would take my clients through, and then I started teaching large groups that all around the world, and then it became the topic of the book. And now for 10 years of really being immersed in working with people around defining what “playing big” means for them, and then most importantly doing the day-to-day practices and work to bring that vision into reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, I like that simple distinction then – more so about your dreams than your fears. And it really kind of puts into focus in a hurry, in terms of what’s my thinking right now, the patterns, who’s sort of got the upper hand. And so, I’d love to get your view then, when it comes to these fears or lack of confidence and self-doubt, what are some of the key drivers behind it? Why is that there and what should be done about it?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, I think that we all have a very strong safety instinct inside of us. And the safety instinct is a primal part of us that is a very deep part of our wiring to be on the lookout for any possible danger or threat, and make sure that we avoid it or we fight it, right? And our fight or flight instinct is there to make sure that if we see any possible risk to our survival, we go into fight or flight mode and we make sure we’re conquering in some way, or we’re avoiding.
And what we know now is that in our contemporary lives that same safety instinct gets misapplied to the emotional risks in our life. So, the safety instinct that should be very conservative and over-reactive if it’s trying to ensure the physical survival of people who are threatened by lots of predators or warring tribes or poisons, as our predecessors were – that instinct is now operating when we face everyday risks, like the risk of failure, the risk of feeling really uncomfortable, the risk of worrying.
We might feel like a beginner or feel clueless or be embarrassed or do something that really rocks the boat among our friends and family. And that safety instinct then tries to do everything it can to get us to stay in the comfort zone of the known or the familiar, and that includes making up a lot of narratives that feel believable but then aren’t true, like, “You aren’t qualified for that. Who do you think you are? You’re not enough of an expert in that. There’s too many other people doing that.” All those inner critic narratives we hear are really manifestations of the safety Instinct.
And the good news about that is it means that our inner critic is not going anywhere. And I know you have many listeners who are a little bit more in the earlier phases of their careers, and I think it’s so game-changing to understand early that confidence doesn’t actually come in an enduring way with experience.
There was just a study done through KPMG that looked at confidence levels among professional women, and they looked at how many women early in their career would say they’re confident, and then how many executive-level women, senior women, would say they feel confident in their work. And the difference between those two groups was only about 10%, in terms of how many indicated they were confident.
In other words, experience didn’t change it, because when you get into a new senior role – sure, you’re more confident about some things that you did a long time ago and you’ve been doing for a long time, but you have a new edge, and the voice of the inner critic and self-doubt comes up again because that safety instinct is perceiving more emotional risk, no matter what the situation. And so we’re really not looking to get rid of the inner critic or find some unfailing sense of confidence. The “playing big” process is in part about learning how do you hear your inner critic, let it be there, know it’s always going to be there when you’re doing important work, and just not take direction from it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So that is powerful, to assimilate that really inside your psyche there. The inner critic, as you said, it doesn’t go away – the KPMG study is pointing to that. And in a way, that kind of unmasks everything.

Tara Mohr
It does. And there are so many lies we tell ourselves. We tell ourselves, “Well, when I get to this stage in my career, then I’m going to feel confident.” We also tell ourselves, “If I get that additional certification or degree, then these uncomfortable feelings of self-doubt or uncertainty or fear will go away.” We tell ourselves, “If my weight changes and it’s this amount, then I’m going to feel confident getting up and sharing my point of view in front of a group.”
We fill a lot of things into that blank, and what we’re really doing there is making it convenient for ourselves to put risks on hold, put playing bigger on hold, put really stepping into our gifts and using our natural talents and gifts more, which is actually a very vulnerable thing – put that on hold thinking something is going to come along that’s going to bring confidence. But it doesn’t. And what we want to do is really learn to work effectively, live effectively with the voice of self-doubt, letting it be there but not taking direction from it, not letting it make our decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so powerful. And so then the implication is that you’re going to feel some lack of confidence and some self-doubt till the day you die, right?

Tara Mohr
Hopefully, right? And I say “hopefully” because it comes up most strongly when you are on the edge of your comfort zone. So for those who might be sitting there right now thinking, “I don’t really hear my inner critic that much”, I would ask you two things. One – make sure you’re looking across all areas of your life, because sometimes people think, “I’ve kind of got it down at work”, but then they’ll realize, “Oh my gosh, in my dating life, or in my parenting, or my body image” or, “I’d love to play music again but I have that voice in my head saying…” So look across all areas of your life.
But second – notice where that lack of inner critic is just kind of a dead-end part of your life, where you are not pushing yourself to an edge, you’re not doing what really matters to you, you’re not being loyal to those dreams. The inner critic will come up when there’s vulnerability, and so if you’re doing something that is 100% in your comfort zone and routine to you and not very important to you, you might not hear it, but that’s not a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you there. And so then, I also want to get your view – now, there’s a bit of a postponement factor – the way that the inner critic can sound, in terms of, “Hey, if this changes – if I lost the weight, if I got the certification, if I had a certain preparation – then I would feel confident.” And so now, for the most part that seems like that is often a lie. It is a deception that is destructive, but at the same time there are times in which no, you really are not prepared for that opportunity or that dream that you’re thinking about, and some action, some preparation is necessary to get there. So, I’d love your view on, how could we prudently discern the difference, and what’s a wise means of thinking through that, so that you get the valid prep steps done but you don’t delay yourself till it never happens?

Tara Mohr
Yeah, yeah, and it’s so funny that you are asking that specific question, because I just got off of our course call and we were exactly talking about this piece today. So there’s a few things I’d offer around that. One is, pay attention to the evidence that you’re getting from the world. Are you getting clear repeated information from the stakeholders that matter to you, that you need more preparation? In other words, maybe you want to offer a support group for moms, and you do a trial day where you invite a few moms in your community to come together, and you put together a great little program for them or whatever.
And then you hand out feedback forms and you notice there’s really a theme on the feedback forms, that people felt like they wanted more content or more expertise. And you hear again and again that your audience is asking for a different level of preparation and knowledge for you – okay, then you have some evidence. But most people never get to that stage of even asking their intended audience for information. They make up a story in their head and it’s usually a convenience story that allows them to hide a little bit that they need to do a lot more preparatory work. So that’s one piece – is it coming to you in real information and evidence from the outside world?
A second is, what’s the energy that you have or the beliefs that you have around that preparation? If you notice that in a very sort of joyful, light, abundant kind of energy you feel like, “I’m going to go learn more so I can do even more here, and this is going to be an enriching process for me” – that can be a great thing to follow. But if you notice that you’re feeling, “I don’t know enough until…” or, “There’s no way I could contribute any value until…” – the sort of like “This will complete me.” It’s like the equivalent of the romantic “He or she will complete me” feeling. Notice that, and that’s kind of a clue that you’re probably putting a story there that is more about fear than about the external thing itself.
And then a third thing I would offer is… A real issue in our culture is that we tend to put all the emphasis on expertise, and have a kind of cultural narrative that the people who contribute value around a topic are the “experts”. And that’s a view that’s really enforced by our educational system, reinforced by our educational system that says if you want to do something in X topic – if you want to do something around history – go get your degree in history. If you want to do something in serving kids, go get X degree. We’re looking for, what information do I need to absorb to be able to contribute value on that topic?
And that is certainly important, and you’re talking to someone who really values education and has a graduate degree and I believe it’s very important that we have those places to get expertise and we have experts in our culture. But on any given subject there are people contributing value as the expert. Let’s take for example breast cancer. So we have our experts who have PhDs in breast cancer treatment and prevention and rehabilitation and so on. And they’re playing a certain role.
But then we have other people – we have people who are survivors, who have different insights and a different sensibility and can contribute something different, in terms of sharing a message, inspiring people, improving upon services, innovating. The experts can never bring what they can bring.
And we have other people who I would call “cross-trainers”, who come from a completely different type of expertise – maybe they come from the design world or the business world or the activism world, and they can take their lens and their expertise and look at a new topic. And because they don’t have formal training in it and they’re bringing a fresh lens, they add value in a different way. And I think we really deemphasize those things.
So that’s another question when you’re discerning, as you’re asking, Pete – do I get more training? Part of it is, who do I want to be? Is my calling to be the expert on this, or is my calling to contribute value in a different way? And really we can’t discount how significant the value is that people contribute, who are coming from that cross-trainer or survivor perspective, not from the formal expert perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so much good stuff. Okay, so we’ve amassed a big lie, we’ve got a nice distinction here associated with, is preparation necessary, and some indicators how the inner critic can be a useful indicator, in terms of maybe pushing harder toward the edge. So, that’s a lot of great stuff. So now I’d like to zoom in sort of in the heat of battle. You’re trying to do some bigger things, and tell us, what are the particular fears that arise and your pro tips for responding to them?

Tara Mohr
Well, I’ll share a little bit about how I look at fear. And in the book I call this “a very old new way of looking at fear”, because I’m drawing here on two terms that are actually Old Testament, ancient Hebrew terms. These are two words that are used in the Old Testament to describe types of fear. And when I came across these I kind of fell off my chair, because I felt like they were so illustrative of what I was seeing with my coaching clients, but I had never heard about them before. So let me walk you through the two.
So the first word is “pahad”. And pahad is defined as the fear of projected things or imagined things. So this is when we imagine the worst case scenario of what could happen. It’s when we project the movie of how things might play out. And most of the fear that you and I and our friends and colleagues experience on a day-to-day basis is this, right? We are imagining a potential outcome and feeling afraid. It’s an anticipatory feeling; it is not usually about what’s happening right now, in this moment, but about what we fear could happen.
We know – not from the Old Testament but from all the biological and neuroscience research that has come since – that this kind of fear is generally over-reactive and misleading. We know for example that when we learn to fear a particular thing through conditioning – let’s say we get bitten badly by a dog and then the way the human response to that works is we learn to fear being bitten by a dog. We also know that we have a very generalizing response to that experience, so we won’t just become afraid of that dog; we might become afraid of dogs in general.
And in the foundational experiment that was done on this in the 1920s, they could actually see how by priming a baby to be afraid of a small white mouse… The baby initially was not afraid of the white mouse, but then they paired it with a very loud startling noise, and so then the baby started to associate the two and would see the mouse and would have a fear response. But then the baby also became afraid of a white rabbit and a white cotton ball and a man with a white beard.
This is what we’re also doing in our adult lives, right? Whether that’s you had one negative relationship experience and now you’re generalizing that a certain type of relationship or a certain type of person – you’re going to fear that. Or maybe you did something in one professional environment that was met with really painful feedback, and then you come to fear a whole set of associated things. So that associative quality of our fear response means that fear misleads us, because of course that white rabbit and the white beard and the cotton ball are harmless, as are many of the things we come to fear.
Another way fear misleads us is that we learn what to fear not just from our own experiences but also by watching what the people around us fear. And that of course happens in early childhood for a lot of us, and happens in problematic ways because many times the fears that those around us have are based on their own false stories. So all to say when we have pahad kind of fear, we do not want to believe it or let it be in charge; we need to know, “Okay, I’m in pahad, I’m in that anticipatory fear. It is probably not accurately guiding me and I want to shift myself out of it.” And you can do all kinds of practices, whether it’s calming your nervous system through meditation or shifting into another energy. I like whenever I’m afraid to just focus on, “What can I be curious about in this situation? What can I get really interested in?” Because if you’re in curiosity, you can’t simultaneously be in fear. So we always want to be looking at shifting out of pahad.
Okay, the second kind of fear that is mentioned in the Old Testament is something we really don’t talk about in our culture, and the word for that is yirah, is the ancient Hebrew word. And that has three definitions. Yirah is what we feel when we are inhabiting a larger space than we’re used to. It’s what we feel when we suddenly have more energy, when we come into possession of more energy than we normally have. So think about in your life, like what lights you up, what fills you with energy, your passions, using your gifts, telling your truth – whatever gives you that infusion of energy. That kind of exhilarated, scared feeling that can come with that – that’s yirah. And the third definition is this is what we feel in the presence of the sacred. So in fact when Moses is at the burning bush, yirah is the word used to describe how he feels when he’s at the burning bush.
So this was very significant for me to see as a coach and as a human being, because I understood that when I was working with people and they really told the truth about what they wanted, or they made a momentous decision that really resonated with the core of them, this was the feeling they felt. And it did include fear; it also had awe and exhilaration in it. And yirah is really different that pahad. We don’t need to shift out of yirah; we kind of need to learn to tolerate it and breathe into it and not find it such an electric infusion of energy that we block it or numb out or avoid the things that bring it. So that is the framework we use in the “playing big” model for working with fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so interesting when you say yirah, if I’m pronouncing it correctly. When you say “inhabiting a larger space”, this is kind of both literally and figuratively?

Tara Mohr
Exactly, exactly. So certainly when people step onto a bigger stage, speak to a bigger audience, maybe stand at the front of a bigger conference room, or whatever that might be. There’s literal spaces and then there’s the figurative, like I am reaching more people or I am being willing to take up more room. You can look at it that way as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool, because I really do find if I have a speaking engagement and I arrive there early, I actually love it. When I’m in the room and it’s completely empty but there are hundreds of seats there, there is a sensation – and now I’ve got a word for it, thank you – and I love it. It’s just so full of possibility. And it’s interesting you say “presence of the sacred” because it does often prompts me to pray – not because I’m terrified, but it’s just like there’s a bigness to it, and that’s just sort of a natural response for me. And that’s so cool and I think really eye-opening, because maybe my personality is I’m just like, “Oh yeah, I love that. Bring it on! I want some more of that in my life!” But you’re saying that for many of us, “Oh no, that’s just too big and I can’t even sort of abide there for very long without getting into maybe like a freak out type of sensation.”

Tara Mohr
Yeah, that’s what I find, that it’s both wonderful and it often feels wonderful when we’re in it, but there is a quality to it of, it’s a heightened state, it does take us out of our comfort zone a bit, it does have that component of fear or almost breathlessness in it. Sometimes it asks us to change, right? Like you could imagine that if you were in a different career and you were only doing speaking once a year or every 18 months and then you felt that feeling when you were speaking, when you were doing public speaking –that’s telling you something about your life and your career, which you may or may not want to hear at that point, because it might ask you to make some changes that require courage or trade-offs and so on. And so we do sometimes try and block the yirah or turn away from it.
I think also yirah, for a lot of people there’s kind of transcendence of the self that comes with it, and you may find when you’re doing that public speaking, you get into the zone, you get into flow state – you kind of lose the sense of Pete and you’re one with the words or you’re one with the audience. And then at the end it’s like, “Oh, where did I go? I went fully into that.” And that happens for a lot of people. The things that bring them yirah – they lose their normal sense of self while they’re doing them, and that’s that flow state, that kind of immersion, what Martin Seligman calls our “gratifications”. And that can be a little bit threatening to our ego sometimes, because our ego likes to be, “I’m Tara”, “I’m Pete”, “I’m in my mundane sense of self.” It doesn’t really like that transcendence of self, and so that could be another reason we resist it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Excellent, thank you. So then you say that’s kind of the different prescription then, in terms of with the projected things and fear. It’s a matter of, “Hey, slow it down, calm it down.” And with yirah the big stuff is being able to hold on for a bit.

Tara Mohr
Breathe into it, lean into it, notice what brings you it, pursue those things. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So now thinking more a bit about self-doubt and it popping up – you say that confidence is not the prescription or the answer to self-doubt appearing. Tell us a little bit more about that, and what is?

Tara Mohr
Yeah. Well, just as we were talking about before – if confidence isn’t coming and if the inner critic is always going to be speaking up when we are on the edge of our comfort zone, we certainly don’t want to wait on confidence to do our most important work. And instead of looking for aiming for confidence, I believe we need a new relationship with our self-doubt. And so that has a couple of components. The first is being aware when you are hearing your inner critic.
For so many of us the inner critic is the background noise that we live with, it’s the music that has been playing in our head for a long time, we don’t even hear it anymore, it’s the water that we’re swimming in. It’s like, “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve never been good at that kind of thing”, “Oh, those people over there are the ones who have it going on and I’m the outsider, “Oh, my body this and that” – whatever your inner critic lines are, many of them become just so habitual you don’t hear them anymore, or you hear them as those are true facts.
So step one here is starting to be able to notice and name your inner critic, so that in those moments you can say, “I’m hearing my inner critic right now.” Now, a lot of times that’s enough; it’s just like a mindfulness practice. That’s enough to let you go, “Oh, if I’m hearing my inner critic, then that’s certainly not the part of me I’m going to listen to.” But sometimes we do need a secondary tool, and there’s a whole range of things that can be effective – sometimes for people creating a character that personifies the inner critic so they can actually see, “Okay, my inner critic sounds like the perfect housewife”, or the stern old mean professor, and really getting a visual, so that when you are hearing your inner critic line you see it as coming from that character. And all of a sudden then there’s humor and you can have perspective on it.

Pete Mockaitis
What are some names that you’ve heard given to inner critics?

Tara Mohr
Oh gosh, all kinds of things. I feel like there was a year there where everywhere I would go and speak, the inner critic was always a Downton Abbey character. I’m trying to think of the name. The evil folks downstairs in Downton Abbey, and Harry Potter characters, and sometimes it’s a random name that comes to people and then I always have to hope there’s no one else in the class with that name. Sometimes they won’t write it down because it’s their colleague from down the hall and they don’t want that their worksheet from the program is seen by anyone later. So yeah, creating a character can be useful.
I really like using another tool, and I’ll share an example of how I used it for myself. When the Playing Big book was coming out, about six weeks before the publication date, I got an email from my editor at Penguin and she said, “Oh Tara, great news – we’ve piqued the interest of the editors of the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. They’d like you to write an essay based on Chapter 6 for their consideration for the Sunday Review.
So I see that and my mouth kind of fell open because I didn’t even know they were pitching them, or I had no idea that was even on the table. And my very first thoughts were, “Oh no, this is going to be a huge waste of time. I have an actual book launch to prepare for and a lot to do, and now I’m going to have to spend all this time writing this piece, which we know is never going to be published, because people who write for the Sunday Review section sound very grown-up and articulate in their writing, and Tara, you know you’ve never sounded that way.”
That was what the voice in my head said. And that voice and those thoughts pretty much stayed cycling that way for a few days. And then there were some other ones that got added in, like, “You can’t write about this for a co-ed audience because the book had been directed at women”, and, “There’s no way you can translate that chapter’s topics into an op-ed; it won’t make sense.” I had piling on every problem and excuse.
And on about the fourth day of this, somewhere there was a little graced thought that flew into my head that said, “You know, Tara, maybe that’s your inner critic talking.” Now, this is like a primary subject of the book that I had just written, but it took me four days because in our own minds the inner critic always sounds like truth. But on the fourth day… And that’s what I think we can get with practice – it might not be immediate but it didn’t take me six months at least. On the fourth day the voice said, “Maybe that’s the inner critic.” And of course internally my response was like, “No, no, no, it can’t be the inner critic. There’s no way you can pull off this piece. Your writing and your voice is just not mature enough.” But another voice said, “You know, this kind of sounds like an inner critic.”
And then I used this tool, which I love, which is to say, “Well, what does my safety instinct not like about this situation?” Because I know that my inner critic is always going to be a strategy of my safety Instinct. So, when I asked myself that question: “What does my safety instinct not like about this situation?”, the whole picture looked so different to me. I could suddenly see, “Wow, this is basically the worst nightmare of an emotional safety instinct”, because in one scenario here I’m going to write a piece that my editor thinks is not good and I’m worried she’s going to write back and be like, “It’s not good enough; I can’t pass it on”, and that’s going to be painful. Another scenario is the New York Times editors say that, and that will be painful because that will make me feel like I don’t measure up.
And even in the best case scenario, what’s my big reward? It’s that 3 million people are going to judge what I write and have opinions about it. And that’s scary for a part of us, for sure. And it can be especially, I would say, even more so often for women, because we are really socialized to not rock the boat and not do things that bring criticism. And I knew if I write an op-ed about some of these issues in the New York Times, they’re some controversial topics, there’s going to be a mixed reaction.
So then I could see, “Okay, I get it. I get what my safety instinct doesn’t like here.” And I’m going to lovingly parent that part of myself and say, “I get it. This feels really big and scary to you. We’re going to be okay. I’ve got this, and you’re allowed to be here with all these fears, but there’s another part of me that wants to be in charge here – the part that loves writing, that wants to get these ideas out, that likes taking a seat at the table in this way.” And that allowed me to proceed.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. That’s a great illustration, and talking about the second arrow – coming full circle here. You’re beating yourself up maybe, associated with, “I’m supposed to be the expert on this and I can’t even…” There may be a risk of some self-judgment even when you’re trying to apply the tools and are aware of this wisdom here.

Tara Mohr
Yeah, and luckily I do. That part I feel very clear on, and I would offer that to people too, that I never have felt I need to be an expert on these things and be flawlessly playing big in my own life. I feel the opposite – I feel the only way I can stay interested in these topics and have something relevant to say about them is if I’m really grappling with them and I am compelled around these topics, because I’m a fellow traveler. And so I proudly use all these tools myself and always try and work my own playing big edges myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, thank you. Well, Tara, tell me – is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some your favorite things?

Tara Mohr
I do want to mention inner mentor for a minute, because I think that’s such an important topic, and it’s really kind of the antidote to the inner critic; it’s the other voice in us that we talk about a lot in Playing Big. And the idea with the inner mentor is that rather than always seeking external mentors and looking for that person out there that has the answers for you, you come into contact with a sense of your own older, wiser self. And so in the book we do a guided visualization, so you can meet yourself 20 years in the future.
And what people find is they don’t just meet their older self, they sort of meet their elder, wise self, their authentic self. And then you can really consult and dialogue with that part of you as a mentor. And it is absolutely the best mentor you will ever have – all its answers are customized for you, it is always available to you. And so, that’s just been such a powerful tool and I want to make sure people know about it, because I’ve watched it be really, really pivotal for so many people now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so interesting, and I’m right now imagining an older, wiser Pete with a cane, sitting on a log on an autumn day.

Tara Mohr
Well, we can do that right now. Yeah, so one thing that you are finding a
dilemma right now – just ask him for his perspective on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. Well, so the silence there… Yeah, I was just thinking about, I just have a new baby. Yay! My first son.

Tara Mohr
Congratulations!

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And so, I’m just thinking about, what’s prudent, in terms of kind of growing business without spending crazy hours, in kind of a way that would be troublesome for a family living. And so, it was only a few seconds, but what I’m picking up is the notion that there’s no need to sprint, rush, rush, do more, is kind of a wisdom nugget I’m starting to unpack there.

Tara Mohr
Yeah, and it sounds like… So did he kind of give you a vibe or a perspective around this question that was a little different than what you were holding in your mind before?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, kind of, yes. Because my instinct is to, “Alright, strategize, let’s figure out what is our optimal point of leverage”, as opposed to having a bit more of a calm, spacious, patient view of the matter.

Tara Mohr
Yeah. So Pete, it sounds like you tapped in really quickly, which is wonderful. Even without doing a longer visualization you could just call up a picture of him and then connect with a voice that was different than that of your everyday thinking, and that’s exactly it. And usually that inner mentor voice is more spacious, it’s more calm, it’s more loving, and it does give us something really different. I can’t tell you how many times people will come with like, “I don’t know, is it A or B? Is it A or B? And I’m stuck between A or B.”
And they check in with their inner mentor for a second and there is a C option that comes that they didn’t perceive before, that feels really right and gives them kind of a new path forward. So, it’s an amazing tool and it sounds like you have it right there at your fingertips. For people who feel like they need a little more help or if you just want to have a deeper experience with that, there’s an audio that you can use and a written form also in the book. But it’s a great tool to tap into.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wonderful, and I’m glad you highlighted it before we moved on to the next phase. And it’s so funny, I’m tempted – you tell me, is this a good idea or a bad idea – when it comes to the visualization, one of my knee-jerk reactions was, “Oh, I bet there is a website where I can put a photo of myself and see what I look like when I’m old.” And it was like, “Hm, on the one hand that could be interesting and help bring about a picture, but on the other hand, maybe I won’t like the picture.”

Tara Mohr
Yeah. I would say, let your subconscious mind do it because it’s sort of going back to our dream conversation – you’re going to see where this person lives, how they live, how they carry themselves. You want your right brain and your intuition to bring all that to you, rather than some computer-generated literal thing. So yeah, I’d say let your mind’s eye dream it up.

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

Tara Mohr
Oh, sure. Well, one of my favorite quotes comes from Marianne Williamson, and it is, “Ask to be a representative of love.” So, in any situation that you’re feeling stressed about… And I have used this in professional situations, including before I was an entrepreneur – very traditional professional situations – with amazing success and results, like going into a tense meeting where there was a lot of conflict and my prayer and inner intention was, I want to be a representative of love in the room. And what that allowed me to do was get out of myself and my fear and my ego, and contribute so much more value and be such a more helpful, mature voice in the room. So that’s always for me like a mantra, a favorite quote, a favorite practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Tara Mohr
I have so many, but I just finished one that I think is outstanding and that your listeners will probably really enjoy. It’s called Einstein and the Rabbi. It’s by Rabbi Naomi Levy and it’s really a personal growth type book that is just very compelling and helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite habit, a personal practice of yours that helps you be awesome at your job?

Tara Mohr
One of my favorite habits is surrender, by which I mean remembering that I’m not supposed to figure it out all on my own. So when I’m feeling overwhelmed or unclear, I can very consciously say, “I don’t know. I don’t know what to do in this situation.” I physically open up my hands to the world, the greater space and say “Help!” And then I kind of go through my day with a sensitive listening for the insights and answers. And I find that that surrender and asking for help really changes everything.

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

Tara Mohr
I’m at TaraMohr.com. And the Playing Big book is available on Amazon and everywhere that books are sold.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Tara Mohr
I do. I would invite everyone to circle back to that idea we started our conversation with, and ask yourself are you being more loyal to your fears or your dreams? And what’s one thing you can do today to be more loyal to your dreams?

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Tara, thank you so much for sharing this. I wish you lots and lots of luck in your coaching and your book and all the cool things you’re up to!

Tara Mohr
Thank you! Likewise.

Oct 11
0

215: Expanding Self-awareness Using the Top Personality Frameworks with Anne Bogel

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Anne Bogel says: "Learning a little bit about yourself is not always easy but it is easy to just take one little step and it's totally worth it."

Anne Bogel provides a whirlwind tour across leading personality frameworks, providing tips on how to apply these insights along the way.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How the Myers-Briggs, StrengthsFinder, Enneagram, Five Love Languages, highly sensitive people enlighten you in their own ways
  2. How to use personality types to better your relationships
  3. Dangers of abusing personality frameworks

About Anne

Anne is a resident blogger, bookworm, and big-question-asker at Modern Mrs. Darcy. She wrote Reading People, where she shares her own experience with the personality frameworks she loves the most, the ones that have made the biggest difference in her own life. She walks you through 7 different frameworks, explaining the basics in a way you can actually understand, sharing personal stories about how what she learned made a difference in her life, and showing people how it could make a difference in theirs, as well.

Read More

Sep 18
0

206: Owning, Loving, and Growing Your Job with Lisa and Elizabeth McLeod

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Lisa and Elizabeth McLeod say: "Look at yourself like the CEO would look at you."

Mother and daughter team Lisa and Elizabeth McLeod share their mindset of taking the reins and leading yourself towards meaningful success at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Key questions to ask yourself for better self-assessment
  2. A mindset that will make you enjoy your job more
  3. Why to view your peers as colleagues instead of competitors

About Lisa & Elizabeth

Lisa McLeod is a keynote speaker, author, and consultant who espouses the “noble purpose” approach. She has served clients ranging from Apple to Peterbilt Trucks. She is the author of four books on leadership, sales, and personal development. She is also the sales leadership expert for Forbes.com, and she has appeared on NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, Oprah.com, and Good Morning America.

Elizabeth McLeod is the vice president of client services at McLeod & More, Inc. Elizabeth manages projects for clients like Google and Hootsuite.

Read More