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KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - Page 3 of 22 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Sep 28
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902: How to Ensure Great Career Fit with André Martin

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André Martin discusses how to avoid wrong career fit and ensure your career aligns with your needs.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What right fit and wrong fit look like in practice
  2. Four powerful questions to know if a job is the right fit
  3. Why it’s OK to have a boring job

About André

Dr. André Martin is an organizational psychologist and author of the book Wrong Fit, Right Fit – Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever. He has spent 20+ years as the Chief Talent Officer of iconic brands such as Mars, Nike, Google, and Target. Now, acting as an operating advisor, coach, and consultant, André continues to counsel leaders and founders to peak performance. When André isn’t working, he can be found with his wife and two English labs on the rain-soaked trails around Portland, Oregon.

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André Martin Interview Transcript

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

André Martin
Hey, thanks, Pete. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. I’m fired up to get into some wisdom from your book Wrong Fit, Right Fit: Why How We Work Matters More Than Ever. But, first, I think we need to hear a little bit about your mushroom farm. What’s the story here? You do that on top of everything else?

André Martin
I do it on top of everything else, although I’m not in the day-to-day operations of it. So, the farm was a passion project by some buddies of mine that grew up in southern Missouri, and the concept behind the farm is we actually grow mushrooms in empty grain silos to the tune of about 20,000 pounds a week.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! How many grain silos does it take for that volume of mushrooms?

André Martin
That’s one grain silo.

Pete Mockaitis
One grain silo?

André Martin
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! One of my first jobs, actually, was I audited, like, local municipalities and farms. I was a little auditor intern for an accounting company. And I had the privilege of getting to climb up grain silos to drop a measuring tape to assess the inventory value of the grain in the silos on the balance sheets of these farms. So, I’m quite familiar with grain silos. And I’m thinking that sounds somewhat lucrative based on the price point of mushrooms and the cost point of a grain silo. Am I overlooking something, André?

André Martin
I think you’re overlooking the length of time it takes to get it right consistently when it’s the first time it’s been done. So, the team has been at this for about four and a half years, and we’re still trying to make it consistent enough that we can guarantee that we can continue to make that kind of production month over month over month. So, we’re getting close. Hopefully, someday it’s lucrative and, even more importantly, I hope it helps us get rid of food deserts around the world someday. That’s the goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s so clever. And so then, do I have multiple, like, layer cake inside that grain silo? Like, how many stories, I guess, of mushrooms am I looking at?

André Martin
Think of it more like a helix.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

André Martin
It’s gravity-based. And so, what we’re really trying to do is remove a lot of barriers to mushroom farming, one of which is the cost to do indoor farming is significant but the cool thing about mushrooms is they thrive in dark and humid environments. So, these grain silos provide a really great sort of architecture to do some cool work off of. And, again, the team has been at it for a while and we’re learning every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious to hear, what is, in your opinion, the most delicious species of mushroom and recipe for that mushroom to be in?

André Martin
Oh, that’s a great question. So, I grew up in southern Missouri, and I remember one of my best friend’s mom, Ruth Lorman, made beef stroganoff, and that was your basic button mushroom done up with a lot of cream, a lot of goodness, and a lot of heart. So, that’s my best memory of a mushroom dish. What about yourself, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. I’m thinking about my buddy, Father Jim Herbert, and we went to get some morel mushrooms, and they were just very simple. We just grilled them up and had them as like a side dish in the middle of the rest of the meal, and there’s life for you.

André Martin
Oh, that’s great. I love them. They’re super good and great for you, so we hope they’re around and an even bigger food in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m glad we covered that, André. We got it now.

André Martin
Yes, sir.

Pete Mockaitis
We set the record straight on mushrooms and grain silos. Now, let’s hear about Wrong Fit, Right Fit. Any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you guys made when researching and putting this together?

André Martin
Quite a few. I think I’d start with the first one, is that, hey, when we looked at the issues around employee engagement today, we know that Gallup tells us there’s an estimated $7.9 trillion of lost productivity due to disengagement. A lot of the time, we like to think that it’s good or bad culture. It’s a toxic environment or it’s an engaging environment.

And the truth is it’s a lot more nuanced than that. So, when we talked to the hundred or so interviewees that we interviewed for the book, one of the things that came out really quickly is this idea that every company starts off wanting to create a great experience for their employees. They want to be a great place to work. It’d be counterintuitive to create anything other than that.

And so, if you start with that truth, the thing that we found that’s most surprising is that, for about 60% of people in the company, they’re pretty happy. Maybe not totally engaged but they’re content. And then for the other 40% who have the same skill set, the same background, the same affinities, they struggle, it’s like they’re slogging through mud.

And so, really one surprising idea is that there’s probably not a single best practice because every company has a different way of getting work done day to day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, then when it comes to fit, there’s multiple styles, approaches that can work. How do we think about fit in terms of which one is good for me or not so good for me?

André Martin
Yeah, Pete, it comes down to a couple of things. The obvious things that align us to an organization are things like purpose, values and mission, the team I’m working on, the manager, the job that I have. But one of the things that came up in the book, too, was there’s this whole piece of information below the surface, which is how the company works day to day. How do we solve problems? How do we make decisions? How do we manage conflict? How do we develop people and give feedback? How do we gather and convene? What’s our relationship with time? How does information flow?

And those were the things that when we talked to talent, they were saying when the company works like you like to work in those areas, it’s easy. It’s like writing with your dominant hand every day. When it doesn’t, it can feel hard, it can be stressful, your quality goes down, you lose confidence and competence, and you end up in a place that’s really hard to go to work every day. It’s sort of the origin of the Sunday Scaries in many ways.

Pete Mockaitis
So, could you share with us an inspiring story of someone who went from feeling like their job was the wrong fit to the right fit? And what did they do? And what did they discover?

André Martin
Well, I’ll start with a story that’ll answer that question sort of in the other direction, so someone who was looking from a wrong fit experience back at what actually was right fit for them. And this was a creative marketer, and one of the places that this person started their career had very standard and consistent ways of working, so those things we mentioned: how they collaborate, how they socialize ideas, how they solve problems.

And early in their career, this person felt like that was constraining. And one of the insights from this story that was really interesting is, looking back now, what they said is, “Because I didn’t have to worry about how to present an idea, back then and that right fit experience, it was actually a pure execution or experience of my craft. That is, I was being able to do what I do best every day because all my creative energy was flowing to the thing that I do really well, as opposed to how work gets done.”

And that was sort of the big insight from the story, is this idea that your creative energy is always flowing. But for many people in wrong fit experiences, it’s flowing to how work gets done as opposed to what they’re really gifted at in this world.

Pete Mockaitis
So, can you give us some examples of some of this “how work gets done” stuff?

André Martin
Yes. So, think about it this way. There are some organizations that socialize ideas via beautiful decks. You create PowerPoint slides with wonderful images and pithy poetry. And then there’s other companies that do that via two-page memos. Amazon is one of the most popular examples of that. And then there’s others that expect really deep research papers, which is something we saw a lot at Google when you’re working in technology and machine-learning. And so, if the way that ideas get socialized don’t match the ways that you prefer to do work, it just feels harder than it should.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so then, I’m curious, how do we go about clearly identifying what an organization does on these dimensions? And what is our preference to really determine: do we have a wrong fit or a right fit and making some adjustments where we can?

André Martin
Yeah, Pete, this is one of the most interesting parts of the book. And, again, through the interviews, one thing that became really clear is that work decisions are one of the most high-value decisions we make in our lifetime. Think about it this way. We spend about 13.5 years of our adult lives at work. That’s every second, every minute, every year. It’s a huge chunk of our lives. It’s actually second only to sleeping if you think about the distribution of our time as adults. And yet we tend to make those decisions about where we work on very little information.

The interview processes, if you think about it, they’re more like first dates than they are really getting under the hood to understand what the reality is going to feel like. And if you’ve ever had a first date, I know I had many before I met my wife, although you feel that excitement on the first date, by the second, third, fourth, or fifth date, things change as you get to know the person.

And what we’re finding in companies today is that’s happening more and more regularly to talent. They get recruited with this idea of what the company is going to feel like, what the job is going to be like, and then when we get into the company on the first day, it feels radically different. And it’s in that sort of discrepancy that we’re seeing a lot of engagements start to suffer.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, what is your recommendation for a prudent, practical research approach by which we can learn the stuff before it’s too late, and we go, “Uh-oh, wrong choice”?

André Martin
I think there’s a few things I’d say, and as a psychologist, I’ll start with some of the cognitive things. First, you have to understand that there’s a few things that are at play as you’re making a big decision. And that could be the cereal you’re going to buy in the grocery store, to the house you’re going to buy, to the job you’re going to take.

First and foremost is we tend to be very influenced by successful brands and successful companies. And there’s a phenomenon in social science called BIRGing. It’s called basking in reflected glory. It’s this idea that we are going to buy into things that have had past success. And so, one of the first things I’d say to talent is just watch that. The biggest coolest brands might not be the best place for you to work.

The second thing that happens is, once you open up a job description, and you get in a recruiting process, you have to realize you’re in a marketing effort. Think about it. Every talent that is showing up for an interview, we show up on our best behavior. We’re first-date ready. We have scripted answers. We’re dressed in our best outfits. We’ve thought about what we’re going to say and how we want to present ourselves. And the same is true for the company.

And so, instead of getting a realistic idea of who each other is going to be like on a random Tuesday morning, we actually are seeing us at our best, which we know isn’t necessarily who we are day-to-day. And the third thing, from just a cognitive standpoint, is this idea of confirmation bias. Because talent is so motivated to find a job, to get the job, to work at a great brand, we tend to pay attention to only a small sliver of the available information given to us, and most of that’s subjective and from the internal source of the company, career sites, recruiters, the interviewees.

And so, the first thing I tell talent is, “Make sure you’re using a broad set of information. Pay attention to what happens in the interview. Pay attention to what’s on the website, but go and find videos. Talk to people who have recently left the company. Look at annual reports. Find all the public information on the company to sort of round out what you’re seeing.” And my rule of thumb is if it doesn’t show up in three sources, really ask yourself if it’s likely going to be true day-to-day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so could you perhaps walk us through a research process by which someone is assessing what’s up with their prospective employer, and they have a few specific questions they want answered, and how they might get after them via these different sources of information?

André Martin
That’s great, Pete. The first thing I would tell any talent at the start of a process is the first thing you should do is not open a job description and apply for a job. The first thing you should do is take some time to really understand who you are, how you work, what you’re solving for right now, the kind of life you’re trying to build, what kind of leader or manager you work really well for.

And in the book, we have this set of excursions that really helps talent to do that. When we were talking in the interviews, one of the things that talent told me when we asked them, “When did you know it wasn’t a right fit?” And they said, “If I’m being totally honest, I knew it in the interview but I chose not to pay attention to those things.” And so, the first step is make sure you know who you are, how you work, and what you’re solving for.

The second step is to really do a lot of external research on the company. So, before the interview happens, don’t just depend on what the company sends you. Look at all those assets we talked about: annual reports, and videos of leaders, and past folks that have worked there, and really get a good sense on, “What does this company look like day-to-day?”

And then when you’re in the interviews, there’s a few key questions that will help you sort of discern a little bit more about what it’s going to be like to work there, and it’s hard because these are first dates. So, a few of the questions I really like, the first one is, “What’s the profile of the person that’s really successful here?” That gives you a sense on… and ask the follow-up question, “How do they show up for work? What does it look like when they’re in a team meeting?” And really get at, “What’s the success profile? Who’s really successful?” And ask yourself if that’s you.

The second thing I like to have people do is have someone walk you through a-day-in-the-life. So, in an interview, have them pull up their calendar and walk you through what’s on their calendar for the day. This gives you a sense on what’s important, what they’ll be working on, how they think about time, what’s their meeting cadence, all those kinds of things.

And then I also love to ask the question, “What’s the reputation of the team? And what’s the reputation of the leader?” because, again, that tells you where the team is going to be and what you can expect of some of the work that you’re going to have to do upon arriving there. And we have, again, about 10 or so questions in the book that help talent get a little bit deeper into how the company works.

Pete Mockaitis
And is the timing for these questions, is it your recommendation that it’s sort of right there in the interview, “Do you have any questions for me, André?” Like, right there?

André Martin
You know what, it’s really funny, Pete, I love the way that you bring that up because we often feel, in an interview process, like we’re being interviewed. And the truth is that you have to be at your best as an investigative journalist inside an interview process. And so, in those last five minutes, which we all get to, “Hey, André, do you have any questions for me?” often we don’t take advantage of those.

We ask a layup question, something that makes us look good or sound good. And this is your moment to really dig in and get to know the company at a deep level. So, I always would say have two or three really strong questions, and use that time. And then if you don’t get them answered, ask for more time because, again, this is one of the highest-value decisions you’re going to make in your life, and you don’t want to just be dependent on the small bit of narrowed information that you get from the company through the process.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m curious, do you recommend, from a timing perspective, we’ve got the “Do you have any questions for me?” right there, first interview or second interview or third interview, and then there’s a whole another zone of time in which, ideally, you have the offer, and you’ve not yet said yes to the offer.

And it’s funny because, as I’m imagining this, I sort of think about, like, “Ooh, that’s the time when I can really just get after it in terms of my investigations and talking to people and all of that.” And so, how do you think about the timing and the sequencing? Does one line of investigation work better at one time versus another? Or, can we just do all the investigating all the time and it’s all good?

André Martin
Well, here’s what I would say, is those early questions you ask in an interview, you absolutely want to be able to convey that you’re both highly interested in the role, and also that you’re a very curious person. And so, I think it’s okay to ask some very pointed, very high-impact and meaningful questions during the interview. It can actually make you look like a better candidate.

The other thing I would say to you, and you mentioned it, Pete, there’s that moment after you get the offer and before you take it, and then there’s also a moment after you take the offer and before you start, where often we just sit and breathe, we just sort of go, “God, I got the job. I’m so happy and my job is over.” I would tell any candidate that that’s the time when you really start increasing your efforts, both so you can be really ready to onboard and get to high productivity quickly.

But the second reason is because this is your time to really find out more and more about the truth of the company. And a couple places I like to look is I almost always reach out to my LinkedIn network, and look for people that I know that have recently worked at that company but might’ve just left because they’re going to be willing to sort of tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the experience and being there.

And because they’re in your network, or second in your network, they’ll usually pick up the phone, and most people want to talk about their past experiences. So, that’s a really good place to do some digging if you don’t feel comfortable about doing it in the interview process itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And these high-impact questions, we talked about a couple, like a-day-in-the-life, let’s see the calendar. Can you just give us bullet after bullet after bullet of some of your favorite high-impact questions you like to ask?

André Martin
Yeah. So, I talk about the person, what’s the profile of success, that’s a big one. A-day-in-the-life I do love. The reputation question is really important. And often, if you’re doing interviews with people outside of your function or your team, they’ll tell you sort of what the reputation is. I like to also get after, “What are going to be the two or three most important pieces of work I’ll do in the first 12 months?”

Because here’s the deal, Pete, as we know that job descriptions, they are a litany of bullet points about all the possible things you could do in a job really for the rest of your life. And that’s very different than what you’re going to be asked to do in the first 90 to 120 days of being there. Often, what we find is if this is the job description, this big long list of all the things you could do, often the job that you get is going to be a very narrow set of those things plus a lot of additional duties that never showed up in the job description.

So, I like to ask that question for two reasons. One, it’s important to really get out, “What is this role in reality day-to-day?” The second reason is that you want to make sure that the near-term deliverables fit areas where you’re best in class because the easiest way to be a success in a company early on is to be given deliverables that are in your wheelhouse or they’re something you’re really good at.

And when I’m looking at a job, if I look at the near-term deliverables, and I say, “Yeah, I can do those things,” but I’m not best in class at it, I might sort of think twice about taking that job because you’re transitioning into a new company, you’re building a brand-new reputation, a brand-new network, and people are going to start looking at you to say, “What kind of talent do we have?”

And if you’re doing work that you’re not great at, it can sort of cause you to create maybe a less impactful reputation than you could’ve otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, let’s fast-forward in time, and so we’re in a job right now. As we think about fit, are there any telltale signs that it’s just like, “Yes, this fit is fantastic” versus “Oh, no, this fit isn’t quite right” that maybe is escaping our immediate conscious awareness at the moment?

André Martin
There’s a few. And so, one of the parts of the book that resonates, at least for me, personally, is the metaphor of what it feels like to be in a wrong fit experience. One of my favorite quotes from the book is someone mentioned they’re in the wrong fit when it felt like everyone else had a secret decoder ring for success except for them.

They were seeing people in the company that looked like them, acted like them, had the same experiences as them, had the same job, and they were excelling, when this person go, “Something just doesn’t feel right.” And so, one of the ways I think about it is if you’ve ever tried to write with your non-dominant hand, that’s what it feels like to be in a wrong fit situation.

It’s harder than it should be. You’re frustrated. You’re stressed. Your quality of work isn’t where it used to be. You start questioning whether or not you’re good enough. And I think your first instincts in that is if work feels hard, you might want to think about whether or not, long term, this is going to be a fit for you.

Some of the telltale signs are things like, “I tend to work harder. I’m putting in more and more hours because I’m trying to be impressive.” That can be a sign many of the interviews talked about, “When I didn’t have a right fit, when it was a wrong fit, I tried harder. I spent more time.” And that’s because you’re trying to make up for fit in effort, and it just doesn’t work out that well.

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

André Martin
The only other thing I would say is one of the aspects of fit that I find really important is this idea that sometimes we mistake the excitement for something new with the comfort that comes from a committed relationship. And so, again, the analogy that’s really great is if you compare a first date to being married or being in a long-term relationship, a first date is all dopamine. It’s excitement. It gets your blood flowing. It’s the unknown. All those things produce dopamine which is this really powerful neurotransmitter that causes us to react in a certain way.

There’s a very different neurotransmitter that’s activated in long-term committed relationships, and that’s oxytocin. And what oxytocin feels like is it feels like more like a deep hug, like this really warm pleasant feeling. And what I worry about is, since we’re in this world where everybody’s infinitely browsing, we’re all looking for greener grass, we can sometimes mistake comfort for boredom, for lack of momentum, and we will jump ship from right fit experiences in search of dopamine or excitement when we really had maybe a place we were thriving at and we just mistook the feeling we had for something other than what it was.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, André, that’s powerful stuff. It’s funny, as we speak, just yesterday, I started listening to Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation, which I’m digging. I recommend it. And you’re right, that idea, especially if we’ve become so acclimated to stimulation nonstop in every format from social media to games or alcohol, you name it, that you think, “My job is boring. I got to go find something more exciting.” And yet if our job is boring, as opposed to horrific, like, that might be a good thing.

André Martin
Pete, it’s a great thing. If you think about where creativity comes from, where inspiration comes from, having a firm grounding, a sense of comfort to explore, that’s the basis of what Amy Edmondson talks about in terms of psychological safety. That is the feeling of comfort that we often are like, “I’m bored. I got to go do something else.”

And I looked at some of the stats data that are out there, 29% of employees leave their company after their first promotion. That’s stats from ADP. And 70% of Gen Z cited that they were potentially thinking about leaving their current job inside of 2023. And so, you just get this feeling that everybody has sort of mistaken this idea of comfort for boredom, and we’re jumping way too fast.

And transitions take effort, right, Pete? Like, the thing that we know psychologically is every time you move companies, every time you hop jobs, you are having to rebuild your understanding of how a company works, you’re having to rebuild the understanding of the products and services that are offered to customers, you’re having to rebuild your social network, you’re having to rebuild your reputation.

And, therefore, if you think about, in every transition you go through, your creative energy in that first year, it goes to rebuilding those things, not to your craft so you’re probably getting better at transitions but you’re not actually getting better at the thing that you’re trying to do as your craft, day to day in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, André, this is probably a whole other conversation but how do we get better at being okay with being bored in our careers or, I guess, anything?

André Martin
One of my strategies, Pete, is I do a lot of self-reflection about what I’m solving for. And so, I go back, not to make this about the book, but those excursions in the book are personally made, because the one thing we don’t do enough in this high-information, high-excitement, high-dopamine world is we don’t stop, take a deep breath, take three steps back, and open our eyes really wide, and ask the question, like, “What am I solving for? What am I trying to build in terms of my life? What do I want out of my job? What kind of career am I building?”

There’s three different types of careers, for instance. Like, you can build a career around craft, company, or cause, but you can’t do all three of those things. What kind of person do I want to work for? What do I want my life to be 10 years from now? And what’s really interesting is, if you do that work, you can sort of start to see the signal in the noise, and you will, I guarantee it, look at your current experience very different, and you will look at every experience that comes after very different as well.

But we have to do that work a lot more often than we used to because there’s just an onslaught of greener grass coming at us every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you expand upon this notion of craft, company, and cause? You say we can’t have all three.

André Martin
Well, that’s the unicorn. I’m not saying you can’t but it’s really difficult. What I try to tell people is each of those careers has a very different trajectory and a very different choice you make around the types of jobs you take. So, I’ll give you, for instance, let’s say you’re of company. I don’t know what your favorite consumer brand is but let’s say you’re working for this company that you just believe in your heart and soul in what it stands for, and the products it brings to bear.

You want to be at this company for the next 25 years because you love it so much. I would tell you that your career then needs to have as many different jobs and as many different functions as possible because the strength of being part of a company as a career is that you know the system and the people in the system better than anybody else.

Right now, very different than craft. If you think about craft, craft is about this question of saying, “I want a career that ensures that I will be the best in class in a very narrow and specific area.” To be the best in craft in any specific area, let’s say my area. I was a chief talent and learning officer, and started my career in leadership development.

To be one of the best in leadership development, it’s really hard to do that and stay at a single company, because if I stayed at a single company, I see one approach to those things. If I’m at multiple companies over a career, I see five, six, or seven different ways of doing it, and, therefore, I have a lot more tools to use as I develop those assets. So, if you’re doing a career around craft, it’s really important that you think about having as many different systems as you can, within reason, to see how to do this in many different industries, in types of companies, and even sizes of companies.

And then cause, cause is the ultimate. Cause is all about, “I have this really big injustice, opportunity, or thing I’m trying to solve for in the world.” And when you have a career around cause, you really want to be at the middle of whatever is happening in that space. So, again, if you’re wanting to solve for the environment, get to a place where the environment is at risk. You want to save the oceans on the coast of California, you want to save the rainforest, but you need to be in the middle of where the action, where the thought leaders are, where all the discussions are happening. And that’ll take you wherever that movement is sort of in the world.

And so, my younger brother spent a lot of time in the Peace Corps, and he was of cause, and he went to Kazakhstan for a longer part of a year and a half because he wanted to help drive education in developing countries, and so he was definitely of cause. But I would say this, it’s not impossible to have all three, but you create very different experiences and design very different careers based on what you’re really making primary.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a very helpful framework there. And it’s nice how it seems like, “Oh, those are the opposite in some instances,” in terms of, like, craft and company, and I know folks who have gone both ways. I’m thinking about web design or systems architecture, it’s like, yeah, they probably know that better than, I don’t know, 99.99% of humans on the planet because they’d gone deep into it. And then once they’ve exhausted the learning that organization can give to them, it’s like, “If craft is your thing, then it’s time to move on.”

And, likewise, I’ve got buddies at Nike, that was their dream, and they’re still there from college to now because they think it’s just the coolest thing ever, in terms of, like, the shoes and the sports and the athletes. It’s so cool, and, likewise, he has been in a lot of different roles, and that makes you all the more valuable and hard to fire in terms of, “This guy is the glue who knows about the manufacturing, and about marketing, and about the new product design, and then the athlete partnerships.”

It’s, like, you think twice before, your next cost-cutting endeavor, you slash that guy because you’re going to miss a lot of the good connectivity that makes a behemoth of an organization function smoothly.

André Martin
Pete, I couldn’t say it better myself. And what I love about your description and your story there is, often people who are of company, they’re not maximizing their ability to be invaluable because they’re not thinking about their job progression as, “Wow, I need to broaden my network. I need to broaden my experience. I need to know every corner of this company.” And that’s the way you protect yourself and allow yourself to be invaluable over time if you truly are in love with the place, like Nike, which many are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re in Oregon. So, you’ve seen that before, I bet.

André Martin
That’s right, I have.

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

André Martin
One of my favorite quotes is “Joy cometh in the morning.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is hopeful on those days.

André Martin
I’m a hopeful person, Pete, 100%.

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

André Martin
It’s a new one. So, there’s a recent study by MIT, it just came out with a company called Culture 500, and they did this really cool study on culture. And what they did is they took the espoused values of all these companies that are high on culture, and they grabbed those from annual reports, and videos, and communication with the company, and then they weighted them.

And then what they did is they took those espoused values, what companies said they were about, and they compared those with the felt experience of employees on the employee review sites. And the net of the study was there’s zero correlation between the two, that what companies are espousing they stand for isn’t necessarily what’s showing up in what the felt experiences for the employees that are part of their company.

Now, that study is fraught with a little bit of a hardship because we know that the employee review sites aren’t necessarily all the employees but it gives you a good indication that, “Hey, often what we’re talking about that’s important isn’t necessarily what’s showing up in the day-to-day lives of our employees as they work for us.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I hope there’s at least a few companies that have a good match up, but, across the board, they weren’t seeing it.

André Martin
They weren’t seeing it. And I find that really fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And a favorite book?

André Martin
Dedicated by Pete Davis. He has written a book on how to get through this crisis of commitment that we’re living in the world. And I really like his perspective that it’s not a loss cause. We can still be committed to things. We just have to stop infinitely browsing as much as we currently are.

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

André Martin
Favorite tool, I have been recently using Arist.co. It’s a text-based learning platform that allows the small micro doses of learning to hit you every morning via your phone, and then you can have the option to go deep or wait until the next day’s lesson. And it just allows learning to be spread over a long time, and it’s with me every day in the flow of work.

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

André Martin
Favorite habit, this is more of something I did to be awesome as a husband and a father. We practice no-text Sundays. So, from the moment all of us got out of bed until 3:00 o’clock, we would turn off our phones and our technology, and make sure that we were eye-to-eye, knee-to-knee, elbow-to-elbow out in the world. And that was a pretty fun way to put technology aside just for a little while, and have some fun as a family.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

André Martin
Yeah, this nugget that resonates for me is that “Opportunity is infinite, and human energy is not.” So, really try to spend every day at your highest and best use because we just don’t have enough time.

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

André Martin
I’d point them to www.WrongFitRightFit.com and also to a newsletter that I run called Monday Matters. It’s meant to be practical tips to make your week better, and that’s at MondayMatters.substack.com.

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

André Martin
I do. I think my final challenge is back to what we talked about, because it’s one that is core to why I wrote the book, which is just be careful not to mistake comfort for boredom. The grass is inherently often not greener, and comfort is something that allows us to be at our best, and so cherish it if you have it. If you don’t, I believe it’s out there, and you can find it if you keep looking.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. André, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and many good fits.

André Martin
Hey, thank you much, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Sep 07
0

896: Finding More Success and Joy in Everything You Do with Suneel Gupta

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Suneel Gupta shows how to find more joy and success every day by drawing from the wisdom of ancient Indian traditions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The eight essential practices for daily success
  2. How to reset your energy in just five minutes
  3. Why you achieve more with only 85% of the effort

About Suneel

Suneel Gupta lost his Dharma and then found it again. He is the founding CEO of RISE and co-founder of the Gross National Happiness Center in the United States. As an author, a visiting scholar at Harvard Medical School, and host of a hit documentary series, Suneel studies the most extraordinary people on the planet to discover and share simple, actionable habits to lift our performance and deepen our daily sense of purpose. His work has been featured by major outlets including CNBC, TED, and the New York Times.

Resources Mentioned

Suneel Gupta Interview Transcript

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

Suneel Gupta
Hey, Pete, it’s nice to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into the wisdom of your book, Everyday Dharma: 8 Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do. But first, I love, in your bio, it says, “Suneel Gupta lost his dharma and then found it again.” Tell us this tale, and those who aren’t familiar, what does the word dharma mean?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah. So, you may have heard dharma used in different contexts. Usually, when I talk to people, they’ve kind of heard the word before, but not exactly sure, or they’ve heard different definitions of it. Sometimes people refer to dharma as a purpose, sometimes they refer to it as a calling. If you go back to one of the original definitions of dharma, that takes you to the Bhavad Gita.

And the Bhagavad Gita is the ancient storied scripture from India which defines dharma as your sacred duty. And then the question really becomes, like, “Duty to what? Duty to whom?” And the answer really is duty to yourself. It’s duty to that fire that is burning inside of you, that some people call that your gift, some people call that your calling.

My grandfather, who first introduced me to the word dharma on his porch in New Delhi when I was seven years old, referred to dharma as your essence. It’s the expression of this thing inside of you. And the equation that I’ve come back to in the year since when I’ve lost my dharma and went looking for it again, is that dharma equals essence plus expression. Essence is who you are, and expression is how you show up in the world. And when you can combine the two, you’re in your dharma.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, you lost yours and you found it. What’s the story here?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, I think, probably like you, Pete, I went through a lot of years in my life where I was chasing something, and I didn’t realize it but what I really sort of felt at that time was that I was going to reach this level of success and wealth and status. And after I got to a certain threshold, I was going to feel all kinds of good things inside. I was going to feel meaning. I was going to feel joy. And all that stuff was going to last, and pretty soon I found myself on sort of the treadmill that, I think, Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University sometimes calls the arrival fallacy.

And the arrival fallacy is if we just get that next job, if we get that next thing, if we get that next deal, well, then we’re finally going to be happy. And, at some point in time, I think we realize that the formula is not really working that way. And I think some of us realize that later on in life, some of us realize it earlier. Personally, I think that we’re actually starting to see that people are recognizing this earlier and earlier in their lives. I think it’s why we have so many people in college or people entering the workforce now, Gen Zers that are asking some, I think, very important questions, the deeper questions.

But, for me, I started to ask that question really after I had gone through three startup experiences, two of them had failed, one of them succeeded. And the one that succeeded exited and I finally had money in the bank, and finally had the image that I had been trying to create for myself as this successful entrepreneur. I realized that that stuff, that the feeling that was associated that lasted for, like, a few weeks, and then I was kind of back to, “What’s next?”

And it was, like, for me, kind of a scary feeling because I had been chasing this thing all along, and when I finally got it, I realized that wasn’t it. And now you’re like, “What now?” And to be honest with you, I really felt like I was alone, like I was being selfish, I was feeling something that most people don’t feel. Like, most people can get to a level of success and just be happy with that. But I felt like, “Look, I’m still ambitious, I still want to do things,” and as a result of that, I still had this inner void.

And so, I wanted to figure out what I was doing that was not making me happy. What was I doing that wasn’t allowing me to feel this sense of inner gratitude and inner peace? And I started to look beyond what was in front of me here in the Western culture, the books that I was reading, the podcasts I was listening to, and I went back to this principle, this body of wisdom that I had learned as a child, and I said, “What does this ageless wisdom that has been practiced and passed down generation after generation, that has found its way from East to West, what can it offer me today?”

Pete Mockaitis
And what can it offer for you today?

Suneel Gupta
Well, that’s really the book. I started to take lessons of dharma and I started to kind of just say, like, “All right. Well, how does it fit in a culture of hustle? How does it fit in a culture of grind?” And I think that the biggest thing for me is that I really saw success as an accumulation of status and wealth and all the things that come with that but I hadn’t really considered the idea of what I now call inner success. Outer success and inner success.

Inner success is really meaning, and it’s status, and it’s joy. And I think the mistake that I made is believing that outer success was somehow going to lead to inner success. It was going to fill up that void that I was feeling. What I learned throughout the course of the book and writing this book, and coming back to this wisdom, was that not that outer success is bad, that ambition is bad because sometimes we can read philosophy or read wisdom, and sort of feel almost shameful for having the ambition that we have.

I don’t think that that’s true in the case of dharma. You can have outer ambitions, you can want outer success, you can want things in your life, but the wisdom of dharma is really about reversing the flow. Instead of starting with outer success, you begin with inner success, you begin with what really, really matters to you. And by focusing on what really matters to you, and tapping into that essence, you are able to express that in a much more vibrant way to the world. You become much more creative. You become much more imaginative.

And as I go out and I study leaders, and this is what I do for a living now is study some of the most extraordinary people, I think, on the planet, what I realize is that all of them, at some point in time, or I should say the vast majority of them, at some point in time, learned how to reverse this flow. Instead of saying, “I want to become a unicorn founder,” or, “I want to become the CEO of a company,” they started with, “I really love to tell stories,” or, “I really love to lead people who develop people in a really profound way.” And when you start with that, when you start with that essence and you begin to express that to the world, you really come into your dharma.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing your story. Do you have another story of someone who managed to find their dharma and then see some cool things? And what changes did they make to have that unfold?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, chapter one of the book, I think, really is all about, “How do we now start to kind of come back to our dharma?” And the essence of that learning is what my ancestors called sukha, which is your true self, your authentic self. And the idea behind elfles is that when you go and search for your dharma, you don’t have to search for it on the outside. Because sometimes when we hear words like dharma, or even purpose or meaning, very existential sort of words, and you almost sort of feels like you have to leave everything, go to the Himalayas, meditate, and figure this out.

And the reality is that your dharma has always been with you. Like, there are certain qualities and certain things about you that have always been true. And one of the most important things you can do, when it comes to finding your dharma again, reconnecting with that place, is actually really talking to people who knew you when you were a kid. And sometimes hearing the stories about what you were like and what you loved to do can be really important indicators towards what you genuinely love, towards this essence that we’re really looking to dig up in chapter one.

It happened for this person, Mila, in the book, who I talk about, who’s a project manager. She was a working mom, and she didn’t like her job. And the thing about Mila, as she was working as a project manager inside a big tech company, and the thing for her is that she really wanted to become a teacher. Like, she knew that in her core she was a teacher. The problem was that she didn’t have the capacity in her life to quit her job, go back and get a teaching certificate, she had a family that relied on her, for her compensation, for the salary she was making, for her health benefits, and it was just really hard for her to do that.

So, she had kind of accepted this fate of, like, “I am not going to become a teacher, and I might as well just suck it up and do my job.” And, as a result, she was showing up day in, day out, but she was doing it for a paycheck not because it was a passion. But what happened for Mila was as she started to dig beneath what I call the occupation mindset. The occupation mindset where it’s like, “We are our job. We are a doctor. We are a lawyer. We are teachers.” And she started to go beneath that to her essence, “What is it about teaching that she really loves? What is it about teaching that makes her come alive?”

And, ultimately, what it came down to is she loves to grow people, she loves to teach, she likes to see people grow and help in that development. And what was interesting is that when she shared that insight, when she finally got to that place and shared that with her family, her family was like, “Yeah, no kidding. Like, you’ve always been that way. You’re the little girl who was helping other kids in the neighborhood learn how to ride bikes. You were the one who’s teaching her baby cousin how to crawl. Like, developing people and investing in people is something that was at your core. It always has been.”

And so, now that she had arrived at this essence, beneath the occupation and into the essence, she could start to think of, like, “What are the other ways that I can express that essence to the world?” Teaching, obviously, was one of those, but teaching was very hard so what were some others? And what she started to realize is, like, “Wow, there are actually some opportunities inside my very company that I could actually pursue that would allow me to express this essence of growing and developing other people. I could really kind of make a push for being part of leadership, which would allow me to lead a team. I could make a lateral shift to HR.”

What ended up happening is, after she realized her essence, she started to have coffees with people, she started to say, “Hey, look, I know at my core I like to develop people. What are some options out there for me?” And they started to bring some back to her. Eventually, she was asked to lead a program that was recruiting graduates, like graduates who had top potential, into a program that was all about developing their leadership capabilities, and they asked her to run the program.

But she was only able to get to that place because she was digging beneath the occupation, “I want to be a teacher,” and able to go into, “What was it about being a teacher that made her come alive?” Then, from that place, figuring out what are the other options that allow her to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, I was just about to ask you about your three-step process. It sounds like we’ve got a demonstration. Could you recap what step one, step two, step three for living out the dharma?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah. So, I think step one is let’s go beneath the occupation. Let’s put aside occupation for a second and come back to your essence, this thing that you love to do. And one of the questions that I think you can ask yourself during that time is, “What is it that I would do for free? What are some of the things out there that I actually would do with no compensation?”

I find that to be a really important question, not because I think that we need to go and work for free, but because I think when we actually have a sense of, “What is it that we would actually do without compensation, without reward?” we start to get a much clearer sense of our essence. That’s step one.

But then, from that place, step two is to say, “All right, what are the possibilities? What are the other possibilities out there?” And it’s very interesting because sometimes when you get to this essence, you’ll start to see possibilities that you hadn’t considered otherwise. You can start going to have coffees with people, and asking people, and you can say, “Hey, I love storytelling at my core. I’m a project manager right now, or here’s my job but I like storytelling at my core. What are some ways to express that to the world?” and you’re going to start to collect these ideas. So, you’re in sort of the possibility phase in step two.

And then step three is when you actually start to whittle it down. You start to take these possibilities, and you start to say, “All right. Well, I can do anything but I can’t do everything, like not all at once, at least. So, let me start to really hone in on one.” And for that, for step three, I really like to use a tool I call the dharma deck. And what that basically means is that every time a possibility comes up, every time I come across a new way to express my essence that I really love, that means something to me, I’ll write it down in an index card. And I’ll continue to do that as these possibilities arrive.

So, over time, what I’m developing is a small deck of index cards. I call it my dharma deck. And every couple of weeks or so, when I’m in this exploration stage, I’ll sort of take some reflective time, I’ll usually leave my phone behind and go into nature, and I’ll take this little deck with me of index cards, and I’ll just sort them from top to bottom. At the top of the deck are the ideas that are really kind of pulling at my heart the most, all the way to the bottom.

And what I notice is that, over time, one or two of those cards, usually tend to retain their placement at the top of the pack. And those are the ideas that I feel are not just pulling at my head but they’re pulling at my heart. These are the things that I really think tap into my essence and allow me to express it to the outside world.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some examples of things that might be written on the cards in the dharma deck?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, absolutely. So, for me, I’ll bring it back to me for a second. Like, I was working as an IT consultant when I started trying to figure out my dharma. But I knew at my core, at my essence, that I love to tell stories. Now, storytelling and IT consulting are not symbiotic. Where I was, was not a place that necessarily valued storytelling. Storytelling wasn’t in my description, but I started to really think about, like, “What are the different ways and possibilities to be a storyteller, to express myself as a storyteller?”

So, in my deck, on these index cards were writing, writing blog posts, writing books was another one, doing a podcast, like you, Pete, was another one, being on stage, doing standup comedy even at night was another one. I had this full deck of possibilities, ways that I could express myself as a storyteller, some of which were asking me to sort of shift my job but others were, like, “Hey, you can do this right now and still be a consultant. Like, you could be doing this in your own time as well.” And those were the cards that initially sort of formed my deck.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so let’s hear about the subtitle here, “8 Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do.” What are these eight essential practices?

Suneel Gupta
So, chapter one is sukha, we talked about sukha, and that is really about your authentic state. And then chapter two is really called bhakti. And the idea behind bhakti is full-hearted devotion. Full-hearted devotion is really about this sense that, oftentimes, when we think about our dharma, we often tend to think of, “How do we sort of become fully scheduled with something and not fully hearted with something?”

Sometimes we make the mistake of believing that if we love something that we have to spend every minute of every day with it, but we don’t necessarily. Like, we can provide full-hearted devotion for partial moments of the day. I bring up the example of my wife and I. We have two kids. We’re scrambling now with our duties and our jobs and raising kids. But we make sure that we have 15 minutes every morning of just like really connected time with each other, or sitting there, we’re having coffee before the kids wake up, and that’s our act of love, that’s our act of devotion to one another.

And, again, we’re not spending every minute of every day just as monks who are dedicated and devoted to meditation don’t meditate every minute of every day. But the act of bhakti, the act of having devotion to your dharma means that you’re having touchstones with it all the time every day. You’re, in some small way, doing what you love. You’re, in some small way, touching this thing that you really appreciate at your heart. So, if you love to draw, you’re spending just a little time, even if it’s a few minutes and drawing. If you love to lead other people, you’re spending a few minutes checking in with somebody else. It’s something that’s important to you.

Chapter three is prana, and that’s really about energy, it’s about, “How do we start to now bring real energy into our practice of dharma?” because sometimes we tend to confuse time with energy, meaning that we optimize our schedules, we think about the number of hours that we bring to a task instead of the quality of the energy that we want to bring to each hour. So, how do we start to manage our energy now in a way that actually brings full heartedness to our dharma?

Chapter four is called upekkha, and upekkha is comfort in the discomfort. How do we actually find some space between the things that really irritate us in life? Because it’s those things that irritate us in life that actually take us out of our dharma. And so, knowing how to be in the fire, knowing how to be in the discomfort but also able to find comfort in that discomfort is a practice. It is something that we all need to learn how to do. And I’ve had to learn how to do, especially when it came to fulfilling my dharma because, oftentimes, the anger and it’s the irritation that pulls me out of it.

Chapter five is called lila, and lila is high play. And, basically, what that means is, “How do we start to blur the lines between work and play?” Phil Jackson, who I start the chapter with, has this amazing quote. He says that, “My goal is to make work my play, and play my work.” That’s the mantra that he took into being a player in the NBA, but then eventually coaching people like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, and leading teams to many national championships. That was his mantra, “Blurring the lines between work and play.”

And there are some really important types of things, sort of ways that we can do that. It’s one of my favorite chapters, actuall, is lila. Seva is the next one, which is all about service. It’s what my ancestors called selfless service, seva, which is all about forgetting yourself in order to find yourself. And that was a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which he said the best way to find yourself in life is to lose yourself in the service of others.

Chapter seven is tula, which is all about, “How do we let go but also take charge?” And those are two sometimes competing philosophies. If we let go, well, then are we really taking charge? Are we just kind of being loosey-goosey and letting sort of life take us where it wants to take us? Not necessarily. We can actually let go, we can loosen our grip, and, at the same time, be intentional about what we want to do and where we want to be, and that’s what tula is all about.

And then, finally, chapter eight is all about action. Like, how do we now put all this into practice and take action? Because none of these matters unless we’re actually taking action. And yet, sometimes, the way we operate is through what I call the game of someday, which is that we wait for courage in order to take action. And what I’ve learned in doing my career is take action first, and let courage catch up along the way.

And one of the techniques and practices I offer in that chapter is what I call sort of the two-way doors. And this came from a mantra from Jeff Bezos, who said that, “Hey, life is basically a set of one-way doors or two-way doors.” And there are certain decisions where, if you walk through a door, a one-way door, you’re not going to be able to come back. But the vast majority of decisions and choices in our lives are actually two-way doors. If you walk through it, it doesn’t work, you can always come back.

But the problem is we sometimes mistake two-way doors for one-way doors, and so we hesitate and we really try to collect as much data as we possibly can. We procrastinate on making the decision. But the reality is that the courage that we’re looking for isn’t all that necessary. You don’t actually have to build all that much courage in order to make a choice when that choice is reversible. And so, a lot of this chapter is about recognizing that we can lead our lives through these two-way doors, knowing that if it doesn’t work out, look, it’s still growth, you’ve still learned something from the other side.

So, Pete, I’ve never been asked to summarize every chapter in the book before, but there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Suneel, that’s just how I roll. I love that. So, with this overview, I now want to dig deeper into the energy and the comfort and discomfort points. Tell us, do you have any best and worst practices when it comes to bringing great energy to things?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, so let’s talk about comfort in the discomfort because I think it’s really, I mean, for me, I think, personally, the hardest thing. Viktor Frankl, who had this just amazing sort of way of looking at life, and Frankl was a holocaust survivor. He was a neurologist. He wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning. And he had this quote in the book that always just knocks me back, which is that, “In between impulse and response, there is a space. And inside that space lies our freedom.”

So, impulse being all the little triggers in life, like screaming kids, annoying colleague, angry emails, all these irritations, people who cut you off on the road. What he’s saying is that in between that and the way that we respond to that thing, there is a space. And if you can increase that space, even just by a millimeter, like, at a time, you will find yourself with just much more vast levels of freedom, like internal freedom in life.

That’s been hard for me. And the reason I think it’s been hard for me, and the reason I think it’s hard for others that I coach and I work with is because we’ve been sort of, I think, like conditioned to act very quickly. Like, look at how fast things are moving today, and especially like in an age of generative AI where we’re sort of spitting things out very quickly, and asked to respond to things at lightning speed at work. Like, it’s tough. It’s tough to build that space in.

And yet, even just having a couple of seconds sometimes can be the difference between making a good decision and a bad one, or saying something you might regret, or saying something that you’ll be proud of. It’s just that little space in between. So, the question becomes, “How do we harness that? Like, what do we do about that?”

One of the characters that I loved writing about in this chapter was Hank Aaron. And Hank Aaron was a player who was absolutely ridiculed by players in the stand. He had a very, very difficult time. He had death threats. And yet he was still able to come back to this space inside of him each time it happened, and walk up to the plate confidently, and he was the one, as you might know, who broke Babe Ruth’s record because he was able to find his place of composure, this comfort in the discomfort.

And one of the ways that I think that he was able to do that is by finding a homebase inside of him. So, every time something was triggering him, rather than just quickly responding to it, he would actually go inside first. And there are ways that we can actually start to channel that for ourselves. For me, I know that just closing my eyes and taking a couple of deep breaths is magic. It’s an absolutely magical thing to do.

If I’m finding myself tense and reactive, literally, just taking a couple of breaths is sometimes the most important thing I can do. It sounds simple but it’s profound. And yet sometimes I find myself in meetings where that’s not possible, like you can’t necessarily close your eyes in the middle of a meeting and take a few breaths. People might wonder what’s going on with you.

So, another thing that I like to do is, literally, just like put my hand over my heart. I will, literally, just take my hand and I give my heart just a little bit of almost like a love tap, like with the palm of my hand, and I just kind of give it a little massage. And it takes maybe two or three seconds to do but it’s my way, it’s almost my little sort of reset button to remind myself, to go internal for a moment, take a breath, take a moment, before I respond to this thing.

Now, Pete, there are certain things that you want to respond quickly to. Like, if my kid is running towards traffic, like, I’ve got to respond quickly. There’s no hand over heart thing. But the vast majority of things, we don’t need to be that lightning fast. We’ve just been conditioned to believe we need to be that lightning fast, and I think it’s time for us now to kind of reprogram ourselves back to this place of peace because, when we do, that’s when we find that sense of freedom.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say increase the space by a millimeter, I’m thinking about, literally, units and measures, so space, yes, we would increase that by a measure of length or width or height, a millimeter. Also, I guess time would be a measure, if we think about the space in terms of rather than instantaneously milliseconds or after a stimulus, just sort of firing out the response, just sort of taking some more time with the breath or the hand over the heart.

And in so doing, describe the increased freedom feeling or experience. What does that look, sound, feel like in practice when you have increased the space, and you have increased freedom? What does that really mean for you?

Suneel Gupta
I think it means that I’m more myself. I think that when we are reactive, it’s very easy to become something that you’re truly not. That’s the kind of premise of regret and doing things that you regret is that you’re in a condition, sometimes under extreme pressure, you responded to it, and you did things that didn’t feel like yourself. And you look back on it and wish you would’ve done things differently.

And sometimes we can’t avoid that. Sometimes it’s very difficult to avoid that. But I think the premise of what Frankl was arguing, and I think my ancestors were really talking about when they talked about upekkha, was oftentimes we can, and we can through these little moments, like just these very tiny little moments where we can choose, “I need to respond quickly or can I actually take a moment here?”

And even just like asking yourself that question can be enough. Like, as you get irritated, and you are about to respond to something, you can even just ask yourself, “Is this something that commands my immediate response? Or, do I have a little space here?” What I’ve found is that there have been a lot of situations where I kind of mistakenly thought I needed to respond quickly, but I didn’t. And I could actually take a moment.

I’m in a text thread with somebody, and it’s getting a little bit edgy. Do I need to respond quickly to what the person says next or can I actually take a moment? Can I take a breath? And, usually, the answer is, “Yeah, you’ve got plenty of time,” but we don’t always take that time. And, Pete, to your question, like, when you get to take that time, what it allows you to do is really what my grandfather called coming back to the center. And when you can come back to the center, come back to who you are, well, then you’re acting from that place.

That doesn’t always mean you’re not going to act angry. Maybe you want to be angry in that moment but, at least, it was intentional. You were able to come back, you were able to take a moment, and decide what you wanted to do rather than let the moment decide for you.

Pete Mockaitis
“After careful consideration, I’ve concluded that the best course of action is to scream at your head off.”

Suneel Gupta
And it might be, honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, in those particular circumstances, uh-huh.

Suneel Gupta
The point of all this is not to suppress any emotion. That is not what we’re doing here, because it’s all human. It’s all part of who we are. The point is more, rather than letting emotions control you, you control the emotions. You can actually start to examine these things, and you can decide which one really feels right to follow. Because, in that case, frustration and anger might be the right thing but, again, you were in the driver’s seat when that decision was made, not the emotion itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now let’s talk about energy.

Suneel Gupta
One of the things that I learned from my research from my last book, and even from this book going out and really spending time with leaders is, like, if you compare people who have gained momentum in their lives and their careers versus those who, I think, tend to fizzle out, tend to sort of lose momentum in their lives and their careers, the people who lose momentum very rarely do they run out of time, very rarely do they run out of talent.

What they almost always run out of is energy. They just get too exhausted. There’s not enough gas in the tank to go do what they want to go do. And if there’s not enough gas in the tank, if you’re exhausted, then you can have the best idea, you can literally have a brilliant vision for what you want, and yet you’re not going to reach that potential.

And the reason all that matters, the reason I say all this, Pete, is because I think we’ve been conditioned to really optimize for time but we haven’t really sort of been taught how to optimize for energy, meaning, like if we’re taking on an important project, what we tend to think about is, like, “What are the number of hours, the number of days, the number of years, that’s going to take to get this thing done?” But what we rarely think about is, “What is the quality? What is the quality of energy that I want to bring to each one of those units of time? What is the quality of energy that I want to bring to each one of those hours?”

And so, for me, one of the most important rituals in the book really comes in this chapter, which is what I call rhythmic renewal, which basically says that instead of waiting for vacations, or waiting for long breaks, what high performers tend to do is they tend to take breaks, mini-focused breaks every single day. In fact, the average high performer that we studied takes somewhere around eight breaks every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what I love to hear, Suneel.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, it sounds extraordinary, right? I bet there are at least some people listening to this right now, being like, “That’s crazy because look at how crammed our schedules have gotten, and now you’re telling me to cram it even further with these little breaks?” But the thing that I want to offer you is a very tactical practice, it’s what I call the 55-5 model, which is that whenever possible, for every 55 minutes of work, you’re taking five minutes of focused deliberate rest.

And that five minutes can be anything. When I asked people, like, “What do you do during five minutes to take a break?” I get the best answers, like, “I take a dance break,” “I do some pushups,” “I take a walk in nature,” “I just drink a cup of coffee.” You can do anything you want during those five minutes. The key is that you’re just not multitasking it with work. You don’t have your phone in your hand, getting things done while you’re taking a break. You’re just purely focused on that break.

And the reason that this is so magical is because while it may seem like you’re actually cutting your time down, what that five-minute break is doing is it’s making the other 55 minutes so much more effective, so much more imaginative, so much more collaborative and creative. And the reality is that whatever you do in 60 minutes, you could probably do in 55.

And so, if we save these little five-minute breaks in between, we start to boost the energy that we bring to all the other sort of meetings, all the other work sessions that we have in the day. And when I talked to people who put 55-5 into practice, one of the most common things that I hear is that, “For the first time in my career, I am actually experiencing as much energy at the end of the day as I did at the beginning of the day just by taking these breaks in between.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Suneel, I love that, and I want to hear some more examples of these crazy breaks. It’s so funny, as I’m in my office, I’m looking at, I’ve got yoga blocks. I like to do pushups on yoga blocks because I can go deeper and have more of a stretch, it feels good, as well as a little tub of cold water I dunk my face into.

Suneel Gupta
Yes, that’s very common. I hear that more and more.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it really? I thought I was a freak.

Suneel Gupta
No, I hear that more and more. So, obviously, cold plunges are all the rage. Like, I’ve had people tell me, like people who work from home or in a hybrid schedule, “I’ll just go take a cold shower just for three minutes.” Somebody, the other day, told me, “I take a cold shower, turn off the lights inside, put on music, do a little dance party inside the shower,” and, literally, it’s five minutes, very, very quick. Come out and it resets their state. But definitely the face in the cold bowl of water is another one.

The other day, somebody told me that they, literally, were, like they talk to themselves is what they said, “I like to talk to myself,” is what this executive told me. And I said, “Well, what do you mean? Do you work from home?” And he’s like, “No, no, we’re back to work now.” And I said, “Well, do you go in your office and close the doors?” He said, “No, no, what I do is I put my AirPods in, and I walk around, and people think that I’m on a call with somebody else but I’m actually just talking to myself. And I find that to be very therapeutic.”

So, if you ask people, like, “What’s an out-of-the-box thing that you do to reset yourself?” you’ll get the best answers.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Suneel, I’m glad I asked. I do love these answers. And if you could give us a couple more, I’ll take them?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, okay. So, I think, for me, breathing is great, and I know that sounds obvious because meditation has been talked about so much, but you don’t have to be a meditator. And one of the things that I love doing is what I call the alternate nostril breathing technique. If we’re on video, this would be a little more visual, but I’ll describe it to you.

What you’re basically doing is you’re inhaling through your left nostril and exhaling through your right nostril. The way you do that is by using your thumb and one of your other fingers to basically, like, gently block one of the nostrils. So, as you’re inhaling through your left nostril, you’re blocking your right nostril. And then you’re exhaling through your right by blocking your left nostril, and then you reverse it. Inhale through the right, exhale through the left. Inhale through the left, exhale through the right.

This is a millennia-old technique. It’s thousands of years old. And the reason that it works, and it’s rooted in science, you’ll hear even behavioral scientists talk about this alternate nostril breathing is because what it really does is it resets your nervous system. But what it also does, we’ve heard of the left brain and right brain before, and oftentimes, especially those of us who are in analytical positions and we’re using our minds a lot at our work, we start to drift away from our heart. We go all head, no heart.

What this tends to do is it tends to equalize both sides of the brain. The left side in charge of analytics, the right side more is, you are heart-centered, focused more on creativity, and it starts to bring these two into alignment. So, this alternate nostril breathing is, I think, just a great one.

The other thing, you mentioned pushups. I like planks. And the reason I like planks is because, for me, pushups are fantastic but they’re repetitions, right? And every time you do a repetition, you’re kind of escaping the moment. So, I find it easier to do pushups than to hold planks because it’s repetitive and it’s giving me something to do.

Planks are really interesting because they don’t allow any type of escape. You’re just kind of holding a plank just for a period of time. And when you hold the plank for a period of time, what that challenges your mind to do is basically come to the moment, come to the present, because you have nowhere else to go. And so, I find that if I want to reset myself with an exercise, like something physical, and I’ve got less than five minutes to do it, I’ll hold the plank.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I got to hear, what’s the 85% rule?

Suneel Gupta
So, yeah, the 85% rule is it comes from the running world, actually. And Carl Lewis was the person who kind of really, I think, brought this to the forefront. Carl Lewis was an Olympic racer, Olympic sprinter, I mean, just amazing. He won all sorts of medals and is considered one of the more prolific racers of his generation.

One of the things that they found about Carl Lewis though that was unusual is that he would always start in the back of the pack. And kind of the conventional rule for racing was that you had to blast out front right away in order to win a sprint because a sprint isn’t very long. But in Carl Lewis’ case, he would almost always start in the back of the pack and then work his way up.

And a sprint coach started to study kind of what was going on here. And what he found was that Carl Lewis was never really deviating in the way that he ran. He was starting at 85% and he was running at 85% speed pretty much the entire race. So, while other sprinters were kind of coming out of the gate at a hundred and then, almost inevitably, kind of losing a little bit of gas over time, he was at 85% steady throughout the whole thing.

And the 85% rule was talked about in running but it found its way to other worlds. Like, I heard Hugh Jackman, the actor, talking about the 85% rule the other day. And it’s coming to the world of music and acting and business as a way of approaching things because, oftentimes, we think that we have to go at 100% in order to get things done, but the problem is that if you’re at 100%, if you’re all on all the time, you’re going to burn out.

So, the alternative is to actually dial it down to 85%, to a very sort of comfortable measurable way of relaxed but intentional leadership for yourself and for the people around you, where it’s not like you’re giving up by any means, 85% is still strong, but what you’re optimizing for is the longer term. Because, look, if you want to get something done in a week, grit it out, hustle hard, and you’ll get it done.

But I think most of us are not looking to get something done in a week. We’re looking to build something over time, whether that be a product, or whether that be a business, or whether that be our own career. We’re optimizing for the long term. And if we’re optimizing for the long term, then we don’t want a model that’s actually built around the short term, which is getting things done in a short term, burning out, and then not having the fuel, or exhaustion to keep going, or coming back but not quite being the same as you were before.

And so, 85% is an alternative way of thinking about really kind of loosening your grip. And the metaphor that I love, a Buddhist monk actually introduced me to this metaphor, is racecar driving. When racecar drivers first learn how to really get competitive, oftentimes, the premise they come in with is that you have to grip the steering wheel very tight, especially during those tight moments. Like, if you’re taking a tight turn, you sort of squeeze the wheel tighter.

But one of the most important things that you have to learn as a racecar driver is that you have to actually loosen your grip in those moments. During the tighter turns, you’re actually going looser and not tighter so that you can stay more emotionally in control between the car and the relationship to the road. Then, I think, the way that we operate our odds is very much the same. Our tendency is to try to squeeze when we’re in these tense moments. But what Carl Lewis and the 85% rule shows us is that if you can learn to loosen in those moments, you can go faster and even further.

Pete Mockaitis
So as I visualize sprinting, it’s a very clear measure in terms of what’s 100%, what’s 85% in terms of the numerator and denominator, and, okay, we got the speed straight up, like miles per hour running, if you will, as a measure of speed. What does an 85% effort look like, say, if I am in a meeting, or processing emails, in contrast to a 100% effort?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, I think what it means is that during these tense moments, you’re able to sort of lighten your sort of grip on what’s happening. And so, for me, the way that that shows up is I find myself sitting at my desk and I’ll actually forget to breathe, like, all of a sudden, I find myself sort of gasping for breath. I was so interested in this the other day because I was like, “Is this just me? Does this only happen to me?”

I’m right now in faculty at Harvard Medical School so I pinged a couple of my colleagues, and I’m like, “What’s going on here?” They’re like, “No, no, no, that’s totally natural.” Most people when they’re in front of their phones or they’re checking email, you actually hold your breath. Like, we tend to hold our breath and we, all of a sudden, find ourselves sort of gasping for air. But, also, if you pay attention to it, you’ll sometimes find that you’re starting to feel stressed out, and there’s not really a total reason for that. There’s nothing in particular that’s triggered you into this moment of stress.

What we find is that we’ve actually been holding our breath, and that’s the reason that we actually feel stressed in that moment. And that kind of follows the pattern of breathing. When you’re stressed out, you tend to take shallow breaths or you stop breathing. When you’re not stressed out, when you’re more in a calm position, you’re taking smoother, calmer sort of breaths. You’re just kind of in this more state of flow during that time.

But the reverse is true, too. If we start to kind of hold our breath, we can actually almost fake our minds into thinking that something is wrong, that we’re actually stressed out. So, going back to your question, Pete, with the 85% rule, it’s just smoother energy. It’s a smoother energy. There’s less grasping, there’s less table-pounding, there’s less grit and hustle. And the thing that I would say is if you’re listening to this, and you sort of feel, “Well, that just sounds like a recipe for non-ambition. Or that sounds like a recipe for letting people walk over you.”

I encourage you to try it. I encourage you to try it for a week where you’re walking into meetings, and you’re loosening the grip just a little bit. And, again, we’re not saying giving up here, I’m not saying throwing your hands up. Loosening your grip to what you consider to be an 85% level, and just seeing how that plays out. Because, for me, what it creates is a smoother, more relaxed energy. I start to feel more free. I start to feel more creative. My mind is thinking a little bit more clearly. I’m also more collaborative.

Because, look, when somebody is really intense, and they’re gritting their teeth, and they’re 100%, like, that’s not always a lot of fun to be around. But if you can relax a little bit, and you can sort of be, again, creative and engaged and intentional, but not like that gritty-hustle personality that can sometimes tend to burn not only themselves out and everybody else around them, pay attention to what the effect is. Did you really lose productivity, or did you gain presence?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And as I’m thinking about it, it’s true. There are times when I’ve approached, let’s just call it processing emails, almost like a pumped-up, cranked, eye-of-the-tiger, jump up and down, “Let’s do this thing,” partially just because I’ve procrastinated for a while, and I think that’s the answer is to just overcome my resistance by being super fired up about it. But other times, you can do the same task with an energy that I think of more like a Bob Ross energy, like painting happy little trees, doing happy little emails. And the output is comparable.

Suneel Gupta
And I think it’s such a good point because, also for me, I find that the reason that I’m resistant to sometimes like going, like blasting through emails, is because I know that I’m going to be putting myself in this hustle-and-grind mindset. And if you know you’re going to put yourself in a hustle-and-grind mindset, that’s not always fun, and, oftentimes, the resistance comes from, “I don’t want to go there.” But what if you didn’t have to be that way?

And what if you could actually, like gently, get through your email, and you’re reminding yourself to be sort of gentle with yourself throughout that? What would that look like for you? And did you lose anything? Because, sometimes, the belief that we have, and I think this is a very sort of like conditioned way of thinking, I know I’ve been conditioned to believe it, is the less grit we put into something, the less ambitious or intentional we’re being about it.

But is that true? Like, is that real? Or do you find that when you actually loosen up a little bit about things, you can be fully equally intentional and, in fact, more creative, more imaginative. You can actually bring a higher level of energy to that task and you’re more fun to be around.

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

Suneel Gupta
I think maybe some of my favorite things and some of the stuff from the book will come up anyway, so let’s go there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite quote?

Suneel Gupta
My favorite quote was from my grandfather, my bauji. And what bauji told me is that, we, as humanity, is like a sitar or a guitar with billions of strings. You are a string. I’m a string. Each of us is a string. And every time we learn how to play our own string, every time we tune into who we are, and we express that to the outside world, every time we come into our dharma, not only does that have an effect for our life, but it has an effect for everybody else’s lives as well. Every time we play our string, we bring the rest of the world a note, just a little bit more of harmony.

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

Suneel Gupta
I’m still a fan of the scar experiment, which you may have heard of. It came out of Dartmouth University in the 1990s. And with the scar experiment, what they did was they basically had these people in a room, and they painted on an artificial scar on their face, this hideous-looking blemish on their face. And then they were to go into the next room, one by one, and interact with strangers just to see how strangers would react to their scar.

But right before they went into the room, the makeup artist went to them, and said, “Hey, can I touch up your scar, just touch up a little bit of the makeup?” And they said, “Sure.” And, without them knowing, they actually wiped the scar off entirely. So, now if you’re part of the experiment, you walk into the room believing that you had this scar on your face, and you don’t. And then they ask the subject afterwards, like, “How did people react?” And nearly everybody said, “Oh, my God, they couldn’t take their eyes off the scar. Like, they stared at it, they were disgusted by it, they were like…”

And it just sort of goes to show that sometimes we tend to see ourselves through other people’s eyes. We tend to sort of like look to people for the feedback on who we are. And I love that experiment because it just brings it to life in such a visceral way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Suneel Gupta
That’s a hard one, and I really think that Be Here Now by Ram Dass has to be the one, I think, because it’s just had the biggest impact on my life. I return to it probably more than any other book.

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

Suneel Gupta
I think my favorite tool is the act of putting my phone down. And I hope that doesn’t sound like a cop-out because my instinct, when you first asked me the question, was to think of a technology, was to think of what’s something that’s helping me be more productive. And there are plenty of tools that I use, from OmniFocus to all these other sorts of things I use to organize my world. I use ChatGPT every once in a while. Like, honestly, man, my favorite tool is, literally, just the practice and the act of putting my phone down, and having some present time with a blank sheet of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Suneel Gupta
My favorite habit is the 55-5 rule. For every 55 minutes of work, take five minutes of focused deliberate rest.

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

Suneel Gupta
Well, I think that the idea of being able to let go but also take charge is something that often people talk to me about. And, for me, it’s really kind of like two very different philosophies coming together. It’s really kind of the Eastern side of me and the Western side of me. The Eastern side of me, I would go to temple, and it was all about letting go. I would read the Bhagavad Gita, and it was all about letting go. Whereas, the Western world was all about sort of taking charge and gritting it out.

And so, for me, as an Indian kid growing up in the United States, I was always sort of oscillating back and forth between these two worlds. I’d have my Eastern identify and my Western identity. And I never really thought that those two things could come together but I really do believe that they can. And that’s really kind of where I think Phil Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with flow, and there’s a lot of practices in the book on how to actually be able to let go to a certain extent, but also be very intentional about it.

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

Suneel Gupta
Just come to my website. Come to SuneelGupta.com. I spell my name S-U-N-E-E-L G-U-P-T-A.com. And there’s a bunch of tools out there for you, and I’d love to connect with you.

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

Suneel Gupta
I think being awesome at your job is one and the same as being awesome with who you are. And sometimes we forget that character is how you behave when nobody is watching. It’s the things that you do for yourself internally in order to succeed externally. And sometimes we get pulled into a world where it seems like external success is the only sort of way to achieve the things that you want to achieve.

But I think if you can sort of start to come back to, like, what really matters to you, like what is that essence, and, “How do I express that essence to the world?” not only is that sort of a way of making yourself come alive, but I really believe that it’s a way of doing your best work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Suneel, this has been such a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and adventure with your dharma.

Suneel Gupta
Thank you so much, Pete. I wish you luck with yours, and I appreciate you having me back on the show.

Jul 31
0

886: How to Become an Executive with Adam Bryant

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Adam Bryant shares powerful insights on how to get promoted and be successful as a leader.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What every aspiring leader should know about themselves
  2. How to get promoted without asking for a promotion
  3. The key ratio that positions you for advancement

About Adam

Adam Bryant is Senior Managing Director and Partner at the ExCo Group, where he works with hundreds of senior leaders and high-potential executives. As the creator and former author of the iconic “Corner Office” column in The New York Times, Bryant has mastered the art of distilling real-world lessons from his hundreds of interviews and turning them into practical tools, presentations, and exercises to help companies deepen their leadership benches and strengthen their teams. He also works with executive leadership teams to help drive their transformation strategies, based on a best-practices framework he developed for his widely praised book, THE CEO TEST: Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders.

Resources Mentioned

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Adam Bryant Interview Transcript

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

Adam Bryant
Thank you for the invitation, Pete. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. Me, too. Well, I’m excited to hear the wisdom you’ve collected in your book, The Leap to Leader: How Ambitious Managers Make the Jump to Leadership. But, first, we need to hear about you and ping-pong. What’s the story, training with a ping-pong coach?

Adam Bryant
Yeah, that’s a sentence that I never thought I would utter in my life, which is that I have a ping-pong coach. But we moved down to New Orleans a few years ago where my two daughters are, including now my son-in-law. And he was blessed with great hand-eye coordination for things like golf. And in the townhouse we have, my wife generously gave me the loft for my “office,” and I put that in air quotes. But I have my desk up there, I have a pool table, a foosball table, and a ping-pong table.

And I just got determined to get better at this, and I found a ping-pong coach in New Orleans, and I train with him a couple of days a week, and it’s pretty cool. At my age, I’d recently turned 60, but it’s cool to get better at something. And my son-in-law used to beat me pretty consistently. I now beat him, I’d say, a little more than half the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, congratulations. And I’m just imagining these training sessions with the ping-pong coach with sort of Rocky montage type music in the background, and he’s, like, screaming at you to push yourself to the very limits. Is that how it goes down?

Adam Bryant
Not so much, but he’s a good coach. He’s from Vietnam and there’s a word he’s taught me, which is “Cho-le” which means sort of, “Let’s go.” And when you hit a really good shot, you celebrate and yell, “Cho-le.” The other thing, you’re taking me down a rabbit hole, Pete, but the one thing that is very cool about the world of ping-pong is that when you hit a lucky shot, generally, you sort of put up your hand just to sort of signal to your opponent that you acknowledge it was a lucky shot.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s friendly.

Adam Bryant
I think it’s very refreshing compared to some sports, like soccer, where people always just, like, fake flopping and things like that, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. It’s like, “Yes, I know. I’m so amazing. Look at me, I can pull it off.” Well, so tell us, I imagine there’s a lot of practice you invested. Are there any sort of tips or principles for folks also looking to be awesome at ping-pong? What would you suggest for them?

Adam Bryant
Well, there’s kind of basement ping-pong where you’re just sort of flailing your arms, but to do it properly, it is, and I know this sounds silly, but it is an incredible workout because you basically have to be squatting very low and also be on your toes. And footwork is a huge part of it, so you got to be super agile on your feet while you’re squatting, while you’re on your toes, and to get yourself in a position to hit the shots. So, it’s one of those things, like a lot of things in life, from afar it looks pretty easy, but it is an incredible workout. I get the same calorie burn from that as like a Peloton workout, so.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding. All right. Good to know. Well, so now onto…

Adam Bryant
Less important matters, how to be awesome at your ping-pong, right, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now for some insights which could have maybe an even greater transformational impact on people’s careers. So, you’ve interviewed over a thousand CEOs over your life and career. That’s pretty cool. Can you share with me any interesting themes associated with what’s kind of different about these people than others? And how do they generally get to become one?

Adam Bryant
And just to give you the context, so when I first started interviewing CEOs, it was for a series I created at the New York Times called Corner Office, which was based on a very simple what-if, which is, “What if I sat down with CEOs and never ask them a single question about their company?” which is how CEOs are usually interviewed, and just focus on the leadership lessons and early influences, and how they talk and think about the sort of universal challenges of leadership.

So, that was my initial focus. I, also, from the very start, embraced diversity in, literally, every sense of the word in the people I interviewed. And so, looking back now and kind of saying, “Well, what are the patterns?” I think one of the clear patterns that emerged is this skill, this habit of mind, to be able to simplify complexity. And, to me, it is one of the common threads.

I don’t think you can lead effectively if you don’t have that because I do think it’s a leader’s job to take the complexity of the world, their industry, what’s happening in their company, and it’s just one of those key leadership moments to be able to stand on a stage, whether it’s literal or virtual, and basically answer the kind of questions that little kids ask in the backseat, which is, “Where are we going? And how are we going to get there? And when are we going to get there?” And I know that sounds simple but simple is hard, and I just think it’s such an important skill. Because if you know how to simplify complexity, then you’re also going to be a good communicator.

So, to me, that’s like one of the core skills that you have to have. In terms of how they became CEOs, what’s been so refreshing and so what I’ve really enjoyed just hearing people’s past and their stories is that, yes, I met a few CEOs over the years, Pete, who just seem like from central casting, like they were the class president, they were the frat house president. There were just those kids who, from an early age, they said, “You’re going to be a CEO someday.”

And I met a few of those but I have to say they were kind of in a distinct minority. I met a lot of people who you just never would’ve guessed, like they were former elementary school teachers, they studied classical organ in college, just really unusual backgrounds, theater. And, suddenly, they’re, like not suddenly, but now they’re running a huge company.

And I have thought a lot about this because I think people are hungry for career advice, and I think part of the thing that they’re looking for is an answer to the question, “Am I on the right path? What is the right path? If I want to move up, if I want to get that CEO job, what is the right path?” And what I always tell people is there are some obvious directional things you have to do. Like, if you want to be a CEO of a really big company, you should get a job at a really big company at a young age.

So, once you check the obvious things, what I always tell people is that there is no right path. The most important path is the path that you are on. And the thing that really separates people that I find is whether they keep their eyes open, and they look around, and they’re always, it’s this kind of machine learning of whatever their experience is, and keeping their eyes open, they’re just always sort of sifting that experience, it’s like, “What am I learning? What am I noticing? Boy, that boss seems to be really effective. What is it that he or she does? That seems like a really bad boss. Why is that? This team is effective.”

And so, to me, it’s just that quality of keeping your eyes open. I often reflect on a saying that I heard from a college president named Ruth Simmons. And what she would tell students is that, “You should always be prepared at any moment of your life to learn the most important lesson of your life.” And I think it’s just a great sort of guide for your life just to keep your eyes open and learn, because there are lessons everywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. And I think, a lot of times, in my own experience, that can come up in just the form of a wild idea in terms of, “I’m noticing this and I’m wondering that. And then, what do you know, and now this is a business. Well, how about that? That was interesting.”

Adam Bryant
Yeah. And, to me, like a lot of that comes from silence. Like, yes, there is that sort of habit of mind. And, as you just described, you’re always questioning, like, “Why is that?” And you see sort of like a seam or a gap in the world, it’s like, “Why is that there?” And it is that sort of curiosity, that relentless questioning. But I also think that a lot of that, making the most of the experience that you’ve had, processing it, looking for the patterns, probing it, it does require time for reflection.

And I think a lot of people, silence isn’t comfortable, and they pick up their phone, and they start scrolling or something. And so, I always tell people, it’s like, “You need to get comfortable with silence, and just to have those conversations with yourself so you can process what you’ve been learning.”

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to the simplifying complexity, could you give us an example of, “Here’s complexity and here’s, on the other side of a CEO simplification. See how that’s great?”

Adam Bryant
Yeah, sure. And I often use the example of Bob Iger, the CEO at Disney. So, the backstory before he became CEO at Disney, he was the internal candidate, and I think the board actually wanted an external candidate. So, he went on this campaign for the job, and he basically created this very simple, like, three-part plan, he said, “If you make me a CEO, these are the three things that I’m going to focus on.”

He said, “Great content.” You can say, “Well, that’s obvious, right? Like, you’re Disney.” But, “Second one was global expansion. So, we’re going to place those bets. We’re going to go into newer markets.” And you could say, “Well, that sounds obvious, too.” But the third one that he said is that, “We are going to embrace technology in all its forms. New technology. So, whatever new technology comes along, whether it’s streaming, even if it undermines our traditional business model in the short term, we are going to embrace it.”

And what’s been interesting is that, Pete, he has never ever wavered from those three things. If you read his book, The Ride of a Lifetime, which is a good book, there’s good insights, it’s not that sort of CEO victory lap kind of book, you can just sort of see, like the growth of the company. It’s, like, all along those three pillars. And he’s just relentless about communicating that.

Last time I checked, the second sentence of his bio on the corporate website referred to those three things, like, great content, global expansion, embracing new technology. And so, to me, that is a good little case study of what that looks like. Because, again, like it’s a sweet spot, you can look at that and say, “Well, isn’t that obvious?” And it’s like, “Well, actually, great content maybe yes, but the other two were very clear bets and clear paths.”

And the great thing about when you get it right, when you do simplify complexity as a leader, then it’s actually really great for morale because everybody kind of understands how you’re going to win, they understand how the work they are doing can contribute to the success of the company. And there’s this popular expression you’ve probably heard that culture eats strategy for breakfast. You hear it a lot at conferences. It’s always attributed to Peter Drucker. It turns out there’s no record that he ever said it, and I increasingly believe it’s wrong.

That you need to have that really clear strategy, that simplified complexity so that everybody can understand how they are helping the team win. And if you do that, I think that’s great for morale and culture.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, in the Disney example, the simplified version is great content, global market, embracing technology. What would be the complex version that a CEO who is floundering might put forward?

Adam Bryant
Listen, you’ve probably seen them yourself. I certainly have. A lot of companies pull together strategy decks, and they’re 40-slides long, and they use 8-point font. You can’t even read it from the back of the room. There’s lots of pyramids, and there are colors and cork screw arrows, and just too much. And it’s the kind of thing that they may make sense in the moment but the key thing is, like, “Do you remember them?”

And we all know all the neuroscience shows that most people can’t remember more than three or four things day to day. And you can have that really complicated strategy document but you have to pass the hallway test. So, you just imagine, if you pick some random person in the hallway and stop them, and said, “Do you know what our strategy is?” would they be able to echo it back to you? And that’s why it’s so crucial to be able to distill that strategy.

I interviewed one CEO and she had this great line. She referred to her father, who used to talk about cows, chickens, and taters. And she internalized that as just a reminder, it’s like, “Just use really simple everyday language. Keep it simple,” because there is this bias in the business world.

People like reaching for that $20-word, it makes things sound better and more formal and fancier and all those things. And it takes so much discipline to hit that sweet spot of simplifying complexity so people go, “Okay, I get it. I get how we’re going to win and I get how the work that I’m doing is helping the team win.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, even if those synergies are highly impactful, you don’t want to say it like that.

Adam Bryant
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood.

Adam Bryant
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so thinking about, specifically, your book, The Leap to Leader, any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries that you came across in the direct preparation of the book or in the background leading up to it?

Adam Bryant
Yes. So, look, I think writing books is a process of discovery. You sort of write books to figure out what you know and to really put a sharp point on things, and I will call out a few things. The first section of the book is called ‘Do you really want to lead?’ And I think it’s an important question that people should really ask themselves because there is this kind of like momentum that just happens, either personally or institutionally, within organizations where you just kind of get carried along.

And if you’re a high performer, it’s like, “Well, of course, you want to lead, of course you want to move into that management position, and then a leadership position.” And I think people really need to stop and spend some time, again, in silence. Spend some time with themselves to be really clear about why they want to lead others and whether they want to lead others, and not just be carried along by that sort of river of promotion into the bigger title.

Because I think, a lot of people, it’s like, “Of course, I want that job because there’s a bigger title and there’s more money with it.” Or, they may want to lead because they like the idea of having more power or whatever. And I just think that leadership is so hard, and a lot of people get into leadership positions, and they go, “Wow, like I had no idea it was this hard.”

You’re dealing with people’s problems, you’ve got fires you’re putting out every day, the day is kind of a three-shift day, you’re tossing and turning, staring at the ceiling at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. And so, you need to be very clear in your mind about why you want to lead. And so, just having that moment, I think, is really key.

Another insight I’ll share is this idea of how to be awesome at your job, and I’m sure you talk in big part of the audience of people who want to move up in their career. And one of the things that I came to appreciate is that, look, we’re always taught, “You got to have your elevator pitch ready.” People are told that early in their career, “Have your elevator pitch ready.”

And, to me, that generally means one of two things. One is your elevator pitch are like, “What are you working on?” In case you’re in the elevator with a CEO, “Hey, what are you working on?” you got to have that ready. And the second elevator pitch is, like, “Well, what do you want to do? Like, what are your career goals?” You got to have that elevator pitch ready.

And what I’ve come to really appreciate is that people don’t spend enough time on their third elevator pitch, which is that if somebody were to ask you, “Who are you as a leader?” what would you say to them? And you may go through your entire career, taking over new teams, and nobody will ever ask you that question, but what if they do? And, to me, that then raises a question, “Well, how do you answer that? Like, what does a good answer sound like?”

And, to me, it’s about being able to say, “Look, these are the three values that are really important to me,” and you don’t just stop at the words because there’s a lot of fridge-magnet poetry in the leadership field. There’s a lot of words that people just sort of toss around, they sound right and good. But I think when people reflect on and think about how they’re going to talk about their personal values, it’s not enough to just say these words, “These ideas are important to me.”

You then need to be able to back them up, and say, “These are the stories of how these became important to me. And this is why they’re important. And this is what it looks like in action. And this is how I found these values to be really important and effective for driving success in the teams that I’ve been part of.” Really bring those ideas to life.

I talk about it as like your personal leadership brand, like, “What do you stand for as a leader? And when you’re not in the room, like how would a direct report describe you to a job candidate?” So, you want to be clear about what you stand for. And I think, in this day and age, just in the last few years, there’s been so much more talk about humanity and transparency and vulnerability and authenticity, all these qualities that people want to see more in their leaders.

And I think being very clear about your personal values and being willing to share those, I think that helps with all those things because you want to take the mystery out of who you are as a boss, because you’re always being studied by your direct reports, they are trying to figure out who you are, like, “Are you moody? Like, are you happy?” They’re studying your body language.

And the more you can be sort of up front, and say, “Look, this is who I am. This is my personal values. This is what’s important to me,” then your direct reports can say, “Okay, I got that. Now, I need to spend less time trying to figure you out, and I could spend more time getting my job done.” And, to me, that’s success on a lot of levels.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, to that first point, “Why do you want to lead?” you say it’s very hard, and you need to have a good why in place as opposed to just, “Oh, well, hey, you know, I’m doing pretty well and I like winning and achieving, so that’s the next step. Let’s just go ahead and do it.” So, that’d be a lame or ineffective why, it’s almost no why. You’re just sort of going with the flow. What would be some rich articulations of effective whys for leading?

Adam Bryant
Yeah, look, the older I get, the more I like sentences that begin with, “There’s only two kinds of people, Pete,” and sometimes those work. But I do think there’s only two kinds of managers in the world, and only two kinds of leaders as well, but I think there’s this sort of framework. It’s not black or white. It’s not one or the other, but I think some managers and leaders are more selfless and some are more self-centered.

And I think, to me, the best leaders, the best managers, are selfless. They’re doing it because they want to help the team, the organization. They want to help their direct reports. And, to me, not that there’s a right answer, but I think really effective whys start there, that you believe in what the organization does, you can see the impact that the organization can have. And then you want to have impact as a leader, and I think that means elevating people, and making them better, and helping build their skills, and seeing trajectories for their career that maybe they didn’t even see for themselves.

I say in the book that leadership is complicated and it’s okay to have a complicated relationship with leadership, and I have, in my career. I’ve been in plenty of roles where I was the number two, and I was very happy in those roles. And I was in other roles where I was the leader. And, to me, it wasn’t about being number one. It sort of kept my ego in check.

And the thing that motivated me in all my management and leadership roles was I approached the job as a coach, “I am here, I’ve learned a few things in my career, and I want to share them with you. And I want you to achieve, like, wild success. I want to help you get better,” and that was my why in all those years.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d love to get your take, having interviewed a thousand CEOs, and I guess it’s hard you can’t peer into their souls, but what’s your sense of roughly what proportion of leaders are selfless versus self-centered?

Adam Bryant
If I could take your question and maybe reframe it slightly, it’s like my understanding of their why, like, “Why are they doing this?” again, people are complicated so there’s, like, a thousand layers of motivations.

That said, I have noticed sort of patterns, and I put them into three or four broad categories, because I’ve always been curious in, like, “Why do you want this job?” One of the questions that I ask so many of the leaders that I interviewed, Pete, is like, “Where does your drive come from?” Because I’m curious about that because you need a certain amount of drive and stamina to do these big jobs. Like, on paper they’re kind of awful jobs. They’re just all-consuming, there’s a lot of responsibility, there’s a lot of weight on your back.

And so, as I’ve tried to probe that, the patterns that I’ve seen, the first one is they grew up with some kind of adversity and sometimes really tough adversity. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve heard really sad stories about growing up, and not just sort of financial straits but alcoholic parent, abusive parent. I’ve heard stories about growing up in a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, mom stayed at home, dad worked, and then he died at a young age, and there was no life insurance. And, suddenly, the family was kind of scrambling to just put food on the table and pay the electric bill.

And there was one time I interviewed two CEOs, back-to-back, and they said the exact same thing, told me the same life story that I just explained to you. So, they had that kind of trauma, that adversity at a young age, they know what it felt like to be out of control, and so that was a big part of their driving motivation. And, again, not to get sort of too shrink-y here but I think sometimes people, when they face a lot of adversity early in their life, they want to have a little bit more control. So, maybe that helps explain part of their drive.

I think another big category is some version of, like, the immigrant story, which is this idea of the first in your family to do X. And I think if you grow up and you’re always the first in your family to go to college, to do this, to do that, that you spend so much time kind of forging a new path that, ultimately, that just becomes, like, your comfort zone. And you need that kind of mindset as a leader, it’s like you’re always comfortable doing new things and dealing with new problems.

I put another category. Some people just like hit the parent lottery, like had a great family, maybe they’ve got an interesting blend of DNA strands where an entrepreneur parent and the other one was a psychologist, or there was an engineering parent married to…and the other parent was an artist, so you get that sort of interesting yin and yang, and just had sort of great messages and lessons growing up.

So, again, armchair psychology on my part. It probably wouldn’t stand up to peer review in a scientific journal, but those are the patterns I’ve seen.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now I’m curious, when it comes to the actual, let’s say, okay, we’ve got some great reasons, folks are raring to go, they want to become a leader executive, can you maybe start us with a story about someone who was not getting promoted, they wanted it, but then they made a switch in their approach and they pulled it off, they made the leap?

Adam Bryant
To me, a big part of making that leap, usually there’s a story under there where people explain, like, “What was that moment? What was that mindset shift?” and there’s a few that come to mind. There’s one executive I interviewed where she was moving up, and she hit this point where she realized she couldn’t do it all, and she needed to delegate. And she had the insight that she had to start giving away the stuff that she really liked to do and that she was really good at, so that she could then get to the next level.

And I can really relate to that because as people are moving up, we all have the things we’re really good, our strengths and weaknesses, and we tend to really like to do the things that we’re good at. But the point is if you want to get up to that top leadership position, at some point you have to start giving that stuff away, and letting other people do it.

There was another moment from another executive where she had become sort of a new CEO of a startup, and she was going to the chair of the board and sort of running key decisions past the board chair. And, at some point, the chairman just turned to her, and said, “Look, I can give you my advice but you need to realize, ultimately, this is your decision. And if you are wrong, we are going to fire you.”

And it was just that sort of moment of clarity, it’s like because when you are a leader, part of the mindset is it’s not about asking for permission anymore. To have that top job, you’ve got to own the accountability and you’ve got to own the outcomes of your decisions. And that’s a big part to me of making the leap to leader is being comfortable making decisions when the data isn’t there, because the higher you move up, like the decisions get harder, there’s less data, there’s more gray areas, there’s more unhappy people. Whether you go left or right, or up or down, you’re going to make some people unhappy.

And, to me, a big part of leadership is being willing to make decisions, to take the risks and own the outcomes, because, honestly, Pete, a lot of people aren’t comfortable doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good to surface there. And I don’t know if there’s a recipe for how one gets comfortable doing that. Is there?

Adam Bryant
Well, I think it’s being aware of the fact that it is your job to make those hard decisions. I reflect on a conversation I had with one CEO, he was a first-time CEO, and he’s just feeling like, “Wow, like every day is kind of a hard day. These problems are coming to my desk, and I don’t really know what the answer is.” And the lightbulb went off for him where he realized, “This is my job. And, yes, it’d be nice to have the easy decisions come to you, but they generally get taken care of farther down in the organization.”

So, at some point, you have to make the shift, and realize what may seem like a burden is an opportunity. It is your job. There are no easy days. And you need to see those tough decisions as interesting puzzles, because I do feel like we’re in this, we’re just living through this breathtaking moment of change for all the obvious reasons since the start of the pandemic. But I do think managing people and leading people has gotten five to ten times harder.

And in our consulting work at my firm, The ExCo Group, we do see a lot of fast-rising executives who are kind of tapping out, and saying, “Look, I didn’t sign up for how hard this is.” And I think we are in this moment where it is kind of black or white, like we are not in this moment anymore where there’s some playbook for leadership and how to have these new conversations about compassion and remote work, and all these things. It’s like these are new and very hard problems for which there’s no clear answer.

And I think you need to do a gut check. It goes back to this idea of, “Do you really want to lead?” And you have to ask yourself, like, “Are you excited about this?” Because if you’re excited about it, and say to yourself, “What an amazing time to be managing and leading people where we’re figuring out the future of work, the future of leadership, and you have an opportunity to shape that and be a part of it. Wow, that’s really exciting.”

So, are you that kind of person or are you saying to yourself, “I just find all these problems just kind of overwhelming. Everything seems so hard. Just the lines are blurring between the personal and professional. Everybody is kind of trying to figure out this new world of work and expectations. And I just find this all exhausting and somewhat overwhelming”?

And you need to be honest with yourself because I do feel like we’re at this moment where you really have to look at yourself in the mirror, and say, “Leadership is getting harder. Managing is getting harder. Do you want to do this?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now to dig into a couple of your particular concepts in the book, I was intrigued by you’ve got a notion called the say-do ratio. What is that? And how do we perfect ours?

Adam Bryant
Sure. So, the third section of the book is called ‘How to get promoted without asking for a promotion?’ And it’s sort of this is in your sweet spot of how to be awesome at your job. How do you set yourself apart? Because if you are ambitious and you want to move up, the question at the core of that is, “Okay, how do you set yourself apart?”

And, to me, one of the easiest ways to do it is to have a great do-to-say ratio. And that comes from a CEO that I interviewed; a guy named Brett Wilson. When I first heard it, I kind of fell out of my chair but what it means is “What percentage of the things that you say you’re going to do, do you actually do?” And it’s about reliability, it’s about dependability, it’s about your reputation, it’s about trustworthiness.

And I think if you want to set yourself apart, if you just have this rule that whatever you say you’re going to do, that you follow through on. And if, for some reason, you can’t, you tell people, it’s like, “Hey, I know I promised you that but this happened. I need an extra day.” You’re just upfront about it rather than letting them discover that you missed the deadline. I think if you build a reputation as being super reliable and dependable, you can really set yourself apart.

And the beauty of this is that it is so easy to improve. Again, you got to be honest with yourself. Pete, your listeners need to ask themselves, “What is your do-to-say ratio? Is it really high? Or are there some things that you say you’re going to do that you don’t always follow through on? And the beauty of this, it’s like a really easy hack to improve your do-to-say ratio, which is just whenever you say you’re going to do something, just write it down. Make a note to yourself, your computer, or mostly on your phone. It doesn’t matter where, just keep a list somewhere.

And even in the small stuff, if you say, “Oh, I’m going to connect you with that person,” and you follow through on it, like if you do that consistently, people are going to start noticing things, like, “Wow, this person always does what they say they’re going to do.” And then that builds your reputation, and so you’re going to get more responsibility because people just know you’re that kind of person that’s going to own it and deliver it.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. You say that compartmentalization is a crucial art. What do you mean by that? And how do we get better at it?

Adam Bryant
Well, I think as you get higher in leadership positions, like the problems get harder, and as we discussed, the decisions get more difficult, you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to be second-guessed, you’re going to be criticized, any decision you’re going to make is going to leave somebody unhappy just because of all the tradeoffs.

And so, I think a key skill of leadership is to be able to compartmentalize and to keep everything in perspective. Because if you’re not good at that, what does that look like? It means like you’re always beating yourself up for any wrong decisions, or you don’t take criticism well, you’re always worrying about the impact of your decisions on other people, you’re staring at the ceiling at 2:00 in the morning when you should be sleeping, and you’re just not going to be an effective leader.

And some people over-index the other way, Pete. I’ve certainly seen people who are so good at compartmentalizing, it basically means they have no empathy, like they just let everything roll off their back, and they don’t seem to appreciate the impact of their decisions on people. And maybe that’s not healthy either, but, to me, being able to compartmentalize to sort of acknowledge the challenges, but then sort of keep them in a box in your mind so that it’s like, “Okay, I’ve dealt with that, I’m thinking about that. I’m going to park this here and I’ll come back to it later.”

Pete Mockaitis
And if our compartmentalization art is not so artful and we do tend to ruminate and think about the thing that’s not so handy and we’d prefer to have it compartmentalized, how do we get better at it?

Adam Bryant
Part of it is to let go of perfection, because if things are chewing you up inside, it’s, first, you’re not going to be perfect and to give yourself a break. One of our mentors at my firm often shares this advice with startup founders and stuff, and it’s a great line. He says, “Look, if you talk to your friends the way you’re talking to yourself, you wouldn’t have any friends.”

And, to me, that’s a sort of a great point to keep in mind. It’s like you need to take care of yourself. And some people are very driven and they’re really performance-oriented and success-oriented. If something doesn’t go well, you could spend a lot of time beating yourself up, and you just need to let that go.

Another trap that people fall into is that we want to be liked. Like, who doesn’t? As a manager, as a leader, you want people to like you, and you need to let go of that as well, and shift from wanting people to like you to people respecting you. It doesn’t mean that it’s fine if they don’t like you because they’re not going to follow you, but just to worry less about whether people like you.

And I think if you just keep, for every decision you have to make, you can get chewed up about, “Well, is this the right thing to do? And it’s going to affect this person this way and have these consequences.” If you just run every decision that you face through a simple framework of, “What is the best for the company or for the organization that I’m running, or the team that I’m running?” like, that’s a way of sort of simplifying and clarifying.

And then you could probably sleep better at night, and say, “Look, I know there are some disruptions here. I know I’ve kind of created a blast zone, but I know this is the right decision for the organization,” that’s going to help you compartmentalize. So, I think those are a couple of specific strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how do you recommend we build our self-awareness muscle?

Adam Bryant
It starts with five words that I heard from a young CEO years ago, and it was one of those moments when she said it, it was kind of burned into my head. And the backstory was that she had a really rough childhood, very difficult relationship with her parents, they moved a lot, she was bullied at school, and she was sort of telling me about her life story.

And, at one point in the interview, I had said, “Well, you have such a positive attitude. Where does that come from?” And she said these five words, she said, “Reality is just source material.” And what she meant is that, “Look, there is the reality of the things we experience but it’s just a reminder that we are always creating narratives for ourselves. We are constantly sort of editing the films of our experience and focusing on certain things to tell ourselves good stories, bad stories.”

And, to me, that’s such an important insight because if you believe in the idea that reality is just source material, and that we’re always, in effect, telling ourselves stories, that it allows you to sort of step outside yourself a little bit and to ask yourself, like, “Wait a minute. What story am I telling myself about that experience? And is there another way to look at it?” And I think that helps guard against some of the traps that people fall into in the stories they tell themselves.

So, one of the common traps is the victim narrative, “Stuff is happening to me,” and you just start feeling like a victim when you should see everything as a learning opportunity. It reminds me of that expression I heard from one CEO, which is that, “Ninety-five percent of the worse stuff that happens to you winds up being the best stuff that happens to you because you really learn from those experiences. It builds your character, gives you a lot of wisdom about life.”

So, the victim narrative is one trap. The fairness or unfairness narrative is another trap. You can often feel like, in organizations, things aren’t fair. And it’s just a matter of, like, “Look, reality is what it is.” And if you really push yourself, it’s like, “Am I thinking about this in the most productive way? Am I seeing everything as an opportunity?”

Because, to me, that’s one of the things that really separates entrepreneurs. I’ve interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs, and they are wired slightly differently. And I think one of the key ways is they don’t sort of dwell on bad news. It’s like everything is an opportunity, “What’s the plan B? What’s the plan C here?” and they just keep pushing forward. So, to me, those are a couple of the key things to keep in mind just to help build that self-awareness muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any thoughts on politics, office politics, networking, trickery?

Adam Bryant
Well, politics, there’s politics in every organization, especially the organizations that like to say, “We don’t have any politics.” And the one tip that I always keep in mind with politics is you really need to understand what the other person’s scoreboard is in their head for their own success. To me, that’s the secret to understanding office politics because, as much as companies like to say there’s a shared scoreboard and everybody is going to work together as a team, the reality is that everybody has got their own part of that.

And everybody is building their part of the business, and they tend to focus almost with blinders on about that. And so, to me, one of the ways to sort of help you navigate politics is always start by understanding what is the other person’s scoreboard. Because if you understand what is their scoreboard, then you’re much more likely to add clarity about how you can help them, and how you can kind of find a common ground. So, that’s my best insight about politics.

And I would also say about networking, I don’t know about you, Pete, but I’m an introvert. I don’t like the idea of networking. That’s sort of like, “There’s 20 people over there, just go mingle during drinks before a conference.” That makes me really uncomfortable, and I’m not good at it. But I think it’s important to build your network. And if you focus on, “Well, how do you build your network?” to me, the most effective way to do it is not just, “Hey, can we have a coffee? Or, do you want to grab a drink or something?”

To me, the most effective way is to do things with people, to build something together, just be on a committee with them to do some project together, maybe it’s outside your day job or something. But, to me, like that’s the way to sort of really cement those relationships. Whether it’s with colleagues internally or, like, maybe serving on a board, or part of an organization outside your company, but the way to build your lasting networks, so those relationships really last, is to do something with people rather than just share a coffee.

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

Adam Bryant
I’m over to you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Adam Bryant
I mentioned the early one from Ruth Simmons about always be prepared at any point in your life to learn the most important lesson in your life. That’s one of my favorites. The other favorite is “Play in traffic.” And whenever people are asking me for career advice, I often mention that. And what it means is just, like, get out there and do stuff. Meet people. Get involved. Just start doing things. Play in traffic, and you’re going to build those connections that are going to lead to things.

And I think about that often because I think, sometimes, people when they’re first starting out their careers, they tend to have very specific ideas about their career plans, like, “By this age, I want to make this much money, I want to have this title,” and it’s sort of very linear. But that’s not how life works. Your career path is going to be shaped much more by the people you meet, the people you work with, people you connect with.

And so, you really just want to get out there and meet a lot of people in the context of work and doing things, so that’s why I love that expression – play in traffic.

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

Adam Bryant
There is a study about capuchin monkeys. And if your listeners look it up, capuchin monkeys fairness study, and it’s this great video about two monkeys in cages, and they’re fed like a cucumber versus a grape, and it’s sort of how the two monkeys react to getting either the grape or the cucumber. It’s just a powerful reminder of how, as human beings, one of our triggers is fairness. It’s a hilarious video.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Adam Bryant
I love In the Heart of the Sea. It’s a great book about whaling that got made into a movie. I love books about sort of adventure and resilience, and what people do, like, in really tough circumstances. I often go back to that.

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

Adam Bryant
I’ll probably say my recorders because I’ve done a thousand interviews, so that’s probably my Swiss Army knife. It all starts with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I need to know. Recorders, we’re talking about, like, an external…?

Adam Bryant
Yeah, I’m a lot older than you, Pete. So, I grew up using external recorders.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Well, that’s handy when you’re out and about. Sure.

Adam Bryant
Exactly. I’m dating myself but, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I have one as well, so. And a favorite habit?

Adam Bryant
Probably the best, but maybe not my favorite is just, like, exercising every day, like trying to go out for a run. And, to me, that’s how I kind of stay centered and blow off steam. I will share that I basically listen to the same playlist every time I go for a run. It’s not because I’m listening to the music. It’s I like to have music, but to me it’s just background noise. It’s kind of like a green screen that I can think against. So, I probably just overshared there.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no, actually that’s perfect, and I would like to know a couple of the tracks on the playlist.

Adam Bryant
There’s Dave Matthews in there, there’s U2, John Legend. It’s a pretty eclectic mix, I have to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they repeat it back to you often?

Adam Bryant
One thing, I’m sure, like an important insight for me, and it goes back to there’s a famous interview question that Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur who’s pretty famous for asking people, which is like, “What do you believe that 95% of the world disagrees with you on?” And I think it’s a great way to sort of getting that creative thinking and stuff.

And I have to say, like it was an important insight for me that I think the world has it completely wrong on in the following way, that the world tends to refer to children as young adults. And I think it’s backwards because I think adults are older children. And I think if we sort of all acknowledge that and recognize that, and that people bring their little red wagon of stuff into work, and we’re all motivated by a lot of the same things that kids are motivated by, like, “You want to go first. That’s not fair. Let me do myself,” all those reactions that kids have, adults have them, too.

So, I think it’s a good sort of unified field theory of understanding human behavior.

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

Adam Bryant
My personal website is AdamBryantBooks.com, and my firm is The ExCo Group, and our website is ExCoLeadership.com.

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

Adam Bryant
I think a huge underrated superpower of leadership is listening. I think most people are not that good at listening, and I think our devices are making it worse. But I just think if you want to be awesome at your job and separate yourself, I think it’s about being a good listener, and it’s a muscle that you can practice all day long in your personal life, your professional life. And, again, if the goal is to set yourself apart, I think being a good listener is one way to do it, plus you’re going to learn a lot more if you’re a good listener.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Adam, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and many good leaps.

Adam Bryant
That’s great. I appreciate it. Thank you, Pete.

Jul 27
0

885: How to Build the Mental Fitness and Resilience of a Champion with Greg Harden

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Legendary coach Greg Harden shares the secrets of his world-famous athletes for conquering fear, fatigue, anxiety, and self-doubt.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to master your response to any situation
  2. The secret to being a top performer
  3. The #1 subject for you to become an expert on

About Greg

Greg Harden is a Peak Performance Coach, motivational speaker, and executive consultant who is best known for his work with seven-time Super Bowl champion quarterback Tom Brady. He also worked with Heisman Trophy winner and Super Bowl MVP Desmond Howard, and twenty-three-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps.

He’s spent over 30 years building them at the University of Michigan, including 400 future professional athletes, 50 NFL first-round draft picks, and 120 Olympians from over 20 countries. He gained national recognition when 60 Minutes Sports profiled him as “Michigan’s Secret Weapon.”

Resources Mentioned

Greg Harden Interview Transcript

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

Greg Harden
Oh, thank you for having me, sir.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to be chatting with you even though you are Michigan’s secret weapon, as in the Fighting Illini we didn’t like losing to Michigan.

Greg Harden
Well, the Fighting Illini.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Greg Harden
The always great competitors and most exciting.

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Well, I’m so excited to get into your wisdom. Maybe, could you kick us off with a particularly memorable story for you in your career, coaching some of the greatest athletes ever?

Greg Harden
Wow. The thing that comes to my mind instantly is, “What’s the difference between all these mega stars and people who don’t make it?” And what we come up with over and over and over is not only were they hungry, they were humble. They were coachable. That made them coachable. They came in with a mindset that made it clear that they wanted to be the absolute best but, most importantly, they came and were able to surrender the ego enough to learn from others.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Can you think of a time that, I don’t know, Tom Brady or Michael Phelps or someone you worked with did just that that stood out?

Greg Harden
Tom Brady, I mean, Tom was really clear about what he wanted. He had watched what I had done and what we had done, Desmond Howard and I, and he was curious as to whether or not it could help him. And so, he walked in and he was kind of low in the depths chart, and made it real clear that he wanted to be a starter at Michigan, and I made it clear to him that, “I can’t help you be a starter at Michigan but I can help you understand that if no one else believes in you, you believe in yourself.” And he said, “Let’s start there.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s cool. Wow. And so then, from there, how do we go from low in the depths to superstar?

Greg Harden
Well, what you do is you start by being a regular schmo who’s going to out-train and outwork everybody. We talk about his gifts, he can’t outrun you, he can’t outjump you, he can’t outlift you in the weight room but you couldn’t measure his heart, and you couldn’t measure his mind. His mental game was so strong, back in the day, you didn’t have all these fancy schmancy phones, we would have to kick him out of the training room where he was studying film all day long, like he was a coach. He had a coach’s mentality and he was a student of the game. He studied and studied and studied, and was more prepared than anyone could imagine when it was showtime.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, you’ve put together some of your learnings in your book Stay Sane in an Insane World: How to Control the Controllables and Thrive. Tell us, what’s the big idea here?

Greg Harden
Well, the big idea here is to teach people to become the world’s greatest expert on one subject – themselves. That’s the mission. The mission is to get people to be obsessed with something other than all the things they’re obsessed with. And what I’m asking them to do is focus just for a moment on becoming so critically conscious, so aware, so mindful that you’re able to look at what’s working in your life and what’s not working, to keep it that simple.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you give us an example?

Greg Harden
Well, if we’re talking about just trying to make your life work at your job, if your communication style is not working at your job, you need to be aware of it. If members of your team think that you’re arrogant and unapproachable, you need to be aware of it. You need to be so sophisticated that you are always examining how people are responding, you’re always examining how you come across and how others come across, and you’re studying everyone but, in order to really know Pete, I’ve got to know Greg. I’ve got to know me so well that I can read myself in different circumstances and situations and know when I need to shift, when I need to adapt, when I need to change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you share with us a story of an example of someone who saw a real upgrade in that self-awareness?

Greg Harden
Desmond Howard, Heisman trophy winner, MVP of the Super Bowl. Desmond Howard was ready to leave the institution when he pulled me aside and asked if he could have a conversation. I said, “Sure, let’s talk.” He talked about how he was unhappy, how he came in as a running back, and he had been shifted to a wide receiver, and how he wasn’t getting any playing time, and he was frustrated, and he was being recruited hard by other people.

And I looked at him and I suggested that perhaps his press clippings from high school had nothing to do with what he was accomplishing here. I said, “What you need to do is understand that, right now if you leave, who cares?” I said, “If you leave now, you told me you were the guy in high school. Hell, I was the guy in high school.” Pete was the guy in high school.

Pete Mockaitis
I really was, yes.

Greg Harden
So, I said, “Son, you may have to examine what’s working and what’s not working between you and the staff. And what does the staff think about you?” I said, “If you liked, Desmond, I’ll go and chat with the people who are around you and ask them, ‘What’s working for this guy? And what does he need to improve on?'” He said, “Go ahead.”

So, I went and found out that they were totally unimpressed with his commitment to blocking. And back in the day, if you were a wide receiver, and you didn’t block, you weren’t getting on the field. They also thought that his attitude was pretty much, “I and me,” and the team was not the issue, and he believed that this was Desmond Howard University, and then they said, “No, it’s not going to work.”

So, I went back and told him, and he says, “Oh, I didn’t know I was coming across that way.” I said, “Yeah. Well, even though that’s not your intent, that’s been the results. So, let’s come up with a strategy that can change everything.” So, what I suggested to Desmond was that, “First off, you need to decide to be the best athlete on the team, not the best receiver, but the absolute best athlete on the team. You need to push yourself in areas that you hate. If you can give 100% a hundred percent of the time at stuff you don’t even like, what happens when you get to the stuff you love?”

Desmond was not someone who wanted to run. Desmond decided to run 10 to 15 miles extra per week while everyone else was doing something else. When he showed up in August for camp, he was the best-conditioned athlete. He was always in the top three of every event, every activity. He transformed himself. I suggested also that he needed to irritate or perhaps piss off the defensive coordinator. He said, “How do I do that?” I said, “At least once a week, try to knock somebody out and apologize afterwards.”

And I said, “You don’t like blocking? You better love blocking. You don’t like running? You better learn to love running. And convince yourself, con yourself, maneuver yourself into thinking differently and being passionate about everything you do, not just the things you like but the things that are required.”

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s talk about that. Con yourself into loving the things you hate. That sounds powerful, maybe dangerously powerful, but I want to know how I do it.

Greg Harden
Well, you practice, and train, and you rehearse. The keyword is practice, training, and rehearsing. When we talk about getting in shape, people understand practice, train, and rehearse. When we’re talking about mental fitness, the mental gain, you have to teach yourself that you can practice, train, and rehearse to upgrade in ways that you think, in ways that you operate, how you can generate passion.

For example, let’s talk about anxiety. Well, there’s a thin line between anxiety and excitement. Your body reacts pretty much the same. Your heart starts pounding so you’re sweating, and your breathing is impaired, “Am I anxious or am I excited?” So, what we begin to help people understand is that there’s a thin line between those emotions, and you can trigger and turn anxiety into excitement, and fear into passion.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I like that. Now, I’m curious then, when we do need the turning into, if you’re conning yourself, is it just you’re telling yourself, “I’m excited”? Or, what are the steps or the how-to, the process?

Greg Harden
Well, you begin to start training yourself to notice when fear and self-doubt, when anxiety shows up, and you begin to track it, you begin to understand it as a predictable part of life. So, what we do is, the first thing we do is convince people that fear and self-doubt, that fear and anxiety are predictable, therefore, manageable. It’s part of being human. So, that’s the first order of business is to begin to get you to understand to stop being stunned when you’re anxious, stop being overwhelmed when you’re anxious, “I’m anxious. It makes sense to be anxious.” And, as a matter of fact, fear is predictable as all get out.

Because, think about this, you hear, “Be fearless. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” That’s total nonsense. Some of the greatest moments of my life, some of the greatest moments of your life and most of the people you know, they’re about to crap their pants before it. Am I right or wrong?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s funny. I’m thinking about when I proposed marriage to my bride, I was, like, probably shaking.

Greg Harden
Right. It’s so predictable but we need to learn how to embrace fear, how to embrace anxiety and recognize it and tell it, “Come on in,” and tell it you don’t have time right now but, “Hey, I expected you, I knew you’d be here, but I’ll get back with you later because, right now, I have something to do.” So, fear becomes manageable when we begin to anticipate it as being part of life.

Let’s take it further. So, then if I’m fearless, that means I’m courageous. Courage is not the absence of fear. Courage is facing fear. Where encouraged it doesn’t even exist unless we’re facing fear. So, yes, be courageous, face fear, grab it by the throat, laugh at it, anticipate it, and then move on because you’ve done it before. And we love being anxious and excited. Why would you go to an amusement park? No, why would you go to a carnival on the corner that’s been setup overnight and get on any of those rides?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Greg Harden
You’re a brave and courageous person if you get on some of those carni rides, right? But think about this, you go to the big-time amusement park, you get on a ride called The Demon Drop, and you go up 10 stories, and some 19-year-old, smoking a cigarette, puts you in a coffin-like capsule, straps you in, closes the door, pulls a lever, and you plummet nine floors.

And then the hydraulic lift kicks in and it saves you, and of course, your stomach did go into your nasal passages before you got off and you screamed. Then you got off and say, “Let’s do that again.” We love fear. We have to begin to understand that fear is passion. It’s predictable as all get out, and part of life, and part of being human.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we predict it, we welcome it in, and then say, “Well, hey, I’m a little busy right now, so I’m going to have to get back with you later.” That’s all there is to it.

Greg Harden
It’s not all that is to it, but if you train yourself and you repeat it over and over, because what we’re talking about is self-talk, “How do I talk to myself?” We talk to ourselves all the time, sometimes out loud, but that’s not the issue here, right? So, we begin to train ourselves to how we process, how we think about things. We anticipate we’re going to have some anxious moments, and we talk our way through it until we get so confident, it becomes a habit of facing fear, it becomes a habit of anticipating it and dismissing it, and getting back with it and understanding it and talking about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’d love to get your take on the opposite end of emotion. So, when we’re fearful, anxious, or really hyped up, what happens when we’re just, “Ugh, waah, tired,” unmotivated, not feeling it? How do we play that game?

Greg Harden
Well, so you’ve heard me say it already, “Train to give 100% a hundred percent of the time.” That’s total insanity. You can’t give 100% a hundred percent of the time. But if it’s my default mode, if it’s what I fall back on, if it’s something that I’m committed to trying, I get to the point where, instead of being, yeah, your worst day can be 30%. Okay, you’re a good guy. You can make it all the way to 50. You’re tired, you’re broke down, you don’t want to do something.

But if your default mode is to give 100% in everything you do, your worst day will be better than the average person’s best day. That’s where we’re going. We’re going to a spot where, “I mean, I don’t feel like doing this,” and you do realize that some of your greatest performances, you were sick as a dog, you were worn out and tired, and you came through because you were relaxed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Greg Harden
Am I right or wrong?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m actually thinking about, I don’t know, this is just so mundane as oppose to championship athletes, but I’m thinking about some of my greatest performances in, I don’t know, chess or Tetris, which really do push my brain kind of as fast or hard as it can be pushed at times. Yeah, sometimes the tuckered-out times did end up being the best, and I guess that’s the missing element because I was relaxed.

Greg Harden
Isn’t that something? I mean, sometimes you’re so tired, you’re too tired to be anxious. Some of the greatest moments, we’ve seen our heroes and heroines who are just broke down and worn out, “And I was sick and I threw up all this morning, but I’m going to give my best,” and their best ends up being a world record.

So, again, everyone else is trying to manipulate and maneuver you into doing, into buying, into performing. You have to be able to do it yourself. And you need to be able to convince yourself that, “I’m going to just absolutely do my best. I know I’m worn out. I know I’m tired. I know jetlag has set in, but opportunity knocks.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, when we’re training ourselves to give 100% one hundred percent of the time, what does that training program consist of, just doing it again and again? Or, are there some key steps or conditioning protocols?

Greg Harden
Well, it’s kind of hard to describe it any other way than practicing. Now, this is a story that I think you’ll like. I’ve worked with a lot of megastars and people who are absolutely the best in law, in engineering, in medicine, boom, boom, boom. But I had this young man from the West Coast who was not a fake gangster. He was from a family, there’s a family business, grand daddy, cousins, uncles.

And he somehow, miraculously, turned into this outstanding athlete so he got a scholarship and he came to the university. And they warned me, “You’re going to have to work with this guy.” And I said, “Well, why did you recruit this guy?” They said, “You’ve got to see him play.” “All right.” Well, he was a really good athlete. He wasn’t the greatest in the world but he could perform and he could pull his weight, and he was a problem.

In the first few weeks, he was in my office because of this, and in the next few months, he was in my office because of that. Well, for several years, we worked together, and, lo and behold, for some odd reason, we bonded. For some odd reason, he started changing, “Okay, that’s nice,” and he was not getting in trouble. But, now, he’d come by my office, “G, what you doing?” “Waiting for you. That’s all I’m doing. I’m just sitting around, waiting for you.” And he’s, “Oh, you’re so silly.” We’d get together and we talk and talk.

So, one summer, he shows up at the office, “G, what you doing?” I said, “Well, I’m bored and that’s not good for you.” I said, “Come on, sit down.” I said, “We’ve been working for several years, and you know you’ve changed and I’m so proud of you. I’m so impressed with what you’ve done and how you’ve carried yourself in the last just few months. But we need to find something else to work on.” He said, “What’s that?”

I said, “People think you’re dumb as a box of rocks.” He said, “What?” And I said, “Yeah. And you don’t care, do you?” “Nope.” I said, “But you might be.” He said, “Hey, wait,” and he used some colorful language. I said, “I’m not saying that you are. I’m saying we don’t know.” I said, “Have you ever been a student?” He said, “No.” “But you still have to go to class. This is an institution where you actually have to go to class, you actually have to pass the classes. All you’re doing is trying to be eligible, right?” He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “But what if we had nothing else to work on, and we decided to work on you being a student involved in athletics?” He said, “Meh.” I said, “Here’s the deal. I’m not trying to get you to be a better student. I’m trying to get you to be a better person.” He said, “Go on.” I said, “This is what we’re going to do. We’re going to use academics to make you a better athlete.” He said, “This better be good.”

I said, “I want you to practice, train, and rehearse being a better student. I want you to do your studying. I want you to do your reading. I want you to anticipate that you’re going to have the tests and not wait till the last minute to figure it out. I want you to see if you can prove something to yourself, not to anyone else. This is not about anyone else. I need you to practice, train, and rehearse the mental discipline, the self-motivation, the self-control that it would take to become a student.”

“If you can train yourself to give 100% at academics, something you’re not even invested in, what could you do if you mastered your mind, mastered your own ability to process, to be disciplined, to be focused, to shut out the noise, to stop daydreaming, and to be focused like a laser beam on the task at hand? This is not about academics, son. This is not about athletics. It’s about what kind of man can we create that can take on the world at any level?” He says, “Whoa, you’re crazy.” “Yeah, but we got nothing else to work on.”

So, we worked and worked and talked about it, and, you know, “How are you doing? Are you studying? Are you reading?” boom, boom, boom. So, several months goes by, and I’m not thinking about it that much. At the end of the year, he walks into my office, “G, what you doing?” “Waiting on you.” He said, “Man, you’re not going to believe this. I’m on the dean’s list, fool.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Greg Harden
And we giggled and laughed and rolled on the floor, and people thought we’d lost our minds. But I’ve got a gangster from the West Coast, thrilled to have mastered his own mind to the point where he became a student involved in athletics. And it’s one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome, yes. Whew! Now, when you say practice, train, and rehearse, which you’ve said a few times, I’m curious, are there distinctions such that practicing is a different activity than training, is different than rehearsing? And how would you distinguish them?

Greg Harden
They’re all the same. And you know how our mind works. For some person, the word practice, it’s going to trigger. For another person, the word train is going to trigger, and rehearse. You’ve got to see them as a compilation, a formula that all leads to the same destination, and that’s being someone who’s disciplined enough to train their mind to commit to improve and maintain performance over time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, you mentioned, in your book, controllables. What do you mean by those and how do we master them?

Greg Harden
There is an old serenity prayer, “God, guide me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to face the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” All this is telling us is that there are some things we can control and there are some things we can’t control, and we have to be able to discern what the differences are.

And being able to control myself is the hardest. I can barely control myself, and I’m trying to control my boss? If we’re talking about being awesome at your job, I can’t control my boss’ personality or style. I can’t control their expectations, real or imagined. I can influence all that but what I can control is how I respond, how I react, how I play my role, how I manage what I do, how I tell the boss. I have to be so sophisticated.

When I talk about controlling the controllables, they’re just giving me some more to do. I’m going to go to my boss and I’m going to make it real clear, “We need to prioritize. You just asked me to do six things. Prior to that, you’d asked me to do three. We need to review these six and determine what’s going to be A, what’s going to be B, what’s going to be B2. And I need for you to be clear, boss, what is the priority because I have my idea but I need to get input from you.”

Now, how is that controlling the controllables? That’s all I can do. I have to make sure that I’m not set up to fail. And so, setting myself up not to fail, I’m going to be assertive enough to walk in, and say, “We need to make some decisions. I need your input, boss.” I can’t control the boss but I can control what I’m sharing, what I’m asking, and how I’m going to respond. Controlling the controllables is a critical piece of the puzzle and it’s in terms of staying sane in an insane world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, so now I’d love to get your view on we talked about humility, being coachable is huge in terms of a key mindset that unlocks all kinds of good things. Are there any other top mindset shifts you’d highlight for us?

Greg Harden
I would challenge anyone to, I mean, we know some people who are, like, the best friend you could have in life. You’ve had some friends that are some keepers, and maybe only one or two but you have some. But we sometimes notice that even those people who are really great at being a friend to everyone else are horrible at being a friend to themselves.

Your best friend in life should be you. So, introducing to people the whole idea of 4As, for example. The 4As are something that when everyone says every and all, they’re either going to say something profound or completely stupid. All people have 4As. The need for attention, the need for affection, the need for approval, and the need for acceptance. We’re always looking for attention, affection, approval, and acceptance.

I don’t know about you but I’ve made a complete fool of myself trying to get, pick one, and I’ve also risen to the top of my game seeking attention, affection, approval, and acceptance. But where we have to go when we’re training people to be the best version of themselves, at some point I’ve got to put the word self in front of those As.

And the simplest piece is to teach people self-love and self-acceptance. I’m glad that you’re able of loving and caring about everyone else but I need you to consider self-love and self-acceptance. Accepting yourself, flaws and all. Because if you’re good friends, your friends could be flawed, they can mess up, you think, “But you’re my friend. Okay, I forgive you. Let’s go.”

But we’re so hard on ourselves, sir. We are so difficult to please. And when we shift to being a peak performer or a top performer who wants to maintain it over time, I believe an X factor is self-love and self-acceptance. Imagine telling a 320-pound lineman the key assignment is self-love and self-acceptance.

So, one of the things that I would challenge anyone to do is not only give 100% a hundred percent of the time, but love yourself unconditionally, to learn how to do it. And if you can’t do it by yourself, thinking about it, and processing it, practicing, training, and rehearsing, get a consultant or a counsellor. Counsellors or consultants.

When we’re talking about business, I’m telling the CEO who wants to know, “How do you transfer all this to my industry?” I’m going to tell the CEO, “You’ve got to create formulas for people to be able to get the help that they need to transform themselves, to be able to dig deeper and get more out of themselves.”

So, I’m sorry, I get excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, no, I love it all. Well, now, Greg, I’d love it if we could zoom all the way inside your brain for specific self-talk approaches that might model this in practice. So, let’s go through a whole loop of, “I don’t feel like doing something. I’m bored. Now, I’m doing a thing and I’m scared, fearful, anxious. And then, oops, I just learned that I screwed it up, and now I’m beating myself up.” What would be the great self-talk arc of moving through these three phases and contrasted with the terrible self-talk arc moving through these three phases?

Greg Harden
Well, let’s think it all the way through, like, “I’m so stupid. I just always…” I have to catch myself, “Well, that was stupid perhaps but it doesn’t mean that I’m stupid.” So, what I ask people to do is to train themselves to not just stop at the first and second thought, but take it to the third, fourth, and fifth thought, “God, I’m so stupid.” “Okay, I’m not stupid. But that was stupid. Beating myself is not working. Oh, okay.”

You’ve got to have in your brain a couple of phrases, “Beating yourself up does not work. It’s ineffective.” So, you’ve heard someone say, “Beating yourself up doesn’t work.” I need you to take it to, “It’s ineffective.” Worrying does not work. It does not change the outcome. Beating myself up doesn’t work. Worrying doesn’t work. I caught myself.

So, what we teach people is to catch themselves when they’re in the middle of beating themselves up. I’ve had people have a notebook where every time they catch themselves in negative self-talk, they jot it down. They even jot down what was happening at the time, what triggered it. And they end up finding out that if they are diligent, they do a lot more often than they thought.

So, the mission is to get people to, ultimately, eliminate but that’s a stretch. We need to reduce how often and how long we beat ourselves up. We’ve got to reduce it and telescope it, and get it down. But we get it down by being critically conscious, mindful, and aware of how often I do it, and I catch myself. So, your brain gets all the way to, when I catch myself, then I beat myself up for catching myself, “Oh, God, I’m doing it again. I’m so stupid.”

And so, we catch ourselves, and then we commit, once again, to retraining the way that we think. The commitment has to be there. People always talk about what they want to do but you’ve got to not just dream big. You’ve got to believe big in order to become big.

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

Greg Harden
Become the world’s greatest expert on you. And sometimes you will have to get input from others. You’ve been to some good schools, you’ve done some really good things, and you’re an international player, right? B school, boom, boom, boom. Anyone that’s been near the B school has heard of SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to our organization.

What are the things that are working, not working? What are the opportunities we need to exploit? What are the threats to us becoming world class? I have the audacity to take SWOT analysis and give it to individuals. I’ll ask you to do a SWOT analysis on yourself. And if you don’t like the word weaknesses, let’s say challenges, SCOT analysis.

And so, I’ll have someone do a SWOT analysis on themselves, and then we’ll review it. Some people are really good at identifying strengths and horrible at identifying weaknesses. Some folks, all they can see is weaknesses and are limited at seeing strengths. I will then ask them to get two to three people who they love, who loves them, who they trust, who will not take advantage and abuse any power that you give them, and ask them to do a SWOT analysis.

Then, we’ll have a review of what you’ve written, what several other people who care about you have written, and see if there are some congruencies, if they can see things that you cannot see or have not seen, that’s reinforcing the changes that need to be made. So, critical self-assessment is an artform that people must practice, train, and rehearse, getting better at being able to not really good at criticizing themselves but really doing a self-assessment is what we’re trying to get people to.

And so, I guess I get excited just thinking about, “How do you teach somebody to become the world’s greatest expert and then daring them to pursue self-love and self-acceptance?”

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

Greg Harden
“No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.” Eleanor Roosevelt.

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

Greg Harden
Carol Dweck’s Mindset is filled with research, and she can talk like a human being and not like just a scientist.

Pete Mockaitis
And that sounds like a favorite book. Any other favorite books?

Greg Harden
Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. That was like a bible to me. When I was really young and dumb, I would have a New Testament in one pocket and Viktor Frankl in another pocket, and would walk around talking smack because I’m grounded.

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

Greg Harden
Identifying self-defeating attitudes and behaviors.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite thing you share that people quote back to you often that really resonates with them?

Greg Harden
Well, your self-worth and self-esteem must not be based on external forces. How I feel about me should not be based on performance.

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

Greg Harden
GregHarden.com.

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

Greg Harden
Commit without question or pause, to giving everything you’ve got every chance you get. Give it 100% a hundred percent of the time as your default mode. And if that’s your default mode, your worst day will be better than the average person’s best day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Greg, this has been a treat. Thank you and keep on rocking.

Greg Harden
My man, most enjoyable. Thank you so much for your time.

Jul 24
0

884: How to Beat Distraction and Make Every Moment More Fulfilling with Dr. Cassie Holmes

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Cassie Holmes shares powerful strategies for finding more meaning and fulfillment from your hours.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why more time doesn’t make us more happy
  2. Two tricks to make drudgery feel more enjoyable
  3. How to keep distractions from hijacking your attention

About Cassie

Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, an award-winning teacher and researcher on time and happiness, and author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.

Happier Hour was selected as a Forbes Must-Read and a Next Big Idea Club Must-Read for 2022, as well as an Amazon Best Business Book of 2022. It’s also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the Today Show, CBS Mornings, and much other media.

Holmes’s academic research has been widely published in lead academic journals and featured in such outlets as The Economist, The New York Times, The Atlantic, and more. The course that she developed and now teaches, Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, is among UCLA’s most popular for MBAs. Prior to joining UCLA, Cassie was a tenured faculty member at Wharton, and she has a Ph.D. from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Columbia.

Resources Mentioned

Cassie Holmes Interview Transcript

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

Cassie Holmes
Hi, Pete. Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I’m excited to talk about the wisdom in your latest work here, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. I understand you had some happy hours, hopefully, recently on vacation. What’s the story here?

Cassie Holmes
Well, getting back from the fourth of July weekend, we had a great time up in Carmel Valley with good friends back from our business school days and their kids and our kids. And we picked up our kids from sleepaway camp. This is their first time away, and they were dirty but happy, and it was just fun to be outside in the sunshine with live music and yummy food and friends. What better than that?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that does sound great. I was just going to ask, what are some themes associated with your happiest hours? And maybe you’ve already listed a few. Any other key ingredients?

Cassie Holmes
Yeah, we’ll pick up on some of these, probably many times during our conversation because they’re sort of goes back to those simple things of those relationships with the people that we love, noticing those simple moments and making the most of them. And so, yeah, it’s people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Makes sense, people. I hear you. So, tell us, as you’re putting together and researching Happier Hour, any particularly surprising or counterintuitive discoveries you made on the journey?

Cassie Holmes
Yes. So, I think that what Happier Hour is, it’s sort of me pulling together my entire career of research on how we think about and spend our time for greater happiness and joy in our lives. And what’s interesting about that is that my relationship with time actually started off as not very happy at all. In fact, I felt, for me, for my own personal happiness, time proved to be this single biggest barrier.

And I share a story that I used to open the book which I think many can relate to and very much motivated my research agenda since, as well as writing the book to help others by applying what I found in my research to their lives, is that it was this day earlier in my career when I was still an assistant professor living in Philly. I was at Wharton at the time, and I traveled up to New York to give a talk that day.

And I was sandwiched between back-to-back meetings and then I’m rushing from those meetings, then to this networking dinner, and then rushing to catch the very last train that would get me home to my four-month-old and my husband asleep in Philly. And I made the train that night, but I remember it so vividly, I was absolutely exhausted.

And I was like, “I don’t know if I can keep up between the pressures of work, wanting to be a good partner, wanting to be a good parent, wanting to be a good friend, the never-ending piles of chores.” There simply were not enough hours in the day to get that all done, let alone to do any of it, while, let alone to enjoy any of it along the way.

And that feeling, which now in my research what we’ve been sort of unpacking, is what we referred to as time poverty. It’s this acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. And it’s a really bad feeling in my experience of that on the train that night. I actually considered quitting. I considered quitting my entire sort of career that I worked so hard for, thinking that, “If only I had a whole lot more time, then I would be happier.”

But before I sort of marched into my boss’ office, and like, “I quit.” And before telling my husband, “We need to pack up our house. We’re moving to the beach,” where this relaxing existence that I was daydreaming about would occur, I was like, “Is it true? Is it true that people who have a whole lot more time are, in fact, happier?” And I recognize this is an empirical question and, one, as a social psychologist, that I could test and should test.

And so, I did, and I recruited a couple of my favorite collaborators, Hal Hershfield and Marissa Sharif, and we looked at, “What’s the relationship between the amount of discretionary time people have and their happiness?” And what we found across our studies, including our analyses of the American Time Use Survey data that looks at, for tens of thousands of working as well as non-working Americans, how they spent a regular day, and we could calculate how much time they spent on discretionary activities and relate that to their happiness.

And what we found was, to answer your question, a surprising finding, was this surprising pattern of results, which was basically an upside-down U shape. And this is interesting because…

Cassie Holmes
What it means is that happiness goes down on both ends of the spectrum. So, yes, people with too little time are less happy, those time poor amongst us. But what was also interesting was that other side, and that surprising side was that there is such a thing as having too much time, that we found that those with a whole lot of discretionary time were also less happy.

And, then digging into the data, they’re unhappy for different reasons, and we can talk about that, but I think it’s absolutely surprising and an important finding for us to keep in mind, in those sorts of hurried days where we do feel time poor, it sort of cautions us away from quitting, and tells us that, in fact, for greater happiness, it’s not about necessarily having a whole lot more time available to spend however you want. In fact, it’s actually how you invest the time that you have available.

And that’s actually then what propelled my research agenda since, it’s, “How do we invest hours of our days so that we feel more satisfied in our days, so that we feel joy along the way, so that, looking back at the end of the week, even if we’re busy, we feel fulfilled as opposed to just having an overly full schedule?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Cassie, there’s so much good stuff in here. Oh, we’re going to have fun digging into this.

Cassie Holmes
Where do we start?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Cassie, I don’t know if this surprises you but I’ve actually been on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American Time Use survey numerous times.

Cassie Holmes
Oh, great.

Pete Mockaitis
For my own fun. That’s right. I’ve researched things for fun. And so, first, let’s just confirm that this is legit, if I may, because you’ll know this so much better than I. Because when I’m up in there, I am surprised at certain numbers, like, “How is that even possible?” Like, the average amount, hours per day for civilian population, spent on housework is 0.57 hours.
So, can you maybe, first of all, for the sliver of the audience who has nerdly crawled all over the American Time Use Survey, can you confirm that it is more or less valid and legit and share why I see some numbers that I find hard to believe?

Cassie Holmes
Yeah, it’s a great question, and when you do dig into the data, and I actually would say, even before you dig in, if you’re not digging in, if you’re just looking sort of at that first glance at averages and some of the maxes and means of the various variables, that’s where you’re like, “Well, what the heck? How is it possible?” For instance, in some of our analyses of the amount of discretionary time people have that they are spending 20 hours of discretionary time, which discretionary time are spending on activities that people want to do.

And so, I’m like, “Well, when do they sleep? They only have four hours of sleep and there are chores.” And for many of us, it’s more than 0.5 hours. So, what I would say is that this is based off of data averaging across a whole bunch of people, and it’s sort of capturing a particular day. And what you need to do is look at, “What are the patterns?” like, the overall patterns so that you’re not relying on one weirdo who has literally, I don’t know, watched TV for 20 hours in a row, discretionary activity, and slept only four hours and not done anything else.

It’s you’re looking at, “All right, what are some actual interactions and moderations? And who is feeling these particular ways? And how are they spending their time?” Now, what we wanted to make sure is that, so that we’re not sort of relying on any one idiosyncratic person and/or relying so heavily on just averages, looking at, “Okay, if we cut up the data in different ways, how does this pattern play out?”

But what’s so interesting is this pattern, this such thing, or this finding that there’s too little or too much that is bad and that is associated with less happiness, is quite telling.

And going to how we even calculate, “What does it mean to spend time on discretionary activities?” We didn’t want to rely on our own idiosyncrasies of, “What are activities that people want to do?” versus obligatory activities, activities that folks have to do. And so, what we did is that we took all activities from the American Time Use Survey, so it’s like 139 activities, and we presented them to a sample of 500 individuals, and we asked them, “Is this a discretionary activity? Is it something that you want to do?” and we said that we would count any activity that more than 90% agreed was discretionary.

And those activities that more than 90% identified as discretionary included passive leisure, so this is watching TV, relaxing. It is also, though, includes active leisure, like playing sports, engaging in a hobby, exercise. It also includes spending time with family and friends. So, this is what we calculate for each individual. Now we’re getting into the weeds. You have me start talking about data which people never ask about.

But actually, interestingly, this pattern emerges, this negative quadratic relationship, also when we use the sort of 75% of people agree, so it is robust. This having too little time is bad, and digging into the data for why with additional studies, the answer is that, for those who are time poor this is no surprise, it is heightened feelings of stress. How could it be that other side of the spectrum, how could having a whole lot of hours in the day to spend exactly how you want it be associated with less happiness?

And what we found is that we are driven to be somewhat productive. We are averse to being idle. And so, when we spend all the hours of our days, day in and day out, this isn’t vacation, with nothing to show for, it undermines our sense of purpose. And from that, we feel less productive. And without that sense of purpose, we feel less satisfied.

And what’s interesting is that we saw, as additional sort of evidence to this role of purpose and wanting to be somewhat productive with the time that we spend, we found that those who actually engage in discretionary activities that they are “productive and worthwhile” like exercise, like engaging in an enriching hobby, actually, like investing in relationships, spending time with family and friends. You don’t see the too-much-time effect. It’s actually the too-much-time effect is driven by spending a whole lot of those hours in the day in ways that are discretionary, things that you want to do, but it’s more of that passive leisure.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting. So, folks who are spending tons of discretionary time can break the rules of the upside-down U if that discretionary time is high quality, family, friends, hobbies instead of Netflix binging.

Cassie Holmes
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And then, also a quick data clarification, how are we measuring “happy”?

Cassie Holmes
Yes. So, with the American Time Use Survey, it’s people reporting their…I think, it was on a five-point scale of how satisfied they are with life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, lay it on us then, on the upside-down U, what is the magic sweet spot that puts us in the top happy spot we want to be? How much discretionary activity time?

Cassie Holmes
Well, we find that, and I don’t want to sort of hang my hat on these exact numbers, but in the American Time Use Survey data, we found that between two and five hours of discretionary time is that sweet spot, that is those with less than approximately two hours of discretionary time in the day, they were less happy because of those heightened feelings of stress. Those with more than approximately five hours of discretionary time in the day were also less happy because of a lacking sense of purpose.

But I would say that what is more, I think, the bigger takeaway here is that it is not so much about how much available time you have or how much discretionary time you have, it’s really when you’re engaging in activities that feel worthwhile. And they can feel worthwhile from different sources. They can feel worthwhile because they bring you joy. They can feel worthwhile because they give you that sense that you are being productive and contributing. They can feel worthwhile when rightly placed because they are rejuvenating and relaxing.

So, it’s about identifying for yourself what are those worthwhile ways of spending, but also when you’re spending that time, how you are engaged? What is your mindset? And that very high level is the answer here. And then I would love to talk about some of the strategies for folks to identify for themselves, “Okay, what are those worthwhile activities?” for you so we’re not relying on averages across people, or even averages across a particular example of any type of activity, but also some strategies that, when you’re spending that time, how do you make the most of it, how do you make it so that those hours that you’re spending are, in fact, heavier.

And yet another sort of answer for you. You asked me, whether it’s some surprising findings, perhaps even the most surprising. I think one was that too much time is a thing, and that having a whole lot more time isn’t necessarily better. But another is that there is incredible amount of happiness available to us in the time that we’re already spending but so often we’re missing and not noticing it.

And so, the extraordinary happiness that can come from ordinary moments, if you’re paying attention, if we are engaged in the activity in that time in such a way to make the most of it, can be so, so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that’s beautiful. Let’s do exactly that. First, let’s talk about worthwhile. How do we get really clear on what is worthwhile and not worthwhile for us individually?

Cassie Holmes
Yeah. So, the research tracks people’s time, so how you’re spending your time over the course of the day, and whether you’re feeling across the day, so researchers can pull out, on average, whether those activities that tend to be associated with the most positive emotion, what are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion.

That research points to our happiest activities being social connection. So, whether intimately or physically, as well as spending time with family and friends. Our least happy activities tend to be commuting, work, and housework, which is a bummer because those three activities together comprise a bulk of our work week. But, again, as I said before, those are based off of averages.

So, the average person as well as the average example of any one of those activities, but, of course, within your work hours, there are some activities that are going to be more fulfilling and worthwhile, and others that are aren’t. So, what I encourage folks to do is to track your own time over the course of a week, writing down in those super simple PDF sheet that you can download from my website, if helpful.

Basically, for every half hour, writing down, “What are you doing? What’s the activity?” and being more specific than just working or socializing. If you’re working, what is the work task? If you’re socializing, whom are you with and what are you doing? And, as importantly, rating, as you’re coming out of that half hour, coming out of that activity, on a ten-point scale, how happy are you? And not the sort of, “Oh, it was just enjoyable.”

When people are rating their happiness, it is picking up on how satisfied you feel, how worthwhile was it. And so, while, admittedly, it is tedious to track your time over the course of the week, it’s totally worth it because you have this fantastic personalized dataset that you can look for yourself, looking across your activities or your rating sheet, your time tracker, you can see what are those activities that got your highest ratings.

And what’s as helpful is not just looking at the particular activities that are sort of your highest ratings versus your lowest ratings, but what are some commonalities among them? So, you might find, for instance, like when I did this, I found for myself it wasn’t socializing per se that was necessarily fun. For me, it was one-on-one time whether with a friend, whether with a family member, as opposed to the whole group going out.

Also, I found in my work hours, actually going on a coffee walk with a colleague as we’re talking about research, that is super fun time versus the group lunches at work, or the group dinners at home, or cocktail parties. And so, I found that, for me, actually, one-on-one time was very worthwhile. And by tracking your time, you can identify, “Okay, what are the sources of fulfillment and joy in the way you spend your time?”

You can also see just how much time you’re spending on your various activities so you can pull out, “Holy cow, I had no idea that I was spending X amount of time on said activity that is not fun, and, in many cases, not necessary.” And this is, for those of us who are time poor, it’s very helpful to, like, “Okay, this is time that I can reclaim and reallocate.”

Can I share an analogy to highlight just how important this is?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Cassie Holmes
Okay. Because our time is limited, and there’s an analogy that I love and I continue to touch back on in my own time spending decisions as well as I actually teach a course to our MBAs and executive MBAs at UCLA that is pulling the research together, Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design is what the course is called.

And in the first day of the course, I share this short film which shows this analogy so well. And in the film, a professor walks into his classroom, and on the desk in front of the class, he puts a large jar. And then into the jar, he pours golf balls, and then he asked his students, “Is the jar full?” The students nod their head because it looks full, but nope. Then he pours pebbles into the jar, and the pebbles fill the spaces between the golf balls up to the top. He asked his students again, “Is the jar full?” the students nod their head, “Yes, it looks full.” But nope.

Then he pours sand into the jar, and the sand fills all the spaces between the golf balls, between the pebbles up to the top, “Is the jar full?” By this point, the students were like laughing, and, “Yes, the jar looks full.” But, no, there was one more step. He pulls out two bottles of beer, he opens one, pours it into the jar, he opens the other, and then he goes and sort of perches himself on the front of the desk, and he explains, and he takes a sip of the beer.

And he explains, “This jar represents the time of your life. The golf balls are those things that really matter to you, your relationships with your family, your friendships, the work that you do that is so in line with your purpose and your goals that feels really worthwhile. The pebbles are the other important things in your life, like your job, your house. The sand is everything else. The sand is all of that stuff that fills your time without you even thinking about, like, unintentionally, without you even choosing it.”

And what’s really important to know is that, had he poured the sand into the jar first, all of the golf balls would not have fit. That’s to say that if we let our time get filled, it absolutely will get filled but not necessarily with the stuff that matters to you. And so, what you need to do is put your golf balls into your time jar first, into your schedule of the week. Put those activities that are so worthwhile, those activities that do connect you with these people that are so important to you.

The work hours, like the work project or tasks that is so important to you and as fulfilling and will sort of propel you forward in what matters to you, put those into your schedule first because sand will absolutely fill everything else, but at least this way, at the end of the week, even if you were busy, you can look back and feel fulfilled because you’ve invested in those things that matter to you.

So, what the time tracking exercise does is it allows you to identify what are your golf balls, what are those things that you can put and should and must from a sense of satisfaction and offsetting burnout and a sense of fulfillment and happiness, is you have to put those into your schedule and protect time for them. Others won’t do that for you. You need to take the responsibility for that. And then, yes, this other stuff will fill in.

My sand is email. Others, when I have my students do this, their sand is whether it’s social media or meetings that are not all that necessary, but it’s so important that our weeks don’t just get filled with sand and keeping us busy but not necessarily spending our time on those things that matter. And then one of the students was like, “Professor, what’s the deal with the beer?” And I was like, “I’m so glad you asked.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I wanted to ask. Glad you went here.

Cassie Holmes
Yup. And the beer goes to show that no matter how busy you feel, how full your schedule is, you always have time for a drink with a friend. So, whether it’s beer or soda, it’s just to make this point that, absolutely, amidst the busyness of our lives, it’s those people that we do and can and must sort of make time for.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, I also have to hear about, when you talked about how we engage with things in our mindset can improve anything and everything, maybe even…

Cassie Holmes
No, overstatement but not, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, even the commuting and the work and the housework, even if you’re only spending 0.57 hours on that housework, like the “average American.”

Cassie Holmes
I agree with you. Who is that lucky person?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m putting my hat on those lots of zeroes from folks who are traveling, like, “Hey, I don’t have to clean my hotel room.

Cassie Holmes
It’s also averaging. Yes, there’s a lot of zeroes because this is picking up the American Time Use Survey data. It’s picking up on a day, and you might be catching people, whether they’re on a holiday or on the day that they’re not doing housework.

But, that aside, there are, of course, ideally, sure we would spend all of our days and our entire schedule on golf balls, but that’s not the reality, right? We do have work to do. And there are strategies to make these times that are less fun more fun.

Bundling is a super easy one. So, this is taking from some of the motivation research by Katy Milkman and her colleagues, and it’s such a simple idea that is so effective is taking an activity you don’t want to do, like commuting, and bundle it with an activity that you do want to do so that that time itself feels more fun.

Like, commuting. Instead of sitting in the car and, like, mindlessly flipping through radio stations, if instead you turn on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
There we go, Cassie. Well-played. Thank you.

Cassie Holmes
Yup. Then, all of a sudden, that time in the car feels more worthwhile. Or, one of my readers, she reached out, she’s like, the bundling strategy was so awesome because her husband, all of a sudden, ironing was his favorite activity of the week because, what he did, Saturday afternoon, he would set up the ironing board in front of the TV, and that was when he watched sports. So, it was bundling the chore of ironing with watching sports. And then, all of a sudden, that time was his sort of delectable time that he got to watch sports and nobody got to bother him about it.

There’s also bundling during our work hours. So, I talked about social connection is so important for happiness. For many Americans, a lot of their hours spent working are not particularly happy. And figuring out, “Okay, how can we bundle social connection into our work days?” And this is so important. Gallup has a funny question in their poll, which asks, “Do you have a best friend at work?” And I say it’s funny because it sounds like something my fourth grader would ask, like, “Do you have a best friend?”

But it is so predictive. And I’m sure the numbers aren’t too far off, but pre-pandemic, only two out of 10 Americans said that they had a best friend at work. Those who did were more than twice more engaged in their jobs. They’re better performers on their jobs. They’re more satisfied at work. And job satisfaction is a very big predictor of overall life satisfaction.

If we can infuse friendship into our work hours, then that is, like, I’m framing it as bundling, but then that work itself becomes more fun, you look forward to the work day because you get to see your friend. When you are sort of confronted with challenges in work, which, of course, we all are, you have that person that you can rely on and sort of find that social support. So, it’s like wins are more fun and losses are less painful when you have friendship in the workplace. So, that’s one way.

Another is identifying your purpose. So, I know it sounds so lofty but, actually, in the book. So, Happier Hour, as I mentioned, I teach this course Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, and each week I give my students an experiential assignment so that they can apply these empirical findings to their own lives and feel the benefits of it. And every time I’ve taught the course, I see significant boosts in the sense of meaning, happiness, a sense of connection, a sense of accomplishment.

And in Happier Hours, since not everyone can take my course at UCLA, is I share those assignments as exercises in the book so that readers can apply them. So, the time tracking exercise is one. There’s another exercise that helps you identify your purpose, and it’s called the Five Whys Exercise. And so, what it is it’s you asking yourself, like, “Okay, what do you do for your job? Why do you do that?” And then your answer for that, you ask yourself, “But why is that important?”

And once you ask yourself why, five layers into really why you do the work that you do, what it uncovers for you as an individual is what really motivates you, “What is your purpose? Like, what is your why?” And the reason that this is so helpful is because it makes even those un-fun parts of your job more fun because you feel better because they feel more worthwhile, you know why you’re doing it.

So, when I did this exercise, I found it so helpful because it helped me identify my own purpose. So, what is my job? I’m a business school professor. Why does one do that? Well, to create knowledge through research and disseminate knowledge through teaching. And then I ask myself, “But why is that important?” And then my answer to that, why is that, and what I uncovered is that, for me, the purpose of my work is to create knowledge about what makes people happy, and to disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy.

This is helpful for a couple of reasons with respect to time, is that it helps me filter out what are those activities, work activities, that I should be saying yes to or should be saying no to if it’s something that is in line with helping me create knowledge about what makes people happy or disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy, then I will do it. Like, joining you and our time today, this is about disseminating knowledge about what makes people happy.

But not only does it help me decide what activities to spend my time on, it makes even un-fun work activities more palatable and more fun because I know the why of it. So, email, I do not like. That feels like sand. It can absorb my entire work day, work week, and I feel like I got nothing accomplished. But when I’m like, “Okay, actually, email with a research collaborator, that’s about creating knowledge about what makes people happy. Emails with my students, oh, that’s about disseminating knowledge about what makes people happy.”

So, all of a sudden, that particular activity of email feels better because I know the why of it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, with the five whys, so you lay it on your purposes to discover and disseminate knowledge about what makes people happy. And I don’t know if we landed there from the third or the fourth why.

Cassie Holmes
That’s the fifth one.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess, if I may, what happens if I say why again to that? Why does that matter?

Cassie Holmes
Because I want to spread happiness. And, for me, that’s really important. And what’s really helpful about this exercise is that what you identify for your purpose, it is unique to you. It doesn’t have to align with other people’s notions of what is the sort of ultimate worthwhile metric of success, which is so helpful because this idea of what success means, there are so many dimensions that go into it, and there will always be individuals who are doing better than you on one of those dimensions, but those are things that might not actually even matter to you.

So, what this, by identifying your own purpose, that’s what you should use when you see a gap between what you’re doing and what you aspire towards, that should be the motivator. When you actually see that you’re making progress, it’s so much more fulfilling compared to what we generally do is rely on social comparison, and like, “How am I doing in life?” or, “How am I doing in my job?” By looking at how you’re doing compared to others, which through social comparison, it’s one of the cognitive biases, or, in this case, our cognitive tendencies, our psychological tendencies that can really serve to undermine our happiness.

Now, if your question of like, “Well, why is spreading happiness important?” then I can tell you my seventh why of pointing to research that shows that happiness, while some might think as sort of this frivolous or even selfish pursuit, research shows that when you feel happier, when you take care of your emotional wellbeing, it allows you to show up better for those around you in the work that you do.

Being happier has positive consequences across our domains of life. Study shows that it makes us perform better in the office. So, when we are made to feel happier, it makes us more creative, we become more adaptive in our problem-solving, we’re more collaborative. Happy employees are more engaged, they’re more likely to show up at work, they’re less likely to call in sick. And so, it helps in not only you in your work but organizations.

It also helps us in our interpersonal relationships. When we feel happier, we like others more, we are liked by others, it makes us nicer, and there’s even work that shows that when we feel happier, it has positive health benefits, too, that we’re more likely to stick to our treatment routines, we have higher thresholds for pain, we react better to physiological stressors. Happier people live longer.

And so, by helping people be happier, based off of the research not just by opinion, based off of the research, then it allows them to not only feel happier, which is such a wonderful outcome, but also it allows them to show up better within their organizations and within their family, so it’s sort of spreading this goodness. So, that’s, like, my eighth why.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s cool. Well, I guess what I’m driving at with the whys is that all sounds super awesome. But just to illustrate the technique, I will say, and why do all those things matter, Cassie?

Cassie Holmes
I felt very satisfied with my fifth layer. But, yes, it’s really helpful because when individuals do this, it uncovers for them what drives them in their work. And, oftentimes, that first layer of why is your job description, or it can be some people are like, “Well, it’s to make money.” It’s like, “Well, why is that particular job the way that you’re looking to make money?” Or, it can even help uncover what’s really driving you in wanting financial security. If it’s like ultimately to make it so that your kids are less stressed, or if you’re going in the job description route, like, “Well, why does that matter to you?”

So often, in just two layers more of whys, folks identify for themselves, like, “Oh, the thing that actually matters to me is this.” And in recognizing that, that can help you figure out, all right, what are those work projects that you want to take on because they are going to help propel you in your particular direction that is “success” for you and are in line with your goals and values.

One of the most painful ways, actually, in the time tracking exercise when people are looking across those least happy activities of theirs, what the dimensions, the sources of the unhappiness, a common one is a waste of time. That is, like, you spent your time on something that just felt meaningless and unnecessary. Those are the same things but they show up.

And so, in the workplace, for example, those meetings that are like, “Oh, my gosh, that was such a waste of an hour,” those are the work hours that bring those averages way down because it’s like, “Ugh, my time is precious.” All of our time is precious. The hours of our days sum up to the years of our lives, so how we spend our hours is how we spend our lives. And when those hours are wasted, that’s the thing that’s sort of a soul sucking.

And so, whether during the work day or even outside of work, the social media often gets picked up as the sort of like people reflect back, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, that felt such a waste and it felt not good.” And this isn’t someone else being like, “You shouldn’t be on social media, or you shouldn’t spend 10 hours a night watching TV.” This is in their own ratings.

And what’s interesting is also in the time tracking, like one student in the reflection piece afterwards, they’re like, “I thought an activity that would be really fun was actually less fun than it was.” So, they thought that TV was their happy time, but they realized that after that first hour, all subsequent hours were actually quite unhappy.

And then there were these activities that they dreaded, that in their ratings, they actually got nines and tens, like socializing. This person dreaded socializing. This person dreaded exercising. But then, in coming out of these activities, they’re actually, apparently, according to their own ratings, actually made them feel really great and fulfilled and is worth the time even when we feel like they don’t have a lot of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, that is powerful when we have those surprises come up. And I’m thinking about Dr. David Burns’ Feeling Good. There’s a lot of exercises along those lines which, “Hey, surprise, this thing you were procrastinating wasn’t that horrible, was it? Hmm, how about that?” Or, “Surprise, exercise and socializing is amazing.”

Cassie Holmes
What I think that would be yet another helpful strategy in terms of where, as I mentioned, so like we want to not only identify and spend our time on those activities that are worthwhile, but also how when we are engaging in those activities make them worthwhile because a whole lot of the time we’re distracted.

So, research shows that we are distracted, not thinking about what we are currently doing, almost 47% of the time, that is almost half of the time. And so, in this research, what they did was they would ping people over the course of their day, and ask, “What are you doing?” as well as “What are you thinking about? Are you thinking about what you’re currently doing? Or are you thinking about something else? And how happy are you?”

And, as I mentioned, people are not thinking about what they’re doing a whole lot of the time. More than half of the time, or almost half of the time, they are not thinking about what they’re currently doing. And also, what was interesting is that people are less happy when their mind is wandering than when they are engaged in their activity.

And so, if you’re thinking about, like, “Oh, my gosh, we’re just at this so much of the time.” And if you’re spending time on the golf ball, on something that matters to you, but you’re missing it because your mind is somewhere else, like planning for what’s next or stressing about what’s next, then you’re missing that moment and the time that you’re spending.

One of the big sources, a huge source of distractions are our cellphones. These are these very handy devices that allow us to get so much done, and by being able to constantly do other things and be aware of what other people are doing on social media, because you’re like, “Oh, my gosh,” at every moment, there are other things that you could and maybe should be doing, it draws us out of the moment.

And so, something that is very effective is actually carving out time as no-phone zones, as in putting the phone away, out of sight, which makes it more out of mind so that you can be more engaged in what you’re doing. This helps during the work day, like for that important work that you’re doing, that needs your deep thinking.

Put your phone on silent away. Close out of emails so that you don’t get those interruptions that are pulling you out of the moment, that are keeping you from getting into flow, that flow state where you’re so engaged in what you’re doing you lose sense of time, and that’s when you’re most creative, that’s when you’re at your best. But it’s not just during the work day, it’s like on in the evenings when you’re with your family, or weekends, us carving out, putting your phones away, making them no-phone zones so that when you’re spending that time, your mind isn’t somewhere else.

So often, something I mentioned earlier is another really important and perhaps surprising finding is that a lot of our happiest moments are in very ordinary activities. So, even if you forget time tracking, just reflecting, thinking back over the last two weeks, when did you feel the most joy? So often when I ask people to reflect, their joyful activities are so mundane. One of my most joyful activities is my weekly coffee date with my seven-year-old daughter.

And this started when she was really little, borne out of a very functional routine on my way of dropping her at her preschool, before going into the office, I wanted caffeine. And so, we would stop at the local coffee shop, and it was just 30 minutes that was time for the two of us. She got her hot chocolate, I have my flat white, we munch on croissants, and we’re chatting. It’s like the two of us together.

And this routine, we turned into this treasured ritual. And we actually went, today is Thursday, we went this morning. Four years later, we still do this. And it’s just 30 minutes but it’s so powerful in affecting how satisfied I am and how happy I feel in my days. And what’s interesting is often though happiness comes out of these ordinary moments, so often we miss them because we’re distracted or because we’re subject to hedonic adaptation, that is our tendency to get used to things over time.

When we do the same thing again and again, we are with the same person over and over, we stop noticing them so much. They don’t have as strong of an emotional impact on us. Now, it’s good that we adapt in the face of negative experiences and activities because it makes us more resilient, but it’s bad when we adapt to the good stuff because we stop noticing, because it leads us to miss out on the joy that’s right there in the time we’re spending.

And I share a couple in Happier Hour a couple of exercises or strategies to help offset hedonic adaptations so that we do continue to find joy in our joys in life, and one of them is counting times left. Because, so often, because these are everyday experiences, we assume they will continue to happen every day just in the way that they are, but that’s not true. Time passes and our circumstances change.

And so, in counting times left, first identify this activity that brings you joy, then calculate, “How many times have you done this in your life thus far?” So, for my coffee days with my daughter, Lita, we’ve done it for over a bunch of years now. And then counting that as well as during my maternity leave where every day I would bundle it up and go to the coffee shop for sanity. I calculated we’ve gone on about 400 coffee days together so far.

Then the next step is, calculate, “How many times do you have left in your life to do this, accounting for factors that will change in your circumstances?” And if your joyful activity involves someone else, accounting for factors that will change in their circumstances. And so, I calculate it, so Lita is now seven. When she’s 12, I suspect she’ll probably rather go to the coffee shop with her friends instead of me. And then she’s going to go off to college, and then she’s going to go live in New York, wherever it is. I calculate we have about 230 coffee dates together left.

And then the last step in this exercise is calculate, of your total times, what percentage do you have left. I realize that Lita and I have 36% of our coffee dates together left. That’s way less than half and she’s only seven years old. Now, what’s the effect of this? It is, at first, you’re like, “Meh, sad.” But the positive effect far outweighs any initial sadness because what it does is it motivates me to make the time. This is a golf ball, I put it in my schedule. I am not taking meetings before 9:00 o’clock on Thursday mornings. Actually, it’s summer so we could do it on Thursday now that she’s not in preschool anymore and school starts earlier. It’s moved to Saturday mornings, in general.

But it makes me make the time. No matter how busy the week seems, that we spend this half hour together. We prioritize it. Also, it affects how I engage during that time because, knowing that this time is precious, knowing that these dates, these minutes that we have together are, in fact, limited in this sort of lovely connecting way, I’m like my phone is away. So, this is a no-phone zone.

And, also, that sort of constant to-do list that runs in my mind, always thinking about planning for what’s next gets quieted because I’m like, “This is the time that matters, not what’s happening next.” I draw my attention back to the here and now so that I don’t miss it.

And, as I said, from the outset, it is those connections, those relationships that are so crucial to our happiness, whether it’s having a best friend at work, or having those people in our lives whom we love and who we feel loved by, that it absolutely makes it feel worthwhile.

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

Cassie Holmes
I love the quote by Abraham Lincoln, or he’s said to have quoted, “People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be,” because what I think that shows is that happiness is a choice, and if we’re intentional with how we spend our time, we can choose to be happier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Cassie Holmes
Well, my own book, Happier Hour but also, I love reading fiction. And there’s a book called The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which references the life and work of Virginia Woolf, but it’s actually I love the novel because it picks up on sort of what I said today where there’s so much life that is lived in those moments, lived within the hours of our days that color our sense of satisfaction and purpose and the story of our lives.

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

Cassie Holmes
I would point them to my website, CassieMHolmes.com, and there is where my research is, you can find more information about my book Happier Hour. And then I am on LinkedIn, so you can connect with me and follow me on LinkedIn. I’m not on other social media because, in my time tracking, I found that wasn’t fun time for me.

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

Cassie Holmes
I would say identify those hours or those activities within your day that bring you that sense of purpose and joy, and invest in those times wholly and protect time for those times.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cassie, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you many happier hours.

Cassie Holmes
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. This was fun.