KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - Page 5 of 23 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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

Steven Hayes
I’m so happy to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so happy to be here with you, too. I’ve been enjoying your book and your interviews, and I think we have more that we could possibly cover in the time available, which is a great problem to have. So, I think, first of all, we got to hear about your extraordinary pushup practice. What’s the scoop here?

Steven Hayes
Well, it’s gone backwards fast, right? But I have long tried to do at least my age in pushups every day. Unfortunately, my son is getting awesome at it, said, “Dad, you’re doing cheater pushups,” so now I’m doing the perfect, absolutely to the floor, nose on the pushups, and suddenly I’m only at about 25% of what I was before, but I’m still committed I’m going to get back to my age, which will probably take me a little while but every day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was listening to your book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters and I heard you say, “Yes, I do 70 pushups a day.” So, is that 70 cheaters?

Steven Hayes
Yeah, it turns out I don’t actually get all the way down to nose-kissing, so I bought the kind of things that lifts you up so that you can safely hit a pad because I don’t want to smash my face onto the carpet, then I get tired. But it’s just one of those things where an arbitrary thing, like pushups, but it’s just a symbol of, “Can you make a commitment?” just stick to it, and just create a habit that’s values-based and worthwhile, and when you fail, you keep coming back to it. And the move to the perfect part is keep upping the ante. It’s not just the numbers that counts. It’s trying to do it in a quality way.

Pete Mockaitis
And, recently, it seems like you’ve had some very rich moments in terms of you shared with me your Mother’s Day exchange as well as some exchanges leading up to your retirement from the University of Nevada, Reno. Could you tell us a bit about these?

Steven Hayes
Well, the retirement thing kind of links over. I’ve been at this for 47 years, and I got up in front of the student group and, spontaneously, said, “Give a few words.” Of course, you don’t give a microphone to a professor, you deserve what you get, so you get a 20-minute rant. But what I found myself saying to my students as my last word, my last meeting, was that love and loss is one thing, not two.

And that when you really love your job, as I have, the way to do that full out is to know that it’s finite and will pass, and to have that be part of it. That’s why we cry at weddings, why we cry at births, because we know there’s things ahead. There’s a bittersweet quality to life but if you inhale that at the beginning, then you can play all out because you know, in the end, you’re going to be waving goodbye and people eventually will forget you. But, so what?

If you moved the ball down the road, it’ll be there maybe, and in some tiny way for your children’s-children’s children, and that’s worth playing hard. So, I think we often think of winning as some sort of permanent thing, and losing as a horrible thing and such but I think it’s kind of a mixed thing, and the love and loss part is that knowing from the beginning that you’re raising your children for them to leave you. You’re loving the people around you, knowing that they’re going to die. You’re creating a business, knowing that it’ll be passed on to somebody else.

You’re not going to have it forever. So, that’s okay. That’s called life, and it’s, to me, an empowering message. It means we can play full out just like we were when we were three, and we ran to touch that tree and gave it every little ounce of effort without asking the question of, “Oh, is this really important? Will it last forever?” One question.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I love, in your reflections there, you mentioned that all these things are loving. In the universe of professor-ing and publishing, you’d said that that is also love, publishing articles. Can you expand on that?

Steven Hayes
Yeah, I remind those students that when you do a job like that and do it well, you will love your job if you do your job lovingly. That will go together. I guess unless you’re a professional hit person, all of our jobs are about somehow contributing to the wellbeing of others. And so, could you bring that into your life’s moments so that when it’s 2:00 in the morning and you’re working on this stupid reviewer who asked you to do stupid things with your article or it’s not going to be published, can you really connect with doing even that with care?

It’s like an awesome opportunity to bring the capacity to bring love in the world, into your world and to the world of others by doing a really, really good job, absolutely the best job you can do, without paralyzing in place, that it has to be perfect or you can’t do it. Now, as I say, the love and loss is one thing. It tells us that failure is part of it. Slipping and falling is part of it. When you learned to walk, how many times did you fall down in an average day? A hundred and ten times.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Steven Hayes
A hundred and ten times on your diapered butt. And unless you had some sort of nerve injury or something, you eventually learn to balance and walk. So, could you approach your work with that kind of quality of doing it in a way that’s focused on the good that you do for others but not in this perfectionistic, self-critical, heavy, “Oh, my God, what if I fail?” that paralyzes us?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that so much because it’s connected to psychology and insights that are research-based and somewhat modern, and yet also ancient in terms of wisdom traditions. And I’m thinking in my own background of Catholic Christian, thinking about Mother Teresa, do small things with great love, and that’s just a whole lot of goodness to be pursued in that way.

Steven Hayes
Yeah, I was raised in that same religious tradition, and I know all those rituals and stories, and all of our wisdom traditions and religious traditions, all of them, at their best, include this really wise advice, but the human mind needs guidance. Very, very easily, you can turn it into a slog or some sort of narcissistic grand thing, and you forget that it’s the small things that are going to matter, and being part of something bigger than yourself is part of what makes life worth living.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, so you are known for the notion of psychological flexibility and acceptance and commitment therapy. And so, it’s funny, in this context, you’ve said in the book that you’re not God’s gift to psychological flexibility, in that that’s something, it’s an ongoing journey. And yet, in a way, your contributions have, indeed, been a gift to all of us, so I want to unpack some of them for us.

First of all, what is psychological flexibility? And how can that help people in general, and, for this show, help us be more awesome at our jobs?

Steven Hayes
Well, it’s the smallest set of things that we do, processes we call them, just from the word, meaning a parade or procession, the sequence of things you do that leads to an outcome. The smallest set of things we do that do the most good things in the most areas known to behavioral science.

And it’s very, very simple. It’s a matter of being more open, aware, and actively engaged in life. If you’re going to be more open, you have to open to the world inside and out. That means your emotions, your thoughts, your memories, your sensations. What does it mean to be open? It means to be able to feel them, to go deeper into them when it’s useful, and respectfully decline the invitation to spend a lot of time on the ones that’s not useful. Being able to sort of see it as just part of the journey.

What does it mean to be aware? It means to be here, consciously present, right here, inside and out. Here’s what’s going on and I’m noticing it. I’m consciously noticing, and I’m noticing you. We’re connected and conscious, we’re working together, we’re creating a cooperative system, or a partnership, or whatever. And then actively engaged, well, actively engaged in the values-based life, creating habits that are focused on what you want your behavior to reflect to the world and to yourself. That’s it.

So, it turns out that those three things each have two things that are part of it, but they’re all really one thing, we call it psychological flexibility, or inflexibility when it goes awry. And in the area of work, for example, if you want to avoid burnout, you want to be effective, if you scale these processes socially, you want to create work teams that have those kind of qualities, creating a psychologically flexible workplace, the environment supports it, and work team so that team reflects it, of workers so the individuals have those skills and they’re actively developing them, you are going to be far more successful as a business, as a business person, as a leader, as a manager, and just as a human being.

So, one of the things that’s really cool, because this small set goes everywhere, you can care about your family, you can care about your kids, you could care about your health, you can care about the world, and you can be massively successful at work with the same processes. You don’t have to turn into somebody else and forget your wisdom training, or your religious background, or how important your family is, and how loving your kids makes a difference to you.

You don’t have to because the processes that empower human beings in one place, empower them another place, when you break out of this normative, categoric way of thinking, that one size fits all deal, or where you are at a Bell curve, and what percentile are you, and all this kind of thing of “Oh, woe is me. I’m too low,” or “Oh, I’m great and grand. I’m so high.” No. What are the things that you do that move your life up or move your life down? Watch it, learn it, observe it, use it, do it. You’re on a journey to success everywhere you look.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to get into a couple very specific tactics. And it’s fun, sometimes I like my advice weird, and you got a couple of them, which has a wealth of science supporting it in terms of the efficacy of these tools and approaches. But maybe before we go granular and tactical, can you give us your four-line ditty that summarizes your life’s work?

Steven Hayes
Well, I have a four-line ditty that summarizes everything that I’ve worked on in terms of the human mind and how it works, which is, “Learn it in one, derive it in two; put it in networks that change what you do.” We’re the creatures who can relay anything to anything else in any possible way. That’s what we’re doing right now with language.

We’re able to put a world together in this vast cognitive network, and it took us a long time to do that, almost for sure, it was happening even before homo sapiens.

But this is a tiger that we’re riding because, as soon as you can think about anything in almost any possible way, and create futures that had never been, you can take the same skills and say, “Yeah, I’m successful but I could’ve been so much more successful. Oh, I’m a failure because…”

You can turn good into bad, bad into good, and you can walk yourself into a mental health struggle regardless of whether you’re a billionaire or a pauper, regardless of whether or not you’re loved by many or by virtually no one. That’s a weird skill, and we better learn how to manage it. If we can’t put our mind on a leash, it’s going to put us on a leash.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you give us an example of something in our lives that we can learn in one, derive in two, and how that can take us two very different paths?

Steven Hayes
Well, okay, let’s say you’ve had a success experience, and you said, “I’m great.” Okay, that’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s me deriving it there, “I’m great”?

Steven Hayes
You derived it, yes, or somebody said it, “Boy, you’re so smart.” Remember the first time, and a lot of the people who were successful who are listening, they had that. They had the teacher, or somebody said, “You’re so smart.” That’s fine. But then it can turn, flip it back the other way to, “Anything I do is smart,” and I’ve never met anybody who everything they do is smart. They may be ‘smart’ in the sense they’re able to learn quickly or so forth.

But once you have kind of bought that, sort of like sawing a fishhook, and it’s hooked into you, you can be that manager who, no matter what other people say, you don’t need to consider their opinions, you’re the smart one in the room, you knew that before you walked in the room.

And you kind of internalized that’s who you are, rather than just a description of what you did, that later on could be a different description. And, yeah, we’re trying to learn how to do smart things, of course, we would. But when you buy into it, “That’s me. It’s like a skin I wear,” there’s a reason why the word personality means the mask that you put on, in Greek. It’s the face that you present.

And once you’re there and you’ve forgotten it, boy, you’re dangerous. You’re going to have a lot harder time listening to other people’s ideas, being genuinely curious about them, exploring them, having a conversation where the whole team can work together, where you can be shown to be smarter as being part of a group because other people have ideas sometimes that are better than yours. That’s just one example.

Derive it in two, “I’m smart. Okay, because I did this, I’m smart. Okay, now, because I’m smart, everything I do is like that.” No, that’s not true, and you better hold that lightly. Learn that first step of learning to be open. Just be open to thoughts that are helpful and thoughts that aren’t, ideas that work, ideas that don’t, emotions that are useful here, emotions that don’t deserve a whole lot of attention right now.

So, that flexibility of taking what’s useful and leaving the rest requires a certain kind of humility and learning by experience. You kind of metaphorically have to fall down on your cognitive diapered butt multiple times before you can get through your thick skull that some thoughts are useful and some thoughts aren’t, some of your ideas are good, some aren’t, and to learn how to really be an effective manager, be a creative leader who can bring it every day, but also empower the team to do the same.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the putting it in networks is “I’m relating this notion ‘I’m smart’ to all kinds of other things in the world.” Is that also maybe sort of a neuroscience network neuron concept as well?

Steven Hayes
It is, although we know so little about how the brain really works. It’s a huge network. So, the networks of cognition, let’s say in emotions and memories and so forth don’t go one to one. There are underlying networks that build the human brain. But we do know that the underlying neurobiology of what I’m saying is positive.

If you take something like psychological flexibility skills, when you can apply those in your world, you’re much less likely to be dumping stress-related hormones. It’s much easier to build new brain circuits. You’re not pushing the start button on these survival circuits of almost ingrained kind of automatic reactions of finding safety, or attack towards others.

So, even down to the point of being able to have slower age-related decline in your cells. You can keep your body tuned by helping your mind be attuned to creating a safe place for you to have a history that includes difficult things. We’ve all had potentially traumatizing-inducing events, if not actual trauma. Just turn on your television, look at your smartphone, and you have potentially trauma-inducing events all around you in the modern world.

How are you going to be able to sort of not go into that almost alligator brain stem freeze or flee or fight kind of system? You’re going to have to learn how to have modern minds for the modern world, the meditators, and the Christian mystics, and the Buddhist, and all of them. All the wisdom traditions all have ways of reining in this kind of alarm-based, safety-based mind.

And so, yeah, I think the networks involved, networks of habits, thoughts, emotions, etc., that all come together as one empowered person who’s able to get better and better. It doesn’t mean you’re great and grand, as you kindly mentioned. I’m no shining star of psychological flexibility. If you want proof of that, talk to my wife. But I’m working on it. I’m working on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and, again, we’re going to get into some of these tools. I think, maybe, the favorite thing I’ve read from you is, “You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.” Can you expand on this for us?

Steven Hayes
Yeah, if you want to find out, really, what motivates you, there’s four ways that I know of – sweet, sad, stories, and heroes, and one you mentioned is the sad one. If you take the things that are hard for you and you flip it over, it tells you what you care about, otherwise, why are you upset about it? So, if you’ve been betrayed, let’s say, and that stabbed you through the heart, that a person you thought was loyal and trustworthy betrayed your love, let’s say, your mind tells you to stop being vulnerable. Avoid intimate relationships. They’re not safe.

But that’s what your heart yearns for. So, we hurt where we care, exactly why it stabbed you through the heart is that you wanted something. So, instead of doing what the mind says, “Let’s all solve that problem,” just don’t want that anymore. And so, you start having superficial relationships, or de-tuning relationships that could open your heart again. You put up defenses and so forth.

Instead, could there be another way to carry that hurt, and that it actually motivates us, “Precisely because it hurt to be betrayed, I know how important it is to me to build an intimate committed relationship. Okay, can I work on how to do that, how to open my heart again”?

But the other method as well, digging into the sweetness of life, and noticing what that suggests, or looking at your heroes, and asking yourself, “Why do I look up to them?” and you’ll find values there, and you can ask the question how do you put that into your life. So, I think a guide to success is inside our deepest failures. It tells us, at least, what we care about and what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, let’s now maybe have an overview of there are sort of six key, do we call them tools, skills, processes? Can you give us this overview?

Steven Hayes
Well, I gave you the three, and each of them have two, so that gives you six. But this experiential openness, that means accepting your emotions without clinging, open to difficult ones, don’t hang on desperately to positive ones. Allow emotions to come and go, and other experiences, too, like memories and sensations. Backing up from and noticing your mind with a little sense of distance so that you can see it as a thought without just looking at the world structured by the thought, without disappearing into the thought.

Like, if you have a thought like, “This is awful.” Have a thought this is awful. Don’t disappear into the awful world. The world is the world; you said it’s awful. That’s two different things. That’s not one. That’s two. And some of that may be just a habit that you don’t need of awfulizing about things. Coming into the present moment but consciously. In the present moment, inside now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have thoughts about the past, or worries about the future, but it means you don’t get hooked by them and disappear from the moment almost like how you do on the freeway sometimes, and you’d become a mindless driver, and wake up you’ve gone miles down the road.

You don’t want to do that with rumination and worry because the opportunities are always in the present, that’s where we live, that you’ll miss it. But from this more conscious part of you that I think is really where we connect with others. When you were a baby and your mama looked at you, you dumped endorphins at birth, natural opiates that basically say to you, “Ahh, this is what I want.” When you saw those kind eyes, you knew you’re connected.

We yearn to be connected in consciousness with others. We’re the social primates. And so, consciousness itself comes out of that, and yet so easily we can use it for closing down or pretense persona, “Oh, I’m so awful,” or, “Oh, I’m so great,” instead of the, “Ahh,” being connected to other people. So, those are two more in the present consciously.

And the final one is “What are the qualities of being and doing that you want to put in your life that you want to be intrinsic?” I’m talking not about goals, goals are great, but values-based goals, what it’s really about. Is it really about the money? It isn’t really about the degree. It isn’t really about any concrete thing. It’s about the direction, owning that and create habits built around it, so that even when you’re not being mindful, which we’re all mindless some of the time, we can kind of trust our instincts to be doing actual things with our feet, values-based behavior that is building opportunities, extending on our lives.

So, open, aware, and actively engaged has two aspects each – acceptance and we call it defusion. So, with emotion and cognition, present-moment focused consciously and a values-based creation of habits and goals. Put all those together, boy. Now, there is one final thing you have to do, is extend it socially so that if you really want to be, for example, emotionally open, that means having compassion towards others, and being interested in what they feel.

Like, in the work setting, one of the things, when I’m called in to kind of consult with managers and things like that, I ask questions like, “Who works with you? Where do they live? Who are they married to? What are their names? And how many kids do they have and what are their names?” And you can just take things like that to the bank as to whether or not you got a manager who’s in a two-way street of communication with people who are important to the network.

You wouldn’t have friends where you didn’t know where they lived, whether or not they had kids, or what the name of their spouse was. You’ll do that to a secretary you’ve had for 10 years. Why? It’s not because you had to be their friend. It’s because you socially extend these issues of values. You want to be that kind of person who really knows others, of consciousness. You really want to be connected as a person with the people you work with.

Emotional openness. You want to know what their insights are like. So, I think those six, socially extended, and then take care of your body. That’s it. When we’ve done research, those things I just named account for about 80% to 90% of everything we know about how change happens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s dig into you mentioned putting your mind on a leash, that you have a turn of a phrase for the dictator within. What’s that about?

Steven Hayes
Well, that voice within that assumes, when we become conscious, we sort of take that perspective-taking skill of being able to go behind the eyes of others, we kind of step outside and look at ourselves, and that’s fine. We even start talking to ourselves, and it’s great. But that voice, if you just let it boss you around, will become a dictator.

It’s very much like if you just give them the rope to do it, they’ll do it. They’ll get you all entangled, “What about this? What about this? And you do this, and you do that.” And sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it’s not. Why? Because you have a lot of wisdom that you can only touch intuitively. Your verbal part is not everything. That thin cortical overlay is only quite recent. You didn’t have a felt sense of what works. Based on what? On your experience.

I’ll give you an example. If I asked you to put your body in the shape of you at your worst with dealing psychological issue, and just do it as like you did when you’re a kid when you’re playing statues or something. But you’re like a sculpture, and we’re going to take a picture, and then I say, “Okay, same issue. Don’t change the content at all. Now, show me with your body, you at your worst.” Because it’s not always one. Yeah, sometimes you’re at your best, sometimes you’re at your worst.

We’ve done this with hundreds of people around the world. No matter where in the world we do it, something like 95% of the people show you, without any training, without any conversation, just what I told you, a body that is more closed at your worst versus open, less aware at its worst versus aware, and less actively engaged. In other words, by experience, you know everything I’ve just said in this interview. You could show it with your body.

But here’s the problem, you’ve got between your ears, that little dictator within that’s constantly just treating your life as a problem to be solved, because that’s what that voice is about, “How do I solve problems? How do I break it down and figure out what’s a better way forward?” That’s fine but it’s not all of it. Sometimes you have an intuitive sense that this job is not for you, that working with that manager is not really what you want to do.

I don’t care what the money is, you know, you feel it, you sense it. If you closed yourself after that, good luck because you now are left with nothing more than a list of pros and cons and all the other things that could be helpful but you’ve got to be careful because that dictator within can sometimes give you pretty unwise advice.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And you share a number of very specific tools, which are fascinating. And in the world of defusion, you call it, for instance, if you just say out loud, so if I got this right, “I cannot walk around this room, I cannot walk around this room,” while you’re, in fact, walking around the room, directly contradicting the dictator within. Folks in studies were able to keep their hands in really hot water for 40% longer just because they demonstrated to themselves, “No, no, those thoughts are not reality, dictating what is possible.” And that’s all it takes, it’s like the tiniest little thing made a world of impact.

Steven Hayes
Yeah, you’re going in a business meeting where you know you’re in there with many people who are really, really famous, and you’re not. They have great power that you don’t have. And you know, just based on your experience, you’re going to have thoughts like, “Why am I even here? They don’t want to listen to me. Maybe my ideas aren’t good enough, dah, dah, dah, dah.”

And you can fight it back, “No, no, that’s not true. No, no.” Meanwhile, where is your attention? On the meeting, on what’s being said, or the argument inside your head? You don’t want to be arguing inside your head in that meeting. What if you do this? What if you could just practice things, like, have the thought, “I can’t lift the pen in front of me on the desk”? And really get it clear.

And when it’s really clear, while that’s still going on, pick up the pen. You can do that, right? This is your life. It’s not your dictator’s life. It’s not those words’ life. Those words are just in your life. They’re not your enemy, but they’re not your friend, and they’re not who you are. You’re a whole human being. So, what if we then go into that meeting, and when you notice the chatter, thank your mind very much for that, “Thanks for trying to help me with that, reminding me that I don’t belong here but I’ve got this covered”?

And go in there and allow those thoughts to come by just like the thought that you can’t pick up the pen. And then when the moment hits, you make that contribution, you make that comment, you make that statement, you present that pitch deck, or whatever it is that you have to do, and get out of your own freaking way. Your mind could be helpful in that, in that sense of worry to get you to prepare, etc. That’s great, “Oh, what if I’m not prepared? Okay, let’s go prepare.”

But when you’re in there, you may need those skills in defusion. Those are made-up words. For tools, there’s hundreds of them. You can make up your own that diminish the automatic hammer blow domination of literal thoughts in your head over what you do, what you feel, what you focus on, what you think about, so that you have greater freedom, you have a little space opened up where you could do things more in the way that you want to do them or the ways that your gut sense guides you.

This is the moment to make that comment. This is the moment to be quiet and allow yourself to go into a flow, the kind of places people go when they’re very successful. Look at athletes and others, how do they really get to be high performers? They don’t do it by constant chatter in the moment. And so, you need to put that mind of yours on a leash.

And the defusion methods, as I say, there’s hundreds of them, but that one of just the poke of eye in terms of the dictator, or the tug on the cape of Superman, of, “You think you can tell me what to do. Okay, tell me what to do, and I’m going to do the exact opposite. You stop me. Ha, ha, ha.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And you say there’s hundreds of tools, one of my favorites is word repetition. How does this work?

Steven Hayes
Take a thought that really pushes you around, distill it down to the smallest set of words you can get to. If you can get it to one, it’s the very, very best. Then say it out loud, at least once per second, or a little faster but at the point at which you start to lose the ability to say it clearly. Make sure you can say it clearly out loud, and do it for at least 30 seconds, even better would be 60. It’ll be the longest 60 seconds of your day but to say it over and over and over again.

Kind of give you an example, a little story, it’s in the book, probably right when I was Stanford. I gave a talk, and I was talking about how much money was spent on sleeping medications, how much we’ve made even normal things that every creature on the planet know how to do, into something that’s a big fight every night. And it’s up in the billions of dollars for sleeping meds, and I showed a graph but it didn’t have a clearly labeled graph, and I said, “And it’s now $3 trillion.”

Three trillion dollars is ridiculous but I somehow missed it and said it. Much sleep, our mind is listening because I print bold upright, it said, “$3 trillion. Are you out of your mind? They were recording it. I was going to talk at Stanford, oh my God. I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot.” And that little that I said it twice reminded me of what to do.

So, I sat on the edge of the bed, and I said the word stupid, actually is, for 60 seconds or so, and I went back to sleep. What are you going to do when your mind is hitting you with these kinds of judgments? One of the things you can do is just to allow the word to be a word. And, “Yeah, okay, lesson learned, label your graphs next time, Steve. You’ll be less likely to make a mistake in a PowerPoint presentation.” That past moment, I’ve learned the lesson, I don’t need anymore of reminding myself how stupid some people thought, if they were quick thinkers, I was in the moment. It was stupid.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, you’re saying the word again and again, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

Steven Hayes
“Stupid, stupid, stupid.” A little faster. A little faster.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.” And in so doing…

Steven Hayes
You know, you only did about four seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, you do it in 60 seconds.

Steven Hayes
Yeah, you got it. Do it in 60 seconds. And we actually have some bunch of research on this, it was embedded by Titchener, one of the fathers of American psychology a hundred years ago. We were the first, it’s called semantic satiation. It’s what they called it. We were, I believe, the first to ever use clinically.

And what happens is immediately the distress starts coming down. After you start doing it for 30 seconds, the meaning goes away. Did you ever had a thing where you have a word and you almost…? Ted Lasso does this all the time, and he knows this method. I wonder if he came across it because the writer for Ted Lasso, because he does this, and he actually mentioned semantic satiation on one of his shows.

But when you take words that are so dominant that push you around your whole life, and within 60 seconds you can drain out the distress, and even the point that it becomes almost meaningless as just a sound. You’re going to let your life be run by that? Really? So, you get a little, you’ll go back, you’ll know what stupid means after 60 seconds or whatever it is, but you’ll also have that memory of, “Oh, yeah, it’s a word. I’m saying a word to myself right now. Okay, like that’s something I have to not do? That’s something that has to dominate my next hours and hours, or days and days, or weeks and weeks?”

But, yeah, people will let words like that dominate months and years of their life mindlessly. “I’m a loser” can make you function as a worker who’s trying to prove they’re not a loser. In so doing, so greatly restrict your ability to be a good worker, to be part of a team, whatever, that you’re not able to show what you have. So, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d also like to think about that in a context of procrastination, like, if the thought is, “Ugh, I don’t want to…” or, “Oh, I’m just so tired. This is going to be boring.” So, likewise, we could just sort of pick whatever is most, I don’t know, activating or linked up to emotion, whether it’s maybe, “I don’t want to…” I don’t know, it might be too many words.

Steven Hayes
It might work. You could say it.

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.

Steven Hayes
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” Absolutely, it’ll work there. Put some other ones. You could take that and sing it to your favorite rap song. Have your little “I don’t want to” rap, and it will lighten the whole load here. You’ll have more openness and choice, “You can’t make me” opera or whatever the thing is. And next thing you know, you’re out there just doing it.

You could have it said to you, like, “I don’t want to.” You can say it out loud in the voice of your least favorite politician, or say it in the voice of Donald Duck, “I don’t want to.” Whatever. The point isn’t to ridicule yourself. You’re not ridiculous. You’re just human. The point is to liberate yourself. You’re not just words in your head.

Look, I can put words in your head so freaking easily. Your parents did it. Commercials do it. If words in your head are what you’re going to do, how are you going to have a life that’s directed. I can give you three numbers. If you remember them, I’ll give you a million dollars an hour from now. Here are the numbers – one, two, three. Can you repeat them back?

Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three.

Steven Hayes
Awesome. That’s great. That’s a million bucks. I’ve got a little donor who’s good with me. They knew this is such an important podcast, I had to do it. So, I’ll say, “What are the numbers?” and you’ll say…

Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three.

Steven Hayes
Awesome. I lied. There’s no million bucks. A day from now, do you think you could say it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Steven Hayes
How about a year from now?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll probably remember Donald Duck more so than one, two, three.

Steven Hayes
But it’s even possible. I already did it twice. It’s possible, isn’t it? When I come up to you, and say, “Hey, what are the numbers?” you might say, “One, two, three,” right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Steven Hayes
All right. Well, what if it was your mama saying, “You’ll never amount to anything”? Except she didn’t say it twice, she said it 20 times, or 200. We’ve got people listening to me right now who had that history. You may have had that history. But what are you going to do with that? It’s in your head. There’s no delete button in the nervous system that’s healthy, short of brain injury, or aging, or age-related cognitive decline. It’s not going away.

Once it’s deeply in, even two might be enough. I guarantee if we do it a little more, I can get one, two, three stuck in there for the rest of your life. How about this? I’ll think of something different. Okay, think of another set of numbers. What are the numbers?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m going to give you numbers?

Steven Hayes
Yeah, but they can’t be that because we’re going to do something new. We have a new grade of thought. What are the numbers?

Pete Mockaitis
Two, four, six.

Steven Hayes
Okay. Did you do what I asked? I told you to come up with something other than those horrible numbers we were talking about earlier, it turns out.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I did, and I gave you different numbers.

Steven Hayes
You gave me different numbers. How did you know you gave me different numbers?

Pete Mockaitis
Because I can recall the previous numbers and know.

Steven Hayes
Exactly. So, now you have three trials. You see the problem? You had one, two, three, one, two, three, and then was it two, four, six?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Steven Hayes
What was it?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Steven Hayes
Which is correct because it’s not…

Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three.

Steven Hayes
Yeah, there you go. Now we got four times. Do you see the problem?

Pete Mockaitis
So, in trying to do another thing, you’ve reinforced the prior thing.

Steven Hayes
Yeah, it’s not logical but it’s psychological. And if you go into the work environment, for example, and you’re trying to convince yourself that you have confidence, you end up training yourself not to have confidence because you don’t do what the words says. With faith, confides, fides in Latin means faith. You want to have faith in yourself? Okay, you got one, two, three in your head.

Mom said you’re never going to amount to anything, or that coach, or that manager. I had a department chair when I was an untenured assistant professor, who said I was a dilettante who would never amount to anything. He’s dead now. I won’t say his name. But he looked at my research career, and said, “You’re never going to be anything.” I have the evaluation sort of on my shoulder. I read it periodically.

Okay, so I can connect with that, that one, two, three, but I don’t need a two, four, six to fight it. If I, instead, would react, “Okay, I’m going to take my one, two, three and I’m writing this next paper,” or, “I’m doing this podcast.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, you’ve got so many tools and suggestions. I’d love it if you can maybe share one more that, in your experience, you found that it is super transformational for folks in terms of liberating goodness, energy, aliveness, and yet it’s pretty darn easy to do.

Steven Hayes
Well, here’s one that fits a work environment, especially if you’re in a kind of managerial or kind of context, or you’re looked to for leadership and so forth. Take just a moment before that next interaction to take the perspective of the other person, and remind yourself of the values that you want to put into your interaction.

So, let’s say you’re waiting, so 30 seconds before you know the knock on the door is coming, a person is going to come in and talk to you. Just picture them, as a way of preparing, of them walking towards that door, and go outside your body, just like you did with those movies, like Harry Potter had the little light out of his head, and go behind the eyes of that person walking towards you.

What are they feeling? What are they thinking? What do they want from this meeting? What’s hard for them? What are they afraid of? Then come back, and before that door knock comes, what are the qualities that you want to put into that interaction? What do you want to reflect in your behavior? I don’t mean just the goals you’re trying to get to. I mean the deeper purpose that you want to reflect of who and how you want to be in this interaction, and the deeper purpose of this interaction.

But knowing, just for a second, what’s going on in the other person, what they’re bringing into the room. And I do that regularly when students are coming to meet me. I’m retiring now so I’ll stop doing it but I’m going to…I do that before a podcast. I try to be in the position of the persons I’m interacting with, and it grounds the interaction to something that’s bigger than just a performance or kind of just saying stuff to get through.

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

Steven Hayes
I guess one thing I would just mention is that if you view your life as, in part, a task of learning how to be more fully you, this open, aware, and actively engaged mantra can give you a guide. And so, I would just like to leave the idea that science is doing a better job of digging down into what’s the essence of the wisdom traditions, the religious traditions, the best of our cultural traditions, the best of our leadership training, and so forth.

Focus on the really important ones and see how far it takes you. Essentially, viewing part of your job as a continuous never-ending process of learning and sort of peeling back the onion so you can gradually be more fully you, and bring it every day.

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

Steven Hayes
What I really like, actually, Margaret Mead, who’s a political consultant. I worked with her a long ago before I became a graduate student, a labor organizer, who taught me, which is something like, I’m paraphrasing it, something, like, “Don’t underestimate the power of a committed group to change the world. And, in fact, they’re the only thing that ever has.” So, I like it.

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

Steven Hayes
Oh, God, I’m going to quote one of my own because my favorite over the last three years is one where we looked at every single study ever done in the history of the world that had a randomized trial focused on the mental health outcome that properly assessed how did change happen. It’s called the mediators of change, it’s geek statistics. We don’t need to walk through that.

It took me three years to do it, 50 people working with me, my colleague Stephen Hoffman, Joe Serochi, Germany and Australia, international team. And why is it important? Because what I’ve just talked about when I said that’s 80% or 90% of everything, learning how to be more open, aware, and actively engaged, but then socially scaling it and taking care of your body. Look, that’s 80% to 90% of everything we know about how change happens.

So, that’s such a small set. I could say that in a long sentence. Time is up. Back to that last comment where your life is a learning thing. I think this is all the studies ever done, no matter what the name, no matter what the goal, let’s learn them. We’ve got a small enough set. We can all work on learning those things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Steven Hayes
A book that changed my life, actually, was Walden Two, BF Skinner’s book. And I took it not to be a utopian novel. It’s written many years ago. But I took it to be this idea that you could take principles and processes and scale it up even to how we should arrange our world. And wouldn’t that be cool? And I do think we have a chance over the next hundred, 200 years, whatever, of knowing enough about, really, what lifts us up, that we can begin to design our world on purpose and evolve on purpose.

And if you look at our challenges of climate change and immigration, political division, and all the rest, we better get busy with it because we sure got a lot of challenges but we also have awesome tools and kids who are ready to do something really new.

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

Steven Hayes
Love isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. It’s a rip-off of Lombardi, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” and kind of meant to be a poke at that win-at-all costs. If I’m going to do something at all costs, I’d say love at all costs.

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

Steven Hayes
If you’re interested in my work, just go to my website, it’s just www and my name, Steven, with a V, middle initial C for Charlie, my dad’s name, H-A-Y-E-S. So, StevenCHayes.com. But if you’re really interested in psychological flexibility, or the kind of things we’ve been talking about, you can Google it and find a whole bunch of stuff for free out there. Even the World Health Organization gives it away for free. So, you don’t have to spend anything to learn more about these processes that I’ve been talking about.

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

Steven Hayes
Yeah, I think the challenge is to live your deepest values. That’s the challenge for every single one of us, I think, is how do we become the kind of person where others look to us and see in that values that they would like to have manifest in their life. How do we live our deepest values? And in the area of work, I’ll just say this, if you really want to love your work, do your work lovingly because when I dig down to your deepest values, I don’t want to put words in everybody’s mouth, but whether it’s appreciation of beauty, or contributing something to others, or alleviating suffering, or really making an awesome product that other people can use, to me, those are all phases of love.

They’re about how we support each other in this journey called life. And when you have your work, be about that. Yeah, it’s not always going to be candy land. I don’t mean love your work like smiley face, Ren & Stimpy, happy, happy, joy, joy, morning to night. No, you have challenges. It’s not always going to be smiling and candy land. But love in that sense of meaningful, important, worthy, honorable. If you want to love your work, do your work lovingly.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Steve, this has been such a treat. I wish you much love and joy in retirement.

Steven Hayes
Awesome. Thank you for the opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis

Anita, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Anita Nowak

Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m stoked to hear about your book Purposeful Empathy: Tapping Our Hidden Superpower for Personal, Organizational, and Social Change. But, first, I want to hear about your travels. You’ve been to 65 countries. What is the story here?

Anita Nowak

Well, I just love being in a new place, meeting new people, having conversations that you wouldn’t expect to have in unusual spaces. So, I’ve traveled to Bhutan, and I’ve lived overseas in Thailand, and been to Morocco, and all over South America, now, 65 countries and counting. So, maybe, maybe, maybe hit 80 by the time I die.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there perhaps an underrated country or location you think people are missing out on and they should know about?

Anita Nowak

Well, I do think that Copenhagen has got the most beautiful people in the world, whether you’re eight months old or 88 years old. Men, women, everybody there is beautiful. And I don’t mean just physically beautiful. I just mean kind and considerate and they have great social policies, so I think Denmark is an underrated place to visit.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Thank you. I had an amazing trip to Lithuania, and I think, like, that should really be on people’s list, but it doesn’t seem to make it. But that’s my plug, Lithuania.

Anita Nowak

My husband is Georgian, and so we’ve, over the years, sent some friends over to Georgia. Tbilisi is a really cool city right now.

Pete Mockaitis

Nifty. Well, thank you. Well, now let’s hear about empathy. I guess you worked that muscle chatting with different folks in different places in 65 countries. Can you tell us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive insight discovery you’ve made along the way when it comes to this empathy stuff?

Anita Nowak
I think people don’t realize that practicing empathy is actually really good for you. So, the neuroscience is out, so they’ve studied what parts of our brain light up when we’re feeling pleasure and the rewards part of our brain. So, if we’re eating chocolate cake, that’s what lights up. If we just had a great orgasm, I’m not sure how they test that, but that part of the brain lights up. If you’re high on psychedelics, it’s the pleasure and reward centers that light up.

Same thing happens when you’re in an empathic embrace. If you’re in an emotional resonance with someone and feeling connected to somebody, that’s what lights up in the brain. And so, it sounds like practicing empathy is always about extending empathy and being empathic to others, it’s so altruistic, but, in fact, it’s the ultimate win-win when you practice empathy that you benefit, too, physiologically, spiritually, psychologically.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. Well, that almost sounds like a thesis statement right there, but how would you articulate the big idea behind your book Purposeful Empathy?

Anita Nowak

Well, I think the world needs more empathy. We, in our lives, need more empathy. I think we’re born with the capacity to empathize and become more empathic with practice is possible and that it’s good for us. So, those are, like, the five levels of why I think we have to dial up the empathy in the world. There’s a few examples that I’d like to share just as an experiment.

When I was studying the neuroscience of empathy, this is what happened to me more than 10 years ago. I was in a lineup for a FedEx at a FedEx counter and over the holiday season. A long lineup, 30-minute wait, everybody was bored, frustrated, nobody had cellphones, it was a long time ago, so you didn’t have anything to distract you.

And I got up to the counter, and the woman who greeted me was extremely rude, I mean, really unnecessarily rude. And I had a reaction to her, like, “How dare you? Like, what’s up with you?” and I wanted to call her out on it, but because I’d been doing this reading about the practice of empathy, I decided to put it into practice, and this is all happening, like, in a matter of nanoseconds, but I just looked at her and I said, “Are you okay?”

And there was this little pregnant pause as she was trying to figure out whether or not I was being sincere, if I was being sarcastic, and she discerned that I was being earnest, and she just burst into tears. And she looked at me, and she said, “I’ve been working two weeks double shifts, my son is at home with a fever. I think I’m coming down with something. It’s 3:00 p.m., I haven’t had a lunch break. I’m just flat out exhausted.”

And we looked at each other, and I held her hands across the counter, and she was crying. And we just held space together. I went to get her a mint tea afterwards, and she got herself together and sent my package with efficiency and grace, but that moment of human connection was available to us just because I asked the question, “Are you okay?”

And so, I think that we’re living in a world right now where we are constantly stressed out and busy all the time, and triggered all over the place, and I think that leaning into our empathic proclivity is going to really save the world. It’ll help other people and it’ll also help us as we journey through life.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. Well, so you mentioned a few benefits of being more empathic: increasing dopamine, reducing stress, boosting self-esteem, heightening the immune system, enriching our relationships. All that sounds swell. Could you share with us any particularly hard-hitting studies that made you go, “Whoa,” like they had some big numbers or transformational differences unfolding there?

Anita Nowak

Well, okay, there’s at work, but let me just start with Jamil Zaki’s work. He’s a professor at Stanford who studies empathy, has a great book on empathy, and his research looks at just having the belief that you can become more empathic actually changes our behavior so that we behave in more empathic ways. So, just thinking it’s possible is already important.

But if you’re asking about stats, I think this is kind of a really important set. I’ll share three stats for you, specific to the workplace, since that’s what’s your podcast is about, becoming better at your job. Right now, 78% of employees would work longer hours if they knew their employer cared about them. So, that’s four out of five employees that would work longer hours if they felt…

Pete Mockaitis

For no extra pay, just because.

Anita Nowak

For no extra pay, okay. Number two, so two out of three workers believed that empathy is critical to business success but only one out of five think it’s rewarded at work. So, they think it’s important but they don’t think that companies are paying attention, and I think that that is a really important gap that leaders and organizations need to pay attention to. And then at the C-suite level, 84% of CEOs believe that empathy drives better outcomes, but seven out of ten fear that they’d be less respected if they showed it at work. And that’s a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m actually having a hard time imagining how I could show empathy and then be less respected. I’m trying to concoct a scenario. Can you give me one, Anita?

Anita Nowak
Well, okay, so an example that I talk about at the office, which has a six-step process to becoming sort of a more empathic leader is a scenario where, let’s say, you’re at your office desk and you’ve just read an email from someone in the organization, and it means that you’re going to have to cancel plans for the evening, or work late, or work on the weekend, or some KPI, you missed a KPI. You’re stressed. So, you’re reading an email and you are feeling personally triggered.

And a knock on the door comes in, and it’s your star performer that says, “Listen, I need to take a week off because my partner just had a miscarriage.” So, this could be a real-life example. It doesn’t have to be a miscarriage, but he needs time off. And so, how are you, as a leader, feeling your own stress about the email that you just read, able to sit down and really hold space for someone else?

Oftentimes, you go straight to the action plan. Oftentimes, it’s like, “Oh, I’m really sorry to hear that. Sit down for a minute. Okay, well, if you take a week off, here’s what we’ve got to do in order to finish that project that you’re not going to be able to work on.” But, in fact, there really is more to the story than just that.

There needs to be, from the leader’s perspective, self-awareness that you’re triggered to start with. And that happens in life. Forget about just in the leadership suite. This happens when you are in a conversation with somebody, and something gets heated up. You have to actually, like, recognize how you’re feeling.

So, have that self-awareness, and then begin to self-regulate, which should be a second step. So, take some breaths so that you actually can bring about the parasympathetic nervous system so you’re not feeling the stress hormones running but that you can actually soothe yourself through some big breaths. Then, as another step, you want to actually intentionally cross the bridge. I call it bridge-crossing where you’re, like, saying, “I’m stepping out of my own space, my own scenario, and I’m going to meet somebody where they’re at in order to perspective-take.”

So, when you’re listening to someone, often we are busy in our own head thinking how it relates to me, or we’re listening to respond and not listen to understand. So, if you really want to engage in some cognitive empathy, you really have to sit with the person and imagine what that situation is like for them. So, that’s all the pre-work to the purposeful empathy. Then, of course, is the empathic action that you take.

Now, in that scenario, it’s not usually likely as a leader that you should actually start troubleshooting in real time. When somebody comes into you with a problem like that, and they need to just share, holding the space for them and asking questions from a place of sincere curiosity, asking that cliché question of “How are you feeling about that?” giving them space to sort of just unburden themselves, then you could take time afterwards, and say, “How about we go circle back and talk about what the implications are?” That’s the empathic action that you take after the fact.

And then the sixth and final step is to actually practice some self-empathy, because we all need to replenish our batteries. Because if we’re busy being empathic all the time with everyone else, then we’re going to run on low energy and a big propensity for burnout and compassion fatigue. So, it’s really a matter of actually taking care of yourself.

So, if a leader does show empathy in that way, the process that I just described, you would be hard-pressed to say that somebody would be disrespectful. Imagine a leader feeling like, “They wouldn’t respect me. In fact, they would feel the opposite,” but not everybody does that. Not everybody manages their empathy quite that way.

Pete Mockaitis

So, what would be a poor attempt at empathy that could reduce respect?

Anita Nowak

Well, certainly, so using the same scenario, knock at the door, “Well, can we meet later about this?” That’s a tough one for somebody to hear. If they’re taking the time to knock on the door and share, like they probably had to gather up quite a bit of their own courage to come forward, so you make space for that, except if you really can’t self-regulate.

If you cannot, if you’re stuck in your own head, you can actually say, “You know what, John, I think this is such an important conversation that we’re having, and right now, I just need five minutes to go to the bathroom so that I can really be present for you.” So, taking a minute or two away from the circumstance so that you really can recalibrate is very, very important. And if you don’t do that, people can tell if you’re present for them.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. Okay, well said. And can we recap those six steps here? What’s step one, two, three, four, five, six?

Anita Nowak

Sure. First one is self-awareness, knowing how you’re feeling. Number two, self-regulation, being able to bring down your triggers. Three is bridge-building, so you’re crossing the bridge, you’re really trying to get to the other side. Fourth, perspective-taking, so that’s active listening and imagining how someone is experiencing someone. Five is empathic action. What is the action you’re going to take that will be empathic for that person? And then six is practicing self-empathy.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So much good stuff to dig into here. So, we’re using the word empathy a lot as well as the term hold space. So, can we just clearly define or identify what counts as, “Yup, this was an empathic conversation,” or, “That was not an empathic conversation”? What are sort of the fundamental difference-maker or ingredients that make the distinction?

Anita Nowak

Yeah, beautiful. So, there’s these four words that get conflated and treated as synonyms: pity, sympathy, compassion, and empathy. And I put them on a continuum in that order. And on the pity side is what defines pity is a power asymmetry embedded in a relationship. When you pity someone, you are necessarily looking down on them, “Oh, you poor person.” So, a lot of foreign aid, a lot of philanthropy is predicated on the very paternalistic pity paradigm.

As you make your way across the continuum, and you get to empathy, empathy, for me, is the innate trait that unites us in our shared humanity. And that means there is no power asymmetry. You look upon someone knowing that they share the same humanity, they deserve the same degree of respect, and they have the same intrinsic worth. They’re just in a different circumstance than you, but you could be in that circumstance where the universe is a different place, if you’re living in a parallel universe.

So, being empathic requires humility and requires us to really accept that we’re on the same journey of life together, having the same joys, having the same fears, having the same shared loves, that we share that common humanity. So, really, the important ingredient is that there’s not a looking down on somebody, “Oh, you poor person.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, that’s empathy. And then in terms of a specific conversation in which you said, “That was an empathic conversation,” or, “That was not…” I suppose, in some ways, that might be in the eye of the beholder, or the interlocutor, the person participating in the conversation, like, “I felt as though that person was connected to me, my emotions, what I was feeling, experiencing, and understood me. I felt seen.” Is that accurate or how would you grade the conversation?

Anita Nowak

Well, there are a couple of big ways that a conversation can feel un-empathic and that things slightly derail. One is that a person starts to problem-solve, and I’m guilty of that. Somebody is trying to unburden themselves, share a story, and instead of just holding the space, as you said before, and sitting with them, even through the uncomfortable quiets, that I start to respond with, “Have you tried this? Have you tried that?” and that’s not very useful most of the time, unless they’re asking, like, “What would you do?” then that’s an invitation to help problem-solve.

Another one is to hear a story and relate it back to yourself, “Oh, gosh, you remind me of,” or, “I know exactly what you’re thinking because that happened to me or my aunt,” or whatever. And those are two really hard ways to end an empathic connection but that we do very often, so we have to be really conscious of it.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, if we’re not doing that, if we’re not problem-solving, well, I guess you could also just be totally zoned out, like, “If I’m not problem-solving, and I’m not relating it back to me, but I’m also kind of just ‘Uh-uh,’ ‘Yeah,’ ‘Right,’ ‘Okay,’” I guess if you’re totally zoned out would be another way that you’re not empathetic.

Anita Nowak

Totally. And there’s research that’s showing just the presence of a mobile phone on a table actually distracts you something like by 50%. So, it’s like the old fashion, you go to a cocktail party, and you’re looking over somebody else’s shoulder, just that phone as a distraction is a real empathy breaker, too.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Anita, I always wonder, because it feels so big in my pocket, when I sit down at the lunch table, where should I stick it? Because I’ve heard about this research, I was like, “This is uncomfortable in my hip but I don’t want to put it on the table because I’ve heard the research.”

Anita Nowak

Maybe restaurants should have Velcro under the table, and then give you a patch to put on your phone.

Pete Mockaitis

I will actually stick it under my leg.

Anita Nowak
Yeah, sure. That’s a good idea.

Pete Mockaitis

And then I’ll need to alternate because I’m off balanced for a while. So, okay. And I’m not about to get a phone holster. That’s not my style.

Anita Nowak

Your style a purse, no?

Pete Mockaitis

No, I’m not doing that either. Okay. So, there are some don’ts, don’t problem-solve, don’t say, “Oh, I know exactly how you feel. That happened to me,” dah, dah, dah, make it about me, don’t zone out, don’t have a phone there. Holding space, what does that mean?

Anita Nowak

What does holding space mean? It means to listen with the intention to understand and not the intention to respond.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, holding space, I’m almost imagining, like, a physical space in terms of I’ve got a beautiful clean kitchen island, and I enjoy beholding its emptiness, and yet it’s so tempting to stick anything and everything right there because it’s so convenient because it’s right there. But to hold the space would mean that, “Oh, no, no, we allow that emptiness to remain much like there’s emptiness in my own head of my own agenda.” That’s what I’m thinking about holding space. Are you thinking about that?

Anita Nowak

There’s a great practice, you can become certified as a practitioner of empathy circles, which I am, and it comes out of a place in California. I’ll make sure to get the notes on the website how to get there, for your listeners. Essentially, empathy circles work where you’re, let’s say, five people on a call on Zoom, or together in person, and you spend 60 minutes, 90 minutes, 120 minutes together doing this empathy circle, and it involves pairing.

So, let’s say the first pair, the listener and the speaker, and the other three are observers. And then throughout the entirety of the time, the pairing switches to different pairs so everybody has a chance to pair up differently. And so, let’s say you have four minutes as a pair to start talking about anything that is the prompt question. So, like, “Why is empathy is important in the world today?” could be the prompt question.

So, the first person will answer but not speak for four minutes on a roll, but actually speak in a bit of soundbites. So, they’ll speak, they’ll say something, and then the person who’s listening responds back, reflects back with what they hear. And then the speaker will continue with the next soundbite, and another reflection back, and it’ll go back and forth, back and forth.

[21:17]

Or, if there’s been a misunderstanding, the person who’s speaking will hear the responder reflect back something that’s not quite right, and then actually correct them until the person has reflected back, like, “Yeah, you got it now.” So, this goes back and forth, back and forth for four minutes, and then it’ll switch to another pair, and another pair, and another pair.

And the goal of this practice is actually to become a better listener. And I remember thinking about this, I’m like, “I’m a fairly good listener. This is not going to be tough at all.” And when you do that for half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour, or longer, not only when you’re an observer, as you’re listening to what somebody is saying and then saying, “Oh, that’s so interesting that that person reflecting back picked up on this, or emphasize that,” so you’re busy listening all the time.

But when you’re actually the active listener, reflecting back, you realize how much focus is involved in actually paying attention to what somebody is saying so that you’re not busy in your own head. You’re really listening and then reflecting back what you heard. So, this is an excellent, excellent practice to debunk the myth that we’re good listeners because we really aren’t.

So, another way to be empathic and to hold space for someone is not necessarily to sit in a dome of silence, but to reflect back, and sometimes even using the last few words of what somebody said, as mechanical and robotic as that might sound, actually really, really does help the person feel heard. And psychologists and therapists, who are doing one-on-one coaching or one-on-one therapy, know this all too well.

So, there’s this cliché, “So what I heard you say was…” dah, dah, dah, dah. You might not actually want to use that language but you do want to do the practice of reflecting back because it opens up for the person to be able to continue talking. It’s an open invitation.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s an open invitation.

Anita Nowak

Yup.

Pete Mockaitis

See what I did there, Anita?

Anita Nowak

Yup.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, okay. We had Chris Voss, the negotiation guy, talk about that as well in hostage negotiations that’s apparently super effective for folks because folks feel like, “You must have been listening at least somewhat in order to be capable of repeating those words.” That’s cool. Well, as you mentioned these empathy circles, that was my reaction, like, “Oh, boy, that sounds exhausting. An hour plus of straight listening, like I’m going to need a walk and a snack and a nap after that.”

Anita Nowak

I did have a headache.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, okay, understood. So, empathy, holding space, huge benefits. Lay it on us. I think, Anita, in my own experience of trying to be…well, hey, first of all, are empathetic and empathic synonymous or is there a distinction between these words, too?

Anita Nowak

Those are exact synonyms. Just some people prefer the extra syllable, and I do not.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. There we go. Well, empathic makes me think of Deanna Troi from Star Trek. It’s like, “Oh, you have superhuman powers? You’re an empath?” Okay. So, I find in my own attempts to be empathic, it’s interesting, like sometimes I’m just in the right emotional groove, and sometimes I’m not. And it almost feels like there’s a particular emotion, or state, or combination of interior elements that mean I am in an empathic groove and ready to rock and roll with that, and other times I’m just not.

So, is that typical of most people as they try to be more empathic? And what are these ingredients? And how do I conjure them up within myself?

Anita Nowak

I think it’s perfectly normal to have all of those emotions and not be constantly on the ready to be empathic and hold space for other people. We’re only human, and I’m perfectly flawed, too. I’m not always in a good mood and stressed. Our brains actually cannot be in a state of anxiety or stress and empathy simultaneously. It’s not possible to our brains.

So, we’re living in a society and working where we’re feeling a sort of either low-grade or mid-grade chronic state of stress and anxiety, which is why our empathy is so sorely lacking because our brain cannot do both at the same time. So, there are some practices that we can do to actually become more empathic with practice.

And it’s interesting that one of the slides that I use, if I’m doing a visual presentation, is I’m up in Montreal where it’s still winter. We’re expecting a big snowfall. So, imagine freshly fallen snow, and your kid, 10 years old, and you have to cross a football field to get to school in the morning. If you’re the first kid, you have to do the hard stomping across the snow, and if you’re the next typical kid or kids, you’re going to follow in the footsteps until the path is created. That’s a very simplified version of how our neural connections are formed too, and our neural pathways are formed.

When we’re born, we have very few neural pathways because we haven’t had a lot of thoughts, and we haven’t experienced a lot of life. But in those first few years of our life, we have exposure to so much, and our neural pathways get formed as a result of all the experiences that we have. And the more often we experience similar things, the thicker our synaptic connections and our neural pathways will be.

So, if you’re a child born into a family where there’s lots of harmony and love and nurturing, our neural pathways will develop differently than if we’re born into a family where there’s a lot of strife or stress or worst going on. So, you’ll know some people in your life as adults that have become very, very defensive just that’s their way of being. You can likely trace that back to some early experiences in life.

And when I first started reading about that, I was like, “Well, that’s just too bad for the children that are born in circumstances that are unfortunate.” But the neuroscience research says we don’t have to let that be prescriptive. We can become more empathic with practice. Just like you go to the gym and you do bicep curls and your muscle grows, we can change the neural pathways in our brain, it’s known as neuroplasticity.

And so, the story that I shared about the FedEx counter, as I was learning about neuroplasticity, I was like, “Okay, I’ve got to try being more empathic with practice.” And so, all day long, every day, we can find opportunities to engage in a little bit of purposeful empathy, and practice empathy on purpose. When you get to the doorway, even if you’re in a rush, hold it open for someone else. As a regular habit to do, all sorts of little things, like smiling and naming somebody who’s wearing a name tag, like actually using their name and making eye contact. Get off the phone, have a chat with the barista.

There are so many little minute ways that we can practice empathy on purpose and become more empathic. And the result, over time, is that we have a different reflex, and we respond more empathically organically. It’s like we’ve changed our patterns. But we are not living in a society right now that makes that easy to do, unfortunately.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s hard-hitting. And so then, I’m looking for opportunities to be empathic. And then I suppose is it fair to say the common denominator in all of these is to sort of recognize the humanity of another person, like looking them in the eye, have a conversation, use their name, hold the door open? Is it fair to say that the common thread here is that I am just putting myself in their shoes and imagining their life experience, and entering into it?

Anita Nowak

Yeah. And so, I have a lot to say about the workplace, but just so that you understand the context of what I could share later, if you want me to dig into that, is that researchers who have studied our evolution as a species, point to empathy as the reason why we survived. So, 40,000 years ago, homo sapiens were not the only large-brain species wandering the planes. We had other large-brain species but they died off and we survived and thrived, and they point to empathy and collaboration as the key drivers for that.

So, how they figured that out is that whites of our eyes grew. We have huge whites compared to other mammals on the planet so that we could read each other’s facial expressions and eye expressions. And we know that. That still lives on. We go to meetings, somebody says something at a meeting that you’re, like, you think is stupid. You look at a colleague and you have a knowing glare, or with your best friend at the table when somebody’s flirting, or whatever. We know that.

Our facial hair dropped off, relatively speaking. Our testosterone dropped off, relatively speaking. We needed to find ways to communicate with each other and understand each other so that we could work together to fight against the circumstances of the day. So, it’s been part of us as a species to lean into empathy, and we need to do more of that today.

Another thing that I think is worth knowing is if you go back to the lineage six or eight million years ago, part of the great apes were descendants of the great apes. There are still two creatures that are much like us – the bonobos and the chimpanzees. Now, folks, the primatologists who have studied chimpanzee culture look at that and say, “Okay, they’re hierarchical by nature, they’re prone to violence, they actually have terrible acts of violence, including infanticide, and people say that’s part of us.” Our human nature is much like the chimpanzee.

But you’ve got somebody like Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist, who says, “I’ve studied bonobo culture for the last 50 years, and I think if more of us have studied bonobo culture, we’d realize that that’s what humanity is all about, because bonobos are nurturing, and collaborative, and compassionate by nature.”

They, literally, when they have problems, they don’t go into open warfare like their chimp friends. They actually make love not war. They’ll have like mass orgies to solve some problems. So, I think we have this belief that we are selfish by nature, and then, of course, some years ago, there was a book about this selfish gene. That’s all been debunked. We’re not selfish by nature. We are empathic by nature. We are collaborative by nature.

And it’s a story that’s untold. It’s not told enough in our culture. But if you give me permission to talk about why this all matters in the workplace, given that this podcast is how to be awesome at your job, I want to poke a little bit at, like, some major tectonic shifts that are happening in the workplace, and why empathy matters now more than ever.

Mental health crisis, America is the most overworked developed nation in the world, burnout rates all-time highs, we absolutely need empathic organizations to help with that. Then we’ve got everybody who’s been shaken by the pandemic. The workforce has got these new buzzwords. You’ve heard the Great Resignation, quiet quitting, bare minimum Mondays. Everybody is rethinking their relationship to work.

And if you are in a war for talent, you’ve got to have a more empathic culture to bring these people in and keep these people on.

Psychological safety. Nobody wants to feel shame at work, and everybody wants to feel a sense of belonging. But guess what’s happening? Political polarization is pulling us apart, and it’s costing people money, it’s costing companies money. This us versus them is coming, it’s seeping into the workplace, so we need to find opportunities for bridge-building. All of that takes empathy.

Fourth one, no surprise, the whole DEI conversation. So, in the face right now of growing diversity training backlash, which is happening, unfortunately, we can look to, like, empathy-based interventions as another alternative to kind of create more feelings of inclusion and to celebrate the diversity. And last is the Gen Z.

They have totally different values. They’re allergic to power-over. They value things like collaboration, sustainability, authenticity. And to attract the younger talent, we all need more empathy in the workplace. So, I think those are, really, it can’t be oversold as real things that matter to leaders and companies right now.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, empathy is huge for individuals and our health, it’s huge for organizations and being competitive and flourishing. We’ve talked about a couple ways we can be more empathic. Any other top practices you recommend people or teams or organizations adopt, as well as top practices you’d recommend we drop?

Anita Nowak

Okay. So, two things that I would invite you to think about in terms of dropping is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we all know from our Psych 101 class, a little triangle at the top with self-actualization. There’s this belief that once our basic needs are met, we eventually self-actualize. We become our full potential. And even he himself, before he died of a heart attack, said, “Oh, my gosh, how wrong was I to think that that was the end all, be all of what we could achieve.”

So, the first thing I would drop is that the epic mountain you want to actually climb to is self-actualization. In fact, he said it really is about self-transcendence, this idea of being of greater service and purpose to something outside yourself. And I think about, so I’ll read out three quotes from three famous people who are all luminaries that walked the earth.

Mother Teresa, “A life not lived for others is not a life.” Gandhi, “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” Dr. King, “Everyone can be great because everyone can serve.” So, there’s this notion that when we are living our best lives, we are in service to something greater than ourselves, that idea of trying to reach for self-transcendence, even though that’s a very fancy word, but just service to others, that is what purposeful empathy is about. It’s about extending, being helpful to other people. So, that’s one thing I would lose.

The thing that I would bring in is a tool called The Personal Values Assessment by the Barrett Values Center. So, we think we know what our values are, and I’m sure you’ve come across the work of Brene Brown. She wrote Dare to Lead. She has this exercise where there’s a hundred values on a sheet of paper, like on one of the pages of her book, and she has a three-step process.

She says, “Okay, read them all and circle the top ten that matter to you, not what you’re projecting onto yourself but what you actually really think are your core values.” So, you circle ten, I did that. Then she says, “Okay, now on a piece of paper, write the top five,” so I did. And then flipped the next page, and it’s like, “And now choose your top two values.” And then it gets really tough.

How do you choose between honesty and kindness? They’re both really important but some people value one over the other. It’s not one better than the other. It’s just that we all live different things. So, I think becoming aware of what our values are and being able to share with people in our lives and sort of align according to values, and then see differences and not see them necessarily as bad but just different, that’s a great practice to have.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Any others?

Anita Nowak

Any others. Well, I have been posting daily empathy posts for 2,414 days as of today, so it’s almost seven years of consecutive posting, and I’m posting only material that other people who talk about empathy are sharing. So, either research that’s out, reports that are out, there are so much to cull from that list.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah. Well, now I’m thinking Brene Brown style. Can you share with me, if you move from 100 to two, can we move from these thousands to a couple others that are really potent?

Anita Nowak

So, the simple practice of meta, meta meditation. So, we all this fancy, all this mindful thinking, mindful living stuff. The meta is a Sanskrit word for loving-kindness, so it’s a simple practice. It’s a four-step process. You could close your eyes or just look down, and you think about people you love. And it’s easy to send them loving-kindness. You want them to have a good day, you want them to get green lights when they’re in a rush and in traffic. You want them to be healthy, happy, satisfied by life, all that good stuff.

So, you think about them for a minute, take a deep breath, then think about people you like, people you went to high school with that you wouldn’t mind seeing again, going on a camping trip with, maybe your colleagues or your classmates, people you like, and you send them loving-kindness. Great. You do that for a minute, take a deep breath.

Then the third group is strangers, people you’ll never meet ever in your life. You think about, I don’t know, a fisherman in Ecuador, you’ll never meet him, or the farmer in Saskatchewan whose wheat is in the bread that you ate with your toast this morning. Send them loving-kindness. And then the fourth and final group or person that you send loving-kindness to is somebody that’s hurt you, or disappointed you, or that really sees the world differently and triggers you.

And the practice of meta meditation is to actually flex your empathy muscle and build up the capacity to be kind to people even if you disagree with them or even if they’ve hurt you because it makes you a better person, and you just don’t know what they’re going through, and you don’t know what level of consciousness they’re living, how they’re living their life. So, that’s a great practice to have.

Pete Mockaitis

And, in practice, what am I doing as I send someone loving-kindness?

Anita Nowak

You’re just thinking the thoughts, so I’m like, “Pete, I hope that tonight you have a great dinner, and that you have a great sleep tonight, and tomorrow morning, you wake up refreshed and everything about the day goes smoothly for you.” You just send them whatever comes to mind about. Like, you just want them, you wish them well.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you.

Anita Nowak

Another powerful exercise, if you want, is something that’s tough to do, you pair. Eye-gazing. So, a marital therapist say that a couple who’s having a problem, and they have to work through and find a compromise, if they do the practice of eye-gazing, they’ll have a better outcome than the couple who doesn’t. And I do this with all my students.

So, they sit in pairs, feet planted on the floor, palms up, facing up on the lap, you set a timer for 30 seconds, and you simply gaze into someone else’s eyes for 30 seconds. And it’s weird and awkward at first, and sometimes there’s lots of giggles and whatever, you get the heebie-jeebies off, you shake it off after the 30 seconds, you might tell each other how you’re feeling about it, how weird it is, and then you reset an alarm for another 90 seconds. So, in total, you’ve done two minutes of eye-gazing.

I’ve done this time and time and time and time again, and I can tell you, in a roomful of people, there’ll always be some that are crying. And in the debrief, you’ll hear people say, especially younger people, “I do not remember the last time I looked into someone else’s eyes like that. I don’t remember what it was like to feel seen like that. And it was so beautiful to communicate with somebody. I feel like I got to know them better in two little minutes.” So, it’s a very powerful practice.

Pete Mockaitis

I think I did this in a Landmark Forum or a Landmark Advance Class, and I haven’t thought about it in years and years, so you’re bringing me back, Anita. And I was, like, I’m pretty sure people were crying during that. And I think I was, too, but I don’t…it’s funny I don’t know why. It’s, like, help me out, Anita. What is really going on there?

Anita Nowak

Well, we lay down our defenses, and some things that are happening in our lives bubble up, and it’s that same, “Why do we have such big whites to our eyes?” Because we are meant to see each other, we’re meant to see each other, not just look at each other, but to see each other. And that’s why the frame, “The eyes are the windows to our soul,” we feel touched when we feel seen. We are touched when we feel heard. We want to be known by other people. We want to feel a sense of connection and belonging with other people, and that’s why empathy is our superpower.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s true. All those things are true. And, yet, staring into a total stranger’s eyes in a facilitated exercise for two minutes lights that up within us. That’s just so fascinating. All right. Okay, well, I guess now I got to ask about eye contact, in general. When I’m talking with someone, I imagine it’d be more empathic to have more eye contact. Is there too much? And how do you think about it?

Anita Nowak

Sure, especially depending on the cultural context that you’re in. Like, proper holding eye contact with somebody in Japan would be seen as, like, audacious and rude. So, yeah, you definitely don’t want to make that a universal claim. I think the idea of, like, eyes darting around, that look busy as if you’re not paying attention is a distraction, and this can be hurtful, especially depending on what somebody’s talking about.

But you don’t have to constantly hold somebody’s eye gaze for minutes and minutes at a stretch not blinking. No, it’s not meant to be work at all. And one of the things, if people have trouble actually looking into someone else’s eyes, because it does take a fair degree of vulnerability, I even practiced it as a teenager with my dad when he was yelling at me, and I didn’t want to cry, I would just look at sort of the spot between his eyes or I would look even at his receding hairline, which made it seem to him that I was looking at his eyes when I wasn’t. So, that’s a little bit of a hack.

Pete Mockaitis

This is a very detailed question on this but when I’m looking at someone’s eyes, it’s sort of actually difficult to fixate on two eyes at the same time. So, does it make an impact if I’m looking at the left eye or the right eye, or shifting?

Anita Nowak

Not to my knowledge, no. You just don’t want to go back and forth quickly, but it’s a natural thing to do. And people actually mirror each other. So, if you’re holding space and somebody feels really connected to you, you could do a movement where you put your hand on your chin, and watch the person in front of you do the same thing. We really reflect each other, and we have sort of this emotional contagion. So, the eye shifting is perfectly normal.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Anita, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Anita Nowak

There’s always an opportunity to practice more empathy in the world all day long every day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Anita Nowak

Sure. It’s actually two quotes in juxtaposition. One is a Polish poet, Stanislaw Lec, “Every snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty.” I think about that, it’s like, “Oh, I didn’t cause the problem,” “Oh, not my problem, not my responsibility,” versus St. Francis of Assisi who said, “All the darkness in the world cannot be extinguished by the light of a single candle.” So, I just like thinking about how you want to show up in the world. Are you somebody who’s just going to shrug and say, “Not my fault,” or are you going to show up as a light?

Pete Mockaitis

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

Anita Nowak

Well, I think I’ve talked about both. I’ve talked about Frans de Waal, and bonobos, and Jamil Zaki, great work on how to become more empathic.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Anita Nowak

I love a few. I’m going to mention Daring Greatly by Brene Brown. I’m right now reading Marianne Williamson’s book called A Politics of Love. She’s just recently announced her run for President, and I think it’s going to be an important…she’s going to be an important voice in the next election cycle, this idea of a politics of love can be dismissed to our detriment.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Anita Nowak

Well, I mentioned that, too, The Personal Values Assessment by the Barrett Values Center. If you want to, you can fill it out, it’s free, and they’ll send you back an assessment about your personality type and the kind of person you are based on that assessment. It’s a great tool.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Anita Nowak

Favorite habit? Drink two liters of water a day. I’m a work in progress.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Anita Nowak

Yeah, I think so. Descartes famously said, “I think therefore I am.” And I want to offer instead “I empathize therefore I am.” I think that’s what makes us human.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Anita Nowak

Oh, please do. My website is AnitaNowak, spelled N-O-W-A-K dot com. Obviously, I have a podcast called Purposeful Empathy, and a YouTube series. I hope people would check that out. And on LinkedIn, I post my daily empathy posts, nearly seven years running now, so you’ll get your daily dose of empathy every day.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Anita Nowak

Do the eye-gazing with a boss or a colleague, and see what comes of it. And when you are having a conversation, be intentional about listening to understand and not listening to respond.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Anita, this has been a treat. Thank you and I wish you much empathy and goodness.

Anita Nowak

Thank you so much.