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KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - Page 8 of 23 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Jul 11
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782: How to Overcome Distraction through Minimalism with Joshua Becker

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Joshua Becker shares his practical ideas for letting go of distractions so you can focus on what matters most.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The one thing that starts day right
  2. How money can prevent us from growing in our jobs
  3. How to tackle technology addiction

About Joshua

Joshua Becker is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of five books: Things That Matter, The Minimalist Home, The More of Less, Clutterfree with Kids and Simplify.

He is the Founder and Editor of Becoming Minimalist, a website dedicated to intentional living visited by over 1 million readers every month with a social media following of over 3 million. His blog was named by SUCCESS Magazine as one of the top ten personal development websites on the Internet and his writing has been featured in publications all around the world.

Resources Mentioned

Joshua Becker Interview Transcript

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

Joshua Becker
Oh, it is good to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, I’m excited to talk about your book, Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life. But, first, I want to hear a little bit about you and your family’s story. You’ve become a minimalist. What does that mean in practice? And what’s the tale behind it?

Joshua Becker
Yeah, okay. Well, yeah, let’s start with the easy stuff, huh? Small background, I grew up pretty typical middle-class America. I’ve been married now for 23 years and have two kids. And like most American families, it seems like whenever we got a pay increase, we just increase the size of our house and increase the amount of stuff in it.

My life changed 14 years ago, my son was five, my daughter was two, and I was introduced to minimalism on a Saturday morning. I was living in Vermont at the time, Phoenix is now home for me. But I was living in Vermont and we had had this long winter. We were into our spring cleaning. I offered to clean out the garage that had gotten all dirty and disheveled over the course of the winter.

My son, Salem, was five at the time, for some reason, had this vision that he was going to enjoy cleaning the garage with his father but he lasted about 30 seconds and went into the backyard, and my garage project just compounded and compounded, and hours later, I was still working on the same garage. And I started complaining about it to my neighbor who was doing all of her yard work, and she introduced me to minimalism. She said, “You know, that’s why my daughter is a minimalist. She keeps telling me I don’t need to own all this stuff.”

And I remember looking at the pile of things in my driveway, dirty and dusty. I’d spent all day taking care of them, and out of the corner of my eye, there was my five-year-old son swinging alone on the swing set in the backyard where he had been all morning long. And I suddenly realized, Pete, that not only were my possessions not making me happy, like most of us would say, but even worse, all the things I own were actually distracting me from the very thing that did bring me happiness in life. And not just happiness, but purpose and meaning and joy and fulfillment.

So, that was the start of our journey into minimalism, our journey into owning less so that I could free up more of my life for the things that actually do bring back dividends that pay off in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, owning less, I mean, there’s such a spectrum between stuff and how much is enough, and too much and not enough. How do you think about that?

Joshua Becker
Yeah. So, it’s very interesting because when I…so, this was 14 years ago. I don’t think there were any…I think I was the first blog. I started a blog that weekend, just a diary. Becoming Minimalist is the name of the website. And I started it just to keep track of what we were doing and what I was getting rid of. Becoming minimalist was a decision that we had made and so it seemed like the perfect title for the website.

At that time, most people writing about minimalism, they were in their 20s, and they were backpacking around the world, or they owned a hundred things, or 20 things, and like I was never drawn to that type of lifestyle. I liked my neighborhood, I liked the school that my kids were going to, I liked having people over into our home that were new to the neighborhood, or I worked at a church at the time, people who were to the church.

And so, minimalism for me never became about, “I just want to own the least amounts of things as possible.” That’s not ever what I pursued. I pursued “I want to own just the right amounts of things so that I can focus most of my life on the things that matter.” And that’s always going to change from person to person. It’s going to look different from a family of eight to a single person in their 20s.

It’s going to look different if you live in the country, if you live in the city, if you’re an architect, or a teacher, or a writer, or a farmer, or a mechanic. Like, you’re going to own different things in order to pursue those things that are most important to you but, in most cases, the things that we’ve accumulated and the things that we continue to pursue have actually become the distraction from those greatest values in life.

And so, how each person finds that, I think, looks different from how they shake out looks from person to person but I think the value is in the pursuit and in starting to recognize how possessions become so much of a distraction from us for us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so then, in the book Things That Matter, are we talking distractions in terms of like physical stuff items as well as what are some other key distractions?

Joshua Becker
Sure. Possessions is a chapter in the book but there are eight distractions that I cover in the book that distract us from a meaningful life. I cover fear, I cover past mistakes, I cover the selfish pursuit of happiness, the distraction of money, the distraction of possessions, the distraction of accolades, the distraction of leisure, and the distraction of technology, or maybe trivial is a better way to say that last one.

So, yeah, people hear the title Things That Matter: Overcoming Distraction to Pursue a More Meaningful Life and they think, “That is a book I need to read. My phone is definitely a distraction,” like we can all picture that one. And then I think the book really hopefully, challenges us to think through distraction in broader and more socially ingrained ways than simply, “I’m playing too many levels of Candy Crush on my phone.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, before we dig into a couple of them in particular, are there any sort of fundamental mindsets, beliefs, habits, behaviors that transcend or cover all of them that’ll be handy for folks to take on in terms of pursuing a more meaningful life and being more awesome at their jobs?

Joshua Becker
Yeah, they’re very broad and they’re very varied. The distraction of fear is very different than the distraction of social media. But if I were to try to boil down the premise of the book that I think applies to all of them, it would be I start with a story of my grandfather who asked me to play a part in his funeral. It was really a life changing conversation hearing my grandpa talk about death, not fearing death, not regretting that death was coming, but proud of the way he had lived his life, so much so that he had few regrets about how he had lived.

And my question became, “How do we get to the end of our lives with fewer regrets?” And I think the way we do it is we identify what is essential, we identify what is important, we look at the distractions that are keeping us from those main pursuits in life, and then we work to overcome them every single day going forward.

And so, if there’s any uniting thought between the distractions, it’s that we were designed to live meaningful lives, that there are pursuits and there are good…there’s a good that we can bring into the world that no one else can bring into the world, and we need to work hard to overcome those distractions that keep us from it, and realize that it’s not a one-and-done thing, that we need to do this every single day when we wake up, to take it to work every single day when we go to work. We need to overcome the distractions that keep us from doing our best, most meaningful work in our jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any sort of key guiding principles or questions or thought exercises to help us zero in and distinguish the essential from the nonessential?

Joshua Becker
Well, yeah, very interestingly, we did a survey for the book and one of the questions we asked is, “Would you say that you have identified a clear purpose for your life?” And I was surprised 70% of people say that they have identified a clear purpose for their life, which I thought it would be lower but I was excited to see so many people who would say that.

We asked a follow-up question, “How often do you feel you are spending time and resources on less important pursuits at the expense of things that matter?” and 77% of people say that they often spend time and money and energy on things that aren’t as important as that thing that their clear purpose is. And so, number one, I think there’s just a thought process to taking a look at our passions, taking a look at our abilities, the personality that we have, and working hard to discover, like, “What is most important to me? And what role can I play in bringing that about or in pursuing that goal?”

Just thinking of all the different problems in the world, this is a side note but I’m pretty convinced one of the reasons we have so much division in our country, in the world today is that people are passionate about different problems, and we seem to have begun judging people in that way, that, “If you are not as passionate about the same problem that I’m passionate about, then there’s something wrong with you, or you’re distracted,” rather than leaning into, “Hey, I’m passionate about solving this problem. I’m passionate about serving this person,” and leaning into that.

So, I think, number one, just elevating what it is that we want to do in the world and the role that we want to play and how we bring about the greatest good for the greatest number of people is how I like to say that, and then starting each day with a thought exercise. I would just call it setting my intention every day, that I wake up every day and one of my first thoughts, usually when I’m in the shower, is, “Hey, today I commit myself to…” something and fill in that blank, and it’s usually the same thing every day.

But somehow starting the day and setting, “Hey, this is what I’m pursuing this day. This is what’s going to be important to me today.” I’ve learned that in college from a mentor of mine, and I’ve tried to keep it as a daily exercise as much as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some examples of articulations of both a life purpose as well as a daily intention?

Joshua Becker
Yeah. For me, I think they’ll, hopefully, stem from each other. So, for me, I would say there’s three main purposes that I have with my life, and the first two come from the first one. So, like my greatest purpose in life, my greatest goal in life, the thing I desire most is I want to be a faithful follower of God. So, my faith has always been important to me and this is always my driving force.

Beneath that, I want to be a faithful husband. I want to be an intentional father. I want to focus on the relationships that are in front of me. So, I always want relationships to be important to me. And the second thing, or the third thing, depending on how you’re counting, is I want to make an impact in the world, and I want to use my gifts and talents, and I want to help as many people as I possibly can.

And so, those are the main driving forces in my life. As opposed to I want to make as much money as possible, I want to be as famous as possible, I want to rise to the top of my corporation, I want to own a house in that neighborhood. Those are the purposes that drive me the most. And then, of course, I think the goals along the way change.

So, my son just left for college, and so, me being an intentional father when he’s 19 is different than me being an intentional father when he’s three, but it’s the same purpose. The goals just change. And so, for me, my daily intention every morning would be I want to, again, just as a faith-based intention, I want to honor God with my day.

So, that’s how I would set out every single morning, but it might look different for someone else, “I want to be the best mom that I can be today,” “I want to be the best architect that I can be today,” “I want to serve people the best that I can today.” It looks different for different people.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, then zooming into the eight distractions, can we zero in on a couple? Like, what do you think are the most widespread destructive and easiest to get some quick wins on?

Joshua Becker
Yeah. So, good ones because, How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast, man, so many I think of these distractions can pop up in work specifically, or in life more generally. Fear, I think, the distraction of fear can pop up, I think, in our work over and over again. And what’s really interesting, a friend of mine, actually, brought about this distraction. It wasn’t on my radar when I was penciling out the book or had the idea for the book, and so he’s the one that kind of shared it with me.

And the more research I did into fear, really, the more fascinating it became that I interviewed someone for the book, his story is in the book, and he’s always had this fear of failure. And it was interesting because he would say that his fear of failure, as he looks back over his jobs and careers, he said, “My fear of failure follows me.” And he said, “Even when I became more successful in organization, the more successful I became, the more my fear of failure began to haunt me,” is the way he would say.

And so, as he rose up in the corporation and got more and more responsibilities, and closer and closer to the top, he said, “My fear of failing, my fear of being found out that I’m not actually good at my job,” would like, eventually, he said it led him to resign from every good job he’s ever had. And it was a new way for me to look at fear that it’s not something that we just overcome one time, but we recognize it over and over again, and how the fear of failure can force us to set low expectations or small goals.

One of the ways we overcome the fear of failure is we just try little things. We’d set very easy goals that we can attain because we don’t want to really march for something that we might not attain. So, certainly, I think that’s a big one.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, if we do have that fear, and maybe it’s failure or something else, and that can, one, just suck in terms of the experience of having that over your shoulder, and, two, cause us to not stretch for opportunities that are bigger or riskier, how do we overcome that distraction?

Joshua Becker
Yeah. Well, number one, I think we become aware of it. I mean, number one, I think we, just in that conversation with my friend, it was interesting. Like, I think he was learning as much about himself in my interview as he knew going in, he’s like, “You know what, I think this has led to me leaving every job I’ve had, now that I’m saying it out loud, and now that I’m talking about it.”

And he would trace it back to just conversations, I think, he had with his father and some of the words that his father spoke into him about being good for nothing. And he said, “I feel like I thought that I had overcome that but now I can recognize that it’s still sabotaging me even to today.” So, I think recognizing that.

Number two, I think believing people when they speak confidence into us, to not push those compliments aside as just flattery or someone trying to get something out of us, but if we’ve heard this compliment over and over again that we’re good at something, to begin believing it. I’m not the type of person who says that we always avoid fear.

Like, I think there is some healthy fear that we have in life. Fear, hopefully, keeps us from doing dumb things. But it’s when the fear is irrational, when, “Hey, I have been successful in my career. These are competent people ahead of me in the organization, that they keep promoting me or keep giving me more responsibility. Why am I so afraid that I can’t do this job? Or, why am I afraid of taking on this new responsibility, or taking on this new project, or really trying at this new goal? Or, why would I let one setback keep me from trying again if this is really what I feel like I’m supposed to do and good that I can bring about into the world?”

So, I think recognizing that, and looking back at our past, and learning from others, and putting some safety nets in place, I guess, if we need to. I tell a story how I transitioned. So, I worked at a church, now I just write full time, and that’s a pretty fearful thing for me to do to become self-employed and become a full-time writer. And along the way, there were, “We can save some money and we can put some money aside to dissipate that fear a little bit.” So, putting some of that safety net in place as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s talk about money next as a distraction. How does that cause havoc?

Joshua Becker
Eighty percent of Americans, actually it’s 79% of Americans say they’ll be happier if they have more money. And over 90% of Americans have financial-related stress, which has always been a really fascinating statistic to me. I think it’s like 92% of Americans have financial-related stress.

And there are certainly some people who don’t have enough money but it is not 92% of us. We are statistically the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, and still 90 plus percent of us are worried about money. It’s not because we don’t have enough money. It’s not because we don’t have enough income coming in, in most cases. It is simply because we have started looking for money to bring something into our lives that it is never able to provide – happiness and security.

We think that more money will make us happier. We think more money will make us feel more secure. Eighty-seven percent of millionaires say that they are not wealthy. And there was a study done by Boston College, and they did a study of the ultra-rich, they called it. And among people with a $20 million net worth or more, when asked if they had enough money, the most common response is, “I just need 25% more and then I’ll feel secure.”

And so, what happens is we start chasing happiness and we start chasing security in money, and then we start making more money, our net worth goes up, or our income goes up, and we realize that we’re not that much happier, we don’t feel that much more secure. And so, rather than thinking, “Hey, maybe money isn’t going to provide this happiness and security,” we tend to just think that we had the wrong number in mind, and we start thinking, “Oh, I just need that much money,” or, “I need that much income.”

77% of Americans say that, almost daily, they’re motivated by having more money. And I think this plays into our job, this plays into our work because the goal of our work, the goal of our job becomes, “How do I make more money in my job?” rather than, “How do I serve people better in my job? How do I find more meaning in my job? How do I help people more in my job?”

When the motivation just becomes, “How do I get more money?” I think that we lose out on a lot of satisfaction, and a lot of fulfilment, a lot of meaning, and even a lot of growth that we can find in our work and in our job and in our careers.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that really resonates and this reminds me, I’ve quoted this a couple of times, but this song “Ill With Want” by The Avett Brothers. There’s just a stanza that just grabs me, that 25% more comment, it goes –

“I am sick with wanting
And it’s evil how it’s got me
And everyday is worse than the one before
The more I have the more I think
I’m almost where I need to be
If only I could get a little more.”

And it’s like that is it. And I kind of tease myself if I start falling for that, whether it’s money or…I think about podcast downloads, like, “Oh, boy, when I have 18 million downloads, then I’ll be happy.” It’s like the absurdity, and much like the possessions, not only is it sort of maybe enough, but it could be actively harming you if you’re pursuing more money at the expense of other dimensions of your career that really are bigger drivers of happiness.

And I think it was a paper with Daniel Kahneman and others, and I’ve updated the number for inflation a few times, but it’s something like in America, they didn’t see happiness gains above $75,000 or they became quite minimal at that point, which I thought that kind of resonates, like, “Okay, when you’re not worried about your home, your vehicle, your food, your ability to do a bit of saving and giving, then that’s a lot to just take care of them.”

Joshua Becker
There’s a Harvard study and they surveyed 100,000 adults, which I always think it’s, for me, the go-to study on money and happiness. There’s literally some studies say there’s no connection between money and happiness. Some 75,000 is the most common quoted one. There’s one study that said it’s 24,000. There’s one study that literally says the more money you have, the happier you can be.

But this Harvard study, they tried to really sort out this answer, and what they discovered was it’s not so much about how much money you have, but it’s “What priority are you making money in your life?” And what they discovered is that people who trade off more important things to get more money end up less happy than those who just pursue the things that are important. And so, for them it’s about time, and it was this whole idea of, “Hey, if I just work really hard for the next six months, then I’ll make it financially and I can finally focus on the things that matter most.”

If that’s the thinking that we embrace in our jobs, those people always end up less happy even if they have more money than the person who says, “No, I have enough already and I’m just going to focus my time on family, or I’m going to focus my time on hobbies, or focus my time on these pursuits that mean the most to me.” And so, I think that’s one of the things.

Like, there’s no limit to the amount…I would say there’s no limit to the amount of money making opportunities in the world, like if the goal just becomes, “I want to have more money,” like there’s no end to the amount of things that we can sacrifice or give up in pursuit of that because I don’t think we never reach that security that we think it’s going to bring us, and so we just constantly want more, and we take on the new opportunity and the new clients, or whatever it might be.

Anyway, and here, your story about the podcast is great because there’s a whole chapter on accolades, which is basically that whole point. In some ways, podcast downloads equals money in some indirect way or direct ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Or likes.

Joshua Becker
Yeah, but when the goal becomes, “Hey, I just want this many people to know my name,” or. “This many people to be listening to the podcast,” or, “This many people to be mentioning me,” what it can do, like you know this, like it can change the content of your podcast. Like, you know by now, a topic you could put on that is going to be really popular and is going to be downloaded pretty often, like I know the articles that I can write on Becoming Minimalist that are going to go more viral, but they aren’t necessarily the content that helps people the most, or is the most meaningful work that I can do, same with your podcast, I’m sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I guess I do think that way about the podcast and meaning because I believe the most popular podcast categories are news, sports, politics, true crime. And I’ve listened to three out of four of those categories, and that’s kind of entertaining, occasionally riveting, but it rarely improves the quality of my life in terms of, like I heard an awesome hacker story.

And, okay, maybe there’s an actionable nugget about password manager, and it was a thrill for the moment. We’re talking about Darknet Diaries, Jack Rhysider, a free shoutout. But in terms of that’s what gets me going is when listeners say, “Whoa, I did this thing, and I got this result, and life is better from that.” Like, that’s the coolest.

Joshua Becker
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think that, I mean, there’s a time and a space for sports and entertainment and hobbies, like not to discount those things, but, for me, yeah, you could get more podcast downloads by doing something. I could write the article.

Pete Mockaitis
“One weird trick to become minimalist.”

Joshua Becker
“One weird trick to never clutter again.” And I just know that it’s going to get a lot of clicks and it’s going to get a lot of views, but it’s not true. There isn’t an easy one-step answer to some of these things, so.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about technology. That is often the source of much distraction. Any unique insights to share here?

Joshua Becker
Yeah, my approach to technology is, and obviously it’s always going to be an important chapter in the book, look, I get to do what I do today because of technology, and so this was never going to be, “Hey, how do we avoid technology? And technology is evil.” We’re here today because of technology. What I think the problem is, the way I look at technology is I try to notice a difference between creation and consumption when it comes to technology.

I can use technology to write an article, I can use technology to be on this podcast, I can use technology to create something that’s going to spread on social media, or I can use technology to scroll cat videos, or play Candy Crush, or watch and binge another season of something on Netflix. And so, noticing in my life the difference between, “Hey, I’m using technology to bring about good,” or, “I’m just using it and it’s become a distraction.”

And so, that’s always the first way that I think about technology to try to help me, I think, notice the good and the bad. And, again, not that there’s not a space for cat videos and whatever the video game is that we might be playing, but when it becomes a distraction is when it becomes the problem. And, for me, I have always taken, I started about four, five years ago, I started taking one annual tech fast every single year.

And the first time I did it, it was for 40 days. I’ve done it as low as 14 days and up to 40 days, which was the longest, where I just set aside a time where I do, ideally, no technology in my life. That’s not usually possible with my job and with most people’s jobs, but there are still limitations that we can put on it in terms of, “Hey, I’m just going to use my computer when I’m at work. I’m not going to do anything. I’m not going to do social media for 14 days, or I’m not going to play my games for 14 days, turn off the TV for 14 days,” whatever it might be, and having that period of time.

Well, for me, going that whole cold turkey route is better than, “Hey, I’m just going to turn off the TV at 9:00 p.m.,” or, “I’m going to limit my social media to 30 minutes a day.” I’ve always just done better with three weeks of no social media, three weeks of no television, and then I always think it helps me evaluate better when I come back.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and then you can really feel, I think, more of the impact and the difference, like, “Huh, okay.” Like, if I go on a camping trip where technology just isn’t even an option, it’s like, “Oh, there’s some loveliness here,” versus if it’s just small changes or interventions, often lead to small results, but not always. That’s rather exciting when there’s levels there.

Joshua Becker
I always think like a food detox is a way to think about that. If I think, “Hey, maybe I’m allergic to dairy,” and you take it out of your diet for a month, and then the first time you come back and have a glass of milk, and you can feel it, you’re like, “Oh, this actually was having a more negative impact on my body than I thought it was. I thought it was just normal how I felt but now I can see that the impact that it has.”

And so, you cut out social media for a month, over the month of July, or the month of August, and you enjoy your summer, and then you come back in, you’re like, “Oh, this is kind of a waste of time scrolling this constantly every evening.”

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

Joshua Becker
We asked, “How much your past was harming your future?” and 61% of people self-reported that something they had done in the past, a past mistake was keeping them from the future they wanted, and 55% of people said that a past mistake committed against them was keeping them from the life that they wanted to be living in the future. And that’s just the people that could identify it.

And, certainly, there’s a lot of overlap there but, man, that is a lot of bottled-up potential. That’s a lot of people who can say, “Hey, I am not able to live the life I want today because of something that happened in my past.” And I just encourage people, if that’s you, to turn and face that problem, whether it’s getting professional help or reading something or talking to a friend. Like, it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not easy to overcome but it’s a distraction I really think we need to work hard to overcome.

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

Joshua Becker
Yeah, a favorite quote, actually one that I use in the opening chapter of Things That Matter came from Seneca, the philosopher, and this is what he said, he said, “It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievement if it were all well-invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we’re forced at last by death’s final constraints to realize that it passed away before we knew it was passing,” which is very much, I think, the message of minimalism and the message of this book that we would invest our lives in things that matter.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite book?

Joshua Becker
A favorite book, man, the greatest book that I read recently is The Greatest Salesman in the World. It’s an old book and I bought it for everyone on my team, and I recommend it to everyone.

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

Joshua Becker
Yeah, I mean, I just want to say my computer here. My favorite tool, got to be my laptop computer, as boring as that sounds. I make my living online and I have found it to be a powerful opportunity to influence people.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Joshua Becker
My favorite habit is I go to the gym every morning and I work out every morning an hour before starting at work, and it’s become my favorite habit for the last several years.

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?

Joshua Becker
Yeah, own less, live more, that our lives are too valuable to waste chasing and accumulating material possessions.

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

Joshua Becker
My homebase online is BecomingMinimalist.com. So, everything, I do quite a few things but that’s the best place to always find me.

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

Joshua Becker
Find the meaning in your work. Don’t see work as just the thing you do to bring home the paycheck. But find out how your job is helping others and serving others. Find the selfless side of your job and focus on it, and you’ll find more joy in it every single day, and you’ll find more passion to excel in it as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Joshua, thank you. This has been a huge treat. I wish you much luck and fun in doing the things that matter.

Joshua Becker
Thank you so much.

Jun 23
0

778: How to Make and Break Habits Using Science with Russ Poldrack

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Russ Poldrack reveals the science behind why our brains are habit-building machines and how to make the best out of it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to make good habits stick 
  2. How to strengthen your brain against bad habits
  3. Why habits never really go away–and what you should do instead 

About Russ

Russell A. Poldrack is a psychologist and neuroscientist. He is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He is also the Associate Director of Stanford Data Science, a member of the Stanford Neuroscience Institute and director of the Stanford Center for Reproducible Neuroscience and the SDS Center for Open and Reproducible Science. Prior to his appointment at Stanford in 2014, he held faculty positions at Harvard Medical School, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin. 

He is the author of The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal about Our Thoughts and Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick. He lives in San Francisco. 

Resources Mentioned

Russ Poldrack Interview Transcript

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

Russ Poldrack
Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about habits and brain stuff, some of my favorite bits. But, first, I’m a little curious to hear about your new practice, the hour of whatever, in your lab. What’s the story here? And what has resulted from it?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, so the hour of whatever grew out of people’s, I think, and especially in the last couple of years, just feeling like we needed time to sort of connect without an agenda, no particular topics or anything. We just kind of come together and talk about whatever we want to talk about. A couple weeks ago, it was about the relative merits of raccoons.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, pros and cons.

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. And sometimes it’s been slightly kind of more academic topics, like, “What happens in an academic conference?” So, it’s a chance for people to just ask any questions they want to ask. And it’s been super fun. I think as we’re all struggling to kind of come back into kind of what used to be our normal kind of social life and social being, and this is meant to kind of be an opportunity to try to help re-engage those parts of our brain that might have withered a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And so, does someone come in with a topic, or is it just sort of like, “Hey, here we are”?

Russ Poldrack
People do come in with topics but it’s also kind of a random walk at times as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Hard to Break: Why Our Brains Make Habits Stick. And maybe before we go into the depths of the book, could you kick us off with some of your most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve come about in your research here?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, we’ve been interested for a long time in sort of how it is that so many different cognitive functions can be sort of crammed into the little two or three pounds of brain that sit in our head. And one of the ideas that has been around for a long time that has kind of driven a lot of the work that I’d done across my career is trying to understand how, like the brain has different systems to solve kind of related versions of different problems.

And so, one of those is actually directly related to habits. So, if you think about like what are the things that we learn as we go through the world, and I like to use driving a car as an example. So, when you drive to work, you don’t have to kind of think back and remember, “Oh, which pedal do I press to stop the car or to go?” And when we think about habits, those are often what we think about are sort of the different behaviors or the different knowledge that we build up through our experience in the world.

That’s very different than the knowledge of which particular parking spot you parked your car in this morning. That changes every day and you really have to use a different type of memory system in your brain to be able to go back and remember where you parked. And a lot of the work that we’ve done is try to figure out, “How do these different brain systems either kind of work together or even compete with one another?”

So, one of the big early findings that we had was sort of showing that these two systems, the system that kind of develops habits, and the system that helps us create these kinds of conscious memories of the past, like where we parked our car this morning, don’t just seem to be kind of working off on their own, but they actually seem to be competing with one another, such that when activity in one of those sets of brain areas goes up, activity in the other set goes down. They seem to be kind of pushing and pulling against one another.

And so, it really tells us that the brain is this big dynamical system that’s kind of got a lot of different parts that are working at the same time, and sometimes they work together, and sometimes they work across purposes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, in practice, does that mean if I am exerting some mental energy in one direction, I would expect deficits elsewhere?

Russ Poldrack
In general, that’s going to be true, yeah. And we’ve showed it to work that, to the degree that you’re engaged in, for example, multitasking, trying to do multiple things at once, that that has a bigger impact on the brain systems that are involved in generating those conscious memories of the past, and less impact on the brain systems that are involved in developing habits.

the brain has limited bandwidth, and so it’s almost necessary the case that if you’re focusing on one thing, it’s going to be at the expense of other types of information processing, and that’s going to have an impact on kind of how you do and what you remember.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now could you share sort of the big idea or core thesis behind the book Hard to Break?

Russ Poldrack
Yes. So, I’d say that the big idea is really, like why are habits so hard to change? We all have habits we’d like to change. We all know how hard our behavior is to change. And I think the big idea behind the book is that behavior change is hard for a reason, and that is that habits, in general, are a really good thing. In fact, they’re essential for us to behave effectively in the world. So, if you think about what will happen if we didn’t have habits, we would be deliberating about every small act that we make, which, “Where exactly should I put my foot when I take the next step?” “Which of these ten different loaves of bread at the grocery store should I buy?”

And, obviously, some people still do deliberate about those things excessively. But habits basically allow us to offload a lot of the uninteresting stuff to what you might think of as our brain’s autopilot. When the world stays the same all the time, when we’re driving the same car every day, we don’t need to worry about where the pedals are changing, and all those old details. The habit systems in our brain basically allow us to not have to think about that stuff.

There’s a great quote from the psychologist William James, he actually wrote this in 1890, and it’s one of the most highlighted bits on Kindle in my book, which is, here’s the quote, “The great thing then in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy. For this, we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can.”

So, it really highlights the fact that, in general, habits are really important to us, and you wouldn’t want them to just go away easily until they become habits that are annoying, and then the stickiest of habits becomes like a real challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so given this, what do you recommend are some of the best practices for establishing new habits, and then, conversely, for breaking ones we don’t want?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, I think when it comes to establishing new habits, the real key is consistency and in some sense, setting up a schedule. So, let’s assume that we’re talking about a habit that isn’t something one necessarily loves to do, like going to the gym. One of the things to think about is to make it as easy as possible for yourself to engage in the thing. One way to think about is don’t let yourself decide whether you’re going to do that thing or not today, but really have it be just part of a schedule.

So, for example, if you wake up every day and say, “Oh, should I go to the gym today?” It’s going to be a lot easier to say no than if you just decide, “I’m going to go to the gym on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at the same time of day, and I’m going to sort of fix that into my larger routine.” And so, the idea is sort of taking away a little bit of your ability to decide not to do the thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, burn the boats.

Russ Poldrack
Sorry, say that again?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, kind of like the burn the boats notion, like, “Oh, we can’t retreat because the boats are gone.”

Russ Poldrack
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, other sort of commitment devices or restraints. Okay.

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. Another interesting idea has come from Katy Milkman and Angela Duckworth and others, this idea called temptation bundling, where basically the idea is you give yourself a small reward in exchange for doing something that you don’t want to necessarily do at least until that thing can sort of become more habitual.

So, you might, for example, say, “Every time I go to the gym, I’m going to allow myself to have a little bit of chocolate.” Angela Duckworth and her colleagues did some research where they gave people free audiobooks to listen to while they were on the treadmill, and that actually showed that it increased people’s willingness to exercise. Even something, audiobooks are fun, they’re not like eating chocolate, but even the audiobooks were enough to sort of get people to be more likely to keep going to the gym.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if we’re trying to disentangle or get away from things we want to stop doing, what do you recommend there?

Russ Poldrack
So, I think one of the really important things is understanding what are the things that trigger the habit. We know that one of the things that makes a habit a habit is that it’s triggered by cues in the world. One of these, for example, you walk into a bar, you’re an ex-smoker, the smell of smoke or the other smells of the bar make you really want to have a cigarette. And almost every habit has some sort of thing that can trigger it.

And so, the first important thing is to like try to understand what the triggers are for you. They’re going to probably be different for every person. What are the triggers for you for the particular habit you’re trying to change? And then, one, can you get rid of those triggers? Can you kind of design your life to not encounter those things? Sometimes we can, sometimes we can’t.

If you can, then the more you can do to avoid the triggers, the better off you are because one of the other things that’s so hard about habits is once they get triggered, they’re really hard to stop. It’s much easier to prevent them from ever happening, to prevent you from ever being triggered to do the thing than it is to stop yourself once it’s been triggered.

Now, there are some things that we know that can strengthen one’s ability to stop, and we know that the prefrontal cortex is kind of the brain’s central executive to the degree that humans can exert any control over what they do, it’s the prefrontal cortex that allows us to do that. And there are things that we know that can make the prefrontal cortex work better or worse. We know that stress has a really strong negative impact on the prefrontal cortex and one’s ability to exert control.

Lack of sleep is also a big way to sort of cause the prefrontal cortex to not function well. So, working on stress reduction, improving sleep, exercise, those are all things that we know can help improve prefrontal cortex function. People think that this stuff is all about willpower, but willpower is, in general, pretty weak. And once the habit takes off, it’s very hard for us to actually stop it.

So, one of the things that seems to work, there’s evidence showing in a number of different domains that this can help people change their behavior, is this idea of planning for what’s going to happen when the situation arises. So, psychologists call this an implementation intention. When it comes time to have to stop yourself from doing the thing, what are you going to do?

And so, instead of saying, “Oh, I’m not going to smoke,” say, “Well, when I go to the bar and my friend offers me a cigarette, this is exactly what I’m going to do in order to prevent myself from smoking at that point.” It doesn’t always work but there’s evidence that these types of planning interventions do seem to help people change their behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so funny, my creative brain just runs wild with that because there can be an infinite number of responses. I’m thinking of like dramatic things, like you can break it into and say, “No, I have conquered nicotine forever.” Okay, that’s dramatic. Or, you can say, “Oh, no, thanks.” Or, it’s sort of like you have your script, or you’re going to, I don’t know, what the alternative to smoking are in terms of I guess there’s other nicotine delivery mechanisms.

There’s like a fuse, I don’t know what it’s called. It’s like a vape. It’s not nicotine or something. So, there can be any number of replacements. And, in fact, I was intrigued you have a chapter entitled “I forgot that I was a smoker” in your table of contents. I wanted to dig into that because we talk about those triggers. It’s kind of like some triggers are internal, like, “Hmm, when I’m bored,” which is sort of happens inside all of us daily, “I pick up my smartphone and see what’s going on in social media,” or whatever, or maybe it is a cigarette or food or drink type situations.

So, when that happens, and the triggers are internal and unavoidable, tell us what are some of the best practices? There’s strengthening of the prefrontal cortex, there’s having that implementation intention.

Russ Poldrack
Implementation intention, yeah. Another thing, so I talk a bit in the book about a bit of what we’ve learned from research on Tourette Syndrome. So, Tourette Syndrome is this disorder mostly in children where the kids have tics, and these could be vocal tics, they could be facial movement. Most kids grow out of them, some people have them into their adulthood.

And there’s a bunch of work looking at what’s called habit replacement, where the idea is like if you have something that, for example, a tic, and these tics, like a person often gets a really strong urge to like to do the thing, especially if they’re trying to prevent themselves from doing it, and finally it comes out.

So, the idea is to have some other thing that you do as a replacement, and that could be, in the context of tics, it’s often like a different movement. But you can imagine finding, for example, if you usually drink alcohol and you want to sort of not drink, finding things that are as close as possible to the thing that you would want to drink but that don’t have alcohol, or as you were talking about nicotine replacement, because those sorts of things can help break that…kind of break the link between all of the cues, like the taste of the thing and the response that you get from, for example, the alcohol.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, that person who forgot that they were a smoker, how did that go down?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, it’s a really interesting case. There’s actually a number of cases where this was an individual who had a stroke and it damaged the particular part of the brain that seems to be really important for sort of storing these types of kind of, I don’t know if you want to think of them as just cravings, but sort of like associations that we have with stuff that we want.

And, yeah, he apparently woke up after the stroke, and suddenly didn’t…after years of waking up every morning and having to have a cigarette first thing, woke up after the stroke, didn’t feel the need for a cigarette anymore. And when he was asked to describe what happened, he basically said, “Yeah, I just forgot I was a smoker.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so, yeah, that has fascinating implications, I’m sure, in your research associated with brain pathways and what’s going on there. Okay. And then you’ve got a particular recipe for stickiness in terms of getting habits to stick. What are the components of this recipe?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, so the brain has sort of brought together several different things that ultimately result in the fact that habits are really sticky.

So, the first one is that when a habit is developed, it never really goes away. As much as we might try to make it go away, what we’ve learned from a lot of research, especially research looking at rats learning habits, but we think it’s true in all organisms, is that when we have a habit and we want to try to get rid of that habit, what we have to do is, basically, push down the habit and learn a new behavior in its place. And as much as we might think that that old habit is gone, it’s always lurking there in the background. And if we get stressed out, or if the context changes, it’s likely to come back. That’s why we think habits are so likely to come back even many years later.

There’s also this thing that happens as something becomes a habit, our brain kind of moves it from initially relying on sort of parts of the brain that kind of make plans and plan out what we’re going to do, to the parts of the brain that are more involved in just doing actions. So, it’s almost like it becomes more of a hardwired action than something that we’re thinking about.

And another part of that is that we start to do lots of things together. We call this chunking in neuroscience, where initially we would have to plan out what are all the different actions we were going to do, say, to go to the store and go get some ice cream. And all of that becomes, in some sense, one bigger action.

And so, it’s easy for us to not sort of be thinking in the middle of what we’re doing. It’s almost like if the thing starts and it just kind of runs until it’s done. And then the other thing that starts to happen is that our attention starts to get driven by the things that are the sort of things in the world that are related to the habit.

So, for example, if you have a habit of eating ice cream, you might be particularly drawn to any kind of image of ice cream, anything in the store that has those features that you kind of associate with ice cream. And so, all those things come together to make it both really hard to get rid of a habit, and also really hard to prevent it from being turned on or to stop it once it’s going.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so given all of the knowledge and concepts and principles, can you share with us a few of the coolest stories you’ve encountered of folks who have put this into practice and done a fine job of creating habits or breaking habits that previously were eluding them?

Russ Poldrack
So, I think one really inspiring example for me is a friend of mine who, for a number of years, had a significant drug habit, narcotics, and was able to, ultimately, kind of hit bottom, and was able to come back. And I think one of the really impressive things that they used was really working on this kind of protecting the prefrontal cortex by doing meditation and really trying to obtain some kind of respite from all of the urges of the world and the voices that we hear. And I think that the ability to get some sort of mental clarity and really understand yourself like that really helps to think about, “How will I respond when the cues come up?”

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

Russ Poldrack
No, I think we’ve hit all the high points.

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

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, this is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.”

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

Russ Poldrack
One of the things that I always like to talk about and it kind of blows people’s minds, and they don’t believe me when I tell them about it, there’s a large body of work in psychology now on what are called flashbulb memories, which are these memories that we all have where something happens. I have one, I was in college when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded, and I have this crystal-clear memory of like walking into my dorm room after class, and somebody telling me, “Oh, hey, the Space Shuttle exploded.” And we all think that those are…they’re called flashbulb memories because, for many years, many people thought that they were this perfect recording of exactly what happened.

It turns out that many people get the details of these memories completely wrong. There’s been a number of studies now that have looked at people’s memories. The first one was actually for the Challenger explosion, where they went back, they had people, like the day after the explosion, say, “Where were you yesterday when you heard about the Challenger explosion?” And then they go back months later, and say, “Where were you?”

And the people often give details that are just totally wrong but they’re still so confident in those memories. And it really highlights the fact that memory is not like a tape recorder. Memory is our brain reconstructing a story about the past.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And could you share a favorite book?

Russ Poldrack
Yeah, one that I think is really fun is called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell, who’s an artist and writer. And it lays out this idea of what she calls the attention economy. It’s like the whole world is just sort of clamoring to grab our attention, and we start to think of like every moment as an opportunity to spend attention on something.

And she makes this, I think, a compelling argument, that we need to take back control of our attention, and that she refers to it as like a revolutionary act, and sort of choose to experience the world in a way that allows us to connect with other people, connect with the world around us. I think about when I was a kid, my mom would make me go to the fabric store with her, and this is before devices or anything.

And so, my brother and I would go to the fabric store with her, and we’d just sit there for 20, 30 minutes with absolutely nothing to do. And that kind of ability to tolerate boredom, like I could never go do that now, but I think that our ability to turn off our responses to the world and to…I think, mindful is a good word for it, to be more mindful about how it is that we’re engaging with the world, I think, is a really important thing.

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

Russ Poldrack
Yeah. So, I think the one piece of software that I use that I think is really useful is, and there’s a lot of things to do this, but I use this thing called Todoist, which is a really lightweight but effective to-do list manager. I like to try to keep my inbox, my email inbox down to one page so I can at least see everything that I immediately have to worry about.

And I’m sure you get as many emails as I do, you know how hard it is to keep everything down to about…I think my page is like 40 emails. And so, having a really good to-do list manager that integrates well with your email system is really important. And so, I find that probably my most important, like small tool that helps me stay on track.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about yourself when it comes to habits? Any favorite ones that really served you well over the years?

Russ Poldrack
I think I try to walk a lot, and I think that that’s a good thing to do both because you can’t be doing other things. Well, you can but I try not to. And I think habits, I’m trying to think habits of mind because, obviously, we all often think about our habits as being actions that we take in the world. But I think habits of mind are just as important, and I think being able to find the sweet spot where you’re almost perfectionist but not quite.
Because I think perfectionism is, at least in terms of productivity, is just a killer. I know so many people who are much more brilliant than I will ever be, sort of people who wanted to go into science but basically their perfectionism prevented them from ever getting anywhere because they were never happy enough with what they had done. And so, I think finding that sweet spot between good enough and perfect, it’s a really hard thing to learn how to do but I think, at least for me, I feel like that’s been a key to success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, it’s been underlined a bunch in the book, or you hear people quote it back to you often?

Russ Poldrack
I think the important nugget is that habits are sticky for a reason. They’re sticky because, in general, we want them to be. We don’t want to do a handstand and have our ability to see completely rewired. And I think related to that, one of the points that I often try to make about the book is that it should be a message for people to not beat themselves up when they can’t change their behavior.

Their brains were built to do exactly this, and especially our brains didn’t evolve in a world with 64-ounce sugary drinks and potato chips and drugs of the sort that one can buy either at the store or on the street. And so, our brains are really badly overpowered by the world that we live in now, and so I think that finding some compassion for one’s self around these things, I think, is really important.

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

Russ Poldrack
I’m on Twitter @russpoldrack, that’s probably the best place.

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

Russ Poldrack
I think it kind of goes back, actually, to the quote, which is to just find as many chances as you can to do something that you’re afraid of.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Russ, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun good habits.

Russ Poldrack
Many thanks. It’s been great fun.

Apr 07
0

757: How to Find the Career You Truly Love with Marcus Buckingham

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Marcus Buckingham reveals strategies for identifying the work that fills you up.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The secret to finding your “love” at work
  2. How you can be “irreplicable” at work
  3. Why you should see your job as a scavenger hunt, instead of a ladder 

About Marcus

Marcus Buckingham is a global researcher and New York Times bestselling author focused on unlocking strengths, increasing performance, and pioneering the future of how people work. He is the author of two of the bestselling business books of all time, has two of Harvard Business Review’s most circulated, industry-changing cover articles, and his strengths assessments have been taken by over 10 million people worldwide. He currently runs all ADP Research Institute’s studies on People and Performance. 

Resources Mentioned

Marcus Buckingham Interview Transcript

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

Marcus Buckingham
Thank you for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into your wisdom and talk about your book Love + Work: How to Find What You Love, Love What You Do, and Do It for the Rest of Your Life. But, first, could we hear what do you love most at work?

Marcus Buckingham
Actually, it’s love and work. I just put a plus in there because I thought it looked cool but I like love and work, I like war and peace, so I like the juxtaposition of those kinds of things. Look, I’m a psychometrician by training, which means I love trying to figure out ways to measure things about humans that you can’t count but that they’re really important anyway.

So, things like talent, strengths, engagement, resilience, that’s what I love to do is get to the heart of some of these really important psychological constructs and figure out, in a world where there’s so much opinion and so many, I think that, can we find a way, nonetheless, to cut through that, and say, “What do we know for sure about people’s strengths, or about engagement, or resilience?” That’s kind of what…it sounds a bit geeky but that’s what I love.

Pete Mockaitis
No, no, it’s beautiful and I understand and it’s exciting. And I’d love to hear, is there a particularly exciting, fascinating discovery that you’ve made recently when doing some of the research and pulled things together for the book Love + Work?

Marcus Buckingham
Well, what’s always fascinated me, when you look at the world through the lens of people who love it, if you look at the world of work through the lens of people who love it, you discover there’s way more variation than you would ever think. So, you look at some jobs and you think to yourself, “Well, those jobs, no one must want those jobs.” We would be able to do them for a short period of time and we want to get out of them as quickly as we could.

Take a role like hotel housekeeping. We kind of think, “Well, that’s not a good job,” and we, therefore, have to put rules and regulations in place to get people to do the job properly, and then we wonder why people find no love in the job. But I had a chance to interview the eight best housekeepers at Walt Disney World, and they didn’t know each other, but they’re all amazing housekeepers.

And you look at their job through their eyes, and the sheer amounts of variety and creativity and innovation that goes into their job from their perspective. One of them lies on the bed and turns on the ceiling fan, that’s the last thing she does before she leaves the room because that’s the first thing a guest does after a long day out at the theme park, and she just loves seeing…She’ll sit in the tub and sit on the toilet because that’s the way the guest would see the room.

Another one loves the fact that she can make a show for the kids. And so, every time they come back in, she’ll have arranged the fluffy toys in a little scene and Minnie’s arm on a remote control, Mickey’s arm on an empty French-fries container, and the kids can sit all day long, Mickey and Minnie just hang out in bed snacking and watching TV. And you suddenly see this world open up because you’re looking at a particular job in this case through the lens of people who love it, and it’s like, “Oh.”

Now, yeah, there are rules and regulations that say, “Don’t touch any more of the guests’ possessions than you need to, to clean the room and don’t lie on the bed.” So, weirdly, we’ve created rules that almost make it harder for the people who love their job, to love their job. But that’s one of the biggest takeaways from all the research that went into Love + Work is you look at the world of work through those people who love what they do and the detail that you get isn’t anything like you would expect.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s really inspiring. And I remember when I was really loving work, and I was doing strategy consulting, and I was super excited, like that was sort of the dream I had from all through college, and I was, like, I got into Bain and I was so thrilled and pumped. And then somewhere, we were having a conversation with my fellow first years, and the conversation came up to whether or not we did good, like we contributed to good.

And so, for me, I thought that the answer was obvious, I was like, “But of course we do good otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And if you just think about it, we get an insane amount of responsibility for a 22-year-old, we’re working on projects that the clients pay half a million, a million dollars a month for a small team for. It’s expected that we’re going to generate a return on that that’s like 10X of what they invest in us. Their share prices are going to go up which will impact those who are saving for their college, for retirement, for nonprofits, for philanthropic grant-making foundations, that the wealth we’re creating is hugely leveraged at this point in time.”

And so, they were sort of like dumbfounded, like, “Huh? We just thought it’d be a good pathway to get to business school and you have cool careers.” But you’re right, people can have vastly different perspectives of their jobs, and that, in turn, fuels their emotions, engagement, motivation, and…well, I’m sure you know a whole lot more about what that fuels than I.

Marcus Buckingham
Yeah, sure. Biology loves variation and by the time we get to be 19 years old, we have a hundred trillion synaptic connections in our brain, and no one has the particular network or pattern that you do, or that I do, and the people that we grew up next to, our brother, our sister, people in the same house, same socio-economic upbringing, same race maybe, same gender maybe, we’re totally different from them in terms of what we love, and what we get a kick out of, and what we pay attention, and what we ignore, and what frustrates us.

We have more synaptic connections in our brain than there are stars in 5,000 Milky Ways. And from that uniqueness comes really differently specific things that we love and that we loathe, and that we lean into and that bore us. And, seemingly, nobody really…you get 10 years of geometry but you don’t get 10 years on trying to figure out how to demystify that beautifully unique massive filigreed network of loves and loathes in your brain. No one really helps us with that.

In fact, you could say school and work actually deliberately try to alienate you from yourself. You’re not really told how to figure out what that unique network is and turn it into work, and turn it into contribution, is how I define work. It’s not just your job; it’s any work where you add value to somebody else. But, yeah, you’ve got so much uniqueness, and your challenge in life, really, isn’t that you don’t have enough time. It’s that you don’t draw enough energy or nourishment from your life.

And so, part of the reason why I wrote the book is to go, “Wait a minute, the reason we’ve got so many kids on Adderall and so much Xanax prescribed to tone down the Adderall and so many frustrated and anxious and burnt-out workers is because we haven’t really understood, “How do you help people move through their life and draw nourishment and strength and love from what they’re doing?” We haven’t had anyone do that.

We’ve just created standardized tests at school, or list of competencies at work, and then 360 surveys to measure you on the competencies, and kind of successes based on how closely you match the model. It’s not related to how intelligently you’ve cultivated and expressed what you love. No one helps you with that. And so, really, the point of the book was to go, “Come on, we are all incredibly varied, and we need to own that variance, understand it, and then contribute it.”

Pete Mockaitis
What you said that really struck me is we draw nourishment. And what else? What else from work? That’s a heck of a sentence.

Marcus Buckingham
Well, we draw nourishment, we draw energy, we draw love, we draw joy from work. We can. The metaphor is you’re supposed to have work-life balance but then if you think about it, that’s a really bizarre aspiration to lay on anyone not just because if you ever managed to find that moment of balance for your life and your work and your family and your finances and your grandma and whatever we’re balanced. But if ever did manage to find that place, Pete, you’d want to say to everyone around you, “Don’t move. Nobody moves.”

Pete Mockaitis
“It’s perfect right now.”

Marcus Buckingham
“I’ve got it.” But you look out at nature, nothing healthy in nature is balanced. And let’s just say that really clearly – nothing healthy in nature is balanced. Everything healthy in nature is moving. And you have to move through the environment that you’re in and draw enough nourishment from it to keep moving. Well, that’s a good metaphor for our lives.

We are moving through our time and our jobs, our time and the other domains of our life, and our challenge, really, is “How do you move through your job, your family life, your community, maybe your political activism, your faith, whatever, your hobbies? How do you move through life and draw enough joy and nourishment and love from that movement in order to keep growing, keep contributing?”

That’s not easy. No one said that it was easy but no one tells us about any of that at all. And that’s a crying shame for many of us.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Marcus, lay it out for us, what are the key principles that we need to follow in order to be drawing nourishment, energy, joy, and love from our work and other things that we engage in?

Marcus Buckingham
Well, the first thing is to realize that you have a wyrd inside you. That’s the very first thing. Not that you are weird, but that you have a wyrd, which is a noun. W-Y-R-D. It’s actually a Norse idea that you’ve got inside you at birth, independent of what happened to you as you grow up, or independent of your parents, or whatever, you’ve got this unique diamond, this unique spirit, and for them it was they called it your wyrd, and you have to get in touch with your wyrd if you’re going to live a productive and happy life.

Today, we don’t need the spirituality necessarily, we just know from the clash of the chromosomes that you do have, from the get-go, an incredibly filigreed network of synaptic connections. We know that. So, the first thing for all of us to understand is the most important aspects of you, what you lean into, what repels you, what uplifts you, what drains you, and the specifics of that, the fact that you are drawn to, I don’t know, reading the back of a milk carton, or somebody else is drawn to make little dolls out of corn husks, and somebody else is drawn to make shapes under a kitchen table with tire. We’re all drawn to really different things.

Those things are really unique to you and super important to understand. So, first of all, everyone should know they’re not a blank slate, they weren’t created by how they grew up or by the traumas that they experienced. Those things might occlude you, occlude you from seeing you, but you have within you this biology, we can see it, an incredibly powerful combination of networks and synapses that lead you in certain directions and away from others. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, of course, is the world is telling you about it all the time. Rather than looking at the world as the enemies, something to withstand, if everybody could just wake up and look at the world as though it was trying to put on a show for you, as though every day it was trying to show you thousands of different situations and moments and contexts and people and activities, it’s trying to show you a lot of different things, and your response is to go, “Which of these are things that I love?” almost like your world is a fabric of many different threads.

Some lift you up a little, some down, they’re black, they’re white, they’re gray, they’re yellow, but some of them are red threads, and they’re threads that lift you up, that energize you, that you find love within. And the first way to spot these red threads, and we are all a genius when it comes to spotting our red threads, the first thing is “What do you find yourself, instinctively, paying attention to?” Your patterns of attention, what do you find that you instinctively are drawn to? You attend to what you value and we tend to think that everyone just pays attention to the same stuff that we do, but they don’t.

So, right from an early age, going back to thinking about “What did you find yourself paying attention to? Maybe, what did you find yourself paying attention to, that others missed and the detail of that?” Normally, as you know, Pete, when you think about patterns, we’re told the verb that goes with patterns is break. You’re supposed to break your patterns as though your patterns are pathological, they’re bad, they’re the source of your trauma or your pain.

Actually, your patterns of attention are the source of all contribution and meaning and joy for you. So, that’s the very…there are other signs which we can get into, if you want, but that’s the very first thing to start with. Your patterns of attention are utterly unique to you and they are totally worth paying attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when we do that paying attention, I guess in some ways, I’d love it, Marcus, if we could get really practical, tactical here because I’m thinking I could sort of psychoanalyze for quite a while, like, “Why did I click this headline but none of the other headlines?” And so, I imagine there are some value into some self-reflection. But how do we do that prudently so that it’s not kind of just blindly unaware, just like sauntering through life and not cluing into the patterns, and not like sort of overkill navel-gazing?

Marcus Buckingham
So, it’s Love + Work. The point of love is, like any energy source, it’s got to flow. Love actually turns into a super caustic abrasive force that will destroy you if you don’t let it out. Love needs and demands expression. So, the reason we stop paying attention to what you’re paying attention to is because you need to express it and turn it into a contribution. That’s what work is in the Love + Work. It’s like an infinite loop where the detail of what you love leads to you making it something of value out of it.

That’s what contribution is, something of value to someone else. It could be learning, it could be a product that you make, it could be a poem that you write, but it’s something of value that you’re creating. So, your attention leads to love, and then it leads to work, and then the detail of what you made informs what you love, which then informs what you make, which then informs what you love. If you look at the most successful people, they’ve got this beautiful infinite loop where love is for work, and work is for love, and love is for work, and work is for love.

And so, if it’s just about navel-gazing, if it’s just about self-involvement or narcissism, then you stop the flow. The point of paying attention to what you pay attention to is so that you can then turn it into contribution. For me, very early on, I found myself paying attention to why. When we’re watching people do the high jump, when I was at school, I was nine or ten, you start watching people watch others do the high jump, and you find that the moment somebody tries to jump over the bar, everyone watching sticks their leg out, and then they deny that they’re doing it. They raise high on their tippy toes and they deny that they’re doing it.

And I was fascinated by the fact that all these people, because then you turn around, you’re, “Why did you do that when he jumped over the bar?” And the person goes, “I didn’t do that.” So, it’s like, instinctively but unknowingly, everyone is kind of weirdly willing the other person over the bar. And for me, I went around, no one else in my school seemed to pay attention to that, no one was even interested in that, and I didn’t know it would lead into a career as a researcher. I didn’t know that at nine, that’s for certain.

But I was so aware of being aware of something other people weren’t that I even remembered it 50 years on, you’re like, “Ooh.” And yet, 20 years later, some Italian scientist discovers the existence of mirror neurons, which is where we try to mimic the experiences and the emotions of others, which is why we do the leg kicking. I didn’t know any of that. But you’re starting off by going, “Is the stuff that you’re paying attention to useful in any way?”

And, for me, weirdly, it led me to learn differently. I didn’t like fiction. I liked nonfiction, particularly nonfiction about why the world works the way it does, why is white light made up of all the other colors, why can you sink a ship and when can you do that, why does every society ritualize death. Have you ever studied a ritual? Why? Like, I’m that guy.

And so, from a very early age, I was lucky enough that I paid attention to some stuff and then noticed that I was the only one paying attention to that stuff. And then it became a channel to which I could learn, and then through which I could contribute. All of us can do that. All of that that I just described for me could sound super boring to you but, for me, that’s a real experience.

So, for any one of us in our work right now, you start off by paying attention to what you’re paying attention to, and you know that no one else is, and that’s the place where you begin to start carving your job to fit yourself, which is what the most successful people do.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when we pay attention to what we’re paying attention to, are there any key practices, or questions, or reflections that help surface some of these patterns all the more clearly to us consciously?

Marcus Buckingham
Yeah, there are three clues you can watch out for. Actually, before that, just FYI. The most successful people don’t do what they love. I run a research institute. We have no data at all that the most successful people do what they love, that they do all that they love. In fact, the data show, instead, that the most successful people find love in what they do. And the threshold seems to be 20%. Like, 20% red threads.

The Mayo Clinic research on doctors and nurses who don’t struggle with burnout shows that they don’t do 60%, 70% red threads. You stay above 20% and 40 looks like 20, 60 looks like 20. Above 20% red threads is like that’s a really interesting psychological threshold. You go below that, 19, 18, 17, 16, and there’s almost a perfect linear one percentage point increase in burnout risk. It’s like below 20% and you start to get psychologically damaged.

So, what we’re all striving for is not a red quilt at work. We don’t need a red quilt. We need 20% red threads every day. Two most powerful questions to predict performance and engagement at work are, “Was I excited to work every day last week? Did I ever challenge my strengths every day in the work last week?” So, there’s something about the frequency of it, the everydayness of it that’s super important.

And the three best clues to spot these red threads would be, first, “What do you instinctively volunteer for? What do you instinctively find your psychological or physical hand going up for even when other people around you are like, ‘You suck at that.’?” If your hand just keeps going up, that’s nontrivial. That’s interesting. Positive anticipation.

Second is what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the positive psychologist, called flow. So, when time seems to speed up when you’re doing something, when you vanish inside of it and you’re not doing the task but you are the task, the steps fall away and you just…almost you’re doing it unconsciously. So, that moment when you look up, you think it’s been five minutes, but you look up, it’s been an hour – that.

The third clue is when you’re doing something and when you’re done with it, you’re not drained. It’s like it conveys mastery, and that feeling of mastery when you’re done with it, you feel uplifted, you feel authentic, you feel as though something about the thing you just did was, not to be too spiritual, but of your essence, and you fill up. You don’t feel drained. You fill up. It’s not like, “Thank goodness that’s over,” which many of us feel about many things.

It’s more like, “What I was just doing was a manifestation of me.” So, there’s other clues, but three really obvious clues to what these red threads are for you. And, of course, within the book, we’ve got a whole red thread questionnaire which dives into the detail of that because God lies in the detail in terms of you. A red thread isn’t like, “I like helping people.” No, it’s, “Which people? What are you doing with the people? Why are you helping them? When are you helping them? How are you…?”

Let’s get to detail for you because love is super detailed. You start figuring out what those red threads are for you, it’s then the most beautiful raw material to start thinking about “How do you weave your job to fit your loves better?” And there’s all sorts of things you can start doing in order to make that happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s perfect. Let’s go there right next in terms of, okay, so we’ve identified some red threads. These are things that I love, that I naturally pay attention to, I’m uplifted by, I enter flow, I instinctively volunteer for it, and I think, “Okay, that’s cool. But, uh-oh, Marcus, I’m not getting 20% of that in my job. It’s more like 5%.” What do we do?

Marcus Buckingham
Yeah. Well, first of all, when you ask people that question, and you say, “Do you have the freedom to modify your job to fit yourself better?” Seventy-three percent of people in the US agree or strongly agree that they do.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.

Marcus Buckingham
That suggests that there’s 73% of us that aren’t utterly in the wrong neighborhood. Seventy-three percent of us at least think, anyway, that we’ve got room to maneuver. Now, that doesn’t mean that 27% of us are in the wrong spot, but 73% of us feel like we’ve got that room to maneuver.

So, the first thing is the data, we know that 73% of people agree or strongly agree that they have the freedom to modify their job to fit themselves better. So, that suggests there’s an awful lot of us have or think that we have that chance. Interestingly, only 18% of us say that we have a chance to play to our strengths every day, so there’s a big attitude behavior consistency problem, as we call it in social psychology, but there’s an awful lot of us have that freedom.

Twenty-seven percent of us are probably thinking, “I’m utterly in the wrong job,” but 73% think we have the chance to maneuver. So, the first thing that one should do is be intentional. When you wake up in the morning, what red threads are you going to weave today? Where will you find them? There are some clues to spot but where will you find them? Approach every day with intentionality about where you will find those red threads for you, first.

Second, Once you know what those red threads are, any way that you can cultivate those red threads with any particular competency or skill or expertise? You might have had a red thread around communicating with people, and then you had to figure out how to make a podcast, and then you had to figure out some technical expertise to turn this thing that probably began as a yearning or an appetite or something and actually turn it into performance, turn it into a contribution. So, is there any way that you can take that red thread and combine it with some sort of competency that enables you to turn it into contribution?

Third, is there any way, one day next week, all red threads, one day, just one day, where there’s a day that you pick where you’re like, “You know what, I’m going to load up on this day. Can I find a way to do that that ensures that there’s some particular day here where I’m just it is really a love-filled day for me?” Can you then figure out a way for your team to name it? Can you keep volunteering, whatever that is, so that your team starts going, “You know what, Pete is the guy who…” because these days, obviously, anyone’s headcount is replaceable. Anyone is replaceable. But, of course, you want to be…and no one is replicable.

You want to be, if there’s a word, irreplicable, where your love is so defined, what people turn to you for is so defined that they go, “I can’t really imagine this company without that person. I can’t imagine a world without that person. I can’t really imagine a team without that person.” So, can you name what it is you’re bringing to that team? If the team itself had a voice, what would it call you? If the team itself had a voice, how would it name what you do?

I, in the end, ask people to do two things. Just take a blank pad around with you, draw a line the middle of it, put “Loved it” at the top of one column, “Loathed it” at the top of the other. Take it around with you for a week, try to spot those three signs of love. Any time you find yourself doing any part of any those, scribble it down in the “Loved it” column. The inverse, you procrastinate, time slows down, blah, blah, blah, put it in the “Loathed it” column.

You’ll end that week with a really vivid sense from your own actual work of where the love comes from. So, start off with that if you can. And then for you, the challenge on the team will be to ensure that you can find the language to say to your team, “Turn to me for this. I love it when people rely on me for this. I love it when this…” not the braggadocio, “I’m the best at…” but, “I’m at my best when…”

This is, for me, one of those things I think, Pete, where we’re teaming, the verb teaming is one of those skills that we all have to cultivate in this new hybrid model of the way that we work. And part of teaming is being able to share, articulately, vividly, with detail what people can rely on you for, where you’re at your best, what you love the most because people can’t read your mind.

So, the more vivid you can be about that, the more likely it is that the team will start coalescing around the particular value that you bring. Until such point has happened with you, where somebody begins to define the entire role, maybe it’s not 100% red threads but those red threads become foundation for the very thing that people will want to pay you to do.

That whole journey I’ve just described, you don’t need anyone else for it. All you need to do is use the raw material of your regular week of your own life to be able to figure out how you scavenge your job into that which you love. And that’s eminently doable. For 73% of us, anyway, it’s eminently doable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Marcus, I’d love it if you could share with us a couple stories of folks who did just that. They were paying attention to what they’re paying attention to, they identified some red threads, combined it with the competence and contribution, communicated that with their teams, and said, “Hey, I’m at my best when I do this. I really love it when you ask me to do that,” so we could see how it all comes together for folks.

Marcus Buckingham
Well, here’s three, and they’re different roles. One person who comes to mind is a person who was in HR. Her first 10 years of career were in HR, and would go to conference with the company that she was with, and would see how the company’s branding was falling down, wasn’t clear enough, wasn’t coherent enough, and kept writing emails, not critical emails but emails that called attention to the branding of the company, and all these darn conferences simply wasn’t vivid enough, wasn’t clear enough.

Customers didn’t really know what that company stood for. Kept writing them. Kept drawing people’s attention to it to the point it was annoying. But that’s a red thread, she couldn’t stop paying attention to it. Couldn’t shut it off. And so, in the end, they had a marketing turn to this person, and said, “Well, what would you do with it if we ran with it? What would you do differently? Let’s turn that into a PowerPoint presentation and come present to me what you would do differently because I can’t shut you up.”

To cut a long story short, that presentation goes really well, that person turns 15-20% of HR into branding at conferences, learns all about how that actually gets executed and activated, signage, logos, colors, brand palettes, etc. So, now, as a head of marketing for a very large human capital management company, head of marketing. Didn’t start off that way. Started off in HR. But because of whatever reason, couldn’t shut off the brand cacophony at these conferences, turns into a very, very different job.

A totally different example, a different end of the spectrum, those housekeepers I was telling you about, well, one of them, her loves were busy, busy, busy check-in, check-out days when the cart has to be…this is more detailed that you might want, but the cart has to be perfect. Everything about the cart that moves up and down those different floors has to work absolutely perfectly because everybody is getting in and out of those rooms with such a volume of people checking in and volume of people checking out. Everything has got to work unbelievably perfectly.

And for whatever reason, her geekiness, what she geeked out on was the precision and the authenticity of the materials on the cart, making the whole darn thing work so perfectly, initially, just for her floor. And the manager sort of figured out that she was getting, particularly, on busy days, she was getting it done with super quality whereas everyone else was struggling. They were behind, they couldn’t find the stuff that they needed for the rooms.

Anyway, she just kept showing what that red thread was for her, and then volunteered to help others when she was finished, get their carts sorted. And in the end, the manager went, “You know what, we can have you clean a few rooms, but what we really need you to do is you’re the person that’s responsible for the accuracy and the efficiency and the smooth-running of everybody’s cart.” And that might not sound engaging for many people. For that particular person, it was like, “That’s exactly what I want to be paid to do.”

Again, she’s not doing 100% of red threads but just kept sort of unconsciously paying attention to some particular aspect of her job, kept volunteering it, not asking to be praised for it necessarily, just kept volunteering it. And, lo and behold, the job came to be morphed so that it actually was a manifestation of her loves. A million of other examples if you look around, but those are two that come to mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, I love it, and I do, I want to hear one more if I can from your millions.

Marcus Buckingham
Well, the other one that I was just talking about the other day, my publisher is HBR, Harvard Business Review, and we put together like a leader series with them where they said, “We want to have learning around the everything in the book because there’s really no curriculum around how do you find out what you love and figure out a way to turn it into a contribution. There’s no language, there’s no ritual, there’s no discipline around that, certainly in the world of work.” So, they put together a whole kind of ongoing learning series.

The person that’s leading it is a person who initially came up through publishing. She’s a book publisher, and yet couldn’t help herself. As the world of publishing changed, and bookstores vanished, and everything became “How do you nurture a community, and, author after author after author, struggled with creating a community?” and publishers struggled to build relationships with readers because the intermediaries used to be the bookstores but now the bookstores are gone. So, more and more publishers and authors kept turning to each other going, “How the heck do we build community?”

Well, this person just kept finding herself going, “I love doing web series. I will host any web series…” This is what she’s saying to the authors, “I’ll host any web series you want, any content you want. I’ll be the face of the publisher. I’ll keep doing that for you.” Now, it wasn’t in her job title, it wasn’t anything to do with her job description actually, but she kept doing it, authors loved it because she’s now building through the author and through the publisher a relationship with a growing cadre of readers so much so that every book that she did it for was massively more successful than the others that didn’t have it.

So, of course, the editor-in-chief turns to her more and more and goes, “Could you do this one? Could you do this one? Could you do this one? Could you do this one?” At some point, she goes, “I would love to but, unfortunately, I’ve still got these other responsibilities hanging up over here. If you can get someone to help me with these, then I can continue to do this stuff that elevates our authors and builds community.”

Well, now, lo and behold, that’s her entire job because that’s so valuable. It happens to fit perfectly with the whole dynamics of the publishing business right now. If it hadn’t been fit perfectly, would it have worked out exactly the same way? I don’t know. Bottom line is she found some red thread, pulled and sort of saw where it led, and turned it into an entirely different job than the one that she had even three years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so good. Well, Marcus, let’s say that listeners are fired up, like, “Yes, I want to identify these red threads. I want to do more of these red threads. I want to communicate and find the contribution therein,” do you have any sort of top do’s and don’ts for folks who are embarking on this path?

Marcus Buckingham
Well, in terms of career, yeah, first of all, the best place to start is where you’re at right now. You didn’t start wrong. You didn’t start right. For you, Pete, like joining Bain, was that good or bad? Who knows? For me, I left university and went to Lincoln, Nebraska. Why? I don’t really know. There was a sign of a red thread there somewhere. I’d done an internship with Gallup and I kind of liked one bit of it, and I was like, “Why not?” Goodness knows why you did what you did.

But for anyone who’s listening, you’ve got so much ahead of you. Start by thinking of your career as a scavenger hunt for love. It’s not a ladder. It’s not a lattice. You’re not climbing anywhere. You’re just scavenging. You’re looking for red threads right now where you are. First of all, do that. Second, don’t put too much of your faith in the why or the who. Put most of your faith in the what.

Normally, we think of a career as like finding your calling, which really means finding your purpose. But the two least engaged, least resilient professions, of all that we studied, are healthcare providers, so doctors and nurses, and teachers, people who educate in schools, in case you didn’t know what a teacher was. But they couldn’t be two professions where the purpose of their work was more vivid and more honorable, helping the sick and helping the youth, and yet they’re the most disengaged.

What that tells us clearly is that although you may believe in lots of different whys and purposes in your career, in the end, what nourishes you, what doesn’t, doesn’t happen at the 30,000-foot level. It happens at the two-foot level, the three-foot level. What activities are you filling your week with? What activities are you doing today at 9:00 o’clock or at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon? What are you actually doing? Because in the end, that what you’re actually doing, the specifics of these red threads trump your purpose.

If you believe in your purpose, and for whatever reason, the day-to-day reality of what you’re doing is loveless, then you will be psychologically damaged as damaged as nurses and doctors are today independent of the pandemic. So, watch out that you don’t try to use the who to compensate for you being in the wrong job, or the why rather. If you believe in the why but you’re in the wrong role on the team, it doesn’t matter how much you believe in the why, or like the people you work with. In the end, it’s the activities themselves that will nourish you or not.

I guess I’ll just give one more. As I mentioned, the idea that what’s really valuable in work right now is specificity. So, one of the things to think about is think about your career as an hourglass where it’s wide at the bottom. You’re scavenging, you’re seeing what all of those different threads are out there and you’re pulling on these different threads and seeing where they lead, and you’re honoring where your loves are and you’re taking them seriously.

But the middle of the hourglass is, at some point, you need mastery. Today, we seem to value follower fame or dilettantism, anyone is an expert today. But, actually, deep down, we do know, as Hippocrates said, “Life is short. The art is long,” or the craft is long, so at some point, you’re going to want to take those red threads of yours and honor them with your undivided attention.

And as an Erikson professor, and as Erickson said ten years, Malcolm Gladwell popularized that as 10,000 hours, but the takeaway from that isn’t that you invest 10,000 hours, you can be great at anything. That was a misunderstanding of the research and the data. All the data really shows is if you’ve got a love, if you’ve got a couple of red threads, at some point in your career, you’re going to want to give at least 10,000 hours to the mastery of that.

And out of that, the top part of the hourglass is out of that comes leadership. We follow people who turn our anxiety into confidence. That’s the job of a leader. And the best way to turn anxiety into confidence is to have deep mastery in something that we can all see and is important to us. Get deep into something. It doesn’t become narrowing. You don’t get narrowed. Your depth becomes the integrating point for your learning but it also becomes your justification for being able to lead others.

They now know who you are. They know that you’ve asked 17 questions, opened 17 more doors, can see around the corner more vividly. Your depth, that middle of the hourglass where you get narrow and focused becomes the authority that you need to lead others. So, those would be some of my do’s and don’ts.

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

Marcus Buckingham
A favorite quote of mine or a favorite quote of somebody else’s?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was going to ask for a favorite quote that you’ve coined later, but I’ll take them both, right back-to-back if you’ve got them handy.

Marcus Buckingham
Mine that I hope people leave with is the power of human nature is that each human nature is unique. That’s its power. That’s not a bug to be fixed. That’s not a problem. Human uniqueness is the source of its power. Most forces of nature, their power comes from their uniformity – electricity, water, wind. The power of human nature is not that. The power of human nature is its uniqueness. And we need to build schools and teams and workplaces where we maximize that power. So, that’s a big one for me.

I think the quote that I always have in my head as I wander around, actually comes from Peter Drucker, and he was the eminent management theorist of the last century. But his quote was, “The best companies get their strengths together and make their weaknesses irrelevant.” A lot of my work has simply taken that on and applied it to the level of the individual. That’s what I learned from my mentor at Gallup, Don Clifton. But it began, really, with Peter Drucker going, “Everything is about differentiation – intelligent intentional differentiation.”

He looked at it at the level of the company, “Don’t try to be all things to all people no one believes in.” And, of course, what I’ve done is taken it through Don Clifton and all my strengths work there, and now here with what I’m doing at the ADP Research Institute, try to take it to the level of the individual and then back on up into the institutions, like school, college, work.

Pete Mockaitis
And this one will be hard for you, but could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Marcus Buckingham
Oh, gosh. Well, actually, it’s one that we’re just doing right now. My co-head at the research institute is an economist called Nela Richardson. She’s a black woman of a certain age, and she came to me the other day, and said, “Are we doing any better at D, E & I?” diversity, equity, and inclusion, “Are we doing better?”

And I said to her, “Well, we can tell you about the D and the E. I can tell you about diversity. We could actually count that. We can just count representation. I can tell you about the E. I can count equitable pay or promotion.” But I said, “I actually can’t tell you about the I. From the 1960 forward, you can write, like today, I actually can’t tell you if more people feel more included.” This was about a year and a half ago.

And shame on me, shame on us, that we’ve got no thermometer for measuring, reliably measuring people’s feeling of inclusion. Nothing. And so, for the last year and a half, we’ve been in the field trying to build a reliable thermometer to measure inclusiveness. And we’ve just come out of the field, it’s about 27,000 people, a thousand people in each country, stratified random sample of the workers in each country, trying to get at what is the right way, the most reliable way to measure inclusiveness so that we can see whether or not anything that we’re doing – programs, training, education – is it actually making people’s lives any better, at least according to them.

So, I’m not going to bore you with diving into exactly what we’re finding and where we’re finding it, but that research right now feels to me incredibly necessary because, let’s face it, what gets measured gets managed. If you can’t measure the I, you might move the D and the E, but if people aren’t feeling better about it, what a miss that is.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And a favorite book?

Marcus Buckingham
I think my favorite book is The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstin, which I got when I was 16. It’s about 700 pages long, and it’s just a book about men and women as discoverers, people who ask why, and why this and why that. And it confirmed for me, because I was reading Lord of the Rings, I was trying to read Lord of the Rings at the same time, and I was bored to tears, I was bored of the rings. But I couldn’t care about Gollum, I couldn’t care about Frodo, I just couldn’t get excited about it.

But why does Marie Curie ask the questions that she does in her laboratory? Why does Isaac Newton put a thin shard of glass in the window of his Cambridge students digs, and then see a rainbow of light on the wall? That’s what that book was all about. And I loved it, and I read it like it was like Lord of the Rings. But it wasn’t Lord of the Rings, it was a book about people asking why.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Marcus Buckingham
I love walking really fast. I live in a place with lots of hills, and I love that pounding-heart energy. I don’t really like working out inside. I’m lucky enough to live in the country so I’ve got hills all over the place and trees everywhere, and pounding up a hill and down a hill, and stepping over rocks. And I saw a bobcat the other day. Like a bobcat. I’m British. There are no bobcats in Britain, and I saw a bobcat. Sorry to be so excited about bobcats, but that was amazing. So, I love pounding up hills and down dales and doing that every day, getting my heart racing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Marcus, I was doing the math when you talked about nine years old and 50, I’m like you’re a very handsome youthful-looking man.

Marcus Buckingham
Well, I appreciate that.

Pete Mockaitis
What is the secret? Is it the exercise? Is there a moisturizer I need to start using? How do you do it?

Marcus Buckingham
Well, I’m 57, I’m not 59 but it’s genes, man. My dad’s dead but my mom is 83 and looks like she’s 70. I don’t know what it is. She’s got youthful genes, and somehow, she passed something onto me where I don’t really have a regimen, a health regimen other than walking a lot, which, as I said, I love. But other than that, I think I got it, like most things, you get it from your mom.

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

Marcus Buckingham
I think two places. One is on the social media front, Instagram is my favorite for whatever reason, so Instagram. And then, together with Harvard, we built this learning series. So, if you want to see the learning around the book, for anything we talked about today, is really something you want to dive deeper into, go to LoveAndWork.org and you’ll see there’s like six hours of content all around the ideas and the practices of some of which we touched on in the podcast and then a whole lot more.

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

Marcus Buckingham
Take your love seriously because if you don’t, no one else will, and that’s the place to begin. The more filigreed and detailed and vivid you can be and understanding that which you love, the more likely you are to respect and be curious about loves of others. If you don’t start with yourself and really dive deep into the detail of you love it, when, what. Write three love notes. That’s what I would do. Write three love notes, which is simply a sentence that begins, “I love it when…” and then finish the darn sentence.

And you’ve got to have a verb in it, not, “I love it when people praise me.” No, “I love it when I do…” what, when, how, to who. Love lives in detail and most of us have forgotten the detail of that which we love, which is why the most common answer to the question, “What are your strengths?” in a job interview is, “I love working with people.” And it’s like, “Come on. What are you doing with the people? Which people?”

So, that’s the challenge I would give everyone of us. Can you honor yourself by describing vividly just three red threads? Write three love notes. Because if you don’t take yourself seriously in that way, don’t expect anyone else to. They can’t read your mind and they certainly can’t read your heart.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Marcus, this has been a treat. I wish you much love and great work in your years to come.

Marcus Buckingham
Thank you, sir. Appreciate you having me.

Mar 21
0

752: How to Reframe Rejection, Beat Burnout, and Get Unstuck with Lia Garvin

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Lia Garvin talks about the mental shifts that are crucial to moving forward at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Key phrases to avoid at work  
  2. The questions to ask when you’re stuck
  3. How to overcome impostor syndrome 

About Lia

Lia Garvin is an operations leader, speaker and executive coach on a mission to humanize the workplace, one conversation at a time. She has nearly 10 years of experience working in some of the largest and most influential companies in tech including Microsoft, Apple and Google to explore the power of reframing to overcome common challenges found in the modern workplace. She is a TEDx speaker, presenting a talk at the 2022 TEDx Conference in Boca Raton, and will be featured at the SXSW Conference in Austin in 2022.

Through her writing, leadership coaching and program management skills, she helps teams examine the challenges that hold them back and focus on what matters. She was recognized by the National Diversity Council as a 2021 DEI Champion. She is also a Co-Active- and ICF-certified professional coach with a certification in Hatha yoga. She lives in Corte Madera, California.

Resources Mentioned

 

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Lia Garvin Interview Transcript

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

Lia Garvin
Thank you so much. Excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to discuss getting unstuck. But, first, I think we need to get to the bottom of is it true that you are descended from one of the 300 Spartan warriors?

Lia Garvin
Well, that’s what they tell me. So, my mom’s family is Greek, from Sparta. We’ve been there. We’ve seen it. And when the movie 300 came out, my mom was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s us.” And I said, “Okay, I don’t have any historical documents to prove it.” But, one day, I was heart-set on figuring out that 300 ab-training workout that all of us did to prepare, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
There were impressive physiques in that.

Lia Garvin
Yeah, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure a number of personal trainers had a lot of work associated with making that movie.

Lia Garvin
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, so tell us, you’re an expert on getting unstuck, and you wrote the book called Unstuck. Can you start us off by sharing a particularly maybe surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about why it is so many of us find ourselves stuck?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. So, I think one of the main reasons I’ve found myself getting stuck and other people getting stuck is because we keep approaching a situation through maybe we try things a little different but we’re still tackling it from the same perspective or the same way. Or, we adjust something small but if we took a step back, we realize we’re actually still doing the same things.

And so, reframing, which is the central theme of my book Unstuck is about looking at a challenge or situation through a whole new perspective, something that we haven’t tried before, and then seeing all that’s available there. And when we look at something through a new perspective, needless to say, new things become possible.

And I would say one area that I think so many of us get stuck around is feedback – feedback at work. Thinking feedback is a criticism, feedback is someone coming to me to tell me all the things they don’t like about me, or someone picking on me or pulling things apart. I think when we get positive feedback, people can also have a little bit of trouble with that even, like, “Okay, they’re happy with this now but what about next time?”

And so, I think, especially things around feedback, all of these beliefs that we have get us really stuck in this narrow way of thinking. And, really, a surprising discovery I had around something like feedback was it’s actually an insight into what the other person, what the feedback-giver believes, and what they want and what they’re comfortable with. It’s really not about us.

And, recently, I had a situation where I was changing roles and I had said I was moving on, and the manager I was working with, we had a good relationship. He was disappointed but supportive of that, and then he said, “Hey, before you go, let’s have a feedback conversation,” and my stomach dropped, and I was like, “Why do I have to have a feedback conversation with someone I’m not even going to work with anymore?” And I went really negative with my thought process, like, “Oh, my God, is he going to tell me all the things he didn’t like about me or all the things I did wrong?” And I went immediately into the dread zone.

And, first, I tried to reschedule it and not have the meeting at all but he ended up rescheduling it, so that was out of the question. And then when it was leading up to the conversation, I was thinking about, “Okay, it’s going to be a two-way street. What should I share? I want to bring in empathy and be specific, all the things I know about feedback,” but still I was really, really dreading it.

And then we had the conversation and he ended up sharing a piece of feedback that just really made me laugh and proved that it was all about my perspective. And that was he had said, “Sometimes when you deliver a piece of work, it looks really done and really polished. I’m not sure how to give feedback. Like, is it in progress or is it super final?”

And I laughed to myself because, well, I had done work that way because of other feedback I got from other managers that said, “Hey, I want something final. It’s got to be polished. I just want to sign off.” And I realized, like bringing…kind of being trashed by different pieces of feedback, and that it wasn’t about me. It was just about how this particular person likes to work or how they like to engage with work.

And when this example hit, I realized it is so not about who we are as a person, what we bring. It’s about getting on the same page with someone else around shared expectations. And that has made me a lot more comfortable with having a feedback conversation because, first, I can level-set and say, “Hey, what are we talking about here? What does success look like?” And then we can sort of word-off future feedback by getting really aligned upfront.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a really cool example in terms of your book, the subtitle there is Unstuck: Reframe your thinking to free yourself from the patterns and people that hold you back. And feedback is a really great area where we can have patterns and associations. And if you avoid it all the time, that’s sure going to hold you back, like, “Oh, I feel so uncomfortable. They’re going to judge me. They’ll tell me all the things I’ve screwed up. I’m not into it.”

Versus if you have a different…reframe that perspective, you’d be like, “Okay, feedback is not so threatening, and, thusly, I’m able to go get more of it, and, thusly, I’m able to align on expectations, and, thusly, people think I’m amazing, and then promotions and good things can flow from that.” So, that’s cool.

Well, so then I’m curious, so that’s a cool example. Was that what you would call the big idea behind your book Unstuck that there are some key things to reframe that will unlock a lot of goodies? Or, how would you articulate the main idea or thesis here?

Lia Garvin
Yeah, I’d say the main idea is when we find ourselves stuck, to reframe the way that we’re looking at that situation. And by reframing our perspective, we unlock a new set of possibilities. And I take that reframing thesis and apply it to 12 different challenges that show up most commonly in the workplace. So, we talked about feedback. Another one is articulating your impact, like talking about your work in a way other people understand that doesn’t diminish the importance of it, that really demonstrates the work you put in.

I talk about negotiation, another really tough subject for a lot of us out there, decision-making, comparison, and 12 challenges that I think most of us get stuck with in the workplace, things that can be particularly fraught for women in the workplace because of all of the expectations and biases and societal norms and these sort of narratives that we often hear throughout our upbringing that we start to attach to or believe with feedback, sort of having to be perfect or that everybody has to like you, or some of these things that many of us might believe from our upbringing can make it even harder to hear feedback.

With an example like talking about your work, some people have trouble talking about themselves at all, and then talking about our work and why it’s awesome and why it’s important and why it should be noticed, that can be really, really difficult for people. So, the reframing, it’s couched in the acknowledgement of these biases and double standards, and how our inner critic really attaches to these, and make these challenges even harder.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love it. It’s so powerful that in each of things, like I can see how you can have a mindset, a frame of perspective, that is troublesome like for articulating impact. Your frame of perspective might be, “Oh, I don’t want to brag. I don’t want to be seen, like, ‘Oh, he or she thinks that they’re just all that, like they’re so special.’ I don’t want to be conceited. I don’t want to be that guy or girl, who just makes it all about them, and it’s just really, really unattractive.”

So, that can be a frame of perspective you have. And if you have it, you’re not going to be articulating your impact and then, unfortunately, some key decision-makers who can have some keys to your fate with regard to promotion or opportunities just won’t know that you’ve got the goods and may very well be ready for a cool new thing if they never heard that impact that was never articulated.

So, I love this, how we’ve zeroed in on a tool that has a whole range of impacts – reframing. So, help us out here. Maybe let’s talk specifically about articulating impact, and then maybe zoom out a little bit in terms of, okay, when we need to get our reframe on, how do we go about doing that?

Lia Garvin
Yes. So, articulating your impact, this is a funny one because this is something I struggled with a lot in coaching and in working with folks internally, especially in larger companies where you have to do things like performance reviews. I saw this just being a huge struggle that folks dealt with, really no level of seniority they even were in an organization.

And when I think about articulating your impact, I look at it in a few ways. First, it’s about really shaping the narrative around your work. And this means not talking about our work in like, “I do these set of things,” like a bulleted list of random tasks or ideas. But figuring out what is the arc across your work, what is the why behind it. And then, most important, how to connect that why to what your organization cares about because that’s where…

Like, you talked about getting in front of decision-makers, people that hold the keys to things you want to unlock in your career. If we don’t connect the dots there, we’re leaving it someone else to figure out the why it matters. And we are always best equipped to talk about why our work matters. And, yes, it’s helpful to have other people championing us and sponsoring us and bringing visibility to our work, too, but we have to have that story figured out.

So, my first step there is to really understand what you do, why it’s important for your organization, the goals that your organization has, and connecting the dots there, and then to be talking about it, not shouting over the rooftops everywhere all the time but making sure that that’s known by decision-makers, by people that are responsible for making decisions related to your career and what kinds of projects you work on, things like that, so that they know and can propose you for projects or opportunities.

The other piece around impact is really getting more precise with some of the language that we use when talking about our work. And one phrase I ask people to strike from their lexicon completely is helping out. Like, no one’s helping out. We’re at work. This is our job. It’s our careers. And I think we can get in the habits and trying to sound collaborative, like a team player, using words like helped out, pitched in, worked on. And, like, worked on, what does that mean? Are you owning this whole project? Did someone like send you an email that you read about it? What does that mean?

And so, getting really specific and owning the verbs. I coach folks around performance reviews. Authored, led, drove, facilitated, brought to light, there’s a lot of really powerful verbs we can use that weren’t helping out, was in a volunteer project. And so, that’s where I always start. And then, also, removing we. I think this is the trap a lot of “us,” a lot of people can fall into is saying we, when really, “I did it.” And, again, there’s a way to talk about being a part of a group and a collaborator without making it really unclear what your individual impact was.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, there’s so much good stuff there. When you talk about owning the verbs, I’m thinking about this Onion article about verbs on resumes, and they were just absurd, like, decimated, whatever. Hey, talk about Spartans, huh?

Lia Garvin
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s very specific in terms of, okay, when it comes to articulating impact, it’s not about, “Hey, you’re bragging, you’re selfish,” but, rather, we’re informing people and we’re just getting clear in terms of we didn’t just help out or worked on something. What that even means is pretty fuzzy. So, as we get specific, folks understand really what you did and, thusly, what maybe skills, experiences, and opportunities may just make a lot of good sense for you.

And so, I’m curious, you’ve shared right then and there, “Hey, here’s a great perspective to have,” as opposed to the, “Oh, no, I don’t want to talk about myself.” How do you recommend that we, generally speaking, if we find ourselves stuck somewhere, how do we know that we’re stuck? And then how do we go about getting to a better frame?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. Well, I think one way to recognize we’re stuck is when we keep running into the same outcomes that’s not what we wanted. And one example is with, let’s say, we keep asking our manager for new projects or a promotion, and we keep hearing, “It’s not time yet. You’re not ready yet.” Or, another is, “I applied for many years to work in tech, and I kept sending the same kind of resume, and I didn’t get there.”

And, for me, personally, it took a lot of stopping and examining my approach. So, I think, first off, it’s about recognizing, after one or two or maybe three times of hitting this wall, and pausing, and asking ourselves, “What is the approach I’ve been using?” and then the question, “What else can I try?” And the real reframing question is really, “How else can I look at this approach?”

I’ve been thinking a lot about reframing rejection, and an example, applying to work in jobs in tech for a number of years; sending out the manuscript for my book to many agents and publishers and not getting a yes; applying to do a TEDx Talk for several years, not getting yes. These are three things that I had done over and over and over and kept getting nos. And it was in these moments, instead of saying, “Screw it. I give up. No one wants me. No one likes me. My work sucks. I don’t care. I give up,” saying, “Huh, I’m getting a signal, and now I have to shift how I’m approaching this.”

And the shift in the approach is the reframe. And with a job, maybe you look at, “Okay, I’m going to try a different way of writing an email when I reach out to a recruiter, or changing out my resume, or share it with a friend to look at, like, ‘Hey, is something we missed here?’” With my TEDx Talk, I found a coach and I worked with someone that was able to really help me unlock how to tell my story in a better way. And with my book, continuing to reframe, “Is it my proposal? Is it how I’m pitching it? Is it this?” because the reframe is really about shifting and not just doing the same thing over and over.

And I think the definition of stuck is when we aren’t able to do a new thing, is when we’re not seeing that we have to shift that perspective. And it does take being a little bit intuitive, trying to be more self-aware. And so, like kind of a quick tip I would say is checking in with ourselves when we’re feeling really down or we’re feeling frustrated, and saying, “Hey, what’s going on here? Am I falling into the same patterns? Have I got a second? No. Did I really shift my approach or did I kind of just sent out the same cover letter because I didn’t feel like writing a new email?”

And being really honest with ourselves on, “How far have I shifted the approach to really get in the zone of newness where I can say, ‘Yeah, I really did give this a new…I really did try this through a new lens.’”

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess it’s also I really like your perspective about working with a coach there in that sometimes we might not know what results are good versus not yet. For example, let’s say, I don’t know, if someone is like new to sales, and like, “I don’t know, man. I’ve called like 50 people. I’ve only made six sales.” And it’s like, “That’s fantastic. You’re doing…”

Lia Garvin
Yeah, that’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re like, “It’s like almost 90% of the time, they’re just like bail on me.” And so, I think it’s so good to get some perspective, whether it’s like there’s some published benchmarks or figures or you just talk to someone who’s gotten the result that you want, or someone who’s got a whole business around coaching or providing expertise on a matter, can really be handy.

And then I’m curious, when it comes to the approach and the shift, I guess I’m thinking about almost like the reframing in terms of our internal beliefs and emotions about a thing. Like, even if someone tells us, like, “Oh, this is how it’s done.” You’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if I like that. Well, that still feels uncomfortable to go get that feedback.”

I remember, for example, I was reading a book, I think, it was about nonprofit fundraising. It might’ve just been called Asking, it might’ve been by Jerry Panas. It might not have been. But he had a reframe in terms of it’s not that you’re hounding people for their money because that’s no fun for anybody. What you’re doing is, in fact, it feels great to give to a cause that you believe in, that you support, and then you see some cool results or social good unfolding from, “Ooh, I had a little part in that.” That feels great as a donor.

And so, as an asker, what you’re doing is you are inviting people to a party, and they’re like, “You know what, that’s not my style of party. I don’t really like horror movies. I don’t like costumes,” whatever. You’re inviting them to a party, and those to whom it’s a good fit will accept the invitation and be so glad that you did. And so, that really worked for me and I got a lot more comfortable asking people for money after that.

And so, I’m intrigued about sort of like the mental-emotional game and how we work on that before, if we need to, before we’re comfortable shifting tactics.

Lia Garvin
Yes, so I love that. And I think that example is the…it’s about that perspective mindset shift. And so, recognizing what’s actually kind of at the base of what you’re trying to do, and a lot of that can connect to, you said, “What is the why behind what you’re doing?” This is about connecting people to something they enjoy. For example, feedback is about getting insight into how you’re being perceived. Talking about your work is about bringing visibility to like the output that you have.

Negotiating is about ensuring that you are getting sort of the right, fair, equitable outcome, maybe it’s financially, maybe it’s not, like for whatever you want it. It’s typically can be mutual beneficial, and I think it’s depersonalizing from all these things because when we attach, like, “I don’t like to ask for money,” you’ve sort of made it about you when the whole thing has nothing to do with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. It’s for the children or whoever the beneficiaries are for the organization.

Lia Garvin
Right. And so, I think it’s the first step in that mindset shift is to detach, and I have a chapter about reframing the ego because a lot of this is an overidentification of, like, “I’m at the center of whatever it is going on.” And when we can get some space there, we see, well, first of all, everybody’s at the center of their own universe, and so we’re not alone there. But it actually is somewhat of an ego issue of seeing ourselves. And having ego, sort of overinflated ego, if you will, it doesn’t mean that we think we’re the greatest person on Earth, but we’re looking at things from a me-centered approach is what that means, and from a me-centered lens, I mean.

And so, to recognize, “Hey, I’m making this about me and what I want and what I think and what I worry.” And so, I’ve been saying, “What is this really about?” that’s how we start to shift that perspective. And I would say that’s the first place to start is when another signal beyond feeling stuck and kind of generally crappy, it’s like, “Ooh, all this is leading to me and I need to get a little distance,” and then we can start to see what else is there.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot with the me-centered lens because I think with negotiations, it’s like, “Oh, no, I don’t want them to think that I’m greedy, I’m not satisfied, I’m entitled, they think I’m just all that.” But, again, that’s all me-centered, like, “I’m worried about the judgments they’re making on me.” But if I shift that perspective on negotiation, it’s sort of like, “Well, no, if I bounce six months from now because someone else pays me a lot more and kind of has more cool things that I’m looking for and opportunity, they’re going to be bummed.”

And like, “Oh, man, we’ve invested all that stuff into Pete and now he’s gone, and I got to go through this whole hiring process all over again.” So, if I shifted from me to them, it’s suddenly like, “Well, no, it’s in their interests to give them a package, for them to provide a package that makes me go, ‘Sweet! This is a good deal. I like working here.’” Well, so far, hopefully, you know the people all around.

Lia Garvin
Exactly. You’re ensuring you have a mutually beneficial agreement that everybody is satisfied with. Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, not to bounce around too much, but you mentioned a few key reframes, and I love decision-making so much. So, Lia, we got to hear what you have to say about that.

Lia Garvin
Well, decision-making is one I struggled so much with that that’s actually what my TEDx Talk was about. That’s going to be coming out in a few weeks. And I have a couple of reframes. One with decision-making is about reframing the finality of decision-making. We can’t predict the future, so when we think about decisions as, “Oh, my God, if I decide this, then, then, then, then, then,” and we cascade down this sort of spiral of what’s going to happen. We’ve, essentially, decided we can predict the future, and we know exactly what’s going to happen. And so, I think reframing and realizing, decision-making is about finding the right decision for right now. We can start to feel a little space and freedom from having to have every decision be perfect.

Now, the second reframe on decision-making, in the same similar vein, is to look at where our confirmation bias is landing. Now, we typically have confirmation bias around the decisions that we make, and for a lot of us it’s negative. And if we’re agonizing over a decision, and we have a lot of doubt about it, we can think, like, “Should I buy this thing? Should I take this trip? Should I order this dinner?” whatever. We can start to fixate on, I think, depending on how uncertain we are, if it goes wrong and we don’t like it, it’s all, “I knew it, I shouldn’t have done that,” and we’re looking for all the reasons why we knew we were going to be wrong, and we’re wrong, and it sucks, and it’s bad.

And my challenge to people is to test out, try on a positive confirmation bias. And, instead of saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t have ordered that burger. I should’ve gotten the salad because now I have a stomach ache,” or whatever, we say, “That was awesome. I got to try something new.” Instead of saying, “Oh, I shouldn’t have bought that,” “Hey, I really wanted this thing, and I was really happy to be able to get this for myself.”

And then when we change that mindset from looking for all the reasons it was bad and we were wrong and we’re bad decision-makers, looking for some of the signals why it was good or positive or we made the right call. Because, again, we have just as likely the ability to predict if it’s going to go poorly with a decision that it’s going to go well, yet we attach the negative. And then when we think it was going to be bad, we’re going to want to believe that because our brain likes to be right. And so, I challenge people to try to be right in a way that doesn’t make them feel terrible, especially with the pretty trivial day-to-day decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. So, feel right, feel good. And then I’m thinking we’ve had Annie Duke on the show, the professional poker player who writes about decision-making and such, and some other decision folks, and they’ve talked about keeping a decision journal, and like, “What was I trying to think through and how did it go?” And so, that’s sort of a different goal, which was improving the skill of decision-making, which, in a way, takes a lot of the sting out right then and there. It’s like, “Well, yeah, I expect I’m going to miss some, so that’s fine, and here’s what happened.”

But if it’s inconsequential, yeah. Go ahead and feel good about it. No need to analyze, and, “What should I have asked the waiter so as to not have gotten this tummy ache?” That’s probably not worth your mental energy and angst. I also love that take about for right now. And sometimes I find when it comes to like starting and stopping subscription services, I don’t know why I get really frozen sometimes, in terms of like, “Oh, I don’t know. I might use it any day now, so I don’t really want to cancel it.” And I’m like, “Well, Pete, you haven’t used it for the last two months, so you’re just kind of burning money. That’s silly.” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, but I think once this process gets set up then it will just be perfect.”

And so, the notion of for right now has saved the day a number of times. It’s like, “Well, hey, this month, I want to use the thing, so let’s pay for it. And if I don’t think I’m going to need it next month, I’ll cancel it. And if it turns out I was mistaken, I can un-cancel it.” It’s fine. It’s not like, I don’t know. I’m thinking about like flip-floppers. Like, in politics, we shame the flip-flopping candidate or job hoppers, on HR it’s like, “Ooh, hmm, I don’t know about this trend. It seems like you’re just hopping around and not committed.” Like, there’s no tribunal judging us about our subscription membership or what we get on a menu or any of this stuff, it’s like, “For right now, does this maybe work for you or not?”

Lia Garvin
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, let’s talk a little bit about some emotional stuff when it comes to the inner critic and impostor syndrome. How do we wrestle with that? And what can we do to feel more confident?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. So, inner critic, I think that’s another one where we need to build some tools around how to recognize when it’s the inner critic talking versus our regular rational, risk-deciding or navigating mind. And I think one signal that the inner critic is talking is when we’re talking absolutes, when we’re saying, “I always,” “I never,” “They always,” “They never,” and that’s really a quick signal to see if, “Are we in this sort of negative space or the inner critic?”

I think when we’re noticing that we keep running into the same sort of outcomes with the conversation we’re having with people, with the approach we’re trying, again, I think it’s when we’re stuck in this judgment zone. And one tool that I learned that I think is another really simple shift is reframing the questions we’re asking ourselves from why to what. When we’re stuck in this self-judgment shame spiral, a lot of times we’re asking, “Why did they do this to me? Why did this happen? Why me?” And these are all just iterations of, “Yeah, why me?” in different flavors.

And when we’re in “Why me?” zone we are not going to get out. We’re not going to be able to see what’s possible. We’re not going to be able to see other perspectives because we talk about reasons for why everything is bad. Now, if we shift the why question to what, “What happened? What might be going on with the other person?” ideally, that we say, because we can bring some empathy into the mix, then we start to see, “Okay, there’s something outside of me that can get me out of this spiral with the inner critic.”

For example, if a coworker sent us a sort of, what we feel, is a passive-aggressive email, we say, “Why did they send that to me? Why are they always doing this to me? Why are they always picking on me?” We’re just going deeper in the reasons why we hate this person. But if we say, “Gosh, what might be going on with this other person?” we might realize, “Okay, well, they’re under a lot of pressure from their boss. They’re under a big deadline.”

Or, “Gosh, their kids are at home for like COVID school closures, and they’re really stressed, and they’re just trying to fire off a quick email between meetings so they can get back to whatever they got to deal with.” We start to both have empathy, we start to, again, make it less about ourselves, we talked about ego, and just be able to see that there’s more besides the conclusion that it’s “Because everybody hates me.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I don’t know, this is almost passive-aggressive the way I’ve done this at times but I remember I got an email that made me angry, and I really tried. I was like, “Okay, try some compassion, think about the other person.” I was like, “You know what, it must be really hard for that person living their life as a stone-cold jerk, all the relationships and friendships they’ve missed out on.”

And so, in a way, I don’t know, it’s a little…I don’t even know about myself how authentic I’m being, like, “Am I still just trying to judge them, and be mean, stick it to them?”

Lia Garvin
Well, you made it not about you. So, you made it not about you.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t make it about me but, it is true. Like, at times, that does work in terms of mustering some genuine compassion and empathy for, “Yeah, maybe they’re just busy when they dashed off that email that was kind of rude. Or, maybe this is just sort of a blind spot in terms of their skillset in general. Or, maybe they’re under a particular acute stress.” But in any of those circumstances, you could find some compassion for, “Oh, that’s tricky.” And sometimes it might start a little bit barbed, like, “Oh, it must be so hard to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder to then being someone a bit more genuinely authentically passionate for that situation.” That’s good.

Lia Garvin
Yeah. And the last thing you asked about impostor syndrome, and I think the related piece there is impostor syndrome is, “Everybody’s watching me, waiting for me to mess up,” feeling, it’s back to this that everybody’s watching us. It’s back to that sort of over sort of like heightened sense of ego that everybody is watching and waiting and looking at everything that we’re doing.

And so, again, this getting a little bit of space from our ego is a really powerful tool for overcoming impostor syndrome because we can realize that it’s really likely not everybody’s watching, waiting for us to mess up because, again, everybody is focused on their own stuff. And if people are nitpicking mistakes or kind of being hypervigilant on our work, that’s a separate thing that we can tackle but it’s not about…but it’s different than impostor syndrome, because impostor syndrome or experience is really like believing that without a ton of evidence.

And so, again, I think this distancing ourselves from the “I” and the “me” and the ego is one of the most powerful tools I’ve found for overcoming impostor syndrome, and saying, “Hey, I’m not in the center of the universe, and that is amazing and liberating, and I like it.”

Pete Mockaitis
That is powerful. My mom said one of her favorite quotes, I don’t remember who said it, was, “We wouldn’t worry how much other people…we wouldn’t worry what other people thought about us so much if we realized how seldom they did.”

Lia Garvin
Yes, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Zing. You’re right, they’re not thinking about you that much. That’s good. Well, Lia, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lia Garvin
Yeah, to check out Unstuck. It comes out April 5th, available for preorder now. And I would love to hear people’s reframing stories, too. I know I’ll have a plug at the end but I think there’s a lot there that, once we start to explore, how to shift that perspective, that folks find possible. So, please do get in touch, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a reframing story that came to my mind, it’s so funny, I remember back when I was dating and all the perils emotionally that come with that and being dumped and such, I remember my reframe was, like if I was blown off or whatever, I wouldn’t say, “Oh, she doesn’t like me. There’s something wrong with me.”

I would say, “Well, this candidate has been disqualified because she has not met the key criterion of crazy about Pete Mockaitis. So, it’s unfortunate we’re going to have to pass on her because she doesn’t check the boxes.” So, I don’t know, it helped me feel less but, again, that is me-focused, I guess. Maybe there’s an even better reframe, Lia.

Lia Garvin
I think if you took a similar parallel to not getting picked for a job, like maybe it’s something you’re really excited about, you feel like you did a great job in the interviews, and then in the last stage you didn’t get it, you didn’t get picked. Instead of believing, “Oh, God, I must’ve misread the interviews. I must not have been qualified. I’ll never find a job,” and going through these sort of doomsday scenarios, and saying, “I’m really proud that I got that far. Like, I got to practice. I got to really practice and see, ‘Hey, like I’m really good at these conversations. I can get to the final stage.’”

And I think, again, not thinking in terms of absolutes is just another way to reframe the situation. It’s like, “I had a fun experience on that date. This person is not going to be forever but I was still able to get out there and see what’s out there.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lia Garvin
Yes. A favorite quote I’d say, in the spirit of reframing, is, “When you change the way you look at things, the things we look at change,” by Wayne Dyer. When I saw that, I was like, “Oh, my God, it’s the definition of reframing,” but that’s what this is all about, is seeing how much is possible when we look at something through a new lens. Because when we look at things the same way, we obviously keep…typically we get the same results. We’ve all heard that quote. And so, shifting the way we look at things, it starts to give us a completely new way of…everything around us starts to change, unfold, be different, be new.

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

Lia Garvin
My favorite is good old Amy Edmondson’s psychological safety. I do a ton of work inside companies around helping build effective teams, and psychological safety is at the base of that. And I think it’s so exciting to see that more and more understood and celebrated. I think it’s going to be the foundation to really getting people, potentially that have left the workforce as a part of the Great Resignation, to be back, to be reenergized.

And I think establishing psychological safety and really fostering that is going to help us move into whatever the next phases of work. Is it hybrid? Is it more distributed? Whatever it looks like. And so, that, I think, is some of the most important work around workplace dynamics that we can learn from.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Lia Garvin
Favorite book is The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, or Dan Coyle. And this book dives into kind of in the spirit of psychological safety. It examines teams of all different disciplines from MBA to military, to restaurants, and what are the building blocks for why those teams were effective, and the kind of cultural pieces. And I think it has a ton of great strategies that any team can apply to helping create a greater sense of belonging. And it’s just super practical, has great stories, really inspiring, and also informed a lot of the work that I do with teams to be more effective and inclusive.

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

Lia Garvin
It’s got to be spreadsheets. And this is such a boring example, I know, but it can be Excel, it can be Google Sheets, it can be anything. If it has cells and I can type things in, I love it. I manage everything I do in spreadsheets. I find them very easy to use.

Actually, in one of my first jobs, I was working for an executive, someone like a chief of staff, and he said, and I was trying to get something done, I was sending an email out with, like, “Hey, here’s what’s outstanding.” And he said, “If you’re sending anything to a group of people, and something has to get done, put it in a table and it will get done instantly.”

And I took this paragraph and the request that I had, and I put all of it into a table using a spreadsheet, and we said, “Here’s the ask, here’s the owner, and status red…”

Pete Mockaitis
Here it is, yeah, nobody wants to be red.

Lia Garvin
Here it is. Nobody wants to be red. And automatically people were responding, “Oh, no, no, no, here it is. Here, I’m done.” And I just find spreadsheets just, yeah, great, simple, like evergreen tool for getting stuff done.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Lia Garvin
Favorite habit is, call me boring again, waking up early. This is something, in order to do a lot of these things I got going on, and have a toddler and a day job, it involves making more time. And so, I get up early before my toddler wakes up. I have about hour, hour and a half to work on personal projects, be creative, exercise, before the day gets started. And I always, no matter what happens throughout the day, feel like I got that productive time for myself.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really resonates with folks; they quote it back to you, they re-tweet you, etc.?

Lia Garvin
Yeah. So, we talked about impact, and a quote that I like to share is, “Not all heroes wear capes. But when talking about your work, wear an F-ing cape.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Lia Garvin
Wear the cape, let it shine, let it flow because we have to be our own advocates for our work. So, when talking about your work, wear the cape. That’s my quote.

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

Lia Garvin
Yeah, check out my website at LiaGarvin.com. Follow me on LinkedIn. On Instagram, I’m @lia.garvin. I have a YouTube channel called Reframe with Lia. All those places are places to learn more about my book Unstuck, to preorder, to get in touch with me, to learn more about the work I’m doing with coaching and workshops, everything like that. So, I would love to hear from folks.

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

Lia Garvin
Yeah. I would say, again, when you are feeling stuck, when you’re feeling the same sort of outcomes keep happening, pause, and ask yourselves, “How else can I look at the situation?” Reframe because it really is unlimited. There is infinite number of ways we can apply this. And it’s about getting more in tuned with finding that moment when we’re stuck, recognizing it sooner so that we’re not stuck for months or years, but maybe we’re stuck for a week or two, or a day. So, tuning in with yourself, becoming more self-aware so that you can recognize that you’re stuck and ask that reframing question.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lia, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and getting unstuck regularly.

Lia Garvin
Thank you so much. It’s been awesome.

Mar 10
0

749: How to Break Free from Perfectionism with Dr. Thomas Curran

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Behavioral psychologist Thomas Curran reveals the science behind perfectionism and why it’s perfectly OK to be imperfect.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why perfectionism is not correlated with performance 
  2. The self-limiting beliefs underlying perfectionism
  3. The tools to combat perfectionism 

 

About Thomas

Thomas Curran is a British Psychological Society chartered social psychologist. His primary area of expertise is the personality characteristic of perfectionism, how it develops, and how it impacts on mental health. He is the author of over 30 published papers and book chapters on related topics and has received numerous awards for his scholarship and research. 

Informed by his research and expertise in data analysis, he has previously lectured to undergraduates in the UK and Australia. He now teaches research methods and statistics units in the Department of Psychological and Behavioural Science. 

Resources Mentioned

 

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Thomas Curran Interview Transcript

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

Thomas Curran
Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom about perfectionism. And I think, maybe, if you could kick us off with what’s one of perhaps the most surprising or counterintuitive or extra-fascinating discoveries you’ve made about perfectionism over the years that you’ve been researching it?

Thomas Curran
That’s a really good question to kick us off. I think the most surprising finding that has come out of the work that we’ve done is that perfectionism has very little correlation with performance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Neither good nor bad.

Thomas Curran
No, nothing. Zero percent. what we do is we give people questionnaires about their levels of perfectionism and then we asked them to report various types of performance indicators. It might be, I don’t know, if we’re looking at education, it’s PPA, or different work, it can be manager ratings, or their own bottom line, or whatever it might be, that we can gather.

And when you put all the data together and you look to see if there’s an association, what we typically find is that there isn’t one. And that was really surprising to me, and that’s a consistent finding, by the way, I’ve seen across many, many studies. Not just one study, but many. Because when you think about how much perfectionism energizes behavior, it keeps us moving forward, I suppose, and it’s really surprising that you don’t get the performance benefits from that energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a head-scratcher. I cannot begin to guess as to why that is. Can you?

Thomas Curran
So, there’s a couple of theories. It’s a really startling study because we do research in perfectionism and we kind of have these ideas or preconceptions of what we might find when we do the research. Nevertheless, sometimes these sorts of findings come pretty consistently. They really kind of draw your attention to ask why, “What on earth is going on here?”

So, we think two things are going on. The first thing is perfectionists put so much effort in that they go above and beyond. And what I mean by that is they kind of reach a zone of diminishing and then inverse returns. So, you have this kind of what looks like an inverted U relationship to perfectionism and effort work. The initial amounts of effort work that you put in get parallel returns, so the more you put in, the more you get out.

But there comes a point where you kind of start to sacrifice things in your life because you put too much effort in, you tinker, you iterate a bit too much, so you kind of water down or contaminate the quality of your work, and then reach a point where you’re sacrificing so much that actually now, any additional effort you put in is actually impacting your performance. You might be tired. You might lack social and replenishment might be poor diet, poor exercise, habits, or whatever it might be. These things have an actual negative impact on you.

So, we think something like that might be going on. But there’s another and, I think, more convincing theory, which is, essentially, that perfectionists actually hold back effort. They don’t put it forward. And that’s going to sound counterintuitive, but when you think about perfectionism and how they’re so wrapped up in this notion that they must succeed and they can’t possibly fail, then it’s the consequences of failure, the shame, the embarrassment, the guilt that they feel that means that the next time they put themselves in that situation, they’re going to feel those same emotions.

So, what you typically see is perfectionists will try really hard in the first attempt but if they fail, then they hold it back on the second attempt and the third and fourth attempt because they don’t want to put themselves in a position where they’re feeling those negative emotions. So, paradoxically, what we think is going on, and we’ve done some research to actually show this is, indeed, the case, is when they’re put in situations or challenged, they tend to withdraw.

And so, this idea of perfectionism actually creates lesser, if not more, is something that we think is probably the high enough finding but it’s a really interesting find.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, indeed. Well, I think your theories, not that my opinion matters to you about your theories, but, “Yeah, that made some sense,” says Pete the podcaster, so you got that going for you, I guess. Well, maybe then, before we get too deep in here, we should probably have an operational definition that we’re using here for perfectionism, perfectionists. How do you define it? How do we know if we are one?

Thomas Curran
So, perfectionism is, at root, a sense and a belief that we’re imperfect. And I think that’s probably the best place to start with perfectionism. So, how much can you tolerate showing imperfections to the world? Some people could tolerate a lot of that, they don’t really mind. Some people find that really tough and they don’t have much tolerance for that.

So, the first thing to say is that if you think about perfectionism from that kind of deficit mindset, that idea that, “I’m flawed and, therefore, I don’t want to reveal those flaws to the world,” then there’s a certain spectrum to that kind of belief, and you can have a lot of it, or you can have a little of it, or you can be more or less in the middle. Most of us have some of it, like we don’t totally want to or completely reveal all of our flaws, defects, and imperfections to the world.

But, as I say, some people are much more…much less tolerant of that and some people are a little bit more tolerant, and some people are more in the middle. So, that’s the first thing to say about perfectionism. It really kind of starts with this deficit belief and then it reveals itself in many different ways.

So, you have a self-perfectionism, so this is kind of “I need to be perfect. I need to be perfect. And I need to shoot for excessively high goals,” but it’s not just personal characteristic. It’s also a sense that “Other people expect me to be perfect.” There’s a social element, so, “Other people and the environment, more broadly, expects me to be perfect, and if I’m not perfect, they’re judgmental.”

And the third part of perfectionism tendency is kind of perfection directed out to others. So, from this deficit mindset, we project our own imperfections, our own need to be perfect onto other people, “So, I need you to be perfect. And if you’re not, I’m harsh and judgmental.” So, from that deficit standpoint, you see a number of different characteristics. We can call them self, social, and other, and, together, those are what we believe are our kind of, I guess, encompassing perfectionist as a characteristic.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess what I find intriguing is, I guess, when it comes to perfectionism, I have it in very specific domains or arenas as opposed to universally. For example, I guess, if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it to the utmost. So, if I’m looking at heart rate variability biofeedback training, Tom, by golly, I’m going to get all the gadgets and find the most imperfect resonance frequency for my breathing to check it out.

Or, if we’re going to publish a podcast episode, then, by golly, I would like the audio to be, hey, in a way, there’s no such thing as perfect audio, but I would like any puffs of breath, like I want that totally eliminated, and not just like mostly eliminated. It’s like if you eliminated it any more, it would be naturally weird and freakish.

So, I guess I’ve got some of those in particular domains. What kind of language would you put to that in social psychology land?

Thomas Curran
What you’re saying there is absolutely correct and it’s what most people feel. It’s like to say, we know that people are perfectionistic about at least or two things in their lives. Not everything. Everybody has things that they’re passionate about. Everyone has a kind of idealized image of themselves. We’re not all the same. Some people want to be the perfect teacher. Some people want to be the perfect boss. Some people want to be the perfect parents. Some people want to be the perfect professor; myself. I failed miserably but I tried.

In our mind, in our mind’s eye, we have these kinds of ideals that we hold dear of the person that we feel that we should be in those domains, and I think that’s very common, very consistent. So, perfectionism kind of is a broad perfectionistic tendency but then, within that, there are different domains in which perfectionism reveals itself, and those domains depend, I guess, on our own identity and the things that we each hold dear.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you say just about all of us have at least a dose of perfectionism going on. Is that fair to say? Or, do we have a rough statistical breakdown of how many people qualify as perfectionists?

Thomas Curran
We don’t have a statistical breakdown but it’s fair to say that this is a spectrum. And I don’t like to think about it in terms of the dichotomy, i.e., “You’re a perfectionist and you’re not a perfectionist.” I think, like anything, and this includes all sorts of psychological characteristics and disorders, there’s no kind of hard and fast cutoff. I think some people have a little, some people have a lot, most people are more or less in the middle, and we all kind of vary around that mean.

And so, perfectionism in that sense is something that most of us, if not all of us, have at least a little bit of. And we know that from large research projects where we find that most people don’t score the very lowest on a scale. There’s a little bit in there even if it’s not much, and that can spread all the way up to the very top in the scale, and it can also fall somewhere in the middle. So, I like to think about perfectionism as a spectrum, and so from some level, we can all identify with. And depending on where you are on the spectrum, depends how much of an impact it has in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And for this deficit belief about ourselves, can you give us some example verbiage to that in terms of like, “I believe that I…” like fill in the blank there? Like, what does that deficit belief kind of sound like in words?

Thomas Curran
“I believe I’m not enough.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m not enough.” Like broadly?

Thomas Curran
But how many times do you hear that? I see that in my job as a tutor and mentor to many young people. A sense that no matter what I do, it’s not enough. There’s still something that can be improved. There’s more growth to have, there’s more improvement to make, there’s more development to undergo, and that at some level, I am flawed and I am defective, or I’m not good enough at calculus, or I can’t give presentations particularly well, or I’m not very good socially in social situations.

There’s also sorts of areas of our lives where we introspect on and we tell ourselves that we’re just simply not enough. And so, when I say that perfectionism really begins there, that’s what I mean, it’s rooted in that sense that I’m not enough. It’s rooted in that sense that, broadly, really what we’re talking about here is relational needs, “I’m not enough to be accepted. I’m not enough to matter. I’m not enough to be loved or approved of,” and that’s really…whereas if you really want to the root, that’s where you start.

All of these issues around our different presentations are really issues of “Everyone is going to think that was a terrible presentation, and everybody is going to have a negative view of me as a result of that presentation.” So, we’re talking about issues around “I’m not a good presenter.” What we’re really talking about is worries about how other people will see you and whether they have…will they have free shade, so to speak, over those performances? So, that’s what I mean by deficit thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very clear and powerful. Thank you. And so, well, that doesn’t feel great being in that zone of belief and imagining negative consequences and ramifications of showing what I can do to a group of people and then finding it to be inadequate. That’s a bummer. And, at the same time though, if we think about sort of people who do want to learn and grow and improve and get better, like is there a…what is the happy articulation of one’s belief about one’s self that, “Yeah, I think I’m pretty swell, fundamentally, but, boy, I sure do have a lot to learn and want to develop in these key skill areas”? That’s a lot of words. Is there a more succinct term or articulation of that kind of belief, that is, it’s enough but it’s also striving?

Thomas Curran
Here’s a thing, we got to make a distinction. That’s the first thing to say. So, perfectionism is rooted in the deficit thinking that, “I’m not enough.” And so, everything from that point onwards is personal. So, if we make a mistake, it’s personal. If we slip up on a presentation, it’s personal. It’s an indictment on me. Life is one big court of appeal for my flaws. And everything that I do is almost apologetic, apologizing for these things I know I’m not good enough of. That’s perfectionism.

Now, the distinction we need to make between that form or that characteristic, that way of living, that way of existing, and other more very positive ways of existing, ways of living, ways of going for the world, striving, so to speak, things like conscientiousness, things like diligence, meticulousness, exactitude, these are all fantastic things. And often it’s the case that people tell me, “Well, do you not want people to strive? Do you not want excellence?” It’s not about that. It’s not about that at all. Of course, I want people to strive. Of course, I want people to be excellent.

But the difference is those who are able to remove the personal from the outcome and see the task as the most important thing…what has happened, what’s wrong with something I did, is not something I am. I did something wrong. I didn’t say a phrase or I coded a piece of code incorrectly. That isn’t an indictment on me as a person. That is just an indictment on a mistake I made. And there’s a very subtle distinction but those are who are able to strive in that way have far greater levels of performance and satisfaction and contentment than those who have high levels of perfectionism for the reason, really, everything is personal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. So, a commitment to healthy excellence is associated with great, good outcomes, and perfectionism has no correlation whatsoever, we’ve learned, associated with performance metrics, and it sure sounds like it feels bad, too, in terms of not being pleasant. Can you paint a picture of some of the other ways that perfectionism is potentially harmful for us in terms of our health, our relationships, or career? Any particularly spooky bits of research or numbers that could startle us?

Thomas Curran
Well, there’s a lot of research to suggest…I mean, we’ve done so much research, and, certainly, I wouldn’t take the large credit for a lot of heavy lifting done by others, but across the piece, perfectionism is a very strong and consistent predictor of low self-esteem and cognitive difficulties like rumination and brooding. They tend to self-handicap a lot and procrastinate a lot. It comes to mind relationships with this like depressed mood and low levels of anxiety and clinical more pathological verbiage, but this is sort of more extreme.

And I’m thinking more if we just sort of just plot the trend higher in the perfectionism spectrum is that to see some of these negative views come in. So, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that there’s a lot of baggage with perfectionism and it’s not a particularly enjoyable way.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay. Well, then what do we do? If listeners are hearing themselves in this conversation, like, “Oh, shoot, yeah, I totally do that and think that and operate that way, and I kind of like to stop,” Tom, what’s our pathway?

Thomas Curran
It’s like anything. Like, changing mindset is like this, varying trends because it’s not easy, I think that’s the first thing to say. And so, self-compassion at the outset is really important because breaking down some of these tendencies, and I know this because I’m a perfectionist and I research perfectionism and I teach perfectionism and I mentor people, young people who have perfectionism, even I still find it difficult to shake some of the tendencies. Some of this isn’t easy but that’s not to say that it’s impossible, and that’s not to say that you can’t manage the symptoms and alleviate them.

So, one of the things I would say is, first of all, like a radical redefinition of failure and what it means. So, failure is not the bogeyman we’ve mistaken it for and I think that’s the first important thing to say. I know this is very cliché right now and everybody is talking about how failure should define you, they should be teachable moments, they should be areas of improvement, growth and development.

When I talk about a radical redefinition, I mean a radical redefinition. But, basically, does it completely force us to turn failure always into success, or turn failure always into growth and development? We’re going to fail all the time. Failure is just part and parcel of life, it’s odds on, it’s regression into the mean. We’re going to fail way more times than we’re going to succeed. And I think sometimes we just need to be comfortable sitting with that failure, sitting with anxiety with that failure and the feelings that it engenders, and then it wash over us as a reminder that we are human and we’re fallible.

And so, I think, first and foremost, really, it’s a shift in perspective, and failure is a big one, and just allowing ourselves to sit next to it is such an important thing. And I know it’s difficult, we always want to turn it into something else but just letting it sit there is really important. And I’d also say we have to remember that the environment around us is structured to promote perfectionistic thinking. And a lot of this isn’t necessarily our fault.

So, work structures are organized to prioritize outcomes. Education systems are there to encourage and engender competition and work ethic. Parenting these days is a lot more expectant, there’s a lot more pressure on young people to perform and achieve. So, as well it’d been a personal characteristic, it’s also a cultural characteristic. And a lot of the time, it’s important to recognize that it’s not your fault. There’s a cultural context to the way you feel. So, also, I think that’s important. This is all bound up in this kind of self-compassionate element that taking the personal, really, off yourself and recognizing that it’s a bigger picture is also crucial.

And so, I’d say, for me, those are the kind of key messages that I normally give to young people and I try to focus them in on what they can do, what’s in their control, so things like not looking at grades, not looking at performance metrics, just focus in on feedback, focus in on the task, “Where did you go wrong in the task?” not “Where did you go wrong as a person?” and “How can it be fixed? And what can we do to improve?”

And seeing these things not necessarily as things that should be catastrophic but actually things that are really important; feedback and information to help us learn and develop, irrespective of what the grade is at the end of the day. So, I think that those, for me, anyway, those are the main things that I would say.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was able to make a turnaround, and what they did, and their before, and their journey, and their after?

Thomas Curran
There’s many, many students and young people who have come, began university journey, unable to even open…you mark their work and they’re unable to open it. You’ll meet them and say, “How did you get on?” and they’ll say, “Well, I haven’t opened it yet. I can’t do it.” So, that kind of paralysis, the crippling fear of what’s behind the curtain, and how they can interpret that, again, it’s all about the person. Like, there wouldn’t be these concerns if it was just about the task itself because it’s so personal and that’s why people are so reluctant and scared.

And I think breaking those things down is really, really important. So, particularly in first year, when you’re focused on development, I’ll often say, “This mark doesn’t really mar you in the grand scheme of things. It’s much more important about the feedback and it’s really important you get feedback now because then you get it so you can implement change, and if you don’t, you can’t move forward.” So, there’s a lot of mentoring around rationalizing how those feelings are holding, are ultimately bad enough, they’re not helping us to move forward.

And I see many students over the years through a process of just slight counseling have improved their perfectionism and they’re able to embrace mistakes and find the open feedback and you’d be better for it. So, there’s a lot of sort of I guess broad success stories in that sense. My own story is one of high level of perfectionism leading to burnout early in my career, slowing down, focusing on things I can control, and had had more success with that approach, being able to let things go than before. So, it can be done and there’s definitely hope but it is hard.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, are there any particular tools, mantras, or mottos, beliefs, words of hope we cling to? What are some of the top resources that can help us out when either, both acutely when we’re directly in the grips of it as well as long term in terms of building our mindsets associated with this stuff?

Thomas Curran
I think the first one is very practical is getting things done and worrying about the output later, so this kind of idea of “done is better than perfect.” One of the things I see a lot, and particularly when it’s figuring tasks that are very complicated, and there’s a lot of creativity that’s required, and a lot of deep thought. And students are reluctant, or not reluctant, they find it difficult to start, starting is the hardest part. So, just getting things written down is really tough.

So, I’ll often tell them, and I’m sure this is also an exercise that people can do in the workplace too, but I’ll often say, like, “In order to get started, the first thing to do, you need to just get writing. And it doesn’t matter what it is you write about. Write a letter to your mom, write a letter to your boyfriend or girlfriend, write a letter to your dog. It doesn’t matter. Just get some written stuff down. There’s a benefit, there’s a lovely message to your mom because you can send it to her after, but do something. Get started and it doesn’t have to necessarily be the thing that you’re doing in that moment. But the important thing is to build momentum, and momentum is really crucial in improving work.

So, often, I say if you’re struggling to get started with perfectionism or the time, then done is better than perfect. Get something done and then use that momentum to push forward with the task, but it’s all about getting your head and the mind space and perfectionists find that especially difficult. The other thing I’d say is that perfectionists have a lot of irrational types of thoughts so there’s a lot of must, have to, should, so, “I must do this, I must do that, I must be this, I must…” and they don’t leave any gray area of ambiguity for any kind of deviation from that path. It has to be a certain way.

And so, I would say that, when those forces start to intrude, it’s quite important to write them down. So, if that thing is something irrational, I’m thinking something irrational, I’ll write it down and then I actually grade it on a scale of one to ten, “How achievable is this thing actually?” So, it’s a kind of self-reflection exercise that allows you to reflect on the irrationality of the things that you’re thinking. And then from that, “Okay, so what is a much more adaptive way to think about this particular task? Is there a certain message that I want to get across?”

And it doesn’t matter how it gets across. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just matters that  it needs to get across. Is that a much better goal for me rather than to kind of “I must ace it,” which leaves no room after all for any of these? So, those are self-reflective things as well is what sometimes I recommend to people.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Tom, tell us, any final do’s or don’ts you want to share about perfectionism before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Thomas Curran
Yeah. So, do embrace failure crucially, do be kind to yourself, that’s also really important, particularly if things do go wrong. Things will go wrong a lot and sometimes things will go wrong for no reason. But for no good reason, you just failed. Don’t feel we need enough room in our mind for this idea that sometimes we’re just unlucky or sometimes something happened to us, it just derailed us, that wasn’t our fault. It just so happens that we’re unlucky on that particular occasion. First and foremost, just being aware that the failure is going to happen and being prepared and ready for it, not letting it derail us is also quite important.

A couple of don’ts. Don’t get too bogged down in the details. Sometimes it’s important to be meticulous, absolutely, and there are certain tasks and jobs where that’s crucial, and I wouldn’t want to diminish it. But, also, sometimes it’s the case that you have to have lens, you need to get things in because there’s a next thing coming. And so, making sure that it’s good enough and being happy with good enough is important. Try not to, on those particular tasks, get bogged down in the detail, iterate thinking, because you’re only going to contaminate and you’re only going to get yourself behind. So, I think, for me, that would be a big one is to focus on the bigger picture.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lovely. Now, can we hear a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Thomas Curran
for me, that there’s many researchers and famous persons, psychoanalysts whose work has impacted me quite significantly, but the big one, I think, is psychoanalyst Karen Horney. And Karen Horney told us, very vividly, about perfectionism and how it’s really about kind of shooting for an idealized version of ourselves.
one of the things she talks about is how we take on a pseudo self, an idealized self, and we toss aside our real selves to chase this idealized version who we feel we should be. So, I’d probably say Karen Horney is where I coined that out, moving away from who you really are and trying to chase an idea, is something that’s inspired me.

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

Thomas Curran
My favorite study is a really nice study showing how perfectionism makes us highly vulnerable to stress. Yeah, that’s the other thing about perfectionism. When we run into, encounter stressful situations, perfectionists tend to be really, really reactive in those situations. So, one experiment this brings to mind is a study that basically it’s just puzzle task and they had people come into the lab, complete a puzzle task, and they measured their levels of perfectionism. And after the first go at this task, they told them they failed, that basically they hadn’t done very well, that they did fail.

Pete Mockaitis
I imagine they’d be funny, those researchers, “Hey, man, you really blew it. What can I say?”

Thomas Curran
Yeah, and also they told them before they went in there it was a really task to do so it compounded this. Basically, what they’re trying to do is invoke a sense of acute stress and keep a sense of “I failed. I’ve done something wrong.” And then after that, they took various different measures of how they felt in that moment, anxiety, guilt, shame. And they found that people who scored higher in perfectionism have especially elevated levels of shame, guilt, and diminished levels of pride after that stressful situation.

And then they asked them to do it again. And what’s really interesting is once you ask people to do it again, the people that are higher at perfectionism just don’t try because you can’t try at something you didn’t fail, so you’d see the effort just fall off a cliff. Whereas, people who were not perfectionistic, they actually maintained their effort on the second go. So, that’s showing you really, that study is showing both sides, like how much negative emotion there is in perfectionism, but also the impact it has on performance.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Thomas Curran
My favorite book. Again, that’s Karen Horney. Our Inner Conflicts is a really important book, so is The Neurotic Personality of Our Time. Both crucial texts in terms of understanding why culture creates in us a need to be perfect, a need to shoot for our socially-accepted ideal. So, I’d say that those two are probably my favorite books, but that does change a lot the more I read.

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

Thomas Curran
A favorite tool would be my pen. One of the things that I really don’t like is typing or reading things from screens, and so I still use a lot of printout and I still use the humble pen to highlight and spot important pieces of information whether that be research paper or piece of data. So, definitely, my pen because it helps me identify things that I needed.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Thomas Curran
I try to suck at things quite a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Thomas Curran
Actually, I play the guitar which I really enjoy. That’s kind of my creative outlet. But one of the things I can’t do is sing, and I got really hung up on that because, as you master things, you get quite skilled, and I feel like I’m a relatively good guitarist but it’s so frustrating that I can’t sing, like I can’t actually put that skill into some practical use.

And so, that used to really frustrate me, until I realized, actually, like just sitting there and embracing the fact that I suck at singing, and sitting with anxiety is an emotion at sucking at singing, it’s actually quite healthy. So, a habit for me is doing things that you suck at because it really does help your perfection.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you amp up the therapeutic benefit by doing them publicly or is that counterproductive?

Thomas Curran
Yeah, I do it in front of my friends and family, that’s often very frustrating and annoying for them, but it’s helping me. That’s what I try to tell them, “This is therapy for me.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s kind of them. And is there a key nugget you share that folks remember; they quote back to you, like, “Oh, Professor Tom, you said this”?

Thomas Curran
I think a lot of the feedback that I get is around my perspective on failure and my perspective on radical acceptance of failure. I think a lot of people remember that because, essentially, it’s kind of hard these days. It’s kind of hard these days to not continually think that we need to recycle failure. So, a lot of my lectures and a lot of things I teach young people is actually “We don’t need to recycle failure all the time. Sometimes you can just let it sit with you. Sometimes it’s much healthier just to let it sit with you.” So, I think that would be the thing.

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

Thomas Curran
I’ve got a book coming out next spring. You can go to my Twitter page. We’ve got all sorts of resources on my website ThomasCurran.co.uk. Animation, we just did some animations on perfection, too, so there’s all sorts of stuff you can find on my website or my Twitter account.

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

Thomas Curran
My challenge would be to be bold, be courageous, don’t be afraid, and push yourself, push the boundaries of what you think is possible. Push yourself into uncomfortable situations where there’s a chance that perhaps you might slip up, or there’s a chance that you might have to be criticized, but just try and be brave enough to sit and let those anxieties and emotions wash through because the more you do it, the easier it will become, because the more you push yourself into uncomfortable difficult but necessary great positions, and the more you develop, the more you grow, and the better you do. So, that will be it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Tom, this has been such a treat. I wish you all the best.

Thomas Curran
Thank you so much, Pete. Appreciate that.