KF #3. Manages Ambiguity Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

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

Jacqueline Brassey
Hi, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to be chatting about your latest book here, Deliberate Calm: How to Learn and Lead in a Volatile World. Can you kick us off with a particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made while putting this together?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, the discovery I’ve made may be a bit more boring than you just introduced, but what I really love about this topic is that, and it has become a lifestyle for me, is that it can be learnt. It is something you can master if you put in enough time and energy in it, and that is absolutely amazing. And, in addition, it’s actually applicable to all aspects of life. So, this book is written for leaders in a business context, but it is applicable to anyone in any job but also in personal situations, private situations in whatever role you play in life.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say it could be learned, what is it?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, it is deliberate calm, that’s a set of skills, and the secret is in the title. Deliberate means that you are a choice, to choose in a specific moment how to respond. That choice is often better if you remain calm.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I can learn a set of skills to become deliberately calm anytime and every time I desire.

Jacqueline Brassey
Exactly. Even though you may not feel it…

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, superpower.

Jacqueline Brassey
Yes, superpower. Even though you may not feel it, but it’s about the response. So, at the heart of this lies also the power to become comfortable with discomfort, basically.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so maybe could you kick us off then by sharing a particularly inspiring story of someone who’s able to learn this and summon it to great effect?

Jacqueline Brassey
Sure. One example that we used when we kick off Chapter one in our book is the very famous story of Captain Sullenberger who lands the plane on the Hudson River after the plane was struck by a flock of birds.

He decided, in the milliseconds, that he was going to ignore the traffic tower and he made a different decision. He did not go to his default response. He has landed the plane, any plane, so many times but now he had to decide to actually choose something different than what was told to him in the moment. And everybody may know that story, you can read about it, but there was a high-stakes unfamiliar moment.

And people may think, “Well, that doesn’t resonate with me because that’s very exceptional.” But I have a couple of stories, how this actually can be also translated to day-to-day life because it doesn’t always need to be a similar extreme crisis situation, as that example of Captain Sullenberger. But we have, in our day-to-day lives, smaller or larger versions of this.

And so, let me tell you another story of someone I met recently, actually. His name is Flavio Gianotti, and I met him a couple of weeks ago in a radio interview. He’s an Olympian fencer. And it’s very interesting because he has been told that he is very talented, and he knows he’s talented. He’s a good fencer. He has all the skills he needs to actually play at this high level of skills and high-level sports. But what holds him back, nine of out of ten, is his brain, his mind.

And we chatted off the radio interview and he had a game that weekend, and a lot was at stake for him. His family was there, it was very visible, and it was important that he had a good game. And he texted me afterwards with a nice picture. He was number one on stage, very happy, so, clearly, he won. And he said, literally, “Today, I made it. I made a difference with my head.”

And I called him, I said, “Gosh, what did you do?” And he said, “Well, I remembered a lot of the stories that you told me and the conversation that we had.” And he said, “In the moment that I was fencing, I actually was noticing, I became aware that I was not winning.” And he then decided to actually consciously enjoy the game and focus on what he does best, which is fencing, and he was able to disconnect from his worries. He could let them be there but he could focus on the game, and he said, “That changed everything.”

And, long story short, he won, which is an example of high-stakes familiar zone, which is very different from Captain Sullenberger’s example because Flavio was also trained to do this game. The game was not unfamiliar territory but was highly stressful. In those moments, the best thing you can do is manage your stress and focus on the skills that you have, and focus on performing.

But if you go into a different situation, which is unfamiliar, that’s where deliberate calm comes in, then you need to learn and adapt on the fly. The key, Pete, is though, that in those situations, it’s hard for us to do. We default to what we know. And that’s what we call the adaptability paradox in our book.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how do we define the adaptability paradox?

Jacqueline Brassey
The adaptability paradox is basically when you most need to learn, change, and adapt, it’s the hardest to do. I say it in a free translation. And the reason is, in high-stakes unfamiliar territory, we feel the stress of the high stakes but we also don’t have the skills to respond in the right way, so we need to actually adjust our behavior, and we need to adjust what we know.

And in those situations, our brains are wired to actually experience stress because we lack predictability. We also lack certainty, and so we will experience extreme stress. And learning and changing on the go is then very hard to do but that is what you learn in deliberate calm. First, you need to learn, actually, to become aware, “What situation am I in? What’s going on for me?” But then, also, you use a lot of the tools to respond in the right way in the situation that you’re in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then I guess that’s the paradox part, is what we need to do is change, and that is stressful, and, thus, it’s harder to change, so that is what’s needed, hence the paradox. Okay. So, then lay it on us, Jackie, what are the skills or the tools, the approach, the top do’s and don’ts so that we can get this going for ourselves?

Jacqueline Brassey
At the heart of this book is what we call, and it sounds a bit fluffy but it isn’t at all, we call the dual awareness. And dual awareness means you need to become aware of the circumstances that you’re in and also aware of what it means for you and what’s going on for you.

So, in the book, we teach people a set of tools, and we have a protocol also in the back of the book that helps you start recognizing moments that you get triggered and that you feel stressed, for example, and that you feel pressure. And those moments matter to you, and why do they matter, and what does it mean.

So, by going through the protocol, you become more aware of moments of stress, also when it happens so you start recognizing what’s going on in your brain and body, but you also start realizing what the situation calls for. And sometimes we feel stressed in situations that’s absolutely, you know, may not be stressful at all but it is something that we do because we interpret the situation as such.

Sometimes we become aware that, indeed, this is a situation that requires a pause. And a big example is, Pete, the pandemic that we’ve been through the last couple of years. We didn’t know what was happening, so it eventually turned into a high-stakes unfamiliar territory where everybody was defaulting to what we knew best, trying to wait for when it was over and trying to get back to normal as soon as possible but we had to learn that that was not possible anywhere, and we had to change a lot of what we normally did in the way we worked, in the way we dealt with situations, and so on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you walk us through an example of an individual who is practicing some awareness and gaining that dual awareness, and then responding in a way that they bring about the calm?

Jacqueline Brassey
I will give an example of a story that I experienced myself a couple of years ago. That was about two years ago, just after George Floyd was killed, which was also very much discussed in the organization where I worked and I was heading learning and development for a topic including diversity and inclusion.

And one of the things that I was asked to do immediately thereafter was to train out 32,000 people in anti-racism. And I had to do that, I was asked to do that in a very short amount of time with a team that I had not yet put together. And so, there we are, hugely purposeful but high stakes because a lot of visibility, sensitive topic, and something we’ve never done before. It’s already difficult to do that in one country, let alone do it around the globe, 32,000 people.

And my default response to things like that, to asks like that, projects like that, is I want to control everything. So, I want to have a perfect project plan, I want every step detailed out and very clear, very sequential, but that was not possible because it’s quite a challenging topic and everybody had also an opinion about it, and we were basically building a plane whilst flying already, right?

I didn’t write about Deliberate Calm in those days yet but I’ve been a resilience researcher, and stress researcher, and authentic confidence researcher for many years, so I applied a couple of tools that we also integrated within Deliberate Calm. It was really to become aware, first of all, of that situation. This was a new situation which would not be served with my standard approach.

And so, taking a break, taking a step back, and re-looking at what was needed in the moment was one thing that I did because I was panicking a bit, and I thought, “Well, if I don’t change and if I don’t learn and adapt, then nothing is going to happen in the right way.” And another step was that I also, and I’ve done that for many years, I took good care of myself because this project takes a lot of energy away, and, for a long time, it will ask a lot from me. And if I worked harder and harder, and if I don’t sleep, and if I don’t take care of myself, then it won’t be sustainable, so I put an operating model in place to support this work that we had to do.

And then within the team, I focused on creating safety and security, and also speaking about discomfort. We all actually felt the stress, and bringing that in the room, putting a great team together but also agreeing that we’re all in this together, and it’s better to get all the problems on the table than to hide them was usually successful because it was a bit messy but, by doing that, we actually all could shoulder that stress. But also, what it helped was that we didn’t all go into default, and we call that protection mode, in the book, when you are in high stress.

But we went into a state of learning, and that gave us the creativity, the stamina, and the solution space that we needed to go into. So, there were a lot of elements that come together, Pete, in practicing deliberate calm. It’s not just one golden nugget. It’s actually a lifestyle, I call it sometimes, and sometimes I say it comes in three different layers.

The one layer is the foundation, having a good base to work from, taking good care of yourself, making sure it’s almost like you sometimes have to be a top athlete in the work that we do. Take good care of yourself because then you are more resilient to any curve balls and stress. And then set yourself up for success during the day, and have a couple of tools, that we also teach in the book, that deal you with moments in the day when you really need them, those SOS moments, when you get a curve ball, and when you have to respond in a calm way, which includes, one tool is breathing, for example. How do you breathe? And how do you breathe in such a way that you can immediately calm yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, let’s talk about a couple of those tracks then, both the taking good care of yourself like you’re a top athlete, and then the specific SOS moments. So, I guess sleep, nutrition, hydration. What are some of the top things that make a world of difference in taking care of ourselves? Are any of them, shall I say, non-obvious? Because I think we’ve heard of a few, like, “Oh, yeah, you should sleep.” Like, “Yes, we know that.”

But, maybe, if you have any nuances, like, “Did you know that complete darkness actually makes all the difference for sleep as opposed to 98% darkness?” Or, give us the secret insight or info, Jackie, in terms of self-care and SOS tactics that make all the difference.

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, self-care, as you said, most people know it but they don’t do it. So, I would say, indeed, all of them that you mentioned, and I would also refer to Andrew Huberman’s podcast, who knows all the tools, who brings a lot of these amazing tools.

Pete Mockaitis
I love his stuff.

Jacqueline Brassey
Oh, me, too. I’m a big fan of his work. He also talks about daylights in the morning. He talks about the physiological side. And then there’s another friend of mine, Alexander Helm, who does a lot in sleep. Indeed, all of them matter. How we bring that together in our book is actually you have to be intentional. So we bring that together in a tool that we call your personal operating model.

And your personal operating model has a couple of elements, including energy management, and that changes also with circumstances when they change. So, what is relevant for me today may be different. So, just take a simple situation, family without kids, family with kids. Different operating models and different way of managing this intention and this energy. So, we provide tools for that.

But what many people forget is they know it’s important to sleep but it’s really critical to act like Captain Sullenberger in stressful moments, to act like Flavio in moments of peak sports. Sleep is important for your overall health, but if you do not sleep well, you become much more susceptible to stress and also to anxiety. And we have an epidemic of stress and anxiety, as also all the research that I’ve been doing through the McKinsey Health Institute has showed.

So, that’s one, no big secrets there. I would say just apply it. But there are also moments in the moment, applying this in moments of stress, there are tons. One favorite of mine, apart from the obvious ones that you just mentioned, is also the use of voice. So, how you actually leverage your voice in the moment, and how you become aware that if you are stressed, you start breathing more from your chest rather than your belly.

And if you become aware, so the key in this book is also about becoming aware, “What is happening for me in the moment?” and then you can catch the arrow, is another way of talking about it, basically, because then you can change, and then you can respond in the right way. And most people actually respond way too late.

The voice is all about calming it down a couple of notches, making a warmer voice, which is the voice is related to the larynx and our vagus nerve, which is also related to our parasympathetic nervous system, and that calms us down when we actually also calm our voice down, and others too.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you give us some example demonstrations here in terms of, “Okay, I’m feeling stressed. Something happened, I’m freaking out. So, I’m stressed, how do I use voice to calm down?

Jacqueline Brassey
I just had one, actually, Pete.

Jacqueline Brassey
In the middle of this podcast, I think my husband tried to call me, and I actually stressed out.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Jacqueline Brassey
No, I had many. I’m talking a lot on stage and I’m talking a lot in workshops as well, and always in moments that I need to focus and concentrate, something happens. But it’s little moments that everybody also will recognize is that the doorbell may go, or everything comes together and it’s very difficult to stay calm.

I once had a workshop where I absolutely had to perform and I started to feel very unwell in the moment, and I wanted to stay calm because I wanted it to be successful. I can, of course, say that I’m sick and I walk out of it, but I really was not well, but too much was depending on it for me, so I made the choice that I actually was going to try to apply my own tools in that very moment, and I did not tell the group.

But a couple of things that I did is basically noticing what I feel in my body, and allowing that, taking a deep breath before I started the workshop, allowing it to be there, and being with that pain that I felt while still delivering the content in front of the group, which, eventually, became a bit hard, and then I decided to actually also bring it into the workshop, and I decided to talk about it, and to share it with people, and to say, “Listen, this is what’s going on for me. We’ll try to keep going as much as we can, but if it doesn’t work out, we have to take a break for a moment.”

But what happened…so, there are different tools. This is one tool which is really about becoming comfortable with discomfort, and it was clearly not comfortable for me. And the reaction that you immediately feel is stress and you want to get away from it. But what we then do, what I teach also in a lot of the work that I do is stay with it and try to actually, with kindness and compassion, observe it and see if you can stay with it. And that builds resilience, which is a story that may sound weird.

But the interesting thing that happened for me in that moment that, eventually, it went away, and I was able to deliver whilst starting with discomfort. So, that’s just one version. Another version of this is getting close to a panic attack where I had to speak in public. And what happens for me is when I feel very stressed, I start shaking.

And so, there was a public presentation where I was. At the end, we were all able to ask questions, and I had a good question, I thought, and so I said I’ll put my hand up. And the man with the microphone was coming to me, and I started to feel nervous but I was ready to ask the question. But, halfway through, somebody else actually put their hand up and they also had a question, and he said, “You know what, I’ll come to you next, but I’ll first answer, I’ll first take this question.”

In that moment, I started to become very nervous and my heart started to beat faster. The trick in those moments is basically to be with it and to learn how to breathe well and not to push it away. Because the moment you do not want to feel the discomfort, it becomes worse. And that has everything to do with how our biology works, how our brain works. And if you dare to start accepting and embracing it, you will calm down.

And that’s exactly what happened. So, I could still be there. So, I was still able to be there and perform, yet on the inside, I wasn’t 100% calm. So, this is also what deliberate calm is about. It’s not always about feeling calm, but it is about being comfortable with this discomfort and then still being able to perform in a calm way, which is what you do.

We call that in the book, you pivot from a state of protection, which is the increased sympathetic nervous system arousal, to learning, which is still increased arousal but with an open brain and with an open space where you can be curious and still effective and adaptive and change your behavior in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, with this observation of kindness and compassion, can you tell us what that sounds like in terms of an internal dialogue? Let’s say I’m thinking, “Oh, I don’t want to do this thing. Aargh,” I’ve got some procrastination urges, and then there’s a number of approaches, like, “Come on, we’ve just got to power through. We’ve got make it happen. Buckle down.” It’s like, “We’re just getting started. We need to do a little pit,” like coaxing one’s self. But what is the internal dialogue of observation, kindness, compassion, embracing sound like in such a moment?

Jacqueline Brassey
I think the most important one in those moments is really about getting in touch with why this matter to you. Why is it important that you actually go through this challenge? Because if there’s no reason for it, why would you go through that discomfort? So, the reason why I do difficult things is because there’s a purpose for me. The reason why I talk about the topics that I find meaningful, also about I have a lot of work done in confidence and the confidence crisis and the anxiety that I have gone through in my life, and I do that because it’s meaningful for me to share and to help other people understand that they’re not alone.

So, doing difficult things for a reason helps a lot. So, the dialogue in my brain is really all about, “Why does this matter to me?” and I focus on what I will achieve by doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s say it doesn’t matter to you but it’s, I don’t know, mandatory, compulsory, it’s for someone else, you’re kind of on the hook.

Jacqueline Brassey
Okay. Yeah, well, when you’re on the hook, you can always find a meaning. You’re on the hook for a reason. And can you give me an example of what you’re thinking of?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s say taxes. It’s like, I don’t know, it’s not fun, it’s not meaningful. You just kind of got to do them.

Jacqueline Brassey
I don’t think you’d get into high-stakes unfamiliar territory with taxes. I think it’s high stakes definitely. Maybe. But the thing is, with taxes, you have the time to do that, and you can find the help to do that. It’s not fun but if you don’t do it, so it’s meaningful to do it because you will suffer if you don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, meaningful in the negative point then.

Jacqueline Brassey
Yeah. Well, you can also think of it, “With taxes, I contribute to this country and I can make a difference,” but that’s maybe for a whole different podcast.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Jacqueline Brassey
It totally depends, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Okay. Well, I think we drifted a little bit away from using voice. Can you give us a demonstration for how we use voice to get those soothing benefits?

Jacqueline Brassey
Absolutely. What happens when you feel stressed, you can start noticing that with yourself, if you try to actually control a situation. And maybe if you have kids, this may resonate. I have amazing kids but sometimes you feel like you’re out of control when it’s a mess in the house and they’re not doing exactly what they need to do, and you feel already tired, and you try to control the situation but your voice comes out in a different way. It becomes this squeaking type of voice, which is the sign of you feel powerless but also you feel stressed and you have a higher pitch. Often that is happening. Or, you start crackling, you’ve got a crackling voice.

The only way to change things, and that’s why this is part of deliberate calm, is, of course, being aware that this happens because, then, you can intervene. That’s why, in this book also, work so much on awareness and awareness in the moment, picking up the signs that you go into a state of distress or in state of protection, we call it, that can be picking of voices in your head but also physical cues or behavioral cues.

And one is your voice when it crackles or where you breathe from, and also when you notice that you do not have…you feel out of control, basically. So, when you notice that, take a deep breath, and I would absolutely recommend people to do Breathwork, which I do a lot. It helps me a ton. There are different versions, different ways of doing that. The most basic version if, of course, breathing from your diaphragm, from your belly, and try to calm your voice down, and go slightly lower than where you are at that moment. Don’t go too deep but you will learn actually by practicing what is a comfortable tone because you start noticing that if you do it, it calms yourself down.

Now, when that happens, it will have an effect on other people. It will have an effect on your children as well because there will be a different response when you shout and you feel out of control, or whether you stay calm and you have a different mindset about the situation. And that’s better for you and that’s better for another, so it’s a very simple tool. So, learning how to control that is super strong and powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Jackie. I’m thinking about Bob Ross right now.

Jacqueline Brassey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Is that kind of what it might sound like or could you give us a demo for what that tone is like?

Jacqueline Brassey
I’m calming down. Totally. Well, I have used my soft voice the whole podcast already so I’m not going any lower. I think the version that you just gave us was maybe a little bit too smooth but…

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, actually, I’m kind of having fun, Jackie. I might just keep it going. Can you tell us about, we talked about athletes a couple of times, you also have some work on flow. How, do tell us, can we enter flow?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, there is a lot of research, of course, on flow, and going there on demand is not always easy because that feels almost like you have to, when you want something, that’s not when you get it. But the circumstances for flow are also often determined by, “Do you feel you have space to focus? Are you working on something that you really care about, that is meaningful for you?”

So, for example, in my case, I can go totally in flow when I focus on my research topic and I have the space to research, and to deep dive in the area, and to write. When I get out of that is, I get out of that if I’m distracted and if I am, well, not feeling well, when I’m very tired, but also when I don’t have the space to go into flow. So, there’s also circumstances, of course, that you need to create to get into flow, and sometimes you can make it happen, sometimes it also happens because of the situation you’re in. You can be in a flow with a team, for example, and it all comes together.

The key is though, in all of that, is the sense of safety and enjoyment. There’s a lot of research on flow, and that is not, per se, being in a hugely stressful situation but it is an increased activity of performance where you feel a sense that what you do is really meaningful and you really enjoy and you feel safe. You feel also the space where you’re also not distracted. So, I guess that is different for everybody but you can create that, I’m convinced, by creating the right circumstances.

Do you remember moments that you have been in flow?

Pete Mockaitis
I do. I’m thinking about a time I was doing an analysis on top-performing episodes, and I was so immersed that I totally forgot I had to go pick up my son from preschool.

Jacqueline Brassey
Goodness.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “Whoa, check out these indicators.” And so, it was like, “How might I do a weighted average in terms of, like, scoring them in terms of given all these interesting data signals from Spotify and Apple Podcast and the emails?” And so, I was really just kind of playing with that and iterating and getting some ideas and moving forward, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I really should’ve left over half an hour ago.” And so, that’s what leaps to mind, it’s because, well, it was painful because then I had to do all sorts of apologizing and felt very silly.

Jacqueline Brassey
Was he safe?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, he was totally safe. He was just chilling with the assistant principal, and they’re like, “Hey.” It’s just like, “Oh, Pete, you owe us some money.” It’s like, “Yes, I do. I’m sorry. Thank you.”

Jacqueline Brassey
So, what happened there? Why did you go in flow? Because you love the topic, you were fascinated by what you saw.

Pete Mockaitis
It was. It was fascinating and there were elements of surprise, like, “Huh, I wouldn’t have expected that.” And then it was sort of they’re like little bite-sized mini questions and challenges that I was tackling, like, “Well, hey, what about this? Oh, I can just do that. Oh, that works. Oh, that doesn’t work. Hmm, maybe I can do it a little bit differently.”

And so, I cared about it and it was, I guess, I’m thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. It was in that right zone of it’s not crazily overwhelming, like, “I have no idea how I would even begin to do this.” And it wasn’t just a snooze, boring chore I can do in my sleep. It was pushing me but not overwhelming in the amount of push.

Jacqueline Brassey
Yeah. In a way, it’s low stakes but unfamiliar new territory where you use a lot of curiosity. It’s a wonderful experience. It resonates with me. I often go there. But, yeah, the danger is you forget about the rest of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Certainly. So, then what are the, perhaps, top do’s and don’ts if you are trying to set the stage to maximize the odds of entering flow? So, you care about the thing, you have the opportunity to focus, and maybe, you said it varies by a person. How about for you personally? What might you do?

Jacqueline Brassey
I actually enter often in flow when I’m on holidays or even in my free time because I love browsing, I love learning, and I love browsing on the internet, and I love jumping from one to the next. And so, at the core, for me, is really deep-diving in a topic that matters a lot, and learning new things, and getting up to speed on the latest insights. And I can totally spend hours and hours just going from one to the next. It’s so much like hopping from one island to the other island, and it’s amazing.

So, yeah, it’s in a space when I have not a lot of stressful things to do, and there’s not a lot of autopilot stuff that you need to do, but there is really space for creating new things. And, in a way, that is in between, if you talk about deliberate calm, we really also focus on the crisis of uncertainty. It’s not what this is about. And it’s also not completely in your comfort zone. It is, indeed, as you said, a little bit of that excitement and that focus, so it is the effort, but you need to have the space for it to happen.

And, for me, that often happens on holidays and in my free time. It doesn’t happen on a normal day where there’s always a lot of stuff coming into the inbox and phones that ring, and things that need to happen that take me out of flow.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Jackie, any final top tips on some of this stuff before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, a top tip for me, I would say this not really a quick fix. This is a set of skills and, as I said, this is a lifestyle and something that you can learn, and absolutely worth it. It’s also a set of skills that do not go out of date because you take them with you for the rest of your life, but I would give it a try. So, this was just the last reflection. Think about why, actually, what is more important, why would you do it, why does it matter to you. And why it matters to me, Pete, is it’s really about it really has brought me so much opportunity but also reaching my full potential, and enjoying life much more than before.

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

Jacqueline Brassey
Oh, yes, my favorite quote is actually from a math teacher from my high school, who I remember very well. He said, “You can do much more than you think.” And that was in a discussion that we had, I think I was 14 years old, in the class, where people were talking about, “Are you born with talent for math or can you learn it?” And he said, “You can do much more than you think if you put the effort in.”

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

Jacqueline Brassey
Well, I mentioned it already. A couple of favorite people that I study is… Andrew Huberman from Stanford. His podcast is amazing, also the work that he does. But I also like the work from Stanford’s Alia Crum, Adam Grant, Francesca Gino. Absolutely my favorites. And what excites me a lot is bringing insights from neuroscience and business together and leadership development. So, cross-disciplinary research.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jacqueline Brassey
One of my all-time favorites is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.

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

Jacqueline Brassey
My favorite tools, a couple of my favorite tools are Breathwork, I walk every day, and I run. So, movement, cardio movement, which brings me in a state of creativity, and it’s also good physically. And voice techniques, I just mentioned one. And also, embodiments experience with really being and feeling situations. So, instead of being in my brain, I just try to feel the stress or the positive stress in my body.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Jacqueline Brassey
I‘m not sure if I noticed it, that you do that as well, but a favorite habit or a favorite feedback tool that I use are biofeedback, one of the tools. And I cannot recommend one over the other but one of the tools that I have is an Oura Ring.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. You saw mine.

Jacqueline Brassey
I think I saw yours. And I try more tools, actually, than only this, but I really love it. I think there’s a huge potential in it. And it helps also to be more aware and to take care of yourself. But I love the improving science around it and also the power and potential of these tools.

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

Jacqueline Brassey
I’m actually very active on LinkedIn. I post a lot, interact a lot there on social, also on other, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And if people want to find more about Deliberate Calm and our work at McKinsey and at McKinsey Health Institute, they can find that very easily by just Googling Jackie Brassey and McKinsey.

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

Jacqueline Brassey
Yeah, I would love to ask people to really think through why it matters what they do. Think about the purpose and think what really is important for them. Life is too short to focus your time on stuff that doesn’t matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Jackie, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and deliberate calm.

Jacqueline Brassey
Thank you so much, Pete. It was lovely being here with you. A lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
April, thanks for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

April Rinne
Thank you so much. I’m delighted to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to hear about the wisdom you have to share about flux. But, first, I want to hear about your notorious handstands. What is the story here?

April Rinne
Oh, I’ve been outed. So, I have been doing handstands for most of my life. Learned to do them as a child, as a gymnast, and then kept doing them. And then, at a certain point in my life, realized that none of my friends that I was doing them with as a child were doing them anymore, and it became a bit of a, like, signature, I suppose. So, I travel a lot, I work internationally, and back in my 20s, actually, some family members challenged me to take a photo of myself doing handstands when I would go to interesting places. They did not realize how seriously I would take them on that challenge.

And so, here we are years later, have visited more than a hundred countries and have handstands in the most random but also most interesting of places. And so, my goal is to keep doing them when I’m hopefully in triple digits. We’ll see.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. I sort of imagine you, I don’t know, you’re at the Taj Mahal or something doing handstands, and then like you’re gathering a crowd, and so that you are also the tourist attraction. Has that happened?

April Rinne
It’s funny you bring that up. Yes, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids of Giza, the Coliseum in Rome, take your pick of well-known but also really off the beaten path places as well. And what I love is that the vast majority of my handstands over the years have been done when I’ve been traveling on my own. Now, my husband does travel with me and he knows the drill. He’s a wonderful photographer. But most of the time, I actually have to find somebody to take this picture, which means introducing myself to a stranger and trying to explain to them, and often their native language is not English.

So, I’m trying to explain to them in a foreign language that I’m going to stand on my hands and they need to take a picture. And, of course, you get this look of like, “I don’t think I understand what you’re saying at all. And if I do understand what you’re saying, you’re crazy.” And then we sort of go through the paces and they get it, and then, oftentimes, yes, a small crowd gathers, which is just fun in terms of meeting locals. But kids start tumbling and joining in, people start laughing and shouting, it becomes a bit of just like a little celebration, I suppose.

And, for me, it’s not, at that point, about the handstand. It’s about immediately getting to break the ice with people I wouldn’t otherwise get to meet. And it has often led to cups of coffee or tea afterwards, or like, “Tell us about your family,” or, usually, “Where is your husband? Why are you travelling alone?” those sorts of things as well. So, thanks for asking. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s just cool. Well, I don’t have a clever segue but maybe there is one.

April Rinne
Upside-down perspective on the world is what I call it, which leads into how we navigate change.

Pete Mockaitis
You do the work for me. This is perfect. Well, yeah, let’s hear about your book, Flux: 8 Superpowers for Thriving in Constant Change. What is the big idea behind this book?

April Rinne
Yeah, the big idea is that in a world and a future that is full of change and constant relentless change, that we, as humans, need to radically reshape our relationship to uncertainty to have a healthy and productive outlook.

Pete Mockaitis
Well-said. So, radically reshape our relationship to uncertainty, I’m sure there’s variability and variation quite a bit from person to person. But if you had to generalize, what would you say is the “typical” relationship to uncertainty? And what is an optimal transformation of it to where are we now and where “should” it be?

April Rinne
Yeah, great question. Well, let’s just pause for a minute and think about change, which includes uncertainty, but just a sense of something what is or was something is becoming something else. Change is messy, it’s complicated. Humans tend to love change we opt into. So, a new relationship, a new job, a new adventure, a new haircut. We tend to really resist change we can’t control. So, the kind of change that blindsides you on a Tuesday afternoon, it goes against your expectations, it disrupts your plans, and it creates an environment of uncertainty.

Now, a change that’s easy for you might be really, really hard for me, and vice versa. We know that more change and uncertainty is around the corner, yet knowing this often freaks us out. So, you sort of get these layers of like it’s complicated and it’s really messy. But when it comes to uncertainty, there’s also this piece, like humans really want to be able to know what’s going to happen. We want things to go our way. We want to command, predict, control, engineer the future. And the last 18 months, but we can come back to this, I didn’t write the book about the last 18 months. The last 18 months, however, have been an incredible kind of wakeup to just how unfit, how outdated that way of seeing the world and our place in it is.

And so, this radical reshaping is like, wow, we have structured, and we can come back to this, part of it is neurobiology, neuroscience, part of it is psychology, part of it is just the human condition, we have in many ways, I think, deluded ourselves into believing that we can predict and control and command the future, and that we can have certainty, and that we can, yeah, predict things and know what’s going to happen. And nothing could be farther from the truth.

And in a world in flux, and when we think about flux as constant relentless change, and before you’ve responded to one change, something else has happened, the list goes on and on and on. And that’s actually what the future looks like. More of that, not less, that there is this kind of, “Oh, this isn’t just a wakeup call. This is also a kind of warmup for what’s ahead. And how can we get ahead of that? Instead of constantly reacting to change that something happens and you’re trying to triage it? How can we reshape our relationship to change from the inside out to be fit for this world in flux which is very different than the kind of world many of us were taught to believe we lived in?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is quite a question, and part of me wonders, “Is that even possible?” I take it you think the answer is yes. Could you share with us an inspiring example or case study of someone who’s just a flux master?

April Rinne
Well, I love that you bring this up because, by and large, humans are really pretty bad at this, and that’s part of why I wrote the book. I like to say that I’ve been working on this book since 2018, so it’s been the better part of three years, like in the writing, but it’s really been more like three decades in the making, in the seeding of these ideas. And a big chunk of that time was spent both as a futurist and a strategist, also just as a human and observing that, on the whole, humans, we can adapt to change pretty well when we’re forced to, when our back is against the wall.

But as a proactive, kind of, “I’m going to lean into change because it’s good for me, or I’m actually going to see a change I don’t want to have happen, I’m going to see that nonetheless as an opportunity for growth and learning and improvement,” we don’t do that naturally. And what was making me and, candidly, continuous to make me very concerned about humans moving forward, both individually and collectively as humanity, is that we are, in many cases, stuck in mindsets and with what I call scripts that are not fit for a world in flux, and we need help.

And so, I can point to individuals that are good at certain of the flux superpowers, let’s say. But on the whole, and at the risk of generalizing, are we really fit? Are our mindsets grooved for a future of constant relentless change? I reckon they are not. But in that is an enormous opportunity for each and every one of us to level up. So, we can come back to some of the examples, but I want to put that out there. Now, you might prove me wrong here, Pete, but I’ve never met anybody who’s like, “Change. Tick that box. I’m good.”

Everyone struggles with some part of it, but we’ve all developed our own unique ways of dealing with it, talking about it, feeling about it, etc. There’s a lot we can learn from one another, but I believe we are very early into this journey into a future full of flux but, as such, we will all have homework to do but we’ve all also been given, I look at it, almost like this gift of growth and improvement by upgrading our mental muscles about change.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, sure. Could we hear an example of someone who has got at least a couple of the superpowers of flux going for them that seems to be doing pretty good when it comes to constant relentless change in their world?

April Rinne
Yeah. An example that I often talk about in regards to flux, and again it’s not all eight superpowers, it’s a couple of them, but it is Airbnb and founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia. And if you go back, and here I’ll tease out a few of the flux superpowers, they built this company that’s home-sharing.

They saw value in empty space in people’s homes that hotels wrote them off as crazy and foolish, said, “This is never going to go anywhere.” Lo and behold, one of the eight flux superpowers is to see what’s invisible. They saw value in what other people couldn’t see. They saw invisible value, basically, and tapped into that and unlocked it, and created a company that is more valuable than the five largest hotel chains combined. That’s a very flux-y way of seeing one’s business model, if you will, to see what’s invisible, find what other people can’t see, and unlock the value that’s in that.

But, at the same time, another one of the flux superpowers is called “Start with trust.” Again, go back to Airbnb, what were people telling them? “This is crazy. People will never stay in other people’s homes. Why would we trust other humans?” And I’m looking at this always against the backdrop of, “How do we navigate change?” and think about who you turn to when change really hits. You turn to your trusted relationships. And if you don’t have many, you’re in a world of hurt far greater than if you do.

And Airbnb, early on, signaled, “We actually think humans are trustworthy. This isn’t blind trust or naïve trust, but we actually think that we can build a business around humans trusting one another.” Lo and behold, they have. And that, too, I’m looking at this from the perspective of, “How do we navigate change together? How do we navigate change better?”

So, I’ll pause there but those are some of the superpowers start kind of surfacing as we dig deeper.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe let’s have a quick overview of the eight superpowers and maybe have your definition and a sentence or two for what that means, and then we’ll see where to dig deeper.

April Rinne
Yeah, sure. So, there are eight flux superpowers, and I always like to say they’re a menu, not a syllabus so you do not have to do one before two, or two before three, but they stand on their own and they also enhance one another. So, the first flux superpower is to “Run slower,” which says that in a world with an ever-faster pace of change, your key to success is to slow your own pace. And I’ll put in a quick caveat here too. Each and every one of these is counterintuitive in some way. It goes against what, oftentimes, society teaches us. We can circle back to this if you’d like.

The second flux superpower is one that I was just talking about, which is, “See what’s invisible.” And this says that when the future feels uncertainty or blurry, rather than focusing on what’s visible and what’s straight in front of you, we need to focus on what’s invisible. Now this includes both identifying your blind spots but also uncovering new forms of value, new forms of talent, new ideas, new forms of inspiration.

The third flux superpower is “Get lost,” which is all about going beyond your comfort zone and your relationship with the unknown. The fourth flux superpower is “Start with trust,” that says when trust seems broken, assume good intent. And this is all about, as I was mentioning, how we navigate change better together.

The fifth flux superpower is, “Know your enough.” And this gets at our quest for happiness and satisfaction, and really the tension between our obsession with more, kind of more, more, more everything, and how that’s mostly making people miserable, in my experience. The way I like to put it is when you’re always after more, you will never ever find enough. And, yet, when you know you’re enough, you’ll immediately begin to see abundance. And, again, more, we can think of as more income, more power, more prestige, more love, more likes, more clicks, more everything.

So, what does it mean to “Know your enough”? And that’s Y-O-U-R. People often ask me if that’s a typo, and I say no. Knowing your enough includes knowing that you are enough just as you are without doing anything more. So, we can come back to that if you’d like.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny when I read that, I guess I didn’t even think about the apostrophe, and I was like, “Know your enough. Like, your number, your level. And what is the level at which it is enough?” which could be different for you versus me versus another. But, yeah, layers. Thank you. Okay, what’s next?

April Rinne
So, the sixth flux superpower is “Create your portfolio career.” This is about designing your professional development and identity in ways that are fit for a future of work in flux. And the punchline here is that I firmly believe that the career of the future looks far less like a singular path to pursue and much more like your portfolio that you create and curate as an artist or an investor would.

The seventh superpower is “Be all the more human,” which gets at our relationship to technology and the tension that we have in spending ever more time with our devices, yet ever less time with one another. And last, but not least, the eighth flux superpower is “Let go of the future,” which is all about our relationship to control, something I have found is tricky for most everyone today, and I always put a caveat on this one as well.

Letting go of the future does not mean giving up. It does not mean failure. It does not mean doomsday-ing. It actually means quite the opposite. So, again, going back to this counterintuitive-ness, even this contrarian-ness, that pervades much of the thesis of flux.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Ooh, so much fun there. So, tell us then, when it comes to professionals seeking to be awesome at their jobs, what’s your take on what is the most important yet also most rare of these superpowers that we should really zero in on cultivating?

April Rinne
Well, I’m not sure that I would put the most important and the most rare…

Pete Mockaitis
We could take two. We’ll take two.

April Rinne
Yeah, I think we’ll do two because I can definitely tell you which ones are most popular. Let me do this, I’m going to put out a few because they’re all very, very sticky for professionals in the workplace of how to be awesome at your job. No question.

So, no doubt, no question, or perhaps no surprise, the first superpower “Run slower” absolutely popular and difficult because this is burnout, this is exhaustion, this is anxiety, this is “Why am I doing what I’m doing? Why am I constantly…? Why am I in this rat race? Why am I on this hamster wheel? How did I end up here? This is not what I had planned for my profession, for my livelihood, etc.” So, “Run slower” for sure.

Interestingly, as soon as you start getting into “Run slower” you do end up often over at “Know your enough,” and that’s sort of, “How do we define what is valuable and important? And what metrics are you using not just to judge how you show up at work and what you ‘do’ but also how you show up in life?” And so, it really starts to unpack some of our values and whether or not those values are reflected at our organization, so on and so forth.

And then the third one, which, not surprisingly, it is the one superpower that is related to work and the workplace, and that is “Create your portfolio career.” So, any of those would be ones I would start with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, when we talk about “Knowing your enough,” Y-O-U-R, no apostrophe, tells us, how do we arrive at that knowledge?

April Rinne
Arriving at that knowledge, I think there’s a process of kind of peeling back the layers of your unique onion around this. And I like to ask people, and this does relate to every one of the superpowers in some way, kind of getting your flux baseline is what I call it. And most people haven’t really thought a lot about their relationship to change as a whole. We’re busy reacting to change, “Something happened and I need to do something about it.”

But we’re not really thinking about, “What are the things, what are the emotions, and the feelings, and the experiences, that are driving me to react in the way that I am? And what is…” what I call in the book, “What is my script about change? What are the stories and the narratives and the norms that I’ve been taught about how the world is supposed to work, and what my role in it is supposed to be?”

And I share this because a lot of our scripts, really, it’s directly related to knowing your enough, a lot of our scripts are increasingly being shown to be not that fit for a world in flux. They’re quite good for worlds that we can command and control, and sort of tie up in a neat tidy bow, but they’re not that good for when the future you thought you were going to have just sort of melts or falls apart or doesn’t work out like you thought it would be, like you thought it would, which I think many of us had experienced in different ways over the last 18 months.

So, back to knowing your enough. For a lot of people, and here I would include myself, we were taught that more is better, and like inherently better, and that the more you had, the more important you were, the more valuable you were to society. And I think, for a lot of people, that’s more money but also more power, more prestige, more love, more choices, more clothes, more clicks. Like, I was saying, it’s more everything.

And, yet, look around and ask yourself, “What is that getting me? Is more actually…?” and here I would say in the workplace, the more meetings you have, the more productive you are. The more productive you are, we can come back and question, meetings are not a good metric for productivity, but the more hours I work.

Pete Mockaitis
The more emails you get, the more important you are. The more emails you send, the more productive you are.

April Rinne
Yes. Yes. And, yet, and again, we can put this on a financial metric, an emotional metric, a workplace metric, take your pick, more is mostly making us miserable. It’s not necessarily leading to greater happiness or satisfaction. It’s not necessarily…it might be making us feel more productive if you’re measuring your life in how many emails you send, but not if you’re measuring it necessarily in outputs, impacts, ways, number of people that you’re able to serve and better, and the quality of your own life that you’re living.

And so, what I like to ask people, the punchline, the metric for this superpower is, “What is your enough-ness? Have you thought about your point of enough?” Because what I find a lot of times, and I’m generalizing a bit here, but we are, particularly in Western culture, we are really over-indexed on stuff. We have more. A lot of people have more than they need in terms of stuff, and whether that’s cars or clothes or physical possessions. But we’re kind of under-indexed on a lot of the humanity stuff. We actually don’t have enough human connection. We don’t have enough dignity. We don’t have enough tolerance. We don’t have enough integrity. So, we’ve got this kind of too much and not enough but not really a sense of what’s in the middle.

And so, I ask people, “What do you have too much of and what do you have too little of?” And too little can include, “I have too few hours in the day,” “I have too little time to spend with my family,” “I have too little…” and you get into this sense of where we have a culture of insufficiency. And so, finding your enough requires getting clear on, “What are you over- and under-indexed on?” And, partly, I’m not giving one specific answer here because everyone’s equation, everyone’s relationship is different because each of us has a different lived-experienced and different things that we’re strong at, weak at, etc.

And so, it’s interesting because even on the enough factor, “Did you grow up with enough love in your household?” I know it sounds a little bit woo-woo but, in fact, not enough love and care as a child will show up in all kinds of ways as an adult but don’t actually get you closer to your enough. You start to compensate for love with money, etc. And so, all of this, I throw out to get people to start peeling back the layers of their own onion around enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s really thought-provoking in terms of what you have too much of and not enough of. And it’s funny, when it comes to money, maybe nobody would say they have too much money but they might say that they have more than enough money, so you can just change the words around a little bit.

April Rinne
Well, what’s interesting, can I…? Oh, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
Go take it away, yeah.

April Rinne
So, this cycle of more. And, again, to be really clear on all of these things, I am not saying that more is bad or anything. I’m just saying let’s get clear on what’s really what here. I’m not saying that for any of the superpowers, I’m not saying like the counter is not good or bad. It’s more like, “Have you thought about this that there are more options on the table than you might realize?”

Here’s the thing about more though, how many people do you know that say, “I will be happy when…” “I will be successful when…” “I will be…” fill in the blanks, when? When implies that you don’t have something you need. You need more. And, yet, when you get to that point, so let’s just say more money, “When I have more money…” then what do you need? You need more money. It’s no longer enough. You need more.

And you get on this kind of vicious cycle that feeds on itself and that never allows you to acknowledge and rest and be easy with enough. And that’s the part we get stuck, call it a hamster wheel, call it our own monkey brain that’s kind of running laps around our minds, but it keeps people from realizing that, actually, a decision to be happy, it actually can happen right now. And when you realize that you might already have enough, and that’s kind of that’s your point of sufficiency, satisfaction, again not too little, not too much, that’s the kind of contentedness. And we can talk about the difference between happiness and contentedness, but that sense of kind of peace and comfort as opposed to this drive for ever more.

Now, I’m not saying don’t strive, don’t try to do things, and I’m not saying…What’s interesting too is if you want more and more and more, okay, what’s that more going to get you? And this is where it gets super interesting because of the belief that if you want more, let’s just use money, you want more money so that you can hoard it or keep it for yourself, okay, I’m not sure how much better that’s going to make the world.

But if you want more in order that you can share it with others, in order that you can gift it, be generous, help better the lives of others, that’s actually a pretty good more but you’re not keeping that for yourself. So, you start getting into issues around ego and generosity as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I guess if we talk about hoarding it, like you probably won’t feel much impact in terms of, “I want more money because, I don’t know, going in an unsafe neighborhood with my children, and I’m worried that they’ll be shot.” Okay. Well, if you have more money and you get to a different neighborhood, you’ll probably feel that as an upgrade in the happiness and peace and contentment parts of your life versus, “You know, I’ve got one million in my mutual fund account, and two is just so much cooler,” then you probably won’t even feel that impact at all except when you refresh the page and go, “Oh, two. Nice. Now it should be three.” There you are.

April Rinne
Yeah. And it’s interesting and, if I may, I’m going to share a personal story here because it factors in exactly into what we’re talking about. And it is interesting because a lot of times people are like, “Oh, I want more money because it’s actually a hedge against uncertainty.” And I totally get that. It is kind of the more money you have, the more options you have, the more ways that you can potentially navigate uncertainty and change. That’s somewhat true.

I also would say that that way of thinking can blind you to what’s really needed when we navigate change. And the story I have to tell, it relates to why I ended up writing the book as well, and I sort of mentioned that I bring the lens of a futurist to change, I bring the lens of a global traveler and global citizen, if you will, to change, but I also bring other human and lived-experience with change and uncertainty. And I often say that my journey or my baptism entry into flux began more than 25 years ago when I was in college and both of my parents died in a car accident.

And I share this because I was 20, and speaking of careers and jobs and all of that, 20 is a really interesting age because I was old enough to be living on my own. I was at college. I could take care of myself day to day, but I was young enough, I really did not know how the world worked or my role in it, all of that. And it had a profound effect on how I thought about my career and how I thought about more versus enough.

Now, back then, I never would’ve expected that I’d read a book about this kind of thing. That wasn’t in the plan at all. But I started asking questions at the age of 20 that I now see, many years later, people going through some kind of a mid-life crisis or some kind of real-life, “What is my purpose on earth?” kind of thing. And the question that I would ask myself every day was, “If I were to die tomorrow…” because look what just happened. No one knows how long we have, “If I were to die tomorrow, what would the world need me to do today?”

And it wasn’t about me, like, “What do I need?” my ego. It was, “What does the world need?” because we all have finite time, and we all have a lot we want to contribute and can contribute to others. So, I keep asking myself this question, and then the answer was never “Get more money.” It wasn’t. It was this sense of, “Yes, I need enough money, for sure.” At that point, I was 20, I became, overnight, self-sufficient. There was no back stop. There was no house to go home to, so to speak, when my parents died. It was like, “Okay, I’ve got to figure out a way to move forward.”

And so, it was very clear to me that I needed enough money to be able to take care of myself, but anything over that became like this, “Is that what the world needs from me today?” And it’s interesting because I spend a lot of time talking to people about grief and loss and this kind of change and uncertainty, and, “What do you do when you don’t know what to do?” as well. And never, never has the answer been, on someone’s deathbed, that, “Oh, I wish I’d earned more money.” It has definitely been, “I wish I’d prioritized my family more. I wish I’d gone after that job that spoke to my heart, but maybe I would’ve earned a little bit less,” kind of thing.

And so, it’s interesting because even when it comes to how to become awesome at your job, these are the kinds of value judgments and value assessments that we’re doing all the time. And I think one of the best ways to be awesome at your job is to make sure that you’ve got a job that aligns with some of these bigger even existential questions, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, thank you. That’s powerful and a lot there. And so, it sounds like you’ve worked through some powerful questions that really get you places. Can you maybe give us a rundown of some of the most insight-provoking questions and how you recommend sitting with them effectively?

April Rinne
What a great question. So, I don’t mean for this to be a pitch for the book but it’s going to sound that way, and that is simply that, at the end of each chapter, I wrote the books because I wanted to help people ask these questions. And these questions that don’t…they don’t have easy answers, and the point is not to come up with the answer. The point is to actually sit with them and think about, “Wow, I’ve been so focused on metrics A, B, C, I hadn’t even paused to consider what might be behind that or this other set of questions.”

So, at the end of each chapter, there are a series of five questions for each chapter that are designed to provoke exactly this kind of thing, and, again, each one tailored to the superpower. So, I’m wondering which one you want start with. What’s interesting is the “Know your enough” is kind of the questions that we were just going after. Like, “What do you have too much of? What do you have too little of? Have you ever thought of that before?” And, also, “Could you draw what enough looks like to you? Don’t write it. Could you draw a picture?”

That gets really interesting because if you have somebody who’s drawing a bunch of houses and cars and stuff, that’s one view of what is more. But then, actually, if you see somebody who draws a kind of Earth where humans are connected and it’s sort of peaceful, that’s still enough but it’s a different worldview. So, that’s “Know your enough.” But let’s just take another one, “Start with trust.” It gets really interesting.

So, generally speaking, are you quick to trust or to mistrust? Just your default, like, if you don’t know otherwise, do you trust or mistrust? And why? Where does that come from? Most people, our tendency and the script that society has taught us is that humans should not trust one another. That, candidly, Pete, I shouldn’t trust you right now and you should not trust me. That’s what society says. And, yet, where did that come from? Like, really? Because we’re in the midst of a trust crisis and trust is the way forward and yet we’re doing everything we can to undermine it.

And so, you start unpacking questions around trust and you start realizing how often, without our even noticing it, we have a narrative in our mind that humans, on average, are not trustworthy. And what’s worse, very few people actually trust themselves. I mean, we learn to. But, like, how does it feel, do you trust yourself? How does it feel when others don’t trust you? Oh, it turns out, you don’t actually generally trust other people.

So, we’re trying to reset our relationship to trust because, as I was saying earlier, trust is the path forward. If we don’t figure out that one thing, there is not a future in which any of us actually can have a lot of hope. But when we learn to start with trust, and what I call design from trust, a whole new universe of opportunities and goodness of others shows up.

So, those kinds of very essential questions. Back to “Run slower” do you feel like you’re running faster today? Why? Where did that come from? When did it start? Is it something you’re driving yourself to do or others are driving you to do it? You got to get this baseline and then you can start saying, “Okay, how do I need to kind of bring the pendulum back, bring more balance, harmony into my life?” And then, in the book, the superpowers are kind of the how-to and what are the practices and disciplines and exercises that you go through to improve that part of your relationship to change.

Pete Mockaitis
And on that trust stuff, it gets me thinking of Dan Ariely’s work, and it’s not bad. Yeah, people do cheat but humans are pretty good. It depends on the context and all kinds of variables that you modify but it could be a lot worse.

April Rinne
Right. Well, I love that you bring that up because I am not saying there aren’t bad apples out there. I’m not saying blind trust, or naïve trust, or just like willy-nilly trust but don’t verify kind of thing. But what’s fascinating to me is that we have designed so many of our structures, institutions, systems, from the basic premise that the average individual cannot be trusted, and that’s the key. Because when we design that if we don’t know, we do not trust.

A minor flip of the switch that, again, you need to account for bad things happening and some people not being trustworthy, but if you treat that as the exception not the rule, you design a different system. And that’s where it gets fascinating because what happens when we design from a premise of mistrust, we throw out so much goodness in people. When I think about, “Would I rather assume that people are good and have an abundance of goodness and generosity show up, and, yeah, I may have to pay a price every now and again, bad calculation, didn’t work out,” versus, “I’m going to live my life assuming that no one is trustworthy, and live in a system that is designed for untrustworthiness?” you’re basically sucking the life out of you and the people around you. So, you do have to be willing that you won’t always get it right, but that price you’re going to pay is worth its weight 10,000-fold over for all the goodness and generosity that you’re going to see instead.

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

April Rinne
Oh, goodness. FluxMindset.com? No, it’s a joy to join you today. I’m really just happy to be able to share more about it. And, yeah, the way I like to put it is when everything is in flux, everything can benefit from a flux mindset. So, there you have it.

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

April Rinne
One of my favorite quotes is inspired by the last superpower, “Let go of the future,” and it’s by Lao Tzu who wrote the Tao Te Ching, and it is, “When I let go of who I am, I become what I might be.” So, I love that. Lots of good quotes from Lao Tzu.

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

April Rinne
I think one of the books that shows up in Flux, and I continue to refer to time and again, is called The Body Keeps the Score and it’s about the relationship between mind and body, particularly around trauma, but there’s a lot around just anxiety and mental health. And the body of research that’s in this book around how our body holds what our minds and hearts and souls are feeling, but without necessarily words, the ways that shows up and how much we need to pay attention to our bodies, and the kinds of things that we’re holding that we’re often burying, absolutely cannot recommend that book enough.

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

April Rinne
I was thinking about this because it’s so basic and yet so powerful. I use Post-its. I use Post-its for absolutely everything. I have a wall that’s covered in Post-its on any given day. If you ask my husband, when I travel, what’s the first thing I pack on a business trip, it’s actually Post-its. So, it’s simple but it has been my super tool over the years.

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

April Rinne
There are increasingly ones about flux but I actually kind of want to come full circle on this one, back to the handstands. And it does show up a little bit in the superpower “See what’s invisible,” but this whole notion of the upside-down perspective on the world. So, I do have people often quoting some aspects of my handstands and upside-down perspective. Why bring this up is that we are trained to see things, literally, figuratively right-side up. There’s one way that you look at something.

And, yet, this goes beyond change. When we flip our perspective, and here I’ll say literally and figuratively, when we look at something upside-down, we see it completely differently. And what I can tell you is sometimes it looks even better. So, I love this like flip your perspective, go upside-down, see something you’ve been struggling with in a fresh light, you might not only see it better but you might find your solution in your path forward.

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

April Rinne
FlexMindset.com is for all things Flux and book related. AprilRinne.com is my personal site where you will find the handstands.

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

April Rinne
I’m going to show my bias but it is all about think about get clear on your flux baseline, groove a flux mindset, open a flux mindset, harness your flux superpowers, and reshape your relationship to change from the inside out from here on forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. April, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck in your fluxing.

April Rinne
Thank you very much, Pete. And may the flux be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.