KF #30. Self-Development Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, welcome.

Andrew LaCivita
Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, I would love to hear, you’re a renowned career coach, you’ve seen a lot of clients, learned a lot of things in your day, could you kick us off by sharing a particularly surprising or counterintuitive discovery you’ve made about us professionals and what we got to do to really stand out and advance?

Andrew LaCivita
One of the things that I’ve noticed as a consultant, as a recruiter, and now as a career coach, I would tell people, and most people don’t…I don’t know that we’ve ever wired to think this way. “We’re wired to go to our jobs, do a great job, learn how to do your trade do, it well, and you will have a good career if you can do your job well. But if you want to have a great career, like you really want to stand out, you want to be the best of the best, or the happiest of the happiest, it’s working more on yourself.”

And in order to work more on yourself, you have to, it’s just like building your bank account. When you get paid, the first thing that, what we hope you do if you want to save money or invest it, is to actually take money out of your check and then put it into your savings account so that it builds over time. It’s the same thing with your career, is that working on yourself, it needs to be planned first or at least a non-negotiable.

What I do every week, which I think is an odd habit that people would think is counterintuitive, is when I plan my week, I actually plan my skill-building time first. So, I pay myself first, I work on myself first, and then everything else gets planned in, but it gets planned in after that. So, I would say that’s kind of a counterintuitive habit that I have, and I just I think it’s really a key to being successful and enjoying your career. And I think that way you will always feel like you’re growing as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s very resonant. We’ve had a couple guests hit that point in terms of someone asking the question, “Well, how much time are you spending working on you?” And for some, it’s like, “Uh, I guess none. Oops.” Or folks will say, “You know, the time you spend in this strategic, skill-building stuff is the most rewarding ROI time there is if you want to be the best of the best in terms of advancement and financially, income, salary stuff,” or I love the way you said it, “or the happiest of the happy, that it takes some development just to feel great in the midst of challenges and stuff going on.”

Andrew LaCivita
So my company, milewalk, during the period between 2004 and 2019, so 15 years or so, we would run surveys every year and we probably totaled up maybe about 20,000 people over the course of the 15 years, had contributed data, and we would always ask them, “Why did you leave your current job? Why are you unhappy in your current position?” things of that nature. There were a variety of questions, but one of the top three reasons was, “I’m not learning anything.”

And I think a big part of that is people expect their organizations to teach them. And while the best organizations will teach them, you can outsource a lot of things but your own career is not one of them. So, if you truly want to develop, you have to take accountability, which means creating space in your life to do that. And I coach a lot of people on a high-performance basis.

And those individuals who want to become the best at their craft, when they enlist my help for how to go about, “What skills do I need to build? How do I build them?” we work together on this stuff, one of the first things I ask them is, “Can you show me your calendar?”

And, inevitably, a lot of them say, “Why, do you want to schedule our future sessions?” I say, “No, I want to see on your calendar where you’ve actually planned time in order to build those skills to achieve those goals that you just told me about.” And inevitably, they don’t have any. They just assume that they’re going to get it on the 9:00 to 5:00 job. And I said, “Well, everybody’s got the playbook. Everybody can learn how to build their widget or provide their service. It’s all those other skills you need to become better,” and like you said, live the more rewarding career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Andy, we are speaking the same language. It’s pretty essential to take ownership of your career and your skills, otherwise, you’re just rolling the dice, you’re gambling. You may or may not have fantastic coaches and mentors present in your workplace who say, “Hey, Andy, tell me, what are you working on? Where do you want to go? What are your strengths? How can we make sure we can build your development plan into what you’re up to, and the assignments that you’re getting, and reflecting, and mentoring, and turning everything into wisdom-generating stuff?”

Some people have that, and it’s a dream come true and it’s precious if you do. Heads up, that’s very special and you may want to stick around. But a lot of people sure don’t. Could you maybe guesstimate, for us in terms of the state of the world of work in the United States in the 2020s, what proportion of us have a phenomenal work, learning culture system, versus what proportion of us really better get proactive in a hurry if we want to get where we’re going?

Andrew LaCivita
I’ll give you kind of what I think the stats are. Interestingly, we all go to work thinking our companies are going to have these career development plans for us, “We’re going to work for a boss who’s going to teach us. We’re going to work for a boss who’s going to care for us, let us know what we need to do so we can get promoted and get paid more and be happier and so on.” I would bet, and by the way, I don’t like at my fingertips have this stat, but I’m going to give you my feel based on, now I want to tell you where I’m drawing the data from.

I was an information technology and management consultant from 1988 to 2004, so a long time, and at that time I’d coached and consulted to 150 companies. Between 2004 and 2019 with milewalk, that’s another 200 companies, so 350 companies. I’ve seen tens of thousands of people working individually with them. Looking at the organizations that I consulted to or recruited for, looking at the individuals I coach in all the companies they work for, knowing statistically that most people in the United States work for a small- to medium-sized company, so not a lot of people work for Coca-Cola, IBM, and these largest of companies. Most people work for small- to mid-sized companies, just statistically more than half.

So, when you think about how many organizations actually have a structured, well-thought-out career development model, I would probably say 90% do not. Meaning, one in ten are probably fortunate enough to actually have some type of structured career development model in place that says, “You’re this level. These are the skillsets we expect you to have, the level of proficiency we expect you to have them. If you want to go to the next level here’s what you need to work on. We have succession planning processes, career development processes, coaching and mentoring processes.” I would 1 in 10 would be my swag, so that is not a statistic I can claim to know.

But I would say that’s the state, and I would guess it’s worldwide.

Pete Mockaitis
Andy, that’s powerful. And you’re bringing me back some memories on a couple of the these. One, you said management consulting, and I worked at Bain for a while.

Andrew LaCivita
Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And then when you talk about the structured situation, boy, you’re right, I haven’t seen it anywhere else in my own career and talking to many other people in terms of like, “Okay, are you an associate consultant six months into your career? Well, at this point, we now expect for you to conduct zero-defect analysis.

It’s like, “Okay, so six months in, we expect for you to stop making visible mistakes in the data,” which is pretty intimidating, frankly. The nightmare of many an associate consultant, having dreams of waking up in a spreadsheet, has happened to me before. But that’s very clear. So, we have a table there, I thought it was very impressive. It’s like, “These are all the skills as rows, and then the degree to which we expect them developed as columns over the course of time.” And then we can very clearly say, “Hey, how is your zero-defect analysis? Is that up to snuff or is it not?”

And most of us, because our jobs are so fluid, and we don’t have thousands of associate consultants who are kind of doing the same thing, but for different clients and business challenges, it’s really hard to know. It’s like, “Hey, are you great at digital marketing?” I mean, I can’t tell you, “Yeah, in nine months, I expect for you to be able to run a Facebook ads campaign with zero supervision and create a return on investment of a cash-on-cash basis for 70% of new clients.” Like, we don’t have that level of clarity and specificity. And so, you kind of got to go invent that for yourself.

Andrew LaCivita
It’s true. Interesting you talk about Bain. I started my career at Anderson Consulting. So, I was looking at career development models and grids and things like that. It was very clearly spelled out. Now, it probably was over-engineered, but at least we had the guideposts. But most people don’t have that these days.

And the other thing, you asked kind of about the state of things, but we live in a much more mobile time right now, meaning it’s rare that somebody would spend that much time in an organization and have the time to evolve. So, people, they’re more mobile, which is creating even more confusion because you’re going to different companies, different companies have different internal vocabulary and what they call things. It’s different now, which means you need to be more organized.

Pete Mockaitis
It is, yes. Well, fortunately, our pal, Andy, here, yes, you, organized some handy pieces in your book The Zebra Code. So, first, tell us why is it called The Zebra Code? That reminds me of the TV show “Ghost Rider” from the 1990s, but I don’t imagine that’s what you had in mind.

Andrew LaCivita
No, it isn’t. So, I have a weekly live show on YouTube, so I teach every Thursday, people come to the show, I teach them, and then they ask me questions.

In the question-and-asking period of the show, one of the gentlemen asked me, about standing out in a job interview, and I told this story about how, when I go out for a run out of my house, I run down the street. And on one side I got the goats, on the other side I got the horses, on another side I got the horses, and since I got all these farms around me, and I said, “Whenever I whenever I hear hoof beats, while I do not technically rule out the possibility that it can be a zebra, I’m thinking horses.” Employers are the same way.

When you’re in a job interview, you’re talking and talking and talking they’re thinking, “Oh, man, this sounds like everyone else that has ever interviewed for this job or anybody else that’s come from Bain or Accenture or whatever.” And people, the interviewers, they need to draw conclusions very quickly, they need to stereotype. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, meaning they have to draw on their own experiences with the limited amount of time that they have in order to figure out and extrapolate whether you’re going to do a good job in their company. It’s a function of the interviewing system, not the individual, him or herself.

So, when I said, “You need to be able to stand out.” Now that was five years ago. I told this little story and I never really thought about it. But when I was thinking about this career development book that I wanted to write, I said, “There’s a big problem in the world that, in this post-academic era, we don’t have that career syllabus.” You and I went to college. The professor hands you the career syllabus, you knew a few things. You knew what you were going to be studying on what given day, what the homework assignments were, when you were going to take the tests, what the tests were going to entail. You had some faith that the individual who was teaching you, at least was well credentialed, should have known his or her stuff. You had some faith in this.

But in our professional world now, the minute you throw your hat and tassel in the air, you don’t have that. That’s gone. And then the journey you take is it’s very difficult, as we go back to that kind of those jokes we were talking about the career development models, people don’t have that. And so, I wanted to solve that problem by saying, “Okay, if I had to rewind my clock 36 years, and I was walking out of school, how does somebody go through their evolution? And what skills would I learn? And what would I learn first so that the higher-level skills that I wanted to learn, I would learn them faster and more easily?”

And so, I put this structure together, this methodology that’s based on expertise in tiers as we go through our professional lives. So, there’s five tiers in the way that I see somebody evolving. They’re a producer, so, basically, you’re managing your own self. Then you become a communicator, which is from an interactional standpoint, “I need to develop communication skills that allow me to support others, be a team player, and so on.” But then as you evolve, you become more of an influencer where you’re using those communication skills to actually draw positive outcomes from people, motivate them, influence them, get results through them or on their behalf.

And then the developers, the fourth tier, which is really the individuals who can actually coach, manage people, but in units, but also build the systems upon which everybody operates. And then, ultimately, the fifth tier, you’re a visionary, where you are creating the new ideas, generating of the new products, the new solutions. And so, as I teach my leadership groups, I teach them these career skills, I don’t call them soft skills. I call them career skills because I actually think these are essential and harder to build than our trade skills, whatever your profession is, that is.

And so, as I looked at what I was teaching and how I was working with them and the issues they were facing, it became clear to me that there were 46 or so vital skills, that if you were able to build them, you would evolve through these tiers as I’ve laid out. So, The Zebra Code book is really this leadership coaching program in a book where I teach you how to put your skill-building plan together and operate it so that you’re not overwhelmed. You know what you should be working on based on your profession, your goals and aspirations, as well as incorporating in your regular old work assignments, “Are there things that you do on a day in and day out, or week in and week out basis where you want to get better?” And so that’s the problem the book addresses, that it’s like a maze.

Professional development is a maze, and people waste a lot of time because they don’t know what skills to work on, or they’re working on the wrong skills, or they’re working on skills but they’re not working on them the right way, or they’re not working on them in the most efficient manner. So, I tried to address all those skills in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Andy, I think that five tiers is very excellently done, as you think about, if you really zoom out, like, “Okay, no, really, where am I in the course of this career?” It’s, like, “Okay, fresh out of school, a first job, all right we’re squarely in the producer zone.” And then I can see, “Okay, yeah,” and then I’m doing the communicator, then the influencer, then the developer, then the visionary.

And if I may, sometimes these lines can get a little blurry in terms of we have someone without direct reports but has been around for a while and is quite highly paid, and senior executives are truly counting on some visionary levels of insight and expertise that they’re bringing to the table. So, not to jack up your model, Andy, but how do you think about those kinds of situations?

Andrew LaCivita
Well, one of the things I didn’t mention, and it’s something good for anybody who is interested to know. Inside the book, there’s also a leadership and skill-building assessment. So, the example you gave was great, because you say, “Hey, I could be a junior person generating great ideas, or I could be a very senior person who has lots of ideas, but I’m not really great at developing people.”

So, when you look at all the skill sets that really, I feel, go into each of these layers, I have an assessment for you to take, literally, a quantitative assessment that’s based on subjective questions that I’ve highlighted for you to see where you have opportunities to improve.

And so, what the model does is, it’s agnostic regarding who you are, your age, your profession. This is what I would say, in general, is the methodology shows you how to pick and choose skills at different levels that you need more help with and figuring out when the right time is to work on those. So, as an example, some of the some of the skillsets, to give you an idea, in the producer level are about self-awareness. We’re talking about your ability to focus. We’re talking about habit-building. We’re talking about planning and running your day, or confidence.

I know a lot of 40- and 50-year-olds that aren’t confident. I know a lot of 60-year-olds that don’t know how to run their day. I know a lot of executives who are creative thinkers who are ineffective at running their day. So, even the most senior people could benefit from building the producer-level skill sets. So, it isn’t a cookie cutter, “Hey, everybody at this level or at this stage start here and only work these.”

It’s taking you from that blank sheet of paper, to giving you some organization, to letting you pick and choose based on your current state. So, what you might find is if you’re a, let’s say you’re in your early 40s, give or take, you got a team of six people you’re trying to manage. Well, I can teach you things about how to better run your day. That’s producer-level stuff. And I could teach you also all of the components that go into motivating, coaching, developing, understanding somebody’s feedback language. How do you determine how to get the best results out of somebody?

So, the skills, it’s really there’s a compounding effect, and the earlier you start the more effective you’ll be at building habits, running your day, and so on because learning how to motivate somebody is a more complicated skill to build. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful. It sure does. So, this assessment, can you take it online for free somewhere?

Andrew LaCivita

I have a 47-page booklet that introduces all The Zebra Code methodology, these tiers we’ve been talking about, this assessment you can take, and also all the instruction to build your career plan, that’s free. So, if you just head to the milewalk Academy website, you can check out the leadership card. It’ll take you to a page where there’s a button there and you can download it for free. So, thank you for asking me that.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, yeah, so we’ll definitely link that. But let’s just go ahead and say, you mentioned focus and confidence, and those are things that a lot of my listeners a lot of times have said, “Yeah, we’d love that.” So, let’s just say we did that, we looked through all the skills, we said, “Boy, you know what, focus and confidence are the things. Now what?”

Andrew LaCivita

Okay. So, I don’t have any children but I don’t know if you have kids, but I know a lot of people have kids. But have you ever told your kid, “Hey, listen to me. Concentrate, focus on this, give me your attention.”?

Pete Mockaitis

“Get your shoes.”

Andrew LaCivita

“Get your shoes,” whatever. That’s not focus. The kid’s never been taught how to focus. They’ve been told how to focus. And we, as adults, have never been taught “How do we get complete command of our mind at any moment in time so that I can, at this moment in time, have the capacity and the ability to concentrate on only one thing?”

So, you ask me a question, right now I need to use muscles to be able to focus on that one thing. So that’s what I mean when I say focus. And what I tell people is, “You cannot possibly have the muscles to do that if you are not continually building those muscles. And in order to build those muscles, you need to be practicing building those muscles throughout the day, all day, every day.”

And what a lot of people do is they, I don’t want to say they practice distraction, but they are so distracted. The phone beeps. What do you do? You look at it. You are now distracted, which means you’re not concentrating on whatever it was that you were doing. Maybe you were having dinner with a friend. Maybe you were working on writing an email to your boss. The phone beeps. Boom. You don’t have the muscle to not look at it.

So, what I do is I concentrate on creating a kind of a lifestyle system that enables me at any moment in time to focus. So, what I do is, there’s basically six or seven things that I go through. Every night, the night before, the next day, I plan my next day, and you might say, “Well, how’s planning your next day helping you with focus?”

Well, number one, I’m getting ready for the day. I know what the day entails. I know that on this day, you and I are recording this on a Tuesday at 10:45 in the morning Central, we started. I knew yesterday that we were going to be meeting. I had everything set up. I knew where I needed to go, what information I needed for you, and so on.

So, I unloaded all of that, which freed up my mind for the evening, for my sleep. I woke up the next day, the next thing I did when I got out of bed and I went through my morning routine is I literally practiced focusing for 10 minutes on one thing, which is moving energy through my body. It’s just a way for me to practice concentration in an ideal environment where I know I will not have any interruptions. So, think of this focusing exercise as, “I’m going to do a warm-up for the day in the most ideal conditions.”

Because now we’re going to go into a day that has a lot of things associated with it, I did seven or eight things before our 10:45 appointment this morning. Well, I thought about everything that I was going to do for the day. I call it considering my day.

So, after I do my focus practice, before I get into my work day, I actually look at my whole day and I think about “What would an ideal day look like? What are the other outputs I’m going to have? What might I do if something goes wrong? What happens if I get interrupted?” And I’m thinking through all this. And what this is doing is it’s enabling me to let go of things that I need to, making sure that I can foresee what I wanted to happen, and then in the event any surprises happen or anything like that, I’m more equipped at any moment in time to be able to concentrate on it. And then I actually practice building my willpower muscles throughout the day.

And this is a great tip I got from Dandapani. So, I don’t want to take credit for this when it comes to willpower. But part of building your focus muscle is building your willpower. Your willpower is your ability to exert control to complete something. So, one of the things that I do as I go through, whether it’s a work deliverable or any household chores, or anything that I do, he’s got this three-step process. He says, “Finish what you start. Do it a little better than you thought you would. And then do a little more.”

And what that does is, if you go start to finish without taking your mind off it, you’re practicing staying in order. And what this is doing is it’s building willpower, and willpower is really your mind being able to concentrate at any moment of time, so that helps. And then as I work throughout my day, when I go from one thing to the next, again, everything I’m doing is aimed at creating free space in my mind so it’s not cluttered, so I can concentrate. 

So whenever I transition, so right before I started with you, I packed up what I was doing at 10:30, I made some notes, I let the dogs out, I thought about you, I thought about what a fun podcast will look like, and I was going through wrapping up what I was doing, thinking forward to what I’m about to do so that I don’t have anything hanging over my head from the prior hour.

Even if I spent an hour writing a great chapter in a book, and even though it was fun for me, I still accumulated stress in my forearms, in my fingers, even just thinking, maybe in my neck. So, I want to let go of that. And so, imagine not letting go of any of that throughout the day. People go from Zoom meeting to a phone call, to doing something, and they just keep accumulating that stress, which again makes it harder for them to concentrate on anything at any moment in time.

And so, these things along with kind of the last point is really the reflection and being able to think back about what happened, wrapping up your day, I do this as part of my nightly practice, but all of these things that I do are aimed at keeping a free mind so that at any moment in time I can focus and I can concentrate. And it takes all of these things and other things but it’s just like a diet.

I always say, “Look, if you eat a healthy breakfast and you think eating pizza and burgers for the rest of the day for lunch and dinner where you’re going to lose weight, it isn’t going to happen.” Well, it’s the same kind of thing. If you meditate for 10 minutes in the morning and then run harried all day, you’re still not going to be able to focus. There’s a lot of things I think it takes to be able to concentrate. So that’s focusing.

Pete Mockaitis

And that’s helpful in terms of, so those are some things associated with focus. So, maybe I’m just going to zoom out a smidge in terms of the first step is we’ve identified, “This is a necessary skill that I need to build.” And then we’ve also determined, “It ain’t just going to happen. I have to actually schedule some time in my calendar to work on me in order to make it happen.”

And then there are a number of practices, protocols, interventions, the stuff you do to build those skills. And you’ve selected a few, I guess based upon your research and your experience and what has worked for your clients, and then you go do them. And so, it seems like there’s just naturally a bit of commitment, discipline, consistency, habit-building that’s associated with making it happen.

Andrew LaCivita

That’s right. Wait, you nailed it. So, number one, that was a fantastic recap because the things that you’re saying about, look, what I just said, while it might sound long-winded, think about everything that you need to do to condition yourself and how, what you said, consistent you need to be in that you need to make the time to do it.

Now, people think, “Well, I don’t have 10 minutes in the morning.” If you don’t have 10 minutes in the morning to work on you, I think you need to rethink your life. You got to figure out if this is important to you, and it isn’t just about work. I mean, don’t you want to have better conversations with your spouses, your partners, your friends, your children? I mean, there are various reasons people don’t achieve their goals, but one of the biggest reasons that I would say most people don’t achieve them is they’re not willing to sacrifice what they need to sacrifice to create the free space in their life to work on whatever it is they want to work on.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so applying these same kinds of fundamental principles, let’s say, now we’re zeroing in on competence, and that’s the skill we want to develop, how might we go about doing that?

Andrew LaCivita

I love that one because I think this is one of the most misunderstood skills ever because people think, “Okay, I need to see myself do it, and then once I’m successful I’ll have confidence,” but confidence, your ability to be confident has a lot more to do with your relationship with failure than it is success. What I say to people is, “Generally, recognize there are multiple reasons why you’re not confident.” It’s you have an activity that you’re reluctant to do, so there’s a task or something that, “I don’t know how to do, so I’m not confident that I can do it.” There’s a big project and you don’t know all the steps that you need to take, therefore, you’re not confident because you don’t know how.

Or the third thing, which is really a misnomer, where people are not confident because it’s something like, “Hey, I don’t want to speak. I feel like I have stage fright, and I’m not confident getting in front of a bunch of people,” when it really has more to do with the fact that you are worried about how you look rather than the performance that you’re actually going to help them with or how to serve them. And so, there are a variety of things that you need to think about.

When I help people with building confidence, the first thing that I say to them is, “Recognize that, as you do these things, you’re always trying to increase your level of performance. And in order to do that, you’re going to fail initially. Build failure into the process so that you become more comfortable with taking attempts at things.”

So, if it’s an activity that you’re reluctant to do, let’s say I’m reluctant to send a cold email to ask somebody for a job, or I’m reluctant to do that cold sales call, or whatever it might be, in these cases, I want you to add repetitions. If you’ve got to make 10 calls, make 20. The more you do, the more comfortable you’ll become, and even if you’re not getting the results you want, what are you getting? Have better metrics for evaluating your performance. Did you make the call? Boom, that’s good. That’s in your control. Did you practice your sales script? Great, that was in your control. Did you learn how the customer might object. Okay, now you’re going to be better armed the next time.

And so, what you’re doing is you’re constantly repping something because the conditioning itself will make it less scary.

And I say when you’ve got these big projects that you want to take on where you’re a little reluctant, it’s like my wife is in marathon training right now. She’s going to run her first marathon. You don’t think about running 26.2 miles. You think about “What does your plan say today?” It says, “Go run six miles.” You could do that. Go do it. So, you’re always thinking a few moves ahead, but not trying to eat the entire elephant in one bite.

And then when it comes to kind of that third aspect where people find themselves usually losing confidence, like the stage fright example I gave, is oftentimes it’s your success in life is going to have a lot more to do with is where you place your attention than your ability. And never is that more true than if you get stage fright or something of that nature. The reason that you don’t have confidence to go give a speech in public or talk at the round table or give the status update or whatever it is, is because you’re thinking about how you’re looking instead of the service you’re providing to whomever it is you’re providing.

If you’re giving a status report to your management team, you’re helping them understand what it is they need to know in order to decide something that they need to decide for the direction of the company. If you’re giving a speech, and that you obviously have something to offer, otherwise you wouldn’t be standing up there on the stage giving it, think about how you’re helping the people. And what this does is it has a way of diffusing that, I don’t want to call it imposter syndrome, maybe it’s imposter syndrome, maybe it’s your reluctance or hesitation or whatever it might be.

So, there are a number of things and tactics that you can do, but confidence, like I said, has a lot more to do with getting comfortable with failure than it does with successes, because that’s easier to be confident when things are going well.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, Andy, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to put out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Andrew LaCivita

One of the things I would tell people that is near and dear to my heart, because this is something I had to live through, and it’s something really hard for people to wrestle with, but I always say, “Don’t let what you can do prevent you from doing what you were meant to do.”

And the reason that I want to share that, I guess if you gave me an open invitation to share something, would be because a lot of us, and I’m sure you went through this too. You talked about working for Bain. At some point, you’re making a nice paycheck, you got to save for the kid’s college tuition, you got to pay for the cars, the houses, the whatever, and people, they know they can do it, they know they can be the engineer, they know they can be the accountant, but they really have an aspiration of doing something else.

I knew I could be an IT consultant, but I had aspirations of helping people. How do I do that? I felt like that was what I was meant to do, is really helping people in their careers. And one of the things that that takes is you need to, number one, you need to want it more than you’re afraid of it, and you need to have faith that there is a way to make a living doing what you want to do.

And there are a lot of people out there, and I’m speaking to anybody who’s listening who wants to make that change, there are people that are out there that need you to do what you’re aching to do. Don’t disappoint them by feeling like, “There’s no way to make a living” or, “It’s too late for me.”

I changed careers at 50, at 38 and 50. You can do it. So, I’d say The Zebra Code is all about that because it’s about building the skills that are enabling you to go after what you want. So, I would end with that, at least before you go on to your next sentence.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I was going to ask about a favorite quote, but we already got it. So now, give us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research.

Andrew LaCivita

One of the things that I do, and I don’t say it’s like a piece of research as much as it is ongoing research. We get fed through the media things like unemployment numbers, let’s talk jobs here, or industries that are doing well, or industries that are hiring, or those that are tanking, or thriving, or whatever, or what consumers are buying.

I am always interested in looking at the details behind what’s being shared, and what I do every month is look for signals as to what’s happening. And then I spend time trying to draw conclusions from the data.

So, as an example, all last year, and even this year, there are markets that are thriving. Well, the three top that were hiring are healthcare, construction, and the government. So, if the government is hiring a lot of people, from a jobs’ perspective that’s good, but from a gross domestic product perspective, that doesn’t contribute anything to retail sales or any contribution for economic growth. So that has to be evaluated when you start looking at, “Well, is hiring good? Is hiring bad? Which way is the employment market going?”

So, I would say in general, anytime you’re looking at data, just make sure you’re interpreting it and then draw conclusions based on what you think will happen, based on what’s under the covers rather than the headline that we tend to glance at.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. How about a favorite book?

Andrew LaCivita

I’m a huge fan of Wayne Dyer. So, rather than just say all his books, one of my absolute favorite books is You’ll See It When You Believe It.

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

Andrew LaCivita

I’ll plug the names here for these companies because I love their platform so much.

We use Kajabi for our online training program. So, I’m able to distribute all of our programs, our video-based online programs, I use Kajabi to do that. We have a community that we run. So, we don’t run the milewalk Academy community on public sites like Facebook. We run it on a private platform called Circle. That’s fantastic. So, think your own private Facebook. So, not Facebook, but Circle does that.

But my newest shiny toy is Andy AI, which is literally an Andy clone of all of my teaching, all of my videos. This podcast will probably get loaded in there, and everything that I’ve taught, all the books that I’ve written, all my YouTube videos, all the podcasts, everything that I’ve created, there’s something like, at the time we’re talking 12 million words of my teaching in the tool that trained it to answer you, like, so it’s AndyGPT, so to speak. So, like ChatGPT, but it’s all my teaching, and that is a product that’s on the Delphi platform, and it’s rather new. It’s very new.

And so, my job-seeking clients and my leadership development clients can access, well, most of them anyway, can access Andy AI and ask it questions and get my instruction. It’s the coolest thing, and obviously you can see how that scales my time. And so, there’s thousands of people around the world that can ask me questions whenever they want and get answers immediately. Pete, that’s got to be that’s the new shiny new tool.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Andrew LaCivita

Yeah, those are great.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Andrew LaCivita

So, I’d say go to the milewalk Academy, just like it sounds, milewalkacademy.com. And from there you can find my blog, you can find my YouTube channel, my tips for working, my podcast, there’s a lot of free downloads, you can get that leadership assessment, there’s premium programs if you’re interested. I’m everywhere on the social channels as well. If you just Google Andrew LaCivita, it’ll pop up. But the milewalk Academy is the home base.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Andrew LaCivita

Figure out what skills are going to pay the most dividends in the short and long term, and then put a plan together that’s going to help you develop those skills. And the other thing that you’re absolutely going to need to do is create space in your calendar to do that. And as a bonus, if you can pay yourself first in time with skill development, you won’t just have a good career, you’ll have an epic career.

Pete Mockaitis

Andy, this has been beautiful. Thank you. I wish you many Zebra moments.

Andrew LaCivita

Pete, I appreciate it, man. Thanks to you. Thank Marco, too, for doing all this for us and bringing us together. It’s been a thrill. I’ve enjoyed your podcast as a listener. It’s been, you know, it just tickles me pink, that you invited me to be a guest.

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome back.

Amy Edmondson
Great to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am super excited to hear your wisdom and talk about failing well. And I’d like it if you could kick us off with one of your favorite failures, personally or professionally?

Amy Edmondson
My favorite failure has to be the time, as a second year PhD student, I had a hypothesis that better teams would have lower medication error rates. I finally got the data after six months of data collection, put it all together, ran the numbers, and, alas, I had failed. My hypothesis was not only not supported, it was 180 degrees wrong.

In other words, the data suggested that better teams measured by a validated team survey instrument had higher error rates, not lower. So, that was just, you know, my dreams of publishing a paper evaporated in a moment as I looked at the screen, and I felt quite despondent about it. So, that was a failure, right? There was no question about it. But of course, it’s a favorite because, ultimately, it pointed me in the direction of a success.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us about how that unfolded.

Amy Edmondson
Well as I tried to figure out what this might mean, “What does it mean when a valid team survey assessment data suggests that these are really better teams, they’re better led, they’re more engaged, they have higher quality relationships? What does it mean when those kinds of teams appear to have higher error rates than their counterparts?”

And it suddenly occurred to me, and what I later thought of as a blinding flash of the obvious, that maybe the better teams aren’t making more mistakes. Maybe they’re more willing to report them, maybe they’re less likely to cover them up, to keep them secret, to shove them under the rug. And the more I thought about that, the more possible, even likely, that became. And, of course, it’s hard to talk about mistakes at work. It’s hard to admit you’ve done something wrong. It’s hard to ask for help when you don’t know quite what to do.

And because of that, what I increasingly started talking about, interpersonally risky nature of those behaviors, it would, in fact, be, at least, it could explain the unexpected findings. It could be an alternative explanation, that the dependent variable, the error rates, was actually a faulty measure. It was a measure that was subject to reporting bias. And just having that insight, of course, wasn’t enough to prove it or to do anything else with it, but it led me down a path of trying to understand whether teams, in fact, have different interpersonal climates, especially around something fraught like error.

And if so, would that affect their learning behaviors? And if so, would that affect their performance? And so, that led me down a road of doing a very different kind of research, which was to sort of explore those possibilities. Later, I called that interpersonal climate, with the input of a peer reviewer on a paper, psychological safety. And so, that was sort of the birthplace of a, then, thriving research program on team psychological safety, which turns out to be a very powerful predictor of team performance in a variety of industry contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Psychological safety is huge, and you are the queen of it, and thank you for sharing those insights with us in our last conversation. So, yeah, now let’s dig into some of the goodies you shared in your latest book, Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Any particularly striking, surprising, counterintuitive discoveries that you made along the way and put forward in this book?

Amy Edmondson
Yes, you know, the failure I just described was what I do call in the book an intelligent failure, and it’s intelligent because, and in research there’s many intelligent failures if you’re doing it right, which is that you are pursuing a goal of developing new knowledge. It’s in new territory. We don’t yet know what will happen. You’ve got a hypothesis, like you’ve done your homework to find out what we know, what we don’t know, and you have a good idea about what might work, and the failure is no bigger than it has to be.

You don’t spend your whole research budget on one experiment. You sort of do it thoughtfully so that you can learn in a reasonably efficient way. And so, science is full of intelligent failures, of course. But I think the surprising thing that I learned through all of this research is that, as human beings, we respond similarly to intelligent failures as to what I’ll call basic and complex failures, the preventable kind, meaning our emotional reactions are similarly negative and unhelpful.

As I started telling my story of my research failure as a second-year graduate student, the emotions I felt were downright catastrophic. I was starting to envision I’ll have to drop out of graduate school, I’m no good at this, I failed, you know, crazy stuff, which is just factually wrong-headed, but that’s where your brain goes. A failure is always disappointing, and when you have one, you can easily, or at least I can, spiral into unhelpful, unhealthy thinking.

And so, I think an opening surprise or insight is that, even though some failures logically are wonderfully helpful in making progress in new territory, we are vulnerable to having an emotional reaction to them that, then, precludes us from learning what we need to learn from them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is huge, and I want to dig into that in some real detail. But first, could you maybe make the grand case associated with failure being okay, or the main thesis, or the takeaway from Right Kind of Wrong?

Amy Edmondson
Yeah, so it’s not actually as simple as “Failure is okay.” It is as simple as intelligent failure is not only okay, it’s praiseworthy. If you are willing to take risks, and we all must be in order to make progress in our lives and in our jobs, if you’re willing to take risks in new territory, you will face some failures along the way, otherwise, they weren’t risks. If everything you try just goes perfectly, you’re probably not stretching very much, and that’s not a way to be awesome at your job.

So, those are the kinds, you know, the intelligent failures in new territory are indeed the kinds we’ve got to sort of develop the muscles to welcome them, and be not only not despondent about them but actually genuinely delighted by the opportunity to learn and sometimes pivot. But it is equally a book about pulling together what we know about the best practices for preventing preventable failures. One kind of failure I identify is a basic failure, which has a single cause, usually human error, or deviation from the process or protocol or recipe, and those are theoretically and practically preventable.

And so, for instance, in a new job, if you are looking around and you’re not quite sure what to do, and you don’t feel comfortable asking someone, and then you do it wrong and it leads to a failure, that’s a basic failure, and those we aren’t so excited about. It’s a book about failure but it’s really a book about success because the idea is, “Let’s do everything we can to execute well in known territory and to explore well in new territory.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well said. Well, let’s continue this typology or categorization here. We’ve got basic failure, a deviation from the recipe. My wife and I, we joke about this all the time. She’s like, whenever I cook something, and she said, “Wow, that was great. What’d you do?” And I said, “I did exactly what the recipe told me to do, because I have learned from many, many basic failures, that whenever I think I know better, or this is no big deal, how about I do this little twist, it almost always ends poorly,” unless sure enough, I’ve done the recipe many times, and I thought “Okay, I know how this works. I’m going to put a little extra of this in there because I know that I like this.” And it usually works out okay in those circumstances, so I like the word recipe in there.

Amy Edmondson
ecome an expert in it, and then you’re in a good position to experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we’ve got our basic failures. And then what else?

Amy Edmondson
Complex failures. So, complex failures are quite simply the perfect storms that bother us and show up in our lives and our organizations. They are the failures that are caused by a handful of factors coming together in just the wrong way, any one of which on its own would not lead to a failure, but the fact of their coming together. Let’s say you accidentally set your alarm clock for p.m. rather than a.m. I’ve done that.

So, maybe you wake up a little late but you still can get to that important meeting on time, but not if you also hadn’t realized your gas tank was hovering on empty and there was a tractor-trailer accident on the highway, five little things happen, none of which on their own would have led you to be late for this important meeting, but they all came together to lead to this complex failure.

Our lives are complex, our world is complex, so complex failures are kind of on the rise, which is depressing. But I think the silver lining of complex failures is that all you really have to do is catch and correct one of the things. Now, some of them are external. There was nothing you could have done about the tractor-trailer, except if it was a really important meeting, you leave a lot of buffers in there. So, then you would have taken extra care to have set the alarm accurately.

But the beauty of them, I mean, the bad news about them is that they’re sort of everywhere and they can just happen when we’re not really at our very best. The good news is, when we’re vigilant, we can catch and correct, and if you sort of catch and correct any one of the factors, you usually can dodge the failure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And talking about the emotional piece, those are the situations, when you can feel it progressively melting down, that just drive you bonkers.

Amy Edmondson
Yeah, likewise, you sort of see it in slow motion heading your way, and maybe it’s too late to change it, but maybe there’s still time, or at least you can put in a plan B. You can make that phone call and explain and maybe reschedule.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And we have additional categories?

Amy Edmondson
Nope, just the three: intelligent, basic, and complex. And there’s a bright red line drawn between intelligent and the other two because the intelligent ones are the ones that we need to have more of, we need to welcome, we need to just force ourselves to like them. And the other two, we need to kind of sit up straight, pay attention, and try to prevent as many as possible.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I was going to ask, sit up straight, pay attention, that doesn’t sound hard.

Amy Edmondson
No. That doesn’t sound…yeah, that’s not complete, is it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Are there some basic protocols, or checklists, or things you recommend to help us prevent those?

Amy Edmondson
Yeah, absolutely. And as I start talking about these things, the worry I always feel is they sound so basic, they sound so simple, and they are. And, unfortunately, they need to be used with intent. So, a checklist, for example, it’s a brilliant tool. It helps us remember to do some of the right things, when maybe it’s just a little complicated, and it would be easy to miss something, turning the anti-icing on, for example, taking off on a wintry storm day, and so we have these structures and tools to help us do the right thing.

But if you have those tools and structures in your life, or in your organization, but you’re using them, roughly speaking, in your sleep, just not really paying attention, not using them with intent, then they don’t help at all, right? If you’re sort of going through the motions of using a checklist but you’re really not paying attention, and you have just a habit of check, check, check, check, check, without your brain in the game, they won’t work. So, no tool is good enough on its own to overcome kind of the vagaries of human nature and lack of discipline.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about good enough, I’m thinking about some people think that they are too good for the checklist.

Amy Edmondson
But that’s another point, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
A Checklist Manifesto, or something, talk about surgeons or whatever, who were reluctant to lower themselves to simply be in checklists.

Amy Edmondson
Right, and that’s because they had the wrong mental model. So, even the wonderful Atul Gawande, who wrote the book, The Checklist Manifesto, I remember hearing him interviewed on NPR, and it was so brilliant because he was asked by the interviewer, “You’re a Harvard surgeon, and so on, a beautiful writer, do you use a checklist yourself in the operating room?”

And he said, “Well, in writing this book, I knew I’d be asked that question, so, of course I had to force myself to use them, even though,” he claimed honestly, “I didn’t think I needed it, right? That’s sort of for mere mortals, but not for me.” I mean, he didn’t say it that way, but it’s exactly, as your question, put it. And so, he said, “And I discovered something.”

He says, “Never does a week go by that that checklist, that I forced myself to use because people like you would be asking me this question, never does a week go by where that thing doesn’t save my process in some way. So, in other words, it turns out I am mortal. I am vulnerable to making mistakes and this very simple, simple tool, this checklist, has saved me on numerous occasions.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, as we think about professionals and basic failures, what are some basic failures you see over and over and over again that might be well-suited to a checklist or some sort of a tool along those lines?

Amy Edmondson
If we all think about our experiences as customers, or as patients, just on ordinary annual checkups or something, trying to get the schedule, or trying to, you know, there’s so many organizations that don’t work as well as they should, that you can look around and say, “This could be better with just a tiny bit of scaffolding to allow the recurring, repeating activities to be a bit more programmatic, a bit more supported.” And I know that’s very abstract, right?

Pete Mockaitis
But no, I think that’s a huge tool right there in terms of, you know, it’s funny when we instituted this, when I’m making courses, I have someone, his name is Ian – shoutout to Ian – and we’ve given him the title of Neutral Ambassador of Learning. And the idea is that Ian had nothing to do with producing any of the materials anywhere around the chain, but his role is to step into what we’ve created, and be that first observer, that first voice, and tell us, “All right Ian, what’s wrong? What chapter title was off, wrong? Which bits of the content seemed incomplete or confusing?”

And it’s fantastic! He surfaces all sorts of things, like, “Oh, we were so close that we didn’t even notice.” But with every customer experience kind of a situation, you’d think it’s like, “You know, if you actually tried to fill out this form yourself once, that you’re making us fill out thousands of times, you’d realize that I need more than an inch and a half to write an address. You’d know it on your form.”

Or, that, “Maybe there might be a means by which you can take my name and birth date from one medical form and auto-populate that into the nine other medical forms I have to go through, to have this doctor’s appointment.”

Amy Edmondson
Because if you can do that, you are reducing the likelihood of error, of just simple human error… You probably won’t screw up your birth date. Although sometimes, on my birthday, I screw up my birthday every year because I just automatically write, once I’ve started with my birthday, the year follows naturally.

And so, there I am writing a year from many, many decades ago in the form, when it’s like, “Oh.” It’s just a simple brain malfunction. Right, you write the actual birth date, but yes. So, now I’m thinking, “What are the failures that could’ve been avoided with a simple checklist or making the thing a bit more programmatic?” For instance, in the world of podcasts, I have been on at least one where there was a failure to press record. It’s not catastrophic, nobody dies, but, boy, it can feel almost catastrophic.

Pete Mockaitis
That happened to me once. I felt so embarrassed.

Amy Edmondson
So bad, where you’ve spent all this wonderful time and energy, and then, “Oops. Oops.” It was great for us but the rest of the world would not hear this one, and doing it a second time is just not…but that is one of those errors, by the way, that you learn from and rarely do it a second time. But it is certainly possible to never do it the first time also.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love it, in the software now, we’re on Riverside, and I believe it does this too, it’ll now tell you. If we’re chit-chatting for too long without record, a notification will come up, “Notice, you’re not actually recording now.” So, that’s cool though.

Amy Edmondson
Which is good! Which is good, right? It’s sort of a little check. It’s a check that’s built into the system.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Okay. So, then let’s talk about these intelligent failures. You say there are a few criteria that we need to check in order to say that something is an intelligent failure before we could just give ourselves credit, and say, “Oh, that was an intelligent failure. It’s okay.”

Amy Edmondson
Yes. So, first and foremost, it’s in pursuit of a goal. I’m not against just messing about, playing with resources, but that’s another category of activity. That’s play. But if something is an intelligent failure, it is the case that you are pursuing a goal, whether that is a better recipe, or a life partner, or an innovation in your job at work, but it’s something that you’re hoping to accomplish and improve, and it’s arguably in new territory.

It’s not possible to just get the answer for what will happen off the internet. There’s no way to get the new knowledge you are trying to get to make this progress without trying it, without the experiment, and you have a hypothesis where you’ve done enough thinking and homework to have a good sense that this might work, “I know it’s not a slam dunk, but it might work.”

And then, finally, fourth criterion is the failure, if it happens, is no bigger than necessary. It’s just as big as it has to be to give us the new knowledge that we need. And I always say there’s sort of a bonus fifth criterion, which is you take the time to learn from it. And so, those four criteria – pursuit of a goal, new territory, done your homework, no bigger than necessary – can apply to all sorts of realms. They can apply to a blind date. They can apply to improving that cookie recipe. They can apply to an assignment in your job.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, now, Amy, I’d love it if you could give us some fun examples of taking this mindset and approach, and doing it with gusto. What came to mind for me was I’m thinking about Tony Hsieh’s Zappos story, is that one of the first things he had to test was, “Are folks even willing to buy shoes online?” This was back in the day. He didn’t know yet. So, he partnered with a shoe store and said, “Hey, here’s the deal. I’d put a photograph of the shoes in the store, and every time I sell one online, I’ll come here and buy it from you, and then ship it to them.” And so, that’s wildly inefficient from, like, a profit perspective.

Amy Edmondson
Right, but it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant.

Pete Mockaitis
But from learning, yes. It nails it.

Amy Edmondson
Because imagine, I mean, compare that little experiment, expensive experiment, but compare that to setting up a whole warehouse and filling it with shoes of all sizes, and then sort of waiting and hoping. I mean, since we don’t know if customers will buy them online in the first place, what if they don’t? Well, we have just spent tens of thousands of dollars filling up our little warehouse here with shoes, and it failed. That’s not so good. Whereas with him, if it had failed, then all he would’ve lost was a little bit of his time, and maybe he would’ve disappointed this nice shoe store, but no harm done, really, right? So, it’s a beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, so please, give us some more. As we’re thinking about professionals who want to have more intelligent failures more often, any cool tales that illustrate how this could be done well in practice?

Amy Edmondson
One of the intelligent failures, and it’s not professional, it’s personal, that I love, intelligent failure stories, is my high school friend, Laura, who in her 40s, decided she wanted to learn how to play ice hockey, which is kind of crazy if you think about it, but, anyway.

Well, she lived in New Hampshire, so she thought it was really one of the things that people around her did all the time, and so it seemed like a good social activity and so on. And I think, it almost goes without saying, that her first forays onto the ice were failures, and it was intelligent because, again, she had a goal to join this league, to have some fun. She had done as much as you can do. She’d skated as a child, but in figure skates, not hockey skates. She knew enough to know that she sort of liked sliding around on the ice, and she didn’t try to join the Bruins or anything. She joins this sort of local women’s league.

And certainly, those first few weeks would not have made her a very valuable team member but she got better and really fell in love with the sport, and it remained an important part of her life now. So, that’s where someone is willing to take the risk of doing something new that might not go well. It’s not new territory for the world, but it was certainly new territory for her in her life.

I suppose in business, you bring up Tony and Zappos, but earlier than that, Amazon, obviously buying books online is not as challenging as selling shoes online, but really, “Would enough people go? Could you make it? Could you make a company work out of that?” And, of course, we later understand that Jeff Bezos had much bigger dreams in mind, but he didn’t start with, “Okay, I’m going to become the retailer of everything,” and assume that’s going to work.

He started with, “Well, let’s see if we can sort of create a little bookstore online, and drum up some enthusiastic customers, and then let’s see if we can extend some of those customers into buying other things. And then let’s see if other customers, who maybe don’t buy books that often, will come and buy other things because our operations are now so good.” So, that would be another story of one risk at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And then let’s talk about this emotional piece. When we hit a failure, we can think, “I’m no good at this,” and we’d have an emotional reaction that prevents us from doing the learning, doing the persisting, doing the optimal response that keeps us moving forward. Boy, in the heat of battle, Amy, how do we address this stuff?

Amy Edmondson
So, this is why I spend some time in the book talking about becoming more self-aware and really more self-reflective and able to pause our unhelpful, unhealthy thinking and redirect it. So, I described my unhealthy, unhelpful thinking in response to my research failure years ago, and I had to learn, and we all have to learn, to kind of talk ourselves away from the wildly emotional and really inaccurate response to the disappointment of failure and rethink it, and sort of reframe it.

Reframe it from “Oh, this is awful. I’m going to have to drop out of my PhD program,” to, “Oh, this is disappointing. I wonder what it might mean?” Now, that’s a shift, or it’s a major cognitive shift, but it’s not unheard of. It doesn’t seem impossible to our listeners, I imagine, that you can practice and then learn to catch yourself, and correct your exaggerated thinking, and turn it into more scientific thinking that brings cooler, more logical thoughts, that also cool the hot emotions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you give us an example of that in practice?

Amy Edmondson
Well, I guess an example in practice is I’m going to go back to this really important meeting, maybe it’s a job interview, and I experienced that little complex failure and I’m really unprofessionally late. I show up late. In fact, I show up so late that they’ve moved on to the next candidate. And my sort of human being’s response might be, “This is awful. I’m not going to get the job. This is the end of my life. No one’s going to hire me, and I’m going to starve to death.” Well, no, right?

So, that’s what the psychiatrist, who I talk about in the book, Maxie Maultsby, would call awfulizing or catastrophizing something that is, indeed, not great, not a great performance, but not the end of the world. And so, once you recognize that, that little emotion taking hold, that kind of your amygdala gets hooked and, says, “This is just terrible,” you pause, and you say, “No.” You force yourself to say, “This is inconvenient.”

That’s my favorite word, right? It’s inconvenient. Because, yep, it’s inconvenient, and it’s not the end of the world. And either it’s, “I’ll make amends, I’ll make an apology, maybe get a second chance,” or, “I will definitely not do this again for my next interview.” You figure out. It’s a shift from a backwards-facing, highly emotional, “This is terrible,” to a forward-facing, “Okay, that wasn’t ideal. What will I do differently next time?”

And this is how we continuously cool our emotions down, but we also force ourselves to keep learning, keep getting more thoughtful, keep getting more disciplined and wiser, and, ultimately, more creative as well, because we’re more willing to take risks because we know that the downside of the risks won’t be catastrophic.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. And if we’re having trouble even beginning to think clearly and rationally and calmly about the matter, any other pro tips? Is it sleep? Is it walking? Is it cold water? Is it any of that?

Amy Edmondson
Oh, yeah, all of the above, depending on what you like. So, I would say you start with the proverbial and the real deep breath. That deep breath will interrupt the automaticity of the thinking. But, for me, certainly one of the things that I habitually have relied upon is go for a run. If I’m really stuck on something, and I just change the scenery, literally by put some running clothes on and go for a run, it completely changes how I’m thinking. It seems to put things more in perspective, and so exercise, that’s one, but anything that interrupts.

You could have a checklist of questions to ask yourself. It could be along the lines of, “Okay, what truly are the consequences of this? And what did I learn? And why is this now something that I’m able to put to use going forward?”

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

Amy Edmondson
So we’ve just been talking about sort of self-awareness, self-reflection, self-discipline. Another key domain is context awareness. Be more mindful and thoughtful when you’re in a dangerous context. I know that’s obvious, but it’s truly violated all the time. People don’t put their safety equipment on when they should have, or they text and drive.

So, develop a habit of thinking quickly and clearly about the context, “What are the stakes here? What are the risks? Financial? Reputational? Safety? And what’s the uncertainty?” And act accordingly. Have lots of fun experimenting when the stakes are low. Be very, very thoughtful and vigilant when the stakes are high.

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

Amy Edmondson
One of my very favorite quotes is Viktor Frankl, which is, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. And in that space lies our opportunity to choose. And in that choice lies our freedom.”

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

Amy Edmondson
I think my favorite bit of research is in the research on the fundamental attribution error by Lee Ross at Stanford, where they show in some sort of laboratory experiments that we are relentlessly willing to attribute others’ shortcomings to their own personality defects or character defects. But our own, we will very quickly and naturally see the situational forces at work. So, once we know that we’re likely to do that, once we truly internalize the idea that we will spontaneously do that, then we can step onto the road of becoming a better person, and giving others the same benefit of the doubt we often give ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Amy Edmondson
I have many long-standing favorite books, but I’m in the middle of one that right now is becoming a favorite book, which is The Road to Character by David Brooks.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they retweet it, they Kindle book highlight it, an Amy Edmondson bit of wisdom?

Amy Edmondson
Choose learning over knowing, and it’s an active choice. We have to choose it because our habitual cognitive response is to feel like we know, feel like we see reality. We have to get curious. We have to choose learning over knowing.

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

Amy Edmondson
I guess AmyCEdmondson.com.

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

Amy Edmondson
Yes, take more risks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Amy, thank you. This has been lots of fun once again. And I wish you many delightful failures.

Amy Edmondson
Thank you. And you, too.