Tag

KF #30. Self-Development

Oct 01

1185: How to Reclaim Your 25th Hour by Getting Out of Your Own Way with Neal Schore

By Podcasts No Comments

Neal Schore shares expert strategies for reclaiming the time we don’t realize we give away.

You’ll Learn

  1. The many ways we waste time without realizing it
  2. The 10-second trick that prevents time-wasting miscommunications
  3. How to feel more powerful in just five seconds

About Neal

Neal Schore serves as chairman and advisor to several notable business leaders, boards, and companies across the United States. He also advises multiple private equity and investment firms on executive leadership and strategic initiatives. He currently serves as cofounder and CEO of The 25th Hour Group, an executive coaching and leadership events firm that showcases his proven leadership toolbox and practice. Previously, Schore served as founder, president, and CEO of Triton Digital, a global technology, data, and services leader in the digital audio and podcast industry. 

Schore received a Bachelor of Arts in business administration, with emphasis on management, marketing, and finance, from Michigan State University. He is currently active in Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Program. Schore is a member of the Los Angeles Gold Southland Chapter of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and the recipient of E&Y’s 2011 Entrepreneur of the Year award for greater Los Angeles.

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Neil, welcome.

Neal Schore
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting and find this 25th hour. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising, fascinating discovery you’ve made to share with us here?

Neal Schore
So many discoveries. I think the most fascinating is that, generally speaking, every one of my clients, and then just people when I ask about their 25th hour, always blame other people for the fact that they don’t have enough time.

So it’s too many meetings, or too many emails, or too many family obligations, or whatever it might be. And what’s fascinating to me is, when I teach them the concept of you manage you, how all of a sudden more time appears.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny when you when you mention this, the first thing that comes to mind is I think about my property manager. I’ve got a little apartment in Chicago being rented out. And he said that in his property management experience, it’s amazing how once tenants begin paying for their own electricity and water, their electricity and water bills just plummet.

So I can imagine in these contexts, it’s like, okay, once they’re on the hook for it and there’s some money, some incentives at stake, they just naturally say, “You know, maybe we could shower a little shorter. Maybe, you know, 74 degrees is cool enough this summer.”

So in the universe of time, once you put that in-your-face challenge about, “Hey, you manage you,” where does the extra time appear from in practice?

Neal Schore
So, obviously, you can’t manufacture time, so it’s not actually about extra time. It’s about the time we stop giving away. So what I have developed in my practice over the last 20-some years is exercises and tools that are very practical, lighthearted, easy to implement, relatively easy to understand that brings the control back to you.

So we spend a lot of time and energy and effort trying to control things that we can’t control, out of our control elements, whether it’s people or processes. And when you manage you, no matter what your rank or title is, it is where the time comes from.

So I’ve watched smart, really capable people just erode enormous sums of time. And with this training and the toolbox, they get to just bring that back. So if I had to say it’s simple, it would be it’s not really about extra time, it’s about the time you stop giving away.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You manage you, stop giving away. Could you share with us a story to paint a picture of all this in action?

Neal Schore
Okay, so I have a client who is petrified of his board.

Neal Schore
So he’s a CEO and he is petrified of his board because he’s got an incredible amount of imposter syndrome. And although he’s the founder of his company and most of the board members of the financial institutions that are supporting him, he just believes that anytime he will get fired.

And so the amount of time and energy that he spends focusing in on not getting fired by over-delivering information, over-emphasizing emails, writes really long emails, what he’ll do in terms of how he manages board meetings, overselling in board meetings, his board wound up growing frustrated with him, not about performance, but about his being long-winded and long in writing. So it backfires.

Now, the emails that he was writing, by how not to get in trouble, so to speak, were taking an enormous amount of time. So, here, he’s spending lots of time crafting and over-communicating, and it’s being poorly received because it’s being viewed as self-serving and non-informative. And so it’s an absolute misfire. So that’s one.

With those modifications, he picked up at least an hour a day. We’re talking about more like 10 hours a week in his board management. With me, I have a great one. It’s a little embarrassing, but I’m free to talk about it. I have freed myself to talk about it.

I’m a young manager. I’m about 25 years old. Most of my staff is about 10 years older than me, way more experienced. And after one of my first team meetings, a woman on the team pulls me aside and says, “Neal, you are really powerful.” And I said, “Thank you?” in a very timid, meek way. And she walked away.

And I spent the next three months, no exaggeration, this is the embarrassing part, trying not to be powerful. So that meant that I was, like, staying late and hanging out with the team members and like back to when I was starting my career, which had only been three years earlier, and like first in, last out, “I’m going to show her I’m not powerful.”

And it was eating me up, I was swirling at night, like the loop just kept playing, wasn’t sleeping well. Finally, I went to her and just said, “Hey, I’d love for you to just explain to me what you meant by powerful.”

And she goes, “Oh, that’s easy. You sit tall in your chair, you’re very approachable, you answer questions very clearly, and you’re always available to help. And I just find that so powerful.”

So, here, she had paid me really like a beautiful compliment, and embarrassingly, I swirled for three months. So had I just paused, figured out her intent, “Is she trying to insult me right now? I don’t think so,” and then just asked that quick, clarifying question, like, “Help me understand what you mean by powerful,” I would have absorbed a compliment and saved myself three months of not being my authentic self.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So there’s our theme. So you manage you because you’re eroding all kinds of time doing things that are not so helpful. And it’s kind of some emotional things at play with regard to doubts and fears that are influencing us to do things that just torch the time.

Neal Schore
Absolutely, consistently, no matter whether you are a young professional or whether you are the CEO and founder, I have not found any exception to the fears that redirect our behavior, the emotional part that you mentioned, away from you managing you. That’s where we try to manage other people.

Like in my case, I wound up trying to be, “Oh, one of the team,” and I was trying to manage them to, in fact, like me, because I didn’t want to be powerful. I viewed the word power as, you know, maniacal or Machiavellian, or I don’t know where exactly my mind wandered, but it was 100% me not managing me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, that sounds like a compelling thesis and opportunity for improvement. We are eroding time, giving it away, because we’re not managing ourselves optimally, but rather we’re letting fears, doubts, emotional things manage us. So, Neal, what is to be done?

Neal Schore
So I’m very metaphorical in the way that I teach, and, certainly, in the book, there are a lot of examples and stories and illustrations and metaphors. So what’s to be done?

Well, our robots, and this is the metaphorical robot each of us have, are programmed young to build sequences. In my view, it starts in kindergarten. We go to lunch at 11:37. In my case, I had three varieties of lunch, came in the same lunch box that I carried every single day.

I lined up for recess at 12:02. You came back in from recess at 12:27. It was just very methodical. And that is a representation of how we start our careers and enter the workforce, and then it becomes a sequence of analyst, and then associate, and then director and then principal. And no matter what the titling nomenclature is, there’s a sequence to getting promoted.

And what I like to say is our robots need to be reprogrammed. We have to break sequences. And it’s really uncomfortable to do because it is so amazingly preset or programmed. And so I start people with silly exercises, like, what I call the pant-leg challenge. So what pant-leg do you put on first? Are you a lefty-righty or a righty-lefty?

Pete Mockaitis
I think I have a sequence of not paying enough attention, and rather just thinking about other things or how I better hurry up and get out the door.

Neal Schore
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But, as you say it and I imagine, I think right first.

Neal Schore
Okay, so you’re a righty-lefty. And as you just very properly described, very few of us, in fact, I’ve done this with thousands of people, are focused in on what pant-leg we put on first. We just put on our pants. And our minds are somewhere else, or we’re contemplating whatever it is that we are doing as we are getting dressed.

When I have people change their pant-leg, so you’re righty-lefty, for the next 30 days, you are now a lefty-righty. So that means that when you go to put on your pants, you have to pause, actually stop and think, and put your pant leg on lefty-righty. Or, if you go in your robot sequence, you have to take your pants off and put them back on.

And what winds up happening, and again, I acknowledge this sounds silly on the surface, but what winds up happening is we realize, through an exercise like this, the pant-leg challenge, how programmed we are when it comes to things like our participation in meetings, the length of meetings, the way we call meetings, who attends meetings, and how many accommodations we make around that.

So someone walks into the meeting and they start talking with a colleague about their weekend, and there’s 10 people in the room, and two people are talking, and everyone else is just sitting around waiting for them to finish a conversation.

Very few people are going to say, “Hey, this meeting was called for 11:00 a.m. We’re starting at 11:00 a.m.” It starts at 11:05 or 11:07 or 11:10. And that erosion of even five, seven, 10 minutes multiplied by 10 people in the room, multiplied by the amount of meetings that you have in a day is hours of erosion.

And so when you start to, then, calculate and do things differently, the meeting starts at 11:00, I always teach people to end meetings at least 10% early. So if you wind up having 10 people in a 30-minute meeting that winds up going 27 minutes instead of 30, everyone gets back three minutes. Three minutes is a lot of time to run to the restroom, get a snack, you know, feed the dog, just walk outside for a second.

Pete Mockaitis
Start the next load of laundry.

Neal Schore
Right, start a load of laundry, whatever you want to do, enormous amount of time. And we don’t worry about whether someone is late, or whether they’re not, everyone is adults, and you just start breaking these sequences and the patterns that the company, any company, has been following, and it’s, again, a game-changer.

Then I teach people to take 50% of their meetings, and, excuse me, 75% of their meetings, and make them 50% shorter. So a 30-minute meeting can be done in 15 minutes. And when you take 10 people in that meeting and it’s done in 15 minutes, not only is everyone thrilled, you’re like, “Hallelujah! I just got 15 minutes back to my day,” but that’s 150 minutes of productivity in a company off of one meeting.

And everyone is happier. And you do that by having a very clear agenda. You don’t let anyone derail it. You start, you stop, you go. And there’s tools in the book that I teach about checking in and using professional vulnerability, but also about how to meeting management, a critical part of time loss.

And then people walk out happy, which spreads positive contagious, as opposed to people walking out with the ughs. Ughs is like, “Ugh, I can’t believe I had to sit in that meeting,” or, “I can’t believe I have to go to my next one,” and “Ugh, I can’t stand listening to this guy,” whatever it might be. Everyone gets the ughs, which is a massive time-crusher.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we’re breaking the robot sequences and, particularly, with regard to meetings, I guess what I’m hearing is to thoughtfully assess and assert ourselves in order to not just erode the time.

So, like, “Let’s start the meeting on time. Hey, do we really need to have all these people in this meeting? Do we really need to have it this full length? Let’s shoot for 10% earlier.” So it’s like the robot sequence is a bit of a lazy or thoughtless autopilot that just goes with the flow and time slips away in the process.

Neal Schore
Absolutely. So if we put this in the more practical sphere, step one is to get comfortable being uncomfortable and to do things differently. And then when we put this in a more practical sphere, my favorite story, which I highlight in the book, is around a company that I started working with as they were in the rapid growth stage.

When they started the company, it was eight to ten of them, and they did a morning stand-up every day. I believe it was 8:15 in the morning. And so as they started to grow and they had hundreds of employees, they kept the morning stand-up at 8:15 in the morning.

So everyone arrived in the office around 8:10 to go to the morning stand-up at 8:15. And the office space expanded, of course, but the routine of the meeting was incredibly robotic, what they shared, how they shared it, even then having to start to use a microphone in order to amplify and get the message out. And it lasted about 45 minutes or so, 45 minutes, sometimes an hour.

So every single person, hundreds of people in the company’s day was built around the morning stand-up. Well, we moved it from an everyday meeting to a once-a-week meeting. And the once-a-week meeting rotated every five weeks. So Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And then, ultimately, we eliminated Friday, so it was four days.

And we wound up building an agenda around the meeting because not every data point that was being shared was applicable. So when you then do the math and you calculate the amount of time saved by not having everyone attend, reducing the meeting to once a week, it was 15,000 hours of productivity redeposited back to the company.

When we looked at the staffing plan of the company, it wound up being a massive reduction in future hires required simply by changing the morning stand-up. And there was no loss of information because so much of the information was just in this rhythm, “And every morning we talk about this and this and this,” which with eight people it works. With hundreds of people, it doesn’t.

And so breaking that sequence wound up, again, over 15,000 hours of productivity back. not only enhanced the bottom line, but people started to come in at 7:00 a. m. So you started this measure and see, instead of rolling in at 8:00 to be an 8:15 stand-up, people actually worked more hours as well.

So people got there at 7:00, it was preferred. Sometimes they left closer to 4:00 o’clock. Other people there, 7:00, 8:00 o’clock at night. So this punch-the-clock mentality that was developed by this morning stand-up completely changed the culture of this company.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. All right. So understood. We’ll thoughtfully take a look at our robot sequences, break them up, see what happens, get more comfortable being uncomfortable. I’d like to zero in some more on this emotional stuff: imposter syndrome, fears, doubts. What are some of your other favorite moves for dealing with these emotional matters?

Neal Schore
So one of the most practical is pausing, then figuring out what the intent of the situation is, and then asking clarifying questions. So it’s like a very quick, rapid fire, in your head, you manage you, where someone is saying something, and then you’re figuring out, “What are they actually trying to ask here?”

Or, “Do they really need my help or do they just want attention from me?” Or, “Why is it that they’re confused?” So we solve for it. Sometimes it’s very much on the surface, “Yeah, I just didn’t clarify it well, or they need some more information.” And then just ask clarifying questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So this is in our interpersonal matters. Rather than stew and try to read the tea leaves of what they might have meant by such a thing, to, in fact, pause and simply ask.

Neal Schore
Correct. Pause, simply ask. Sometimes it’s just about buying a little time, asking and just getting a little bit of time to figure out the intent. But when trained in this, it becomes, you know, within three to 10 seconds, it becomes a very rhythmic way that we save ourselves a lot of time by not getting distracted, by not understanding the intent.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And when we are all by our lonesome selves, anything we can do to help us get a handle on this fear, doubt, and imposter syndrome stuff?

Neal Schore
So one of the things, one of the tools that I have developed, I call cookies. So cookies came from the eight-year-old version of myself, where in my household, my mom ran a tough kitchen. You did not get dessert before dinner. Period.

And one time, my sister snuck me a pack of Chips Ahoy at 5:00 o’clock before dinner, and it was like a euphoric feeling. I won the cookie lottery. You can’t even describe it. I literally remember vividly, like being at dinner that night, like I beat the system. It was incredible.

And I remember, because it was so euphoric, the idea of giving cookies, that affirmation to employees is really important, but receiving it is also critically important. And the higher we get in organizations, the less cookies or affirmation we receive.

So a CEO of a company, very, very, very few cookies. Like, very few people walking up to me as the CEO of my company and saying, “Neal, you crushed it in that meeting,” or, “Great job in that presentation today,” or, “You did a wonderful job with that client.” It doesn’t happen.

When we, on the other hand, as a CEO, it is very important for me to provide that affirmation and those cookies. So I teach people to, in you manage you, to give themselves their cookies.

And so it would be like this. You could say to yourself after this podcast, “I asked great questions today. I am so happy that I found Neal to bring on as a guest to the show. I am thrilled with the way that everything is going.” It could be any of that. It takes about five seconds to do. And when we learn to give ourselves that nutrition, we become less dependent and needy on other people.

So even as the CEO, we don’t get a lot of affirmation. We get very little, in fact. However, we’re humans. We need it. And so learning how to provide ourselves that affirmation, I call the, you know, sticking with the theme of cookies, that nutrition, it’s great.

And the more cookies we provide ourselves, the more enhancements we allow to reduce that noise for the next test or the next presentation or the next meeting, whatever it may be.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And when you give yourself these cookies, are there any best practices? I’m thinking about, Ethan Kross, who wrote the book Chatter, was a guest of the show, mentioned that using your name in the third person can have some distancing effects, providing a different perspective and can reduce rumination.

And his example, like LeBron James has got to do what’s best for LeBron James, is the example he used. And so in this instance, it’s almost like, I’m guessing, we might want to do the opposite in terms of, like, your front and center, like, “Pete, you were very effective in that interview,” or whatever, I don’t know, “Hey, look in the mirror. Give yourself a hug.”

I don’t know, Neal, you tell me. What is the best practice for making these cookies as hot and tasty and wonderful as possible?

Neal Schore
I love it. You literally nailed it. So one of the other things that I teach people is to get comfortable being uncomfortable. And there’s a wildly uncomfortable component to talking to yourself and looking at yourself. And so that’s exactly what I have people do.

So you have to go to a mirror or some sort of reflective device. It could be an elevator in a building, you know, going up or down in an elevator, whatever it may be, preferably with no one around because it’s a personal thing and talking to yourself could wind up putting your business in other people’s business.

And so the other thing is when you’re online, if you’re using Teams or Zoomers or whatever your device is, when you hang up from a meeting, when I hang up from a meeting, it is me staring at me.

And so I spend a lot of time on video with my clients every single week. So when I’ve had a particularly impactful session, instead of immediately flipping my computer down, I have them exit the meeting, the virtual meeting room, and I’m eyeball to eyeball looking at myself.

And I’m like, “Neal, you crushed it. The way you explained that today was exceptionally good. Nice work.” And no one’s hearing me. I’m in a private setting. I am looking at myself, which is very uncomfortable to start with, and I’m providing myself that affirmation, which not only provides the cookies or that nutrition, but it’s also very energizing, right?

No different than when someone pays another person a compliment, there’s a boost that the other person gets. And so, again, as you get higher in a company and you go through the ranks in the org chart, we receive less, although the humanity and our needs don’t change. And so, therefore, you manage you works incredibly well in that case.

Pete Mockaitis
And even if you’re low in the company, if you just have a manager who doesn’t share, you know, supportive encouragement very often, you go for it. I think that’s swell.

Neal Schore
It’s a great point. I was with a young professional just yesterday who’s one of our clients that is drowning in “I hate my job,” and very generationally apropos, “And I get absolutely no credit for the work I do.” And the conversation is like, “Well, why do you need credit from someone else for the work you do?”

And then we go through a series of questions that get, I go through a series of questions that gets that person to the other end of it, which winds up going, “Yeah, I can manage myself.” And so that is in the simplest form, but it’s very applicable there as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. You know, I chuckle, I’m imagining the Fathom AI meeting Notetaker capturing that as a summary bullet at the end of the meeting, “And Neal congratulates himself for being awesome.”

Neal Schore
There’s no doubt about it that that has happened, and it is very funny. I wound up forwarding notes from a meeting. It’s very funny. This happened just last week. Forwarding notes from a meeting where I didn’t pay attention to the AI Notetaker. And I had a moment of cookie.

And one of our team members who was looking at it, was like, “Great cookie you gave yourself.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a little embarrassing? But not really.”

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

Neal Schore
Well, I would say that the applicability of the toolbox and the book is there from, again, young professional, even students through retirement. It is also professionally-oriented and in the book, you learn so many tools. One of my absolute favorites, I call “It’s my fault.” It winds up being, again, a game-changer for people who naturally respond defensively, which is about almost all of us, and so many great things there.

Pete Mockaitis
“It’s my fault.” Can you tell us what’s that about?

Neal Schore
Your neighbor’s garbage can fell over, it was your fault, or there’s traffic on the freeway, it’s your fault. And people get very, “How is that possible?” and that’s part of the teachings. And then when you accept the word fault as not being like a dirty, nasty, ugly word, which it really is, like blame, default, it is, and we do things differently, and we just change that defensive setting that we’re all programmed in, it winds up saving not only a lot of time, but we just live happier.

Pete Mockaitis
“It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my own grievous fault.”

Neal Schore
There it is.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite quote?

Neal Schore
Build your people who build your business.

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

Neal Schore
So it’s David Brooks, who’s an author, has a management philosophy around great managers make people feel seen. And there is research around that that he quotes in his book that I find so compelling about employees not needing job descriptions, and learning is really a big part of the motivation system, and experiences are what drive it. And there’s data in there that support all those points. And it is philosophically very much in line with what I believe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Neal Schore
One of my favorite books is From Strength to Strength, and the other one is Tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Neal Schore
My favorite tool is firing your devil.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we do that?

Neal Schore
So you fire your devil. Your devil is that metaphorical devil and angel sit on our shoulders, the devil becomes the governor, activates all of our fear systems, becomes the narrator of all those things that cost us enormous sums of time and feed the swirling.

And when we fire our devil, which literally is an exercise where we have a conversation with our devil-self, that version of us that’s that devil, and we’re like, “You’re out of here. You are not welcome here anymore. I am kicking you out. Turn in your keys. Turn in your computer.”

And there’s a whole exercise that I take people through so that when the swirls start, we have the concepts of, “Oh, wait a second. The devil is no longer around.” And then the angel gets to come back and take over the governing of that moment. It saves a lot of time and it winds up bringing that levity or that fun tone to what I teach in my practice.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Neal Schore
Favorite habit is exercise. So I am really good about trying to do something every day. So I am not maniacal about it where I have to have it, but I’m mindful about it and I feel better being in the habit of doing something physical or exercise-oriented every day.

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

Neal Schore
So one of the tools that I teach is around the line of mediocrity. So the concept is, this is the line of mediocrity. It’s just a straight line. And just below the line is mediocre. And just above the line is good. And up here, straight to the right, is exceptional.

And every day, we have moments where we are mediocre, we have moments where we are good, and we have moments of exceptional. We are trained to be mediocre. We learn to be good and we strive to be exceptional.

And what I hear religiously from clients and people that I’ve been in discussions around the book and otherwise is how mediocre, again, a word that isn’t necessarily pleasant, but we bring that lighter tone to it, saves a ton of time and energy where you just go, “Oh, I was just mediocre,” and you have fun with it. And then we fix it and strive for our exceptional.

So leadership is hard. We just recognize mediocre and strive for exceptional.

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

Neal Schore
Well, they can go to NealSchore.com. It’s N-E-A-L-S-C-H-O-R-E.com, or 25HourGroup.com, and there’s links to the book there and all kinds of different exercises and learnings and teachings on the websites as well.

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

Neal Schore
My final call to action is break the sequence. Do not do things tomorrow the same way you did today. You will get comfortable in your uncomfortable, I promise you. And to just shake it up. You’re going to see a whole new world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Neal, thank you.

Neal Schore
Thank you so much.

Sep 03

1178: How to Stand Out and Get Hired in the AI-Powered Job Market with Emily Durham

By Podcasts No Comments

Emily Durham reveals the smarter approach to job-hunting.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why “medium is more” when it comes to networking
  2. The keys to opening the door for opportunities
  3. Why AI-generated resumes work against you

About Emily

Emily Durham, better known as Emily the Recruiter, is a recruiter turned career coach and content creator. On her popular social media platform and her podcast, Clock In, she gives real-world advice to help people thrive in their careers. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, BBC News, in the Globe and Mail, and more. She lives in Toronto.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Emily, welcome!

Emily Durham
Thank you so much for having me. I’m so jazzed to talk all things work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am jazzed to talk as well about how we clock in, which is a clever little twist.

Emily Durham
Why thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess, you know, clocking in and locking in. Okay, nice. So, boy, the universe of job hunting is full of myths, BS advice. I’d love it if you could give us, right at the top, any counterintuitive goodness that you think we all just need to know, set the record straight up front.

Emily Durham
Oh, I love that. We’re doing no BS right away. I think we need to dismantle the idea that more is more. So applying to more jobs does not necessarily yield more interviews. Reaching out to more people doesn’t necessarily yield really high-value mentoring relationships.

And I think in a world where the economy is rough, friends, we know this, we’re preaching to the choir. It’s easy for us to take advice online that tells us just to double our output, to double our results. And that really isn’t the most strategic way to go about these things.

So we definitely can get those better results and more interviews and get further ahead at work, but the idea that you got to do six times more isn’t always the best. Sometimes we just need to re-strategize, not double down on what’s not working.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the more is more is false.

Emily Durham
False.

Pete Mockaitis
And that is not the right move. Well, then if more is not more, then what what is more?

Emily Durham
Yes, I wouldn’t say less is more, but let’s say medium is more. I’m fine with that. The idea that, for example, when you’re job-hunting, and you’ll hear this from people all the time, you scroll on TikTok, there it is, they’re telling you just to apply to more jobs.

But the reality is the challenge today isn’t that you need to apply to more jobs. And it’s not that you’re not applying to enough. It’s also not usually that your resume needs a total facelift. It’s often that our resumes aren’t getting opened at the same rate or in the same ways that they previously were.

So, for me, when I’m thinking about the right strategy to get noticed, yes, have a strong resume, yes, apply for great jobs, and use most of the time that you would have spent applying to those next two, three, four hundred jobs, and really over-index on strategic networking.

I’m talking, not reaching out to recruiters on LinkedIn, reach out to the people who are currently in the position that you want, people who are likely to have less inbound messages for those networking chats, going to small scale, like teeny tiny industry local events.

I’m, you know, a Toronto resident. We’ve got organizations like TechTO, Women in Tech Sales Toronto, where you’re able to network on a really small scale and build those meaningful relationships to get you those referrals.

And I know this sounds like a lot more work. It is, but if we just shift, you know, the four hours we’re going to spend a week job-hunting to it being three hours networking, one hour applying, usually that’s going to get you a little bit further ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that makes sense to me. And I’ve even heard that more might not even be not more, but it could be, in fact, less. How’s that for a clear sentence? What I mean is if you apply to more places, you could actually, in the automated applicant tracking systems world, be doing yourself a disservice because they’re like, “Oh, they already applied here at Facebook or Amazon or whatever. So we’re just going to not pay attention to this one.”

Emily Durham
I do think there’s a lot of fear-mongering with how AI does and doesn’t influence the application process. Like, the reality is – how do I say this nicely? – and maybe I don’t have to.

People can profit off of, you know, making us very scared of how AI is influencing the applicant process. You’ll see people offering sketchy courses who’ve maybe never worked in careers or AI. So I think it’s always important to consider the source to an extent, of course, the more you apply for high-volume jobs, even if a person, you know.

When I was an active recruiter in tech, if I saw a candidate applying to five different jobs with different job descriptions, to me that reads, “You don’t know what you want, or you don’t know what your aligned skill set is.”

But from an AI perspective, it drives me crazy when I hear people say, “I need to AI-optimize my resume and apply to the right jobs on the right AI.”

Like, there is no way to know in a concrete manner how much a company is or isn’t leveraging AI in the top part of your funnel, so when you’ve just applied for a job. Every company is at a different stage, which is why I’m so big on the networking. The one thing we know for certain right now is people’s opinions still matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well said. Okay. Well, so your book, Clock In, can you tell us what’s the main idea, the big picture message here?

Emily Durham
Definitely. Clock In is an incredibly practical book. So think of it as a step-by-step guide to doing everything from figuring out why you want the job that you want, if you want that job, and most importantly, how to actually get there through the practical stuff like the resume writing, the LinkedIns, the networking, but also those more social skills, “How do you communicate and advocate for yourself while at times dealing with difficult people?” So it really takes you that full journey.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That sounds handy. Well, tell us, this job market, some would have you believe there are no jobs, we are in dire straits. You can apply to hundreds and you will hear nothing back. Others, I’ve seen get jobs real quick. What’s going on?

Emily Durham
Like, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that things are peachy. Like, I’m not going to be your uncle at the Thanksgiving table asking you why you’re still job-hunting.

The reality is the market is very hard. Job creation is not booming at the pace that has been projected. In fact, in many states and in many countries, it is flat or on a decline. But I think the messaging here is we need to control what we can control.

I, fundamentally, disagree with the fact that there are no jobs. There are less jobs. There are jobs that are not paying adequately, but there are some jobs available. Where I really like to kind of push people to think through is, number one, “Would a portfolio career be something that could be valuable for you?” Meaning, is balancing contract work, is being self employed, having side gigs, side hustles?

We’re seeing Gen Z pick up a lot of this. Something that can be beneficial, like, to your career overall. but there are jobs available. And I think it has to be a shift less of the what, like, “What jobs are there?” into the, “How do I get recognized for, yes, the more limited jobs, but jobs that do exist?”

And the people getting hired quickly are, oftentimes, especially right now, like, “Take a shot every time I say this,” or like, you know, “Go sip your coffee.” They’re the people who know someone who works at the company. Those are the people who are getting ahead quickly or have a built-in brand presence.

Maybe they post very actively on LinkedIn. They’re active in their community and they’re able to phone a friend and say, “Hey, I’m looking for a gig,” or, “Hey, I saw this job posting.” So that’s really the differentiator.

But I might underline is there are less opportunities that are as exciting and as sexy, and perks of some of these jobs have not been as appealing as they were in years prior, but things always level out because they always do, and we have to focus on what we can control, which is getting what we’re able to get.

Pete Mockaitis
That makes good sense, if I may, when you say it’ll level out, it always does. And I’m wondering, the AI tech bro hype masters would say, “No, no, this time, it’s completely different because the AI is fundamentally reshaping blah, blah, everything.” What’s your read on that in the recruiting world?

Emily Durham
So I think of this often because a lot of the headlines about a year ago were telling us that 98% of jobs are going to disappear with AI.

First thing I have to say is these are all predictions. I think sometimes we hear these predictions and we think that they are like Bible, that it is the truth and it’s 100% going to pan out that way. There’s no way to confirm or deny how much change and what that change is going to look like.

We know AI is reshaping work. It already is. We know that many roles are being eliminated, but we also know that, as many experts are predicting mass job loss are predicting even larger job creation.

And the relationship to AI is a complex and loaded one. I’m not saying that we need to be, “Rah! Rah! AI” in any capacity. But I do think we have seen in history so many waves of the workforce being revolutionized and many industries dying, but ultimately to give birth to other ones.

So I try to lean on the side of optimism until we have all of the information that we know new jobs will, in fact, be created. But we also know that a lot of organizations who’ve reported mass layoffs attributed to AI have not truly replaced full human jobs with AI.

What they’ve done is tried to cut costs to up AI investment, but they’re not truly replacing the roles. And I think that nuance can help us understand where we’re currently at in the cycle. We are not in a space right now where Susie’s job is gone because a robot is fully doing Susie’s job. Like, that is not the headline, I think, people need to be taking away.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And many folks who have done layoffs because of AI have hired them right back, it’s like, “Oopsies!” And well said with regard to we can’t take any prediction to the bank because, fundamentally, no human being knows what’s going to happen, even if they have a very compelling YouTube thumbnail and graphic and strong words with capital letters sometimes.

Emily Durham
Oh, with an underline and then it’s, “Do you want to save your job? Buy my AI-powered course.” And you know what? God bless them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. We got it. Okay. Well, so let’s get into some of the particulars of your approach, but could you first maybe give us a fun success story of someone who did just what you recommended and what happened for them?

Emily Durham
Oh, my gosh, can I give you the best success story ever, because it’s literally my mom. I share this all the time. I think this is, like, the coolest thing in the world. So my mom had worked at the same organization for 20 years. Like, she did the old-school, “I’m staying at this company forever.”

Ultimately, that company ended up selling, and her role got dissolved and she wasn’t ready to retire. So she truly was like, “Well, AI is here. I’m screwed. I’m just learning how to, like, canoodle with this. I’m not going to be able to bring this into the workforce. And who’s going to want to hire a woman in her late 50s?” To which I said, “A smart person is definitely going to want to hire someone with incredible experience.”

So we spent the time doing the table stakes stuff, you know, uploading the resume and making sure the LinkedIn was up to date. But, really, what we focused on was leveraging her previous connections. And I think that was like a mental unlock moment where my mom was like, “Well, I don’t know anyone. It was only the people I worked with.”

And I was like, “Yeah, girl, people who know you’re incredible.” So reaching out to those former connections, reaching out to people who were still with the company, happy clients she had were, contractually, that was a comfortable thing that she could do.

And really just having an honest and vulnerable conversation about where she was at, within seven days, which I will say is kind of bananas quick, she landed an incredible role, work from home, fully remote, doing the stuff that she loves in account management. So leaning into that network, even if you’re not proactively networking necessarily is game-changing.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. And the vulnerability piece, I think, is pretty key. Because I’m imagining all kinds of folks that I’ve been a client of, and I just, like, generally, have positive thoughts about. I think about SERVPRO, the restored situation after some water damage and they were great.

And some of the specific folks there, if they called me out of the blue in six years, I’d say, “Oh, hey, Chandler, what’s up? Oh, okay, you need a job situation? Huh. All right. Well, I don’t know a ton about construction matters, but, yeah, let’s chat about it and see what I got in my LinkedIn, etc., you know?”

And I think I would be quite willing to do that and, in fact, I would feel a bit honored and flattered to be asked.

Emily Durham
One hundred percent. And I think this is where networking, like old-school networking tells us, which, in many ways, is still efficient and helpful, that you need to be having a chitchat with someone once a month and it’s formal and it’s structured. And that works at times.

But networking is also like running into someone at a housewarming party, hitting it off, and it’s just adding each other on LinkedIn for a rainy day. This is a bit of an aside, but there’s a wonderful gal who works in the main lobby of a gym that I go to.

She is incredible at what she does. She deals with very difficult people. I’ve walked by her dealing with big personalities. And a couple weeks ago, she reached out to me and was like, “I got to get out of here. Do you know anyone hiring in customer service?” And I was like, “Girl, for you, the freaking world.”

And I think there’s just a power in leading with that vulnerability, having an honest conversation. And we live in a world where more people than not have been impacted by layoffs. So if that is the situation you’re in or you’re worried about layoffs, you have the space to have that conversation with infinitely less stigma than maybe 10 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. And I guess there’s a silver lining here with all the uncertainty and the spookiness that I would imagine, and maybe you’ve got hard numbers of outreach results to prove it.

But I would imagine there is a general generous receptivity upgrade amongst folks on the receiving end of such messages, like, “Yeah, I hear it’s rough and I’d like to help, but I don’t know how or where or whom. And here, this lands in my world. Cool. It looks like I can do something to make this spooky world brighter.”

Emily Durham
Yeah, I think there’s an uptick, and this is totally anecdotal, in the receptiveness of a warm lead or a warm connection. So a friend of a friend, or the barista you know at the coffee shop, or the mechanic that helps you with your car.

I really find, in a world where AI and technology has become so paramount and is the headline of almost everything that we’re reading, ultimately, people will always crave connection. And a personal recommendation means so much more in a world where everyone’s cold outreach on LinkedIn sounds the same because ChatGPT wrote it.

So I do think the cold outreach, we’re in a place where it is much more difficult to get a response, but that’s why that warm outreach, whether it’s local events, asking a friend of a friend.

I feel like I keep dropping these random antidotes of just people in my life, but it is that season. My little cousin had texted me and she’s like, “Do you know anyone who works in ‘Insert her industry here’?”

And I, at first was going to go through my LinkedIn and thought, “Why don’t I text my group chat with my girlfriends? Like, surely, someone knows someone.” And they did. So sometimes it’s just enough to reach out to a couple of pals and say, like, “Do any of your cousins work in aerospace engineering?” Like, quick question.

And sometimes the answer is yes. And it’s just finding these low-lift ways to network that don’t feel as structured and formal can help us get a little bit further.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. So that seems to be a huge theme is network, network, relationships, warm intros, make all the difference. So you said there was a bit of an unlock or a shift for your mom. Can you maybe speak directly to folks who, if they have some resistance here, what’s their resistance and how do you respond?

Emily Durham
Yeah, I find the resistance with networking often comes from us feeling like we’re burdening other people. And when you resist reaching out or asking for help, first of all, you are robbing yourself of an opportunity for your own career, which you already know as you’re listening to this.

But I think, sometimes, we forget how much it means to someone to be able to help. Because, especially if you’re reaching out to someone who’s, you know, at least mid-career or above, they, at some point, have ran into layoffs, career hardships, the need for support. They have been the person asking for help.

And you had even mentioned, like you’d be honored to get a phone call from Chandler. And I think we often see ourselves as bigger burdens than we are. People, by nature, I believe, want to help. And when you hold yourself back from that, you hold yourself back from opportunity.

And if the altruistic emotional side does not make you feel inclined to reach out and ask for these conversations, let me ask you this. When you cash that check at the bank, are you going to care that you had to reach out to 10 people on LinkedIn or are you just going to be happy that you got the referral?

My guess is you’re just going to be happy you got the referral. So we don’t need to like the things that we do. We don’t need to like the networking. We just need to do it. And sometimes that’s what it takes to get paid.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is a nice reminder that, and in other ways, you kind of have to pick your flavor of unpleasantness.

Emily Durham
Choose your hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Because you could not do that. Would you like more months unemployed? And maybe you would. Yeah, you’re having the time of your life and you got the savings to support it. Okay. Maybe you’re not in a rush. Okay. Well, rock and roll then.

Emily Durham
Definitely. And I think, too, is that’s why I recommend starting with the people you know, whether that’s in-person, friends, family, friends of friends, just to get that ball rolling and you’ll realize how you’re not a burden. You’re not going to be received like you’re inconveniencing people.

People also have the opportunity to say no or to ghost you if they don’t have the capacity. So people have autonomy to handle how much they do or don’t help. But I really believe, by default, especially people you already know, they want to help.

And, a little friendly reminder, if you’re reaching out to folks who are working at a company you want to work at, y’all do know there are referral bonuses, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. We do forget those.

Emily Durham
Yeah, like, you know, for some companies, especially if you’re in, like, the tech banking consulting space, and mid senior role is between $2,000 to $6,000 for the referrer. You’re literally saying, “You can get paid if I get hired.”

So I also think, like you need to remember there are websites like Fishbowl where there are entire job platforms where people are auctioning off referrals, where you can literally purchase someone to refer you to a company. It is financially in the benefit of the person working at the organization for you to get hired.

So just try to remember these little things. And if that doesn’t help, you need to act more than you think. Just do the damn thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, I was unaware that you could purchase referrals into a company until this very minute. Thank you for that tidbit.

Emily Durham
We’ll write that one down.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I suppose, and I guess refer means something different in every context. Sometimes I think that there is an implied, you know, endorsement or vouching for a person.

And I guess different companies probably have their own things set up differently with regard to what they’re asking their employees to do when they provide a referral. It might be just literally just mean contact information, or it might be a strong kind of a endorsement. Is that accurate? I’m just speculating here.

Emily Durham
You are 100% spot on. So there’s really two kinds of referrals. One is a systems-based referral, which is where the company has a website or an internal form where you would simply say, “Hey, I know Susie. This is her LinkedIn. This is her contact information,” and maybe they’ll prompt for a couple of examples of times you’ve worked with Susie.

After that gets submitted, often Susie’s profile has a nice little star next to it that indicates it’s a referral. Now that’s great because, oftentimes, people run additional data and reports to make sure that referrers, or the referrals rather, get contacted quickly. They don’t sit in that black hole quite as much.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that your profile is getting reviewed first or really getting reviewed at all. It just guarantees that when they look at your profile, there’s this nice little bonus. But a warm interpersonal endorsement, to your point, is that other end. And that’s what I want us shooting for.

This is where someone, yes, refers you in the system, but then sends a message over Slack, that says, “God, I worked with Susie. She was awesome. Met her at this event. You know, here’s bibbity bobbity boo. Absolutely adored her.” That’s where someone makes a personal connection and goes out of their way to find you in said system.

So although both are great, that real personal connection that really can be established quickly, it doesn’t need to be like a months’ long relationship, that’s the moneymaker.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about I had a buddy who went deep into, like, an interview process. I don’t know, maybe like interview seven or eight, and it sounded like, you know, he was going to get this thing, and it was exciting.

And then he did not, and it was disappointing and surprising. And they said, “Oh, hey, sorry. You know what? A referral came in kind of at the last minute.” And I was scratching my head a little bit, it was like, “Okay, I know referrals are useful, but, like, at this point, you’re seven, eight interviews in.”

Emily Durham
That’s an executive referral. That was someone’s SVP saying, “You need to hire my nephew.” A hundred percent.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Okay, so the word referral in this context is not a heads up, “But I think this person’s great,” but rather a, “This person from on high has been decreed to be very special.”

Emily Durham
Yes. And most companies, it really depends on your company culture. Most companies a referral is a suggestion. It’s just saying, “I endorse them. You do what you got to do. I’m not influencing your hiring decision.”

But I’ve worked at and worked with companies where a referral from a certain level and above, especially once you start touching C-suite, is like, “All right, well, someone better cook up a job because Billy is getting hired. So we got to find him a home.”

Pete Mockaitis
Which I find fascinating. As a naive idealist who would like organizations to be meritocratic and have people who are awesome at their jobs doing necessary work, it’s kind of a sad comment that this happens unnecessarily.

Emily Durham
Yep, and more than we think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. But, all right, that’s reality. All right. Okay, so network, network, network, referrals make all the difference. Any top do’s or don’ts you recommend when we’re doing the outreach game?

Emily Durham
Okay, I’ll start with the don’ts because I love to lead with negative and then we’ll be nice and fluffy and positive. Please don’t have AI write all of your outreach. It is so painfully obvious, it comes off very cold, very insincere, and by virtue, you’re going to sound exactly like everyone else, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to go for.

Please don’t place high expectations of response rates, meaning for every 10 to 11 messages that you send, especially on a platform like LinkedIn, expect maybe one response.

And the more senior you get, the less likely you’re getting that response, which is why I’m a big believer in shoot directly for the level you’re looking for or the manager of what you’re looking for versus going to HR or an SVP or someone on that more senior chain of command, depending on where you’re at in your career.

You also don’t want to immediately ask for a favor. Like, please, oh, my goodness, do not reach out and say, “Hey, I need a referral,” or, “Hey, I need this.” No matter what your true intention is, your message needs to say, “Hey, I’ve been really interested in careers at…” insert their company.

“I saw…” insert a few things they listed on their profile, maybe how long they’ve been at said company, their academic background, “I’d love to hop on the phone with you for 20 minutes to learn more about your career if you have time. If not, I’m more than happy to message online whatever is best for you.”

The goal isn’t to ask for the favor. The goal is to get into contact with them. Ideally, in a 15- or 20-minute phone call where you have that honest conversation, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It’s not too honest.

You’re going to be asking two or three questions to them specific to their career, asking, like, “You know, what skills do you wish you had before you moved into this role? Any advice for someone looking to get into this company?” Really use this as a chance to learn from them. And then at the end you have a strong call to action.

And that’s where you say, “I saw this role posted. Do you know who’s running the hiring process?” You’re not asking for a referral, but you’re asking for a referral. They’re going to say, “Oh, yeah, it’s Susie from this team. I’ll connect you.”

Or, if they don’t know the person or perhaps they’re not hiring, you can plug in a different call to action. Maybe it’s, “Is there anyone in your network that you think would be worthwhile connecting me with? Is there anyone you’d be comfortable on your team that I chat with to learn more about this position?”

So you ask these questions that sound soft but get you the same result so you don’t come off as pushy. That’s my, like, big do. That’s the big flow I would follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. Don’t come across as pushy and I’m thinking about some of the research our guests have done with regard to people not wanting to say no when directly asked, specifically in sort of a live phone call context. So they might just say yes and then do nothing for you because that’s less socially uncomfortable for them.

But I’ve been in that position where, you know, I’ve let them know, it’s, like, “They will not interview anybody who has less than 3.5 GPA. So I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but, you know, you can close this door and go elsewhere and good luck.”

Emily Durham
Well, the honesty goes a long way, but I do think, if you’re getting the sense there’s apprehension on this phone call, send that follow-up email. All it is is a thank you. You reiterate the ask, and that’s really all you can do.

And, again, that’s why like the conversion of how many people you speak to, to how many referrals you get, is ultimately a small number. And that is unfortunate. And I wish there was a better way. There kind of isn’t, right? There isn’t necessarily a better way.

So just getting in the flow of, especially if you’re actively job-hunting, maybe it’s one call a week. Like, that might be enough for you to get in at the right company sooner than later.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. All right. So we’ve talked relationships, relationships, relationships a lot. Outside of that, what are the top things you recommend folks do and don’t, again?

Emily Durham
On your resume, please, for the love of goodness gracious, you need more data than you probably have. I can’t tell you how many resumes I see that are, like, either AI slop or so long-winded in their messaging that there is no data to actually communicate the outcome.

And with a lot of the organizations who are using AI to screen these resumes, they’re often pulling AI summaries of your resume in the system. So it’s a quick paragraph that lives next to your name that’s summarizing what you’re working on. And data, oftentimes, makes it in there. So it’s so important to have that data. From a human lens, you’re also able to scan that and see that quite easily on a resume.

I would also say, when it comes to the interview, in an age of everyone reading off of scripts that were written by little teeny weenie LLMs, I want you to be a person. I want you to bring a personality to the interview.

Small talk at the top of the interview. When they ask how you are, give them a little something-something, “I’m great. I just made this new baked beans recipe. I’m awesome. I just did…” insert a neutral thing you can chit-chat about to break the ice. That is something that so many people are missing right now. And it’s feedback I hear from companies I work with all the time.

And when it comes to actually being on the job, this might be like corny old-school advice, first couple months is dedicated to being a sponge. Learn as much as you can. The next couple of months is dedicated to fixing as much as you can.

And, really, the theme of being great in your career is going out of your way to be a kind person, set those boundaries so that you don’t burn out and operate with a lot of humility. Because I will say the companies that I work with, there is a concerning lack of humility, both on the job and in interviews.

Because we’re so supercharged by AI and having the answers, it’s really hard for us to admit when we need more training or when we don’t understand. And I think that is such a valuable superpower. It’s really about that human element. That was so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now you said scripts. Maybe I just need to stop being so surprised, but are you telling me candidates show up with an LLM-written script in their interview and proceed to read it from the paper verbatim?

Emily Durham
What if I said yes and, and the kids have taken it further? Okay, so you’ve got that. That’s like a thing that’s 100% happening.

Pete Mockaitis
This happens, like, semi often?

Emily Durham
Oh, I would argue, and this is data I’m making up, I would probably say depending on your industry, 40% of the time. This is like standard where they’ve got like their pre-prepped bullet points, they’re chatting with you on Zoom, eyes float to the right, we’re now reading a script.

What’s also happening is there are now tools available that plug into your Zoom or whatever platform you’re using, and it is using AI to transcribe the question the interviewer is asking while automatically generating the correct answer in front of you in a teleprompter. And that is happening at an astronomical rate as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then on the flip side though, you’ll have interviewers who are AI avatar robots saying…

Emily Durham
Gives me the heebie jeebies.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Tell me about a time that you worked on a team in collab.” What? And so it really is like a dystopian “Black Mirror” like situation. Part of me thinks that the world will figure out, any week now that that’s way dumb and to stop doing it. But part of me thinks, “No, the short-sighted efficiency hounds might really double down on this.”

Emily Durham
There was a really interesting thought piece that came out on this, talking about how experts, and they cited no experts, so Lord knows who’s they’re referring to.

But basically how the hiring system is so broken because companies are over-indexing on the use of AI. In response, candidates are, too. Got to fight fire with fire. I’m never going to blame the candidates. But it has basically made first-round virtual interviews meaningless because it’s, essentially, like AI versus AI.

So what some companies have started to do is increase the amount of in-person interviews, because obviously that blocks out some of this. But they’ve also bumped up the amount of live case study or hackathon-style interviews, like circa Silicon Valley 2011.

So I do think we’re going to start to see a rise of like the live case study need to be in-person watch-you work interview, which is crazy because that’s so much more labor for free.

But I do think that bubble has got to pop at some point because it is, when people say an interview is a conversation between two liars, it’s now yes and they’re both like WALL-E the eye robot.

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

Emily Durham
I think that’s all the big stuff. The only thing I like to leave people with is the market is tough, but so are you. So please try to be mindful of what your for-you page looks like. Do not allow yourself to doom scroll into the belief that you are not capable of growing in your career today. You can. We just need to adjust the strategy.

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

Emily Durham
My go-to favorite quote all the time, it’s a bit of a cheesy one, which is, “Be scared and do it anyways.” I’m a big believer in doing before you think. And sometimes you make mistakes and you learn quickly, and other times you stumble into great people or career paths that you didn’t expect.

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

Emily Durham
Another one that I actually just posted about a couple of days ago was specifically a study around how women, the curvier or less thin or “standard-size bodied” they are, the more time they spend at work trying to find outfits to conceal their bodies, and it actually occupies brain space at work.

So women will get up and get dressed and automatically have to think about how they can conceal a body to not be perceived as showing said body part or somehow being sexualized in the context of wearing something like a button-down top, as simple as that may be.

So I find that absolutely fascinating, how bodies, especially, you know, bodies that can be racialized or looked at through the lens of gender, are already things that are conditioned into people getting ready for work. It’s like labor that starts before the clock starts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Emily Durham
I haven’t finished it, but I’m quite excited by it, is Strangers. It’s going viral right now, which is a sign that Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage. It’s by Belle Burden. I’m only like a third of the way through, but it is a memoir about her relationship, and it’s fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Emily Durham
I’m a Copilot girl. As much as I talk about AI, I do think that the reality is we need to learn how to leverage it to stay competitive with what we do. So I’m big on my Note-Taker function in Copilot so that I don’t have to draft any meeting summaries. I’m really anti-meeting summary right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Emily Durham
I would say doing my makeup. And as silly as that sounds, that is my, like, me time. And I wake up, make my coffee and do my makeup, and I feel like it resets my nervous system before I even check my phone. Like, those are the first two things I do. It’s coffee, makeup, and then I deal with the real world.

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

Emily Durham
I think it’s that all of our jobs, ultimately, are made up and we float on a rock. And all the career advice in the world is fabulous. But, at the end of the day, when all of our lives flash before our eyes, I surely hope 80% of it isn’t you at a cubicle. I hope it’s you with the people you love. So act accordingly.

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

Emily Durham
You can find me on Instagram and TikTok, as well as YouTube at Emily The Recruiter. And you can check out my book and my podcast, which are both titled “Clock In.” If you miss me, everything’s going to be hot pink, so surely I’ll be easy to find.

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

Emily Durham
I think this is the week where you talk to a stranger and ask a stranger for a favor. It could be as small as feedback on how you performed in a meeting or a question about their career. Let’s get used to building community again. And when you ask people for favors, you open up the door for them to do the same.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Emily, thank you.

Emily Durham
Thank you. 

Jul 23

1169: Tapping into the Transformative Power of Sabbaticals with DJ DiDonna

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DJ DiDonna makes the case for why taking more extended time off helps professionals get further in their careers–and shares tricks for actually snagging that time.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to convince your boss to let you take a sabbatical
  2. How sabbaticals act as “regret insurance”
  3. How to plan a truly fulfilling sabbatical

About DJ

DJ DiDonna is a senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School, where he teaches MBA courses on entrepreneurship and building meaningful professional and personal lives. He has spent his career translating social science research into real-world tools for positive change. In 2019, DiDonna founded The Sabbatical Project to define, explore, and research the role of sabbaticals in modern life. He has helped organizations around the world—from nonprofits to Fortune 50 companies—design and implement sabbatical policies.

His work has been featured in The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Time, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Previously, DiDonna cofounded EFL Global, a fintech company that enabled more than $2 billion in capital to underbanked businesses and individuals across twenty countries before its acquisition in 2018. DiDonna earned his MBA from Harvard Business School. On his sabbatical, DiDonna walked nine hundred miles on pilgrimage in Shikoku, Japan, helped lead the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities at his undergraduate alma mater, Notre Dame, and unskillfully remodeled his kitchen. Outside work, you can find him plotting how to be in the Big Outdoors.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
DJ, welcome!

DJ DiDonna
How are ya? Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Doing well. Doing well. I’m excited to talk sabbaticals. First of all, we’re going to use that word a lot, what are we talking about here?

DJ DiDonna
So it’s funny, when I first took my sabbatical, I instinctively called it a sabbatical and I didn’t know what that meant. I think a lot of people use it because it lends this prestige from academia. It lends this prestige of, like, here’s an identity that you can have when you’re doing something very uncertain and you’re oftentimes giving up your identity.

And so, you know, I created one, take it or leave it, but intentional extended leave from your job. So, “When you’re away from your job, are you not looking for another job?” which is what we tend to fill in the space with. “Is it a time that’s hopefully measured in months, not days or weeks?”

And you can do work, but it can’t resemble your routine job. So no little consulting projects, nothing similar, but people will do things like try to write a book or get certified in yoga or scuba. I remodeled a kitchen, which might sound like work to folks, but it’s like intrinsic work of your own choosing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds nice, and we’re going to get into the practicals and the pushbacks and the constraints and the difficulties soon enough. But, first, let’s hear, tell us, I mean, they sound like a swell time. Can you share with us any surprising discoveries or key benefits that we should know about?

DJ DiDonna
I think anyone who’s been on a vacation knows that vacations are great and you can easily imagine that a longer vacation would be even better. The reason I set out to do this research and write this book was because the profundity of the kind of changes that I experienced, identity changes, life changes, the joy, the density of memories from that time were such that I was like, “Okay, something very different is going on here.”

And so when I spoke to other people for the research, I realized that there’s something deeper on a personal identity, “Who are you? What do you value?” that is changing in a way that just is not happening with shorter breaks. So that was surprising that it wasn’t just, you know, my personal experience, but universal across everyone that I spoke to.

But the other thing I think that’s counterintuitive based on how you framed it is that sabbaticals can be really tough. I think, a lot of times, you’re getting to sabbatical land burnt out or it’s catalyzed by some crisis, like a personal crisis, a work crisis, a relationship crisis, a health crisis. And so you’re having to work out a lot of stuff, and the vacuum of your responsibilities and how you spend your normal day allows a lot of big thoughts to come in.

And so people will look and say, “Oh, my gosh, you’re off for three months. You must be having the time of your life.” But, oftentimes, personal development and identity change is hard work and it’s difficult and uncomfortable. So that’s what I would say some of the surprising things were.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, identity change sounds big and it sounds like that can go in very many, many directions. Could you give us an example? And is that a good thing? Maybe I love my identity. I don’t want to change it.

DJ DiDonna
I think that the most important thing is that you are looking at who you are and what your identity is from the perspective of someone that can change it and is in charge, right? I think one of the things you see in the research is that there are some debate about whether you have like a fixed identity.

And so you want to return back, you know, to your identity that might have been obfuscated by, like, hard work or stress or taking a job you didn’t want or being in a relationship you didn’t want. Or is your identity constantly shifting and it’s your job to kind of guide your life towards how you change and shift as a person?

And so I think, in sabbatical, what is being offered is you’re stepping away from your life long enough. People have talked about it as like a near-death experience. You’re zooming out from your life. You’re looking back at how you’ve lived it and how you feel living it now, and what you would like for your life between now and when you die, and getting to say, like, “Do I want to make changes or not?”

And some people are like, “Love my life. Love my work. It gives me meaning. I don’t love going in every day, but that’s a job. But I would like to have stronger boundaries between work and life.” And that can be enough to change your identity, right?

Like, do you see yourself as someone who is a super committed father that picks their kids up every day and coaches the teams? Or do you see yourself primarily as a person that’s doing work and not really of your choosing?

So I think that’s the invitation is just to say, you know, really pick yourself out and say, “What am I doing? And how does that align with who I am and who I’ve wanted to be?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s intriguing as you describe it in this way. It’s like the sabbatical provides a context or fertile soil for epiphany or revelation, and we sort of have the time for it, as opposed to, a lot of times, epiphanies, even the word implies, “All at once, I realized, ‘What am I doing?’ Or, ‘I had a panic attack and I… no, no more of this.’”

So with the sabbatical, it seems like we don’t have to get lucky or have a strike of divine inspiration in order to come to these major realizations that perhaps we would really benefit from coming to.

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, I mean, I would think about it also as imagine if you could manufacture a scenario that would produce an insight that would change your life forever, right? So if you look at what’s called peak life experiences, like a lot of those are fomented by negative things that happen.

So a health crisis, you know, we’ve all heard about “The Bucket List” or seen it. Like, a health crisis makes you think, like, “What have I been doing and how do I want to change?” And what a sabbatical says is, you know, you can basically carve out time, you know, six months off in the scale of a 40- to 50-year career is like 1% of your working life.

And you can carve out 1% percent and say, “I want to try something on that I’ve always wanted to do. I want to write a book. I want to, like, become fluent in a foreign language or live in a foreign country with my family.” And then just have that experience as opposed to it being an emergency or something that happens to you.

I mean, another surprising thing from the research is that we found that about two-thirds of sabbatical takers, a sabbatical takes them, right? And so it is this fomented by a crisis as opposed to something that’s regularly planned.

And my intention is to identify these kind of inflection points across your life, from gap year early on in your education, to like a twilight career where you can take a pause and figure out if you’re heading in the right direction or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so I think, already, brains are firing off, it’s like, “Oh, it sounds nice, DJ, but no way that I could pull that off.” But even before we dig into some of those particular practicalities, I’d like to get a sense for some examples of these identity-shifting perspectives, insights. Like what kinds of things have popped up for people and how does it go down?

DJ DiDonna
You know, Pete, for the skeptics, just to make sure they get through the episode, right, like take the word sabbatical away and just think about it from the perspective of you, upon retirement, or upon your deathbed, or with your grandchildren, you know, bopping up and down on your knees, like, what is something that you would like to do in your life that doesn’t fit neatly into vacations, that certainly you’ve thought is important so far, but you clearly haven’t made time for?

And so it takes this, like, grandiosity around, like, “Taking a sabbatical is difficult,” and makes it more personal around, like, “I want to go on a road trip with my family to see the national parks.” Right? That’s an often one I hear. Like, how are you going to do that without a bigger container of time?

So I think I would encourage folks to think about, actually, what’s passionate for them as opposed to getting hung up on the term or the amount of time. Because, I think, once you start having this idea and it becomes concrete, it grows and germinates.

As far as the actual tangible outcomes, what we saw is an increase in confidence. So people come back having done a thing that is pretty rare. It’s certainly not the typical story of how we work, you know, at least in the States. And they come back stronger, you know, having healed personally and mental health-wise. And found out a little bit more about their capabilities outside of work.

A lot of people will do some sort of physical expedition, right, like a long hike or get in shape for a marathon or something like that. And that lends confidence about what’s possible. Creativity, so one of the cool things about a sabbatical is instead of doing like a vacation, you’re just being yourself. You’re just being.

And a lot of times that means you’re picking up some hobby that you used to have, you’re tinkering with something that is just for fun, there’s no purpose. And that kind of spurs our creative brands. Like, you’ve heard about the creative process where there’s no bad ideas and let’s get everything out there first and collaborate.

The other thing I mentioned earlier is just about perspective. So because you’ve disengaged from your work identity being governed by your calendar, that kind of thing, for long enough, and people will say it takes about six to eight weeks to fully disconnect, you’re able to get perspective about who you are, where you want to be going and whether how you’re allocating your time and resources is getting you there or not.

Pete Mockaitis
And so could you share some stories of some folks who did this and the realizations that they had?

DJ DiDonna
A couple of my favorite stories, one, there was a family that took a sabbatical on an island off the coast of Norway. So the father had been working in tech, had kind of burnt out, and his wife had taken a few years off from teaching in order to stay at home and raise the kids, right?

So she had wanted to get back into the workforce, he had wanted to take some time off, and so they spent a month above the Arctic Circle off the coast of Norway. She was, like, one of two teachers in kind of a one-room schoolhouse type situation for the island, and he was just experimenting, spending afternoons with his kids, doing little projects and hobbies.

He learned how to fish, learned how to smoke fish, learned how to catch fish, things that just aren’t that seemingly productive. But then he also wanted to go back to his hobby of being a computer developer. He was at management level, and so you’re not really down in the weeds.

And so mobile app development was coming out, this was about 10 years ago, and what he did was he created just a simple kind of text-to-speech app. His father had done work with kind of vision-impaired folks, and so it gave him the idea.

And as a result, he created something, published it on the app store, and it actually started gathering some steam, you know, people paying ten bucks a year. And when they came back to Boston, not only had they completely changed their relationship to money, because they had lived on a relatively meager teacher’s salary in Norway, it gave him the confidence that he could spend another year, a year and a half, building it up to support the family.

He designed the business such that he could take summers off because he was like, “Why would I not spend summers aligned with my wife’s calendar, spending summers adventuring with my kids being present?” And it gave his wife things on the resume and experience to get back into the workforce in the States. I love that story.

I think on the opposite side, it’s also important to know what you don’t want to do. So a lot of people use sabbaticals to test, like, “What’s the counterfactual to the life that I’m living?” There was someone, in the book, who was a career trial lawyer. He studied English in college, always wanted to write a novel, but kind of found himself starting a family early on, wanting to support the family.

And so after 25 years, he took six months off to write. And it allowed him to walk his kids to school, cook them dinner at night, be more present with the family, which his job hadn’t before. But, more importantly, he wrote for about two months and then he printed the manuscript out, tore it into pieces, put it in the trash, and was like, “Actually, I want to go back to being a lawyer.”

And so this concept that, like, part of navigating through life and navigating your identity is, “What are you good at? What are you not good at? What do you like? What do you not like?” And I think about sabbaticals as regret insurance, because you get to try things on for size that you would have regretted not doing at the end of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really cool. And I’m thinking about, well, first of all, I believe that’s Winston Chin, right, who made the Voice Dream Reader, an app that I use and love. And Kwame Christian did, like, a whole episode about how that’s a key part of his life.

DJ DiDonna
Oh, funny.

Pete Mockaitis
He could see, but he likes having notes read back to him at rapid speed while he’s doing other things. So that’s pretty cool. Hey, sabbatical enriching all of us.

DJ DiDonna
Developed over the winter, you know, dark, dark winter in Norway.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So that’s really cool. And then you’re right, the regret insurance thing is resonating. I’m thinking about, I remember at Bain, they had a program, and they might still have it, they called it Take Two, which is basically this.

It’s, like, you could take two months off, I believe it was unpaid, but you keep your health insurance benefits, and you could just do whatever. And what was interesting is it was a real win-win for the consultants trying something else, like, “I always thought I wanted to work in sports.”

And so then they work in sports for two months, like, “You know what? I like consulting better.” So they come on back and they have that retention of an employee for longer because they could scratch the itch, they could take a look, and they come back and say, “Actually, this is really a pretty sweet gig. Let’s keep doing this.”

And it’s great for the people because, you know, sometimes they do discover just the thing, or they put to rest that lingering doubt. Regret insurance is well put, it’s like, “Ah, I wonder what would have happened if I worked in sports? Well, I know. I tried two months and it wasn’t all I hoped it would be.”

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, I have a fair amount of examples from the consulting field because, as you know, it’s project-based and so when you’re on, you’re on, and you’re on like 11 out of 10. And then when you’re off, you’re totally off.

Like, you’ve finished the engagement and so there’s not work to do that lingers. And I think that the economy is heading more towards this, like, cyclical project-based, like you see it in tech product development cycles.

And so I think, as the economy heads more towards natural inflection points every four or five, however many years, I think it gives you these opportunities to say, “Okay, let me step back and recharge. Let me maybe, right now, right, like let me step back and learn AI from a curiosity standpoint. Like, build something that’s interesting to me,” as opposed to, like, trying to fit it in in everything else that you have to do with life.

And then you’re actually training yourself for the next job. So I like the consulting example and a lot of consultants in the study would use that time off. You know, McKenzie has Take Time, Bain has Take Two, where you would run an experiment.

Someone in the study thought that they wanted to own an eco resort when they retired. Sounds idyllic, right? You live in a beautiful place, and he worked in Costa Rica and in Hawaii over the course of his sabbatical, you know, in the kitchen, in the front office, and he was like, “This is miserable.”

And so it’s this, like, just how can you test different hypotheses about your life so that you’re more fulfilled in the life you choose or the next life you choose?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, if folks think, “Yeah, that’s great, but…” where do we go from there?

DJ DiDonna
You know, I think the first step is nurturing that seed of an idea, as kind of woo-woo as that might sound. Like, you really have to think about something concrete. Go to a cafe for an hour, no phone, no music, no friends, and just think, like, “What are things I want to do before I die?”

And I think that’s important because it just makes it more tangible because I think, then, you start to build this intuition, like, “Wait a minute, why can’t I? I’ve always wanted to do this. I’m X years into my life. Like, why have I not done this?”

For me, it was about the spiritual search, right? I felt like I was spiritual. I grew up in a religious household. I wanted to, like, nurture and investigate that side. I felt like it was important, but I wasn’t allotting time to it. And I think it’s something that takes a fair amount of time. So find that thing that is so important that you start to realize, like, “This is not fair. I will not be happy with life if I don’t get a chance to do it.”

The next thing is, I think, take your time scale away from the next 90 days, the next year, and put it into, like, a five-year plan. Of course, a sabbatical is out of reach for almost everybody. If you don’t have a company supporting it with a policy, if you’re talking about taking off three months from now.

But what are you doing in 2032, right? And kind of like plant a flag somewhere in the future that sounds impossibly far away, and say, “I’m taking the summer off with my family in 2032. We’re going to align schedules, we’re going to tell our bosses three years in advance, and it’s just part of how we live our life,” as opposed to waiting until some emergency kind of, you know, clutches you and takes you out of routine life.

Once you do that, then you can financially save 5, 10% a year. You can work out the logistics. Put it far enough in advance that it becomes logistically feasible. Dream and understand what your what the stakes are. Like what does it cost you not to do this over the course of your life?

And then the other thing that’s important, in our research we found that one of the most enabling factors of taking a sabbatical is having an example in your life of someone who has taken it. So ask far and wide, “Is there anyone in my network who has taken extended leave, who has taken a sabbatical?”

I mean, don’t be afraid to post it on LinkedIn. There’s a career break feature on LinkedIn that was rolled out in 2022, and millions of people use it. So that, like, norm around like work devotion, I think, is disintegrating pretty quickly.

But once you can get some advice and some proof and permission that it’s okay to take extended leave from someone you know, the barriers start to break down a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about the career break feature on LinkedIn.

DJ DiDonna
So when you’re putting in the employer that you have and how long you worked for them, there’s a career break employer. And then you can kind of say, career break, skills development, personal needs, whatever, whatever.

I thought it’s pretty revolutionary, like, to have every person who’s displaying their resume online include career breaks.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you, in terms of the normative piece, because I think there’s some old career resume advice somewhere, like, “Oh, make sure there’s no gaps in that resume. That’s a big red flag.” I don’t personally evaluate any candidate or talent in such a way at all.

I don’t know if maybe you could demystify some of that for us. If we have these fears about, “What will others say or think or do? Or how will this impact how I’m judged or viewed or evaluated, assessed?” What’s the scoop there?

DJ DiDonna
I think, first of all, like flipping that on its head, if you’re looking at a few different resumes, and one person says something about their life that’s interesting, right, it shows that, so there’s this concept called the red sneaker effect.

That if you have the confidence to dress unlike other people in an interview, or if you have the confidence to say, like, “You know, I took six months off to sail across the Pacific, or to take care of my parents,” that actually sends a signal that, like, “My work will kind of stand for itself. This is who I am as a person. Here’s a tiny glimpse on the resume.” So I would encourage people to think about it like that.

And then, on the negative side, if someone is going to screen you out for taking three months off to care for a loved one, probably not a good fit. You know what I mean? Like, if you’re looking for a signal that the company doesn’t value you as a human being, I think there it is.

And we know that younger generations are more likely to trade autonomy and mission and purpose and flexibility for compensation. And so it’s bubbling up within the economy anyway, as you said, outdated story. And so you can either be a part of this and encourage it and support it, or you can be kind of left behind and, you know, working two jobs and sleeping under your desk.

Pete Mockaitis
And, likewise, with regard to the, “What do other people think?” situation, if you give the boss a heads up, “Hey, three, four years from now, I want you to know I’ve got this sabbatical on the calendar,” how do those conversations tend to go?

DJ DiDonna
I mean, listen, you have to compare apples to apples, right? So in Silicon Valley, the average tenure at a company is, like, two years. And so I think if you’re saying to someone, “I want to stay at this company. I view my tenure here to be long. I like it. I want to grow here. And in four years, I want to take two months off with my family to live in Spain,” I think that’s totally manageable.

Like, people are leaving their jobs. And when people leave their jobs, managers have to scramble and hire someone else. They have to, like, train that new person. People go on parental leave. Like, you have a bit more notice, but maybe five, six months notice.

And so what you’re doing is you’re helping the organization build resilience around, “Can you survive when someone leaves the company?” You’re being super purposeful about, “Here are my tasks. Here’s who I kind of delegate them off to. Here’s how I onboard them back.”

And I think, most importantly from an employer standpoint, it’s an equitable benefit. Like, if you’re carrying water for someone else because they’re on sabbatical, and then you can take a sabbatical, that’s very different than if you’re carrying water because the staffing needs were messed up, you couldn’t hire a replacement, you’re working way more, or someone else goes on parental leave but you’re not planning on having a kid.

So I think it creates this world where, like, our humanity is honored outside of work, as opposed to just pretending like no one ever quits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you’re right. If you’re hearing that, it might actually be very appreciated by your employer. Like, “Oh, I didn’t realize you were planning on being here for four plus years. Most people don’t. That’s pretty cool. Okay. Well, we could probably figure that out. Sure. Thanks for the heads up.”

DJ DiDonna
Yeah, every company can figure that out, right? Like, companies have to figure out when people leave. They have to figure out when people go on parental leave. And so it’s not easy, right? This is not easy at the current state where there aren’t enabling policies for everyone. It’s not financially feasible for everyone.

But, again, like, looking at the trajectory of the paid parental leave movement, and the US is still the only high-income country in the world that doesn’t have, like, government-supported paid parental leave, but it’s increased over time. I think 40 states offer paid parental leave. And then if you apply to a job that doesn’t, it’s a bit of a head scratcher.

So I think the evolution of sabbaticals and sabbatical policies, I see taking that same trajectory, which is just, “Wait, I can’t take three months off every four years?” Like, it’s not a lot of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any pro tips, top do’s and don’ts to keep in mind as we start walking down this path?

DJ DiDonna
I think the first thing is to make sure that you are sufficiently disconnected from your routine life. So if you’re stepping away from work, and you’re coming back to your job, making sure that auto-away messages, emails are being deleted, like, “I will return on X date,” making sure you have support inside the organization to say, like, what’s the break-the-glass moment where, like, “If someone reaches out about this, like, here’s my phone number, but otherwise, no.”

If you’re leaving a job, I think the way to be disconnected is, like, don’t post about it on LinkedIn, don’t tell people you’re taking time off. Just do it. You can post at the end and say, “Here’s what I learned, and many of you might have noticed,” but no one notices. Like, everyone is focused on their own life.

Most often, you’ll hear, like, “You were gone for six months? Like, oh, my gosh, it felt like you were just here yesterday.” People are busy. And that second aspect of disconnection is making sure you’re gone long enough, right?

So, again, best practice, if you can take three months or more, awesome. If you can’t, take as much as you can. I think that it’s like a gateway drug where you take a month off, and you’re like, “That really flew by, and I didn’t get to do 90% of what I wanted to do. Maybe next time in five years, I’ll take more time off.” But just start to experiment with, like, why it’s so different to take extended leave off.

And the other thing, I would encourage people to take that time to get a coach, right? A coach or a therapist to try to, like, process who you are, and use that opportunity to grow as a person. And then, finally, a lot of people shift directly from, like, work-productivity mode into, like, life-productivity mode, and they’re like, “All right, I’m done with work. Now I need to become fluent in Portuguese,” or, “Now I need to do this project I’ve always wanted to do,” which is understandable.

But I encourage people to take a beat. Take a couple weeks, just heal. Get out of your head into your body. Do things like ceramics or yoga, like things that don’t just, like, swap out one brain thing for another, or one laptop thing for another. Like, return to kind of being human again, return to body movement, all that kind of stuff, music, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what you’re saying about the gateway drug and our beliefs and associations, I think, somewhere inside of us, I think we have kind of a belief that, “If I disappear for a while, you know, disaster will strike,” or, “If I can disappear for a while, then I guess I’m not all that essential.”

And so I’ve heard, talked to people who are taking paternity leave who have said such things. And I remember, I, one time, went on an eight-day silent retreat. And so my phone was totally off, and so I had this extensive email autoreply, as well as voicemail.

And it’s like, “Hey, if you need this, ask this person. You need this? Ask this person. You need this? Ask this person. If you really need something and it can’t wait, you know, here is the number of the retreat house.”

And I guess you can already guess, DJ, how many people felt the need to call the retreat house over eight days? Zero. And so, yeah, the world continues, and yet, we are also missed at the same time, you know?

DJ DiDonna
Yeah. I think that, listen, silver lining from COVID was that we all, especially knowledge workers, right, we found out that you actually don’t have to be in the office to get most of the work done. We had the technology to do it before that, but this kind of, like, forced us to say like, “Oh, my gosh, we can’t be in the same room. How do we get the work done?”

And so I think taking time off can be the same thing. It’s like, “How do we get this done when they’re not here?” Like, what changes when you step away from the office? I think we’re scared of change, we’re scared of uncertainty, you know, understandably, especially this kind of like age of AI.

But at the end of the day, like, you’re replaceable anyway. Like, no company, at least not any good ones, fail because one person leaves, right? And in America, you know, you are employed at will, right? And so you can be fired, for the most part, for no reason.

And so I think you have to, like, lean into that and be courageous, and say, like, “How can I arm myself? How can I improve myself in this age of uncertainty?” And in order to do that, it’s making sure you’re healthy and whole, right, you’re not burnt out, you have energy to kind of persist.

Making sure you have creative ideas for yourself and what you want to do in the future, and making sure you have confidence about what value you offer, like, “Oh, I got fired,” or, “That company shut down, like, I can find another job,” because you you have to, and that’s how the world of work is now. Like, no one is watching out for you and saving up for your retirement for you, unfortunately.

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

DJ DiDonna
A quote that I have in the book that really stuck with me is Wordsworth who says, “To begin, begin,” right? If you want to have the life that you’re not going to regret, if you want to check things off your bucket list before it’s too late, you got to begin.

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

DJ DiDonna
I think this concept of how you rest and recover. So I think everyone thinks that the best way to rest and recover is by doing nothing. And what we found in kind of drafting off other research is that, actually, engaging in activity that’s intrinsically chosen is a great way to recover.

So you don’t have to just sip coconuts on the beach. Many type A achiever people are, like, concerned, like, “What would I do on sabbatical? I’m going to be so bored.” You can do work, but it’s work of your own choosing. It’s intrinsically motivated. It’s something that matters to you. I thought that was a pretty empowering study to read.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

DJ DiDonna
Anything by Herminia Ibarra, Working Identity is a really good one. And I think anything by Johann Hari, I think, does really good kind of journalistic investigative work. I’m reading The Three-Body Problem right now, which has been on my shelf forever. So I’m a sci-fi person as well.

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

DJ DiDonna
I don’t want to say what everyone says about using Claude Code, but it’s been pretty incredible to go through all of my notes over the ten years kind of investigating sabbaticals and help surface and identify people that I’ve spoken to who might be interested in the book. It’s been really nice to have like an assistant through the process.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

DJ DiDonna
It’s honestly doing the dishes in the morning. That sounds really lame, but I actually learned to love it on a meditation retreat. We should circle up on our meditation retreat experiences afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear a smidge more. Learning to love it in what sense?

DJ DiDonna
I think appreciating something like washing dishes as, like, work for the household that adds value, and also work where you can just focus on nothing else. There’s, like, a Nintendo Switch game which is about power washing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, it’s a top seller.

DJ DiDonna
Which is crazy, but I get it, right? I mean, you wash dishes, you kind of give that gift to your family, you leave the kitchen better off. It’s the most kind of mid-40s dad thing to say possible, but there it is.

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

DJ DiDonna
I think people talk about the cost of a sabbatical, the price, you know, “Does it affect your retirement?” I think it’s, “What’s the cost not to?” So, really, asking people, like, “What is the cost of living your life without pursuing your dreams, without identifying things on your bucket list, and going after it?”

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

DJ DiDonna
TheSabbaticalProject.org. If you search sabbaticals and DJ, I’m all over the internet. This is not the identity that I thought I would have, but here we are. And I am on LinkedIn a lot as well.

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

DJ DiDonna
I think, even outside of sabbaticals, this annual reflection of really looking back and saying, like, “How was my year? What do I want the next year to look like?” But I think one thing that people don’t do, you know, I teach at a grad school, and when you apply to college, when you apply to grad school, you have to fill out these applications and these essays, “What are three things, three mistakes, three successes? What do I want to do after I graduate from this place?”

I think, often enough, we don’t apply to the next four or five years of our life. So I kind of encourage my students, I’ve created a template where it’s like, “All right, four years from now, like what life are you applying to? Like, no one’s going to read the essays,” but as opposed to just like a one year frame, I like that four year apply to life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, DJ, thank you.

DJ DiDonna
Great to meet you.

May 07

1150: How to Reclaim Your Schedule and Own Your Time with Laura Vanderkam

By Podcasts No Comments

Productivity expert Laura Vanderkam shows you how to take charge of your schedule so that you can make time for what truly matters.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you feel like you don’t have enough time–and how to change it
  2. How setting aside 15 minutes can change your whole workday
  3. How to become the ringmaster of your schedule circus

About Laura

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. 

Her 2016 TED talk, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time,” has been viewed more than 5 million times. She regularly appears in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. 

She is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and four children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back!

Laura Vanderkam
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Time. You’ve got a simple path for us for time abundance. And we talked a little bit about this notion of time scarcity versus abundance last time. Tell me, what have you discovered with your new research adventures?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, Big Time is all about moving beyond a sense of time scarcity, and what happens when we truly believe that we have enough time for the things that we want to do in life. I really do think it is possible to fall in love with our schedules, and I’ve got lots of practical tips, talked to lots of people who are making it happen. I think that time can, ultimately, be our friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds enticing. Can you share with us some of the on-the-ground investigative research studying you did to discover these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, one thing I did is looking at how people spend their work hours. And how people feel about work is a very complicated question.

You know, if you ask people, in general, how do they feel about their jobs, most people will say they’re reasonably satisfied. If you look at people’s happiness during the day, like in a 10:00 a.m. staff meeting, they tend to be pretty unhappy. Like, they are watching the clock, hoping that time is moving faster.

So we have this, you know, gap between, like, we’re reasonably happy with our jobs overall, but during the hours we are spending at our jobs, we may not be as happy as we could be. And I really hate to have people wishing time away in their lives because time is so precious.

So one of the things I had people try out is a couple of strategies for making the experience of working hours better. Like, are there things you can do during an average work day to have you watching the clock less? And they’re pretty simple strategies.

I mean, one was spending one more hour per week on your favorite sort of work. We all have things we don’t like about our jobs but, hopefully, there’s something that drew us to the job in the first place. And so spending one more hour a week on that.

Spending just 15 minutes deepening a work friendship. So even if you’re not enamored with your job itself, like you probably have at least one colleague that you could be friendly with, and building a relationship with that person can make the experience of time at work a lot better.

And, finally, taking intentional breaks, taking two short breaks each day that you have decided ahead of time what to do with, turns out can also vastly increase the happy feelings at work. And so taken altogether, when I had a couple hundred people try these out over the course of three weeks, their workday satisfaction rose significantly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, if folks are in a situation where they’re not enjoying their job, the idea of spending more time working, like your first tip there, might seem very unpleasant, like, “Heck, no. I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to.”

Laura Vanderkam
No, not that you need to be clocking 41 hours a week instead of 40. No, I mean, re-purposing some of the time that you are already working. And even when people don’t have a ton of control, a ton of discretion over how they spend their working hours, there are often still things you can do to change it on the margin.

Whether that’s asking your supervisor to assign you to something different than what you’ve been or to spend a little bit more time on one project and try to be a little bit more efficient on something else.

There’s always things you can do just on the margins to increase the number of minutes spent on enjoyable activities versus less enjoyable activities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so the re-purposing, that’s a great distinction. Although, I might suggest, you tell me, that even if you do spend the 41st hour instead of 40 hours, well, I’m thinking of Mary Poppins got that tune in my head, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

Laura Vanderkam
That’s true. That’s true. It might be worth a 41st hour just to change the experience of work. You know, it’s so true. I mean, there was one ridiculous study I read with psychology that had people put their hands in freezing cold water.

And when they made it slightly less cold at the end, people rated the experience as so much better. And so maybe it’s the same thing if you spend the last, you know, 15 minutes of your work day, but maybe even if you work 15 minutes later on something you really enjoy doing, maybe that could make the whole experience different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, and the notion that you’re taking control as opposed to work is happening to you, it’s like, “No, no, no, this is the 41st hour. I am choosing to do this discretionarily.”

And in so doing – and I’m just totally making this up, so give me your hot take – that you can have some transformative impact on your own associations and relationship to the experience of work by going there.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, and I think having that mindset of, “I have some agency over this situation,” is huge. And, again, I know a lot of people don’t have complete control over their work or their working hours. But even if you don’t have complete control, you have some. And using whatever agency you have to make your time better can just change how you feel about life in general.

I mean, we don’t spend the majority of our waking hours working. There’s that adage that, “Oh, you spend the majority of your waking hours working.” Most people do not. But, that said, we do spend a fair number of hours working.

And so if there is something you can do to move those hours out of the wishing-time away category and into even the neutral category, that can be a major life satisfaction boost. And something like deepening a work friendship.

I mean, you think about a friend as somebody that you would spend time with off the clock. So wouldn’t it be exciting to be able to spend more time with somebody that you enjoy on the clock? And, in general, friendships are built through the accumulation of relaxed, pleasant time spent together. So the more you can throw at that pile, the better.

Pete Mockaitis
And with regard to these categories of the experience of work, can you unpack a little bit of the names of the categories, how you kind of think about which vibe is appropriate for a given activity, the tracking, a little bit of the nuts and bolts for these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
I think one way to think about how you’re spending your time at work and how you’re feeling about your time at work is to give yourself, honestly, a mood score or an energy score as you go through your day.

I’m a big fan of time tracking, in general. I’ve found, through other research I’ve done, that when people track their time for a week, they tend to feel better about their time overall because it turns out that many of the catastrophic stories people tell themselves about their time are not true, right? Life isn’t actually all that bad.

We don’t work around the clock. We do get some sleep. We have some time for ourselves, even if it’s not as much as we want. And so as you’re tracking time, you could also keep track of, “How do I feel about my time? Am I happy?” Is it all clouds and rainbows and unicorns? Or is it, “I’m hating the universe?” and sort of somewhere between zero and 10. And probably most of the things we do in life are around a five or a six. But maybe some stuff is better.

And if you are going through your work day and you find that some categories of work are edging up, like you’re feeling like this is maybe a seven or if it’s in certain circumstances, it might be even an eight, well, obviously, if you can come up with a way to spend an extra hour of the week in that seven or eight category, as opposed to maybe a two, three, four kind of category, you’re going to see a big boost in overall satisfaction.

Same thing with energy. Actually, it’s interesting, because one of the problems that creating intentional breaks helps solve is that people’s energy dips a lot through the day. People have been working for a while, and then you feel like you need a break, but if you don’t take an intentional break, you’ll probably take an unintentional one. For many people that looks like scrolling around online, checking email after you just checked it five minutes ago.

And so if you find yourself with your energy dipping, like that’s trending down, maybe 10 as you’re ready to run a marathon and zero as you’re flat on your back, that’s a good sign that it’s time to build in something that would boost your energy, something like taking a quick walk, talking with somebody you like, getting some fresh air.

And as people try that, they’re going to find that the numbers after that break start trending higher.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us just plenty of fun stories in terms of practical, tactical, experiential, individuals who figured out how to make that switch to re-purpose an hour to have more engaging goodness, what they did for their breaks, and how that was transformative?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, sometimes it’s about noticing the work that is already there and savoring it when you’re doing it, because so much of life can just be mindless. Like, you’re going through the day, you’re doing stuff, but your mind is somewhere else, so you’re always thinking about the next thing.

So, for instance, one health care provider who was part of the study would take a minute to look at her schedule coming up and what was going on. And she realized that some of her favorite visits were with babies, right? She loved to have babies come into the office and take care of them and talk to the new parents about how they were doing.

And so when she would see these on her schedule, she would consciously be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to this, right? I’m getting to do this favorite work coming up in one of my patients this afternoon, and would savor it while it was happening and take a moment afterwards to pause and be like, ‘Yes, I love doing that. That’s my favorite kind of work.’”

And, you know, the kids were on the schedule anyway, right? The same patients are coming no matter what, you know, if her mind is somewhere else or if she’s fully absorbed and enjoying this. But her experience of work was so much different by anticipating, experiencing, savoring in the moment and reflecting on it afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super – the anticipating, savoring, and looking back. Boy, that’s powerful. You can do that with just about every day, there’s something worthwhile.

Laura Vanderkam
It could be even that you had a great conversation with a colleague before a meeting.

Like, you can pause and notice that, be like, “Oh, yeah, I like that person. That was a moment in my job that was a wonderful thing.” And it’s the same with you mentioned the breaks, like, stories of people taking breaks. This was almost people had to teach themselves to take good breaks.

I always say people take breaks anyway. People cannot work straight through. Even if it’s just to go to the restroom, there’s some break happening in any sort of work. The problem with a lot of information work is that they are unintentional breaks.

Like, you are going along, doing your work, you get distracted by something, you’re on your phone for a minute. Next thing you know, you’re cycling through headlines, you’re checking your WhatsApp messages. These are breaks, but it doesn’t feel rejuvenating at all.

So I was having people really learn to take real breaks. And some people were very nervous about it at the beginning. Like, I had people, you know, somebody printed out an e-book so it looked like they were working on a document while they were taking a break.

But I’m happy to report that, over the course of trying this out for a while, people realized like the earth does not crash into the sun when you take a 10-minute break. Most of us are just not that important. So you can do it.

And somebody would go outside and sit and look at the sky for 10 minutes and come back in. And it’s pretty hard to tell yourself, “I am starved for time,” when you’ve had 10 minutes to just kind of watch the clouds. And just little things like that can change your entire experience of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really good in that, by physically doing a thing, it’s like your brain gets the memo, “No, actually, you’re not wildly scarce in time because look what just happened.”

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, we could change our story like that all the time. Our time narratives are based all on what we are noticing. So training our brains to notice things that are not just these stressful moments can completely rewrite the story from one of time scarcity to time abundance.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to these breaks, so you say two 10-minute breaks and just build them into the day, is that like one in the afternoon, one in the morning?

Laura Vanderkam
Sure, whatever works. I kind of think of these as in addition to a meal break that people might take in the middle of the day. But, obviously, you could add on a few minutes to take a longer lunch break instead if that works better for your schedule.

Some breaks are formal. Sometimes people are, like, you take it at this specific time. For a lot of people, it’s more you catch it when you can. But looking at your schedule ahead of time and kind of proactively choosing when might work is another very smart way to exert agency over your schedule for the day.

Because that sort of strategy is what can then have you say, like, “Oh, well, look, I actually have a longer break between these two meetings, and I could do something else. I could work on some of my favorite work in addition to taking a break.” And when you start to see those kinds of things, you take more charge of your working day.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share with us some breaks that folks have just been loving in terms of finding them super rejuvenating? Staring at the sky sounds fun. What else do you recommend?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, anything that can get you moving physically is going to be a big win. There’s some pretty solid evidence that people who engage in physical activity will see their energy levels go up quite a bit, even through very short bursts of energy.

So if it is possible to get outside and go for a brisk walk, that is going to be at least two things right there that will boost your mood and energy. If you can take a work friend with you, good. That’s even, like, three. That could be even better.

But so people definitely enjoyed that. Now, obviously, you can’t always get outside. But are you somewhere that you could go up and down the stairs even? That would make people feel much more alert than they had.

You know, I had people take, like, little adventures. If there is, say, a park near your office, you might be able to walk out the door, walk there for 10 minutes and come back and have the boost of seeing something different in the course of your day.

But it could be other things. It could be calling a friend. It could be listening to something inspirational like a soaring movie soundtrack. People might find that a little bit exciting. Meditation works for people. Reading something, especially something upbeat.

Even if you, like, read something fun for 10 minutes twice a day, that’s 20 additional minutes of reading you’ve gotten in your day. And if you do that five days a week, that’s 100 minutes, which is an hour and 40 minutes. Like, this is a lot, you know, it does add up. You could probably read an extra book a month that way if you wanted to.

People looked at art online. Even, you know, watching funny videos, as long as you’re doing it intentionally. I think a lot of people are just sort of, you know, pull up YouTube shorts and see what’s there, which, you know, I get it.

But if you have maybe saved up a clip from a favorite stand-up comedian or a clip from a favorite sitcom that you used to watch back in the day, those can be the kind of things that will make you laugh, and a laugh will boost your energy quite a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, and I’m a believer in breaks. In this office, it’s wild. I’ve got like a little basin of water I will dip my face into. I’ve got a little rebounder trampoline I’ll just jump on. I’ve got an acupressure mat. I’ll lie on it. I’ll stand on it. I joke that it’s the recording studio and wellness spa with all these amenities.

And it’s so true. When I really stop and engage with these things, it creates a great energy boost as opposed to, if you blast straight through, it’s like the body will demand a pause. And so often, yes, it is a scrolling of some sort. I like your phrase – an unintentional break asserts itself.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I refer to that as our electronic hobbies, right, because it fills so much time. And a hobby could be a great thing to do on a break, particularly if you work from home some days. I mean, you know, 10 minutes you could go play a musical instrument.

You could go do some knitting, or needle point, or color in one of those adult coloring books, or even go outside and weed a few things in the garden, if that would be, you know, something you’d find relaxing. But instead, we tend to default to these electronic hobbies of scrolling around, reading social media comments, opening your inbox again, even though you just opened it five minutes prior.

And by naming that as a hobby, I think it gives people pause, because it’s like, “Well, that’s not what I’d choose to do as my hobby.” It’s like, “Okay, well, then we need to re-purpose that time for something that you find more enjoyable.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super. Let’s talk a little bit about the tracking of time. It seems there are many tools that would love to avail themselves in this domain. What have you found works great for you and for others in doing this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, so I’ve been tracking my time for about 11 years now. Nobody else needs to do that, but I have been doing that because I find it very useful and it’s also very easy. And I just check in three to four times a day, write down what I’ve done since the last time I checked in.

Each check-in takes me about a minute. You know, three minutes a day, same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth. So it is not something that I find incredibly onerous. But I just use spreadsheets. It is a basic Excel, standard thing.

It’s got the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, 5:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. So 336 cells representing the 168-hour week, and I just fill it in as I go.

However, that’s not the only way you could do this. There are lots of time tracking apps on the market.

My podcast co-host on “Best of Both Worlds,” Sarah Hart-Unger, was having trouble tracking her time for years, even though I was constantly preaching the benefits of it. And she came across Toggl, T-O-G-G-L, which has a free version that is a more digital version of this.

Like, you just… it’s on your phone, you say what you’re doing, start and stop. You can go back in and correct the record later if you’ve forgotten to hit stop, and so you’ve been commuting for the last six hours. You can go back in and change it later.

But she found that fairly intuitive and something that fit in with her busy life. So that’s something that people could give a whirl. You could also walk around, like, with a little notebook. You want to look all artsy, like, “I look at my journal as I’m going through the day.” That works too.

Like, the tool itself doesn’t really matter. It’s more like, “Can you do it? Will you do it? Will you stick with it for at least a few days?” and, ideally, a week. And if you do, I think you’ll learn a lot about your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, and I’d love to zoom out and get some of your big-picture perspectives. You’ve got a mindset or metaphor of being the ringmaster. Can you expand on this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, this is probably one of my favorite metaphors for time and how we think of our lives. So when people tell you, “My life is a circus,” they tend to mean it is chaotic. But that is such a slander against circuses because circuses are the most organized performance you will ever see.

Nobody is getting shot out of a cannon at the wrong time, right? If there are supposed to be tigers in one ring, they are not in another ring. They’re not coming on at the wrong time. They are there when they are supposed to be there, right? And so I think we should aspire to have our lives be as organized as a circus. A circus is complex, but it is not chaotic at all.

And so I’ve developed this metaphor of, like, I am the ring master in charge of my life. My life has three rings, right? So this is a three ring circus of career, relationships – so meaning friends and family – and self, the things I need to do for my own physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health.

So all the time, you are monitoring all three rings, you are making sure that what is supposed to be happening in each ring is actually happening, that the logistics are thought through, that this all looks like a good time. And one of the additions of this metaphor is that a lot of circus performers, acrobats and stuff, perform over a net. And the net is there for when things go wrong.

And, to my mind, a net is a net, but I have interviewed circus performers and they have informed me that, “Oh, no, no, no, no, the net has to be very well thought through. The net is exactly where it’s supposed to be. The net is inspected frequently. We train ourselves on how we land in that net so that we don’t injure ourselves if we fall or something goes wrong.”

And so I was like, “Wow, that’s a good metaphor for life, too. We all need nets under ourselves. We need backup plans for when things go wrong. We need to actually think of those backup plans. Like, do they work?”

It’s not just, like, “Oh, I think maybe if my kid is sick on a day I have a big presentation, I could avail myself of this backup plan.” It’s like, “Well, no, no, no. Let’s make sure. Let’s test that net. Let’s make sure it’s there.”

But when you do that, the circus can go off with much less stress, with much less worry that when something goes wrong, it turns into a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super and inspiring. Like, we should be so lucky to have it.

Laura Vanderkam
We should all be a circus. We should be a circus. And not just that, you want to manage it for delight, right? Another part of the metaphor is that a circus isn’t cool if it’s all drudgery. Like, if people are just going through with no smiles on their faces as they’re doing their tricks.

You want to make it look like it’s enjoyable. And as we manage the complex but not chaotic three-ring circus of our lives. We want to make it look like a real performance and truly enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your philosophy on embracing your golden hours?

Laura Vanderkam
So the golden hours are the hours after work and before bed. If you think about how people talk about the golden years for retirees after they stop working, they have time for leisure and family, it’s the same that we get a miniature version every weekday evening.

After you’re done working, you get time for leisure and family. However, many people find this time incredibly hard to use well. And that is because we are tired, right? We’ve used up a lot of energy in the course of the day. In many cases, it’s this march toward bedtime. And sometimes people are even counting minutes as they are getting through the evening.

And again, time is precious. I hate to have people wish any time away. So I am all about embracing our golden hours. Partly that’s just a mindset. If you think of that time after work and before bed as your golden hours, you’re going to have a different mindset than if you’re thinking of it as a second shift or just the time that’s left over after work.

I think it’s a good idea to set just small, possibly low energy intentions for the evening so it feels like something happened, right? So it’s not just all this time passed between the end of work and bed. It’s like, “Oh, well, I did a puzzle for 30 minutes,” or, “I went for a walk outside with my family for 30 minutes,” “We had ice cream on the patio because it’s nice outside tonight.”

And if you have something you can point to that you enjoyed that actually happened in the evening, you’ll feel more like this time exists and life isn’t all just these have-to-do’s. There’s some want-to-do’s in there as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Golden hours, golden years. Understood. I guess I’m thinking about, in the universe of time tracking, I find that sometimes our hangups are not so much about having the time available to deploy on something, but finding the will, the audacity, the motivation to push past resistance or avoidance to go make amazing things happen with time.

So it’s, like, sometimes time is the bottleneck resource, and other times it’s more of like an emotional will type vibe. How do you think about these two resources in conjunction with each other?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I think time gets blamed for all sorts of things, that it is not really a time matter. When I have people track their time, often people find that they have a reasonable amount of discretionary time. It’s just that a lot of it happens in chunks that we haven’t thought about, right?

We haven’t thought ahead of time, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to have four hours after work and before bed. Only two of those are going to be spent on childcare,” for instance, “I’ve got two hours after that. What would I like to do with it?”

But, you know, by that time, you’re kind of tired and at the end of your rope and feel like you’re out of energy and out of sorts, and that’s the end of it. And so nothing happens except those electronic hobbies, as we talked about earlier.

I think intention goes a long way. So if you know that this evening you are going to go play a board game with your partner or something, like, you’ve got that on your brain, you’re managing your energy toward it so you’re not surprised by it and feeling sort of resistance to it in the moment, even though it’s something you actively chose to want to do.

So knowing it ahead of time is often helpful for sort of getting ourselves in the mindset for doing something. When my kids were little, I would sometimes even think about that, like coming into the evening, “What could I suggest that we do that I wouldn’t hate so I don’t get, like, ambushed by the request to play Candy Land, which I definitely did not want to do?”

So it’s that kind of thing. Like, can you go into it with an intention? Because the intention will shape how you handle your energy going into it. I think, also, you got to be careful about making sure you’re setting intentions for yourself to do things you truly want to do.

And I think a lot of people just have not thought about this. The things they say they want to do are not things they actually want to do. And so it’s like you get to that time in the evening, you’re like, “I need to learn Spanish.” Do you actually want to learn Spanish? Like, is that something you’re telling yourself you should do?

Or, you know, is it just, you know, the thing that feels responsible and productive to do with your leisure time, like, “I should be on Duolingo”? Well, you know, maybe you don’t want to be. Is there something else that you feel less resistance to?

And if that is the case, maybe you should re-shape your goals to be more in the direction of things you truly do want to do, like things that make you feel more energized when you think about them, as opposed to thinking like, “I don’t want to,” in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a really good distinction. And we might have any number of “shoulds” that, like, “I should learn this language,” “I should build big muscles,” “I should learn AI, apparently.” Do we all need to know AI?

Laura Vanderkam
That’s another one. We’re all going to be behind the game on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So any pro tips on distinguishing between a should and a genuine desire of our heart, our values?

Laura Vanderkam
I think paying attention to that energy that you feel with something. If you think about like, “Ooh, that sounds exciting,” or, like, “I feel a little bit more energized as I think about it.” I’m not saying it’s going to be automatically easy, but like if you saw it on your calendar, like somebody had put “Spend two hours doing X,” like, would you be excited about it?

You know, some things I would, like having dinner with a friend. Absolutely. Like, reading one of my favorite books. Yes, I would. Learning Spanish, not so much. That’s not one of my goals. So I think that can help quite a bit.

In general, in life, I’m always encouraging people to spend less time on the things you are trying to talk yourself into. You might want to spend a little more time on the things that you are trying to talk yourself out of, because it sounds logistically difficult, or it’s outside your comfort zone. Like, those are things you can deal with.

Where that comes up and people are like, “Oh, you know, it would be so cool to sing in a choir again. I really enjoyed that in college, but I’m a busy person. I have a job. I have a family. I can’t make time for that.”

But that’s when you’re talking yourself out of something. Whereas, if you’re talking yourself into it, like, “Well, I should learn Spanish,” “I should be doing this,” those are things that maybe are not the direction to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a master key right there. Wow! It’s so funny because that really does cut to the heart of it. When you’re talking yourself out of something, it means that you have a desire. It’s there and you’re fighting against it, by definition, it’s like, “Oh, that’s not practical. That’s too expensive. It’s like, I’ve got all these other responsibilities.” So that’s really intriguing. And I guess, sometimes, I see a two-by-two matrix in my mind’s eye, Laura.

Laura Vanderkam
Oh, boy.

Pete Mockaitis
You can’t take the consultant out of me. There’s the internal desire and then there’s the argumentation. And sometimes you don’t argue with yourself at all. It’s like, “I should really get a burrito. Yeah, let’s do it.”

Laura Vanderkam
“Let’s do it. We’re on it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s that. And then it goes in every combination of the two-by-two. And so, yeah, I think that you’re right. That really is a zone of opportunity there in terms of you have the desire and yet you’ve been talking yourself out of it. Maybe go ahead and give it a try.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, you know? I mean, logistics can be figured out. You can always try something for a while and see how it goes, too, right? You can go back to life as it was after a trial period or whatever, but you might be surprised at what you can fit in.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, Laura, tell me, any critical insights you want to make sure How to be Awesome at Your Job listeners hear before we hear about your favorite things?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, I’m always preaching the time tracking. So if anyone’s listening to this and thought, “Well, hmm,” I’m going to say, well, that’s maybe a should that we should try at one point in our life.

Because I do think many of us walk around with stories about our lives that just aren’t true, that, “I work around the clock,” or, “I’m working late every night,” or, “I spent my entire weekend working,” “I never see my family,” “I don’t get enough sleep,” or, “I sleep terribly all the time,” “I never have free time,” all these things, “I spend my life doing housework,” various stories that people tell themselves.

And almost universally, time tracking will show that those stories are incomplete, right? Even if you work long hours, you are probably not working around the clock. There are probably some other hours where you are awake and not working. And so you can see where those happen and maybe start thinking about, “Well, what would be the best thing for me to do during that time?”

You may have a bad night or two. Many people do, but often, over the course of the week, we tend to average out toward what our bodies are needing. And when you see that, you might start thinking, “Huh, well, given that I’m not saving any time by sleeping less on Tuesday and crashing on Saturday, maybe I could try to get the same amount of sleep every night and feel better and more energetic overall.”

You might see that there is some discretionary time, but, you know, what you spend that doing is kind of up to you, and that’s the nature of discretionary time. And sometimes we’re spending more of it than we like on our electronic hobbies, but we can do something about that, right?

We can challenge ourselves to do things that sound a little bit more fun, rejuvenating, relaxing, you know, for just a few minutes before going toward that YouTube binge for the rest of the night. So I really do think that time tracking will make time feel more abundant.

And you can believe me or not, but I did have several hundred people try it and they felt better about their time afterwards. So I take comfort from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Now could you share your favorite quotes, something you find inspiring?

Laura Vanderkam
So many years ago, one of the first people I interviewed about how she spent her time told me that “I don’t have time” means it’s not a priority, and that has stuck with me forever.

And there may be consequences to making different choices, but it reminds us that time is a choice. And also it means that I never tell anyone now that I don’t have time to do something.

Pete Mockaitis
You just tell them they’re not a priority?

Laura Vanderkam
It’s not a priority, sorry. I try to be nicer about it, but, you know, that is fundamentally what it comes down to.

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

Laura Vanderkam
I would say that the one I mentioned earlier about people just getting short bursts of activity, like, five, 10 minutes of physical activity, their scores on an energy scale went from, like, a three to an eight or something. It was, really, I’m misquoting it here, but the idea is that it doesn’t take much. And we can’t make more time but we can definitely change our energy levels.

And when you feel more energetic, you can just do more than if you feel less energetic. So even though you can’t make more time, you can sort of have the equivalent of making more time by paying attention to how, you know, where your energy levels are and what you can do to get them back up again.

Pete Mockaitis
And, to be clear, five-ish minutes of activity raises the energy level for hours, or…?

Laura Vanderkam
At least an hour. I remember from that particular study, people took like five minutes to do a burst of activity. And then their levels right afterwards, I think, it was a nine. And then an hour later, it was still north of a six. So if you go from a three to the rest of the hour spent north of a six, like, how could you not be getting more done? That’s the difference between feeling like you’re flat on your back and feeling like, “Hey, I can do stuff with my life.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And a favorite book?

Laura Vanderkam
This is, honestly, what I read in the course of writing Big Time is I read War and Peace, and I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
I just got War and Peace.

Laura Vanderkam
Okay, you should read it. Yeah, I mean people look at it, and it’s like, “That’s a really big book,” and it’s true. But it is very accessible. It has 361 very short chapters. So if you read one chapter a day for a year, it only takes a couple minutes each day and you’ll get through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key habit?

Laura Vanderkam
So I have started listening to, like, all the works of a particular composer over the course of a year for the past three years. So this year, I am listening to Mozart in the car.

And that’s a lot better than other things I could probably be listening to. And so it has definitely upgraded the running around that tends to happen in my life. So that music choice habit has definitely elevated my listening game.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Please come visit me at LauraVanderkam.com. You can learn more on my website about my books and podcasts. You can get time tracking spreadsheet if you want to do that. You can also reach out to me at Laura@LauraVanderkam.com. I love hearing from people.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Maybe today you could think about what your favorite sort of work is and challenge yourself to spend just a few more minutes on that favorite sort of work, and then reflect afterwards on how it went. And I think you’ll change the experience of your work day completely.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, thank you.

Laura Vanderkam
Thanks so much for having me.

Mar 16

1137: How to Build an Unbeatable Mind with Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine

By Podcasts No Comments

Mark Divine reveals his strategies for forging mental clarity, focus, and resilience at an elite level.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to fix your broken attention span
  2. A simple 20-second breathing protocol for resetting your nervous system
  3. How to fuel extreme motivation

About Mark

Mark Divine is a former Navy SEAL Commander, entrepreneur, and NYT Bestselling author with PhD in Global Leadership and Change who has dedicated his life to unlocking human potential through integrated training in mental toughness, leadership, and physical readiness.

He owns and runs the SEALFIT Training Center in San Diego, California where he trains thousands of professional athletes, military professionals, SWAT, First Responders, SOF candidates and everyday people looking to build strength and character.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome!

Mark Divine
Hey, it’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear your wisdom when it comes to having an unbeatable mind and resilience and so much good stuff. Could you maybe kick us off with a thrilling story that tees up some of these great lessons about mental toughness? No pressure.

Mark Divine
Thrilling story. Okay, so I was at SEAL Team 3 doing some parachute training. I jumped out of a helicopter about 1200 feet in the air. I was a second jumper out and it’s a static line jump so it was pretty low. It was nighttime. So I’m popped out and my chute deploys, which is always a good sign, as you might imagine. And I’m thinking, “This is just beautiful evening and I’m doing a dream job,” like anyone would love to be, like jumping out of a helicopter in the middle of the night and the moon is bright and everything.

And I, suddenly, see another jumper coming toward me, which was unusual because, as a second one out, I should have been above this guy, but somehow he must have had an uplift and he was coming right toward me. And, of course, from our training, I knew that for a mid-air collision, you’re supposed to pull your right toggle.

And so I pulled my right toggle, and he’s supposed to pull his right toggle, and both jumpers would then veer away.

Pete Mockaitis
Makes sense. Good standard rule.

Mark Divine
Yeah, that’s the SOP, standard operating procedure. So I pull my right toggle, he pulls his left toggle, and he collides with my chute, and my chute just collapses. Now, mind you, I’m about 1,000 feet in the air then, and that is about one second per 100 feet, so I’ve got about 10 seconds to live.

And so I immediately went into the practices that I had been training, you know, not just in the SEALs, but for four years prior to, through my Zen and through my martial arts training. And that was the default mode for me, which was I obviously very grateful for because it saved my life. So I just started breathing really slowly, calmly, and reciting the mantra.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s not too many breaths with 10 seconds.

Mark Divine
Right. Exactly. I had about six or seven of those breaths on the way down. Probably a lot less than that, actually. And the key point is I didn’t react with fear. So my parachute absolutely collapses. So I go through the SOPs, I’m calming my mind, I’m breathing deeply, I’m remaining positive about this situation, and I start to yank on my risers, which is the first thing you’re supposed to do to try to get them to get air, and I got nothing, no response.

And so I think, “Okay, second order of business here is to deploy my reserve.” So I take a deep breath, calmly. Pulled out my reserve ripcord, punch it, throw it out, and my reserve doesn’t catch any air. Now I’m down to about 300 feet.

And at the same time, I’m just super calm, right? I’m not like freaking out, which allowed me to think, “Okay, maybe I can go back to the main and work that one again.” So I went back to that and started yanking on those risers again.

And about 100 feet above the ground, which is practically nothing, my main chute caught enough air so that when I landed, I landed hard, but I was super relaxed and I did a perfect parachute landing for a PLF, meaning I just rolled out of it and ended up actually standing.

The reason this was interesting is that had I not had the training that I had, I would undoubtedly have reacted with fear. And my heart would have been racing, my mind would have been racing out of control. I wouldn’t have been able to calmly and methodically think through how to solve the problem in the eight or 10 seconds that I had.

And so I walked away without a single broken bone, which is pretty incredible. That scenario, not necessarily like a parachute accident, but I had multiple scenarios like that in my SEAL experience, my SEAL days where, you know, shit hit the fan, everything went wrong. And instead of reacting negatively or reacting out of fear, I was able to calmly deal with the problem.

Now, you might think, “Well, all SEALs are trained this way.” And it is true, right? We are trained to be calm under pressure and whatnot. But to have these skills in the first year of my SEAL career was fully attributed to meditation. And I started a practice of Zen meditation when I was 21. And it’s a big part of really why I became a SEAL. And I could tell that story, too.

But it really had a profound effect on my nervous system and my ability to focus and to just develop clarity under extreme pressure, which I found to be pretty useful as a special operator. Anyway, so I think experiences like that led me to want to delve deeper into those practices, into the development of what I now call unbeatable mind, development of the mind and the body and the spirit, and really plumb the depths of what’s possible for a human being.

And so that’s why, later on, I ended up kind of really refocusing and really going deep into that territory of human performance and the what’s possible for humanity, which is what I do today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mission accomplished, sir, and a thrilling story delivered. So you’ve learned a lot about this stuff with regard to mental toughness and staying calm under difficult times. Can you share what’s perhaps the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned that when you share with people, they’re a little bit puzzled, like, “Really? Is that true?”

Mark Divine
Well, when I teach SEALs, I have to, like, use stories for the young guys, right? Sometimes I’m training 18-year-old kids who want to be a Navy SEAL. And one of the stories I tell them, and they come in and think, “Okay I’m going to…” they’re going to learn mental toughness and how to be a badass Navy SEAL from Mark Divine and through my SEALFIT team and program.

And they think mental toughness is just about really learning how to be hard, like how to tough it out, how to get through, you know, like my teammate Goggin’s story, it’s like, “Okay, you can always do more, you know? When you hit the wall, you’re capable of 40 times more, I just got to be tougher. Suck it up, buttercup.”

And I say, “You know, that’s actually really flawed thinking,” right? It’s important to be hard when you need to be hard, but it’s also incredibly important to be soft when you need to be soft. And what I mean by soft, because SEALs don’t like that language, like, “I’m not soft.” I say, “What I mean by that is to be really flexible and pliable and relaxed and to learn how to to let go.” So you can interpret that a lot of ways.

So the story I would tell is, like, “If a tsunami is coming, and it was inevitable that it’s going to just knock everything down in this path, would you rather be the mighty oak and strong? Or would you rather be like the the lowly reed and super flexible?”

And they said, “Well, in that scenario, I’d rather be the reed because the reed is just going to get washed over and then it’s going to pop right back up and carry on with its life. Whereas, the oak is just going to get swept away and it’s going to get killed.” See, that’s right.

So mental toughness, the big aha is that mental toughness is actually a balance between the hard and the soft. And, also, if you want to use the Eastern concept, the balance between the yin, which is the hard, and the yang, which is soft. Yin represents forcefulness, you know, get-it-done mindset, pushing through the pain. And the yin, the soft side represents receptivity and creativity and flexibility and taking time to recover and relax.

So one of the reasons that the SEAL athletes that I train are so successful is this principle put into practice through their training regimen, through how they navigate their lives, through how they approach even a single day. You’ve got to balance the hard and the soft, otherwise, you’re going to break.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could we hear a story of someone who internalized some of these principles and saw cool transformation as a result?

Mark Divine
Every one of the SEALs that I’ve trained have internalized it. They commit. I’ll give you an example. So there’s a guy named Shane. Now Shane recently got out of the SEALs and went to Rutgers Med School. He’s now a doctor.

But he came to me as, like, an 18-year-old, like hardcore, you know, heavy weightlifter and just really kind of beast-mode guy. And most of the guys come, you know, if you want to be a Navy SEAL these days, like you’re already pretty fit.

And what I do through my training, or did, was round you out and give you all the skills of mental toughness, resiliency, emotional control, the softer side. And then I make sure that the physical is going to be sustainable for the year-long training that you’re going to be in.

And what I mean by that is most guys come to me and they’re just, what they lack is not, they’re great runners, they’re great, you know, in all around great shape, but they lack the durability to punish their body the way the SEALs will punish it every single day.

And so that durability is kind of a mixture of like physical stability, usually in your joints, and your spine, as well as the ability to hold your mind on the task over a long period of time, which brings in the concept of yin and yang, or hard and soft.

And so we train them. So I had to train Shane to basically get out of his own way and stop just pushing like everything was a competition. So we call it co-opetition. Everything was a competition in the sense you wanted to compete with yourself and put your best effort in. But if that best effort was going to lead to an injury or degradation of the team, the team’s capacity, then that was flawed thinking.

And so what I taught Shane was that, even in the course of a single evolution and also in a day, like we consider each day like a major evolution, like it was a performance sport just to get through the day. Because when we train for a special operation, you’re training like eight hours a day or longer just to get ready for it. And then when you go through training, you’re training for 12 to 16 hours a day.

So we would do hard things during that, but we would also spend time sitting and just doing what I call box breathing, just breathing for arousal control. And we would spend time meditating and concentration practice to deepen our attention control and our concentration. And I had them doing yoga.

In fact, at first, back in 2006, when I was doing these, teaching these skills, I learned very quickly that I shouldn’t call it yoga because the guys would cross their eyes and some guys are like, “Well, my religion forbids me from doing this.” I’m like, “What?” So I changed it to functional mobility, integrated development, those types of terms I used. And you see those throughout Unbeatable Mind.

But if someone who’s ever really approached development the way from a different perspective, you could say, “Well, that Unbeatable Mind is actually kind of a compendium or a combination or integration of Eastern practices, such as yoga and mindfulness and breath work, with Western practices of peak performance, sports psychology, Western therapeutic depth psychology, and a little bit of just Navy SEAL kickassery.”

So I brought all that together and I had to, like, simplify it and present it in a way that an 18-year-old kid would be like, “Yeah, this is awesome and it really works.” So I taught Shane and these other SEALs how to not just be hard, but to balance that out with these practices that really created a total warrior, right, a warrior that could be calmly sitting in a meditative posture or visualizing their mission, but they’re simultaneously just absolutely alert, and the explosive power that they have is like a coiled spring, right, but it’s locked and loaded. It’s not going to it’s not going to release until absolutely ready, right?

And those are the skills that I think are super valuable for everyone these days. We have a saying that, in the military, we prepared for VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. And back in my day, that was episodic. Like, you go to war and you’re going to VUCA, or, if you’re going to do a specific operation, maybe a clandestine op, the VUCA is basically time on target, or if something goes wrong.

But nowadays, they’re using that term pretty frequently in the business world because everything is changing so fast, and it’s so volatile, and so uncertain, and so complex and ambiguous that the entire business world now is VUCA and it’s persistent, it’s not episodic.

So the skills that I taught the SEALs and I taught through Unbeatable Mind are now looking more more useful, if not imperative, for business leaders and everyday leaders for that matter. This idea that you have to be calm and clear and focused and, basically, be able to declutter all the crap, discern what’s really important, what’s really true to be in control of your thoughts and your emotions at all times so you don’t get triggered into reactivity.

And to be an exceptional teammate because your ego has been honed, refined, polished, set aside, whatever term you want. And you really are recognizing that what’s in your interest is usually what’s in the team’s interest. So you put your eye on the team and help the team succeed. And through the team’s success, you find success and also more purpose and meaning.

So the transformation is multi-dimensional, in other words. We’re transforming an individual to be more capable from a skill perspective, but also more competent, confident, and conscious from kind of the internal awareness and sense of self and perspective lens.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Well, let’s talk about some of the secret sauce, the means by which one pulls off some of these cool things. So holding your mind onto a task for a long time is something you highlight. And that’s something that I hear from listeners that it’s hard in terms of there’s a lot of, you know, pings, beeps, distractions, emails, whatever, or there’s just a task that’s boring, it’s not interesting to them, or it just keeps going and going and going. What are some approaches that we could use to pull that off well?

Mark Divine
It’s a great question. And there’s a lot of simple tactical things, and then there’s the stuff, the training your mind. The tactical things are to really just commit to doing less things and doing them better. So stop multitasking. Multitasking degrades your output by about 40%. So you think you’re getting more done, but you’re actually getting 40% less done and you’re doing a worse job at it.

And multitasking trains distractibility. And people say, “Well, I only do one task at a time,” but if you’ve got your phone near you, and you’re prone to looking at the alerts when they pop in, because you think, “Oh, there’s an important text,” or, “There’s an important phone call,” that’s multitasking.

And that’s training distractibility. So you’re bleeding off your attention, bleeding off your ability, your energy, actually, right, which is going to lead to low-grade motivation, you know, like piercing a balloon and it’s just bleeding out. So things like that. Starting to turn off, like I have no alerts on my phone whatsoever.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, me, too.

Mark Divine
And that was fairly up, finally had to be like, “Get this thing out of my…” I wanted to throw my phone in the frickin ocean one day. I’m like, “I’m tired of this thing.” So I took off all the alerts. And take a vacation from the phone. Every day, you should have that phone out of your sight for a couple hours or longer. And, certainly, when you sleep.

But you also should take a vacation from it like once a week for the whole day, or most of the day. So I think it’s kind of like intermittent fasting with your digital device is a really smart thing because you’re getting your attention back and you’re rebuilding energy that was bled off through that device.

I don’t watch any news or any like network TV. Like, network TV, it’s built today for high-speed mind that is a very distracted mind. Even I heard Netflix, like, I can’t watch Netflix because most Netflix shows and movies are designed for split screeners.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve heard that, yeah, that’s why they keep repeating things now.

Mark Divine
Yeah, there’s no depth whatsoever. They basically expect that the viewer is not paying attention. And that’s why they’re skin deep and they skip all over the place, and they don’t leave any of the plot for you to figure out anymore, you know?

So if you think you need that playing in the background while you’re doing work, my son does that, and it’s because his mind is trained that it needs that kind of distraction. And it’s unfortunate because it’s bleeding off your attention.

And the other thing is, like, with those shows and also with commercials, they move so fast that they’re training your brain to have that kind of fast twitch reactivity, which is very challenging then when you try to shift focus and do any deep work. Your brain needs to actually slow down and you need to learn how to slow your brain down in order to do the deep work. So I recommend not even watching TV.

Forget about how negative this stuff is and the reality that even through the TV shows and the movies, not just the commercials, but your mind is being trained and conditioned to accept a reality that might not be true. Let’s not even talk about the news, right? That’s just pure mental conditioning and propaganda.

I have a saying that I like to say a lot, but if you’re not training your mind, then someone else is training it for you. Because, essentially, your mind is the sum total of all that you’ve consumed mentally through your experiences, through your reading, through your screens, and through the interactions that you have.

So if you want to change your mind, then you’ve got to change the input, and you’ve got to basically deconstruct all the false ideas and beliefs and ways that your brain works, such as being extremely distractible and operating at like a gamma level when you should be operating at a high alpha, low beta level. So those are the tactical things.

The training aspect of this piece, Pete, is like radically simple in its form but difficult in that it requires a lot of discipline to do. And it’s simply, like I use the box breathing, which I referenced earlier, as a container for a series of mental discipline practices that bring you that calm, focused, clarity and ability to really, really get shit done at a high level without the distractions.

So let me explain real briefly how that works. So box breathing, it’s a practice that I coined back in 2006 when I was training. Remember I said I couldn’t use like yoga terms and, you know? I had learned breath practices through my Zen training when I was 21.

And then later on, I really did get into, like, the traditional eight limbs Ashtanga yoga, which is mostly about meditation, concentration, self-awareness, introspection, and the stretchy bendy physical part is the least of it. It’s a process of transformation. And so I learned breath practices through there, and I knew it was called pranayama.

And pranayama means controlling the life force because breath is life. It’s not just oxygen. It’s life. It’s prana. It’s chi. It’s energy. So when you do breath practices, what you’re doing is taking control of the life force and you’re consciously using that life force to purify your mind, open your heart, and to train your mind to tap into greater powers that every human being has the capacity for.

So instead of calling it pranayama, because I tried to do that for a couple of my classes, and they’re like rolling their eyes and thinking I’m gone off the deep end. So I just said, “Okay, we’re to do a simple practice.” I called it box breathing.

And that is to all the principles that we now know to be so important for breath work, were kind of unknown back in the mid 2000s. But I knew what worked for me and I’ve been practicing and training and seeing the benefits on myself for years. And that is deep diaphragmatic nostril breathing, right?

Nostril breathing, mouth closed, eyes closed if you are in a practice setting. Eyes open if you’re like standing in line, or at the bank or something, you can do this practice. And that deep nostril breathing, we did it in a pattern of five count inhale, five count hold, five count exhale, and five count hold. So it had a pattern of a box or a square, hence, the box breathing.

So if each count is roughly one second, you’re talking about a 20-second interval for one full box breathing cycle, and that’s three breaths per minute. And, over time, when you practice it, if you turn this into a daily practice, and my recommendation or my prescription is 20 minutes in the morning when you first wake up, and 20 minutes in the late afternoon, over time, this has an extraordinary effect just on your physiology.

And here’s what it does. Number one, because you’re breathing through your nose in that slow, controlled, deep, diaphragmatic way, you’re massaging your vagus nerve, and that’s stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest.

That’s the yin function I was talking about. That’s the receptivity, the calming, the relaxation, which is getting your body and your brain into homeostatic balance. So you’re bleeding off all the excess stress that you built up over your lifetime until you get into this perfect state of homeostatic balance.

And the other thing that happens is, because you’re breathing in slowly, five count in, five count out, and holding for five count, when you’re operating throughout the day and you’re not doing box breathing, which you’re not going to be doing that most of the day, you’re going to be doing regular breathing, but your breathing, then, naturally begins to reshape itself into that form of five count in and five count out through the nose.

And we now teach that and we call it tactical breathing as a practice, but it becomes something you quite naturally do. And so that’s six breaths per minute, right? Five seconds in, five seconds out, that’s 10 seconds, times 60 seconds, that’s six breaths per minute.

Pete Mockaitis
So no holds in the other word, in that way. Okay.

Mark Divine
Yeah, right. So during the day, the practice will lead you to this natural nostril breathing, six breaths per minute, which, astoundingly, research has come in on this in the recent last two or three years, that that is the ideal breathing pattern for health and longevity. And we just kind of stumbled on this and we’ve been teaching it since the early 2000s. So what an incredible benefit.

And, again, we’re just talking about physiological at this point. The term we use is arousal control. You’re controlling your arousal response. And your out arousal response is simply your left hemisphere brain is wired to detect threats. And it’s five times as negative as it is positive as a result of that.

So you’ve got this mechanism built for survival that is through the amygdala, constantly sniffing everything that’s happening in your environment, every stimulus, external and internal, and saying, “Is this safe or is this unsafe?” And at least five times more than positive, it’s saying, “It’s not safe. It’s negative.” And when that happens, it activates your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight or freeze.

And that’s dumping adrenaline and epinephrine and cortisol into your system to get your body ready to fight. Well, the problem is 99% of the time, it’s really not a threat, right? It’s really not a threat, right? So that alert comes in, you think it’s your boss, the phone rings and you see that it’s a creditor, you know, you’re in traffic and someone cuts you off, then that could be a threat, but most of the time it’s not.

But you’re reacting negatively and it’s jacking you up into this sympathetic arousal response. And the problem is that, when your sympathetic nervous system keeps getting triggered like that, then your parasympathetic response atrophies. It quite, literally, goes offline because it says, “Well, you don’t need me.” It’s not getting, you’re just like other channels in your brain. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

So what I found is, even with these young guys that I work with, and every one of the older clients I work with, they’re stuck in hyper arousal. So this simple practice of box breathing will reset their nervous system so that the parasympathetic nervous system comes back online. And then it slowly and, with certainty, bleeds off all that excess stress, and brings the hormones back into balance, and then you’re sleeping better, you’re feeling better, you got more energy, so you’re exercising better everything comes back into balance.

And people, just through this practice, have literally lost excess weight they were carrying just by breathing effectively. It’s pretty extraordinary. So that arousal control has a pronounced and profound physiological and physical effect to bring your body back into balance.

And guess what? Your brain also, because it’s part of your body, comes back into balance as well, and your brain starts to operate more effectively instead of that high gamma distracted state, which is reinforced by your environment, in this culture that we live in, with this fast pace and constant distractions.

It begins to actually function at a slower level, in a mid-beta range, and even when you’re doing the box breathing practices, it’ll drop into a high alpha or mid-range alpha. This has extraordinary benefits now in the mental realm because the subjective experience of that is of more calmness and more clarity because your mind isn’t racing. You get less of the monkey mind popping around, popcorn mind.

So, already, it’s having an effect on training the quality of your mental experience. So the physiology then spills over into the psychology. Well, the second part of this, Pete, is that I asked the students to focus keenly on that box pattern like they’re Inspector Clouseau, and they’re watching every little nuance of it, every little nuance of the inhale with internal eyes like they’re watching it and they’re experiencing it with their internal senses.

You have five external senses and a number of, I’ve read, five internal senses. I mean, internal sight, internal auditory, internal sensations. And so you turn those directly toward the breathing pattern itself.

And we say, “You watch it closely. You can even visualize it if you want.” We have an app called Unbeatable Mind Box Breathing where we it shows a box being filled in as you do the breath, so you can watch that for a while and then visualize it.

Now what that is doing is holding your attention on one thing and one thing only, and that’s this box pattern. So this is like classic Zen training. All Zen training starts out with concentration. In fact, Zen is primarily a concentration path. It’s one of the two primary paths of meditation, are concentration or mindfulness.

What most people don’t realize is that concentration is a prerequisite for mindfulness. And this is why people jump into mindfulness and they fail, because they just simply can’t do it, because they can’t control their mind. They can’t control their attention.

So by holding your attention on the box pattern, what you’re not doing is paying attention to all the other thoughts that come. They’ll still come and go. You’re not like, you can’t not have those other thoughts, because thoughts happen to you.

And you can generate thoughts, but most thoughts, you know, the default mode is thoughts happen to you, 60,000 thoughts a day and 59,500 are the same thoughts that came to you yesterday. They just happen to you. And when you think you’re thinking, it’s when you’re taking a thought that happens to you and you’re grabbing onto it. And then you’re generating secondary-level thought, like rumination or pondering or like planning, that type of thing.

So when you’re doing the box breathing practice, you’re holding your attention simply on the box pattern. You’re ignoring the rest of the default mode network thoughts. But what will happen is your mind, because it’s especially in the early stages, will kind of wander over there and start ruminating or start grabbing on because it gets bored. And so then the practice is to notice that and to bring it back to the box.

And so you’re training now three things. Arousal control, which we already talked about, that’s the physiological. Now we’re getting into the mind, attention control, which is to hold my attention on just one thing. All I’m asking you to do is this one thing, just hold your attention on that box pattern.

But notice when your attention either gets split and you’re focusing on the box pattern and thinking about something, or if you’ve completely wandered off the reservation, notice that and notice it earlier and earlier and come back to the box pattern and hold your attention on the pattern for longer and longer. And we’re shooting for 50% of a 20-minute session.

If you can hold your attention on the box pattern for 10 minutes, you’re actually doing really well. And you’re deepening your powers of concentration. It’s like gathering up all your mental energy, which was being thrown out there like a floodlight, and you’re focusing it like a laser beam, and you get really, really sharp and penetrating mind. That’s extremely valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Mark, when you say 50%, now you’ve got my optimizing, point-scoring, loving self going. I’m curious because, I mean, I’ve done a number of mindfulness-y things. I even have the Muse headband. And so it’ll give you some numbers about how much I was relaxed or whatever. But I’m curious, since I do find that quite motivating, is there a means by which you can see, “Oh, I was 41% last week, and now I’m 43%”? Or  is that unknowable?

Mark Divine
If you want to collaborate on creating a wearable that can track that, I’d be all ears. No, it’s clearly subjective. I’ll give you an example of why, or the reason why I know this to be true. I mentioned that this second part is very similar to Zen training. And I spent four years training Zen, before I went into the SEALs, under the watchful eye of a guy named Tadashi Nakamura, who’s still alive. He’s in his eighties in New York.

He’s a very famous grandmaster martial artist, runs a martial art program that he created called Seido, which means the way of sincerity, and headquartered in Manhattan. So I was in Manhattan after college for four years, got my MBA at Stern School of Business, NYU, and, believe it or not, became a certified public accountant in New York.

But during that time, probably the most momentous thing that happened is I trained under this guy, starting as soon as I got to New York, I just stumbled into it. Since I was 21, I trained with him for four years. And, of course, did all the karate stuff, got my black belt.

But what really transformed me was he was a Zen teacher, had a Zen class every Thursday night, which I joined with about 10 other black belts. And we would then go to the Zen Mountain Monastery up in Woodstock, New York several times a year for these long four- to five-day sits with the Zen monks.

And the basic practice, and he never deviated from this, and you’re sitting on your bench, was simply eyes closed, inhale, exhale through the nose, and count one, but don’t think of anything else. Inhale, exhale, count two. Don’t think of anything else.

And the goal was to get to 10. And, of course, the first few times I did it, I got to 10 no problem, but when I was honest with myself, I was thinking the whole time, and I realize, “Oh, shoot, now this is really serious.” If you think, you have to go back to zero.

So inhale, exhale, “I’m doing great. Oh, shoot, I just had a thought. Back to zero. Inhale, exhale, one. Inhale, exhale, two. How am I doing? Oh, I’m doing good. Oh, I’m thinking. Back to zero.” Or, if you start thinking, your mind is just wandering off the reservation, which is going to do until you train it.

So it, literally, took me, Pete, about a year before I could, with integrity, say that I got to five without any thought, without any other competing thought in my head. And I once asked him about it, and he said that that actually is really good, for students of Zen to be able to have that.

Now we’re talking about roughly a five-count inhale, five count. Back then he didn’t specify. That was my add later on. But we’re roughly talking about just one minute. You know what I mean? Five rounds is only about a minute. Wow, that’s how busy your mind is.

So if you can sit and still your mind for a minute and have no thoughts whatsoever, that is profound. You know, the Buddha said once that you could find enlightenment in a single breath if you’re paying close enough attention.

So I think that’s really, it’s a great mark or target to shoot for. And anyone listening who tries it or has tried this will agree with that, it’s not easy. It’s really not easy because, again, the brain has just not been trained this way. I think there will be a time in the future where we teach these skills to young kids, kind of like they would do for the Panchen Lama or the Tibetan monks for the kids, they start them young.

It’s extraordinarily valuable to do this type of training at a younger age when your brain is still developing. In fact, one of the reasons I think I had such extraordinary benefit with my meditation practice is because I was 21 when I started. And now the male brain doesn’t fully develop until it’s mid to late 20s.

And so, neuroplastically, my brain was just on fire developing all these new pathways, all these new skills through my meditation practice in my early 20s. And it’s completely changed my life. So it’s a valuable, I think, that’s just, you know, I use that 50% just partly to motivate people, but also to help them understand that, you know, just be easy on yourself. This is not easy work. So be kind to yourself, in other words.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And so we talked about being able to persist, hold our mind onto a task. I’d also like your take on how to start something. If we’re dragging our feet, we’re procrastinating, we’re, “Ugh, I don’t feel like it,” have some avoidance, do you have any pro tips there?

Mark Divine
Well, probably the biggest pro tip is, whatever you’re going to do, whatever you want to do, make sure that you should do it. And so you say, “What do you mean, Mark?” Well, remember earlier I said we should all be doing less things better. And then the question is, “Okay, good, I agree with that. But what things should I be doing that go in that bucket of less things? What makes it through that wicker?”

Well, it’s the things that you should be doing. And the things that you should be doing are always going to be related to who you are, not what other people think you should be, or should be doing, or what society thinks you should be doing, or what your parents think you should be doing.

And so the most effective way to develop extreme motivation and personal accountability is to get clear on who you are and why you’re on this planet and what you’re going to do about it, your mission. So this is like one of the most fundamental things I teach. In fact, it also is probably the ultimate secret to resiliency and mental toughness is when you’re doing what you know you’re supposed to be doing, there is no quit.

No matter what also comes up to you, you just navigate it with grace because you know it’s there to help you learn, and it’s just something you have to go through. It’s going to make you stronger. It’s going to help you fulfill that mission.

Now my feeling is, unless you’re blessed with this insight at a young age, is that the best way to really get clear about who you are and why you’re here, and then what you can do about it, is through a practice of stillness. Well, guess what box breathing is? It’s a practice of stillness. So we can build that into the practice.

I mentioned earlier, box breathing is a stacked practice. We’ve already talked about arousal control, attention control, concentration. It naturally opens up to mindfulness. And as I mentioned earlier, concentration is a prerequisite of mindfulness.

The part of you that is focusing on the box pattern and that notices, the part of you that notices that your mind has wandered becomes your primary seat of awareness. In other words, instead of identifying with the thoughts, you become identified with the witness of those thoughts, which is the ultimate aim of mindfulness, is to see yourself in the perspective of the witnessing, non reactive, aware human being that is seeing thoughts and emotions happening to you and through you, but you’re not caught up in them. You’re just watching them as if you’re watching a play.

So when you develop that skill, then you’re in a state of receptivity. Every other skill that I’ve talked about is the yang, it’s an active process. But when you get into that witnessing awareness, then you shift it into your contextual mind, your right brain, which is beyond space and time. It doesn’t have the same construct. It doesn’t create sense of separation in space and time. That’s all the function of your left hemisphere, your left brain.

So you’re in your right brain and you’re in that witnessing awareness, and in that space, you become connected to the rest of your mind, your heart, and your gut. And we now know that the heart and the gut are brains. They have neurons, neurological processing, neurochemicals, neurons itself. And so in that receptive space, the right hemisphere is what connects to your heart, mind, and your biome, your gut mind, and your entire enteric nervous system, your entire body becomes a mind and an antenna.

And so in that very calm and receptive state, witnessing state, you begin to get messages from your heart. I mentioned earlier, my meditation led me into the SEALs. I knew nothing about the SEALs when I went down to New York. I was planning on being a CPA and making a lot of money and going into investment banking.

But the longer I sat on that meditation bench, now two years or three years into it, I started to get messages that I was meant to be a warrior and that I was misaligned, that I was heading down the wrong path fast. And it really kind of created like this existential crisis in me.

Like, I thought I had a midlife crisis at 23 years old because I’m like, “Well, how is it that I’m sitting here in a suit and tie and racing toward this MBA, CPA, and to make a lot of money? How is it that I’m supposed to be a warrior? Why am I getting all these signals that I’m 100% misaligned and going down the wrong path, and I’m going to live that life of quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau talked about?”

Well, it’s because my heart was telling me that I’m a warrior, I’m meant to be a warrior. And so I started to take it seriously. And I started to ask better questions, “Well, if I’m meant to be a warrior, then how? How am I supposed to serve as a warrior?”

And that’s when the world, you when you start getting close to your own truth, then synchronicity happens. So, for me, the synchronicity showed up in the fact that I walked home one night, kind of pondering this existential crisis I was having, and I walked right by a Navy recruiting office, and there was this poster there, and it didn’t say SEALs on it.

It said, “Be someone special,” and it had pictures of Navy SEALs doing what I thought was pretty cool shit, like jumping out of airplanes. And I was like, “That’s how. That’s it. Thank you, universe. That’s how I’m supposed to be a warrior.”

So back to your question. If you lack motivation, it’s probably because what you’re doing is not the right thing and you’re misaligned. Now that, you know, what do you do then is another, you know, that’s a whole different discussion.

Because if you’re misaligned, it’s not going to go away. It’s just going to keep getting worse and worse. Your motivation is going to keep declining. You’re going to get more and more burned out. You’re going to feel more and more disconnected.

And I think a lot of people in our culture suffer from that because they’ve been taught that, “You know, I’m supposed to be a lawyer,” or, “I’m supposed to be a doctor,” or something. And it may be completely off from what they really are meant to be doing in this life. And when I say meant to be doing it, it’s not a job or a career. It’s who you are. But it can be encapsulated in a career.

Like, being a Navy SEAL was a job, but it certainly sparked and allowed me to express the warrior in me. But I always said that my purpose was to be a warrior, not a Navy SEAL Admiral. Because if I had said, “I’m going to be a Navy SEAL Admiral. Well, that’s my purpose,” we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. I’d be still in the Navy probably.

But, no, my purpose was to be a warrior, and that transcends the structure of what you do. It’s really about who you are, what your beingness is. So if you’re doing something that isn’t in alignment with your beingness, then you will experience a little bit of crisis. And crisis literally means opportunity for transformation. That’s what crisis means. So it’s an opportunity for you.

So to face that opportunity and say, “Okay, I hear what Mark is saying and I think I’m in that boat. The reason I’m burning out, lacking motivation, it’s not because I just have a shitty job, it’s because I’m misaligned. So what I need to do is go learn to sit in silence and to open up my mind so that I can hear my heart’s calling, and get a greater understanding and some clarity about who I really am and why I am on this planet at this time so that I can align with that.”

And aligning with that might not be leaving your job. Like, if you’ve invested 20 years or you’re waiting for a pension or something like that and you got a family to feed and a mortgage to pay, I’m not suggesting you just blow it all up, but you could find meaning through some service.

Maybe it’s like you were meant to really work with the earth. You just love it, and so you start a garden or you go develop a community garden somewhere. And it’s going to be different for every single person. And some people, I’ve worked with tons of clients who, like, literally have left their jobs to start their own business.

Or, I think there’s probably like 15 or 20 clients I’ve worked with who have gone off and written books because they really had that urge, they felt that need to really say something, put something out in the world, creatively like that.

So that’s the fastest path to motivation, really, is to discover who you are and what you’re meant to do about it, but that’s a slow path. It can be a slow path. It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes contemplation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mark, we’re having fun here. It’s time to hear about a few of your favorite things. Can you kick us off with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Divine
What a man can think and believe, he can achieve. That was Napoleon Hill. The first book I read that ever really kind of touched on a greater human potential than what most of us are taught. So Think and Grow Rich. If you haven’t read Think and Grow Rich, that’s a must read. I think I’ve read it about 10 times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned Think and Grow Rich, do you have any other favorite books?

Mark Divine
One of the books that really blew my mind and got me down the rabbit hole of what’s possible for human beings, and it’s the only book that Steve Jobs carried on his iPad, by the way. It’s called the Autobiography of a Yogi by a guy named Paramahansa Yogananda. That’s doozy. I highly recommend that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Mark Divine
Box breathing.

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

Mark Divine
If you want to move fast and break things and do great things in the world, then you’ve got to slow down and spend time in silence every day, spend time cultivating these qualities that we’ve talked about in the show, and get really clear around who you are and why you do what you do, so then you can go out and bring it to the world.

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

Mark Divine
MarkDivine.com, and Divine is spelled D-I-V-I-N-E, that’s my personal website. Pretty much anything you need is there, or would find interesting. UnbeatableMind.com is my training program, and so we’ve got great programs, great courses, and a community, and even a mental toughness certification that teaches all these principles, and you can go teach it to others or help others.

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

Mark Divine
Yeah, I would challenge you, you, Pete and your listeners, to take up a practice of box breathing and try it out for 30 days. If you don’t think you can afford 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in afternoon, just do 10 minutes and 10 minutes, or just do 10 minutes in the morning. But do it every day for 30 days. And prove that I’m right. Don’t take my word for it. Be that study of N equals one. Prove that I’m right. Even 30 days of daily practice can be utterly transformative. So do that. I challenge you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, thank you.

Mark Divine
Yeah, hooyah! It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate you, Pete.