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

Jun 20
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972: Amy Edmondson on How to Fail Well

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Amy Edmondson shares how to minimize unproductive failures and maximize intelligent ones.

You’ll Learn

  1. What separates good failure from bad failure 
  2. The surprisingly simple tool that prevents many failures 
  3. How to stay motivated in the face of failure 

About Amy

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School. Her work explores teaming – the dynamic forms of collaboration needed in environments characterized by uncertainty and ambiguity. She has also studied the role of psychological safety in teamwork and innovation. Before her academic career, she was Director of Research at Pecos River Learning Centers, where she worked with founder and CEO Larry Wilson to design change programs in large companies. In the early 1980s, she worked as Chief Engineer for architect/inventor Buckminster Fuller, and innovation in the built environment remains an area of enduring interest and passion.

Resources Mentioned

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Amy Edmondson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome back.

Amy Edmondson
Great to be back.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us about how that unfolded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And we have additional categories?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

Amy Edmondson
I guess AmyCEdmondson.com.

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

Amy Edmondson
Yes, take more risks.

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

Amy Edmondson
Thank you. And you, too.

May 27
0

965: Why Your Boss Isn’t Advocating for You…and What to Do About it with Dr. Nicholas Pearce

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Dr. Nicholas Pearce reveals the hidden reason why many high-performers don’t advance—and provides candid solutions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The harsh truth behind why many don’t advance
  2. Why even a great mentor is no substitute for a sponsor
  3. How to find support if you aren’t being supported

About Nicholas

Dr. Nicholas Pearce is a Chicago native and vocational multihyphenate who has committed his life to creating social impact at the intersection of the academy, the church, and the marketplace. He is an award-winning organizational behavior professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Founder & CEO of The Vocati Group, a boutique management consultancy, and a respected faith leader. He is also the author of the bestselling book, THE PURPOSE PATH: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Dr. Nicholas Pearce Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nicholas, welcome.

Nicholas Pearce
Thanks, Pete. Good to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to be chatting with you. You have so much wisdom in so many domains, but my producers originally found you from your phenomenal Harvard Business Review article called What to Do When Your Boss Won’t Advocate for You. And it sounds like you struck a nerve with this one, Nicholas. What’s the scoop here?

Nicholas Pearce
I think this is something that a lot of people struggle with. People long to have great mentors and great managers who are invested in their success and care about them as humans. But if there’s something that we learned during the pandemic is that a lot of leaders don’t care about the humanity in us. They view us as not human beings, but as human doings.

And for those who have managers who don’t really care about them, don’t care about their forward progress, or won’t bring their name up in rooms that they’re not able to occupy, it creates a challenge to figure out how to navigate your career and your life forward when you recognize you’re lacking that sponsorship.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Nicholas, coming strong right out of the gate. I love it. So, they don’t care about our humanity. That’s a strong sentence and yet it seems accurate. It’s not that they wish us harm actively, but it’s just kind of like, you know, at the end of the day, you are a means to producing a thing, and that’s a fairly prevalent attitude. If you had to hazard a guess, what percent of managers do you think fall in the humanity-affirming versus humanity-eh column?

Nicholas Pearce
That’s a hard number to guess at, but I can tell you that most corporations, based on how they are structured, tend to look at people as products, even the language of human resources or human capital. Human capital was, I guess, designed to be something of a more humane way of saying HR, but when you think about human capital, putting human capital alongside physical capital or financial capital, these are resources that are under the control of the organization for the organization’s purposes, not things that have lives of their own to be valued.

So, putting people in the thing column, I think it’s very, very common. And, unfortunately, most folks who have been in the working world for any amount of time know that while HR may sound like they exist for the people, most HR departments exist to shield an organization from lawsuit. So, HR typically is not really there for you. HR is there for the company.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Telling it like it is. So, just for funsies, is there a language that you prefer to use when it comes to organizations and people, like, the people department or learning and development? Like, what are the terms you like to use?

Nicholas Pearce
I love the concept of people and culture. Having an executive leader who is primarily responsible for the development and wellbeing of the people in the organization and the stewardship of a healthy culture, I think that language works well. I think learning and development, as you mentioned, Pete is great because it focuses on the value added to the people and their development. Anything that does not make it sound like the organization owns or controls assets. That type of language, I think, has its own limitations.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Nicholas, I just love where you’re rolling. And I know, in your background, you are both a business school professor and a pastor. And it’s really beautiful to kind of see how the thinking interplays here in terms of just even the words we use, we can find irksome or even dangerous.

Nicholas Pearce
That’s exactly right. I think words have power and words should be used with intention. And I think the words that our organizations and corporations have used over the years are reflective of the desired intention. And as we begin to deconstruct some of those harmful ways of thinking and being in workplace life, we have the opportunity to refresh not only our perspectives, but our language as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, lovely. All right. And we’re just getting started talking about advocacy. So, we’re going to say this word a lot. Maybe since we’re talking words, could you give us some definition? When we talk about having a boss or someone advocate for you at work or advocacy, generally speaking, within work, what do we mean by that? You said speaking up for someone when they’re not in the room, that’s something, got a ring to it. Are there any other dimensions of that you’d highlight?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. So, I think about advocacy as the act of sponsorship, and I juxtapose sponsorship against mentorship. So let me describe the two and contrast them. Mentorship is having that person who will coach you, who will pull you aside and say, “Hey, I like what you did there. Maybe a little bit more of this next time, a little bit less of that.”

Maybe they’re going out to coffee with you once every couple of weeks or every four weeks or every quarter. They’re there to help you navigate. They’re there to invest in your development. They care about you as a human. They care about your performance. They’re trying to invest in making you a better you.

Sponsorship is altogether separate. Sponsorship is not so much about making the direct investment of time in giving feedback, and having lunch regularly, and having coffee, and giving micro corrective feedback. Sponsors are people who are opportunity creators. They are career accelerators and catalysts of opportunity. These are individuals who are bringing your name up when you’re not in the room. And as is often said, 80% of what is said about you is said when you’re not in the room.

So, for many people, especially women, people of color, and others who tend to be excluded from a lot of opportunities in many work environments, they tend to be over-mentored, “We’ll give you a coach, we’ll give you feedback, we’re going to make you a better you,” under the guise that the reason you have not ascended is because you need to be made better.

But what they really need are sponsors, people who are willing to say, “Hey, did we consider giving Nicholas that opportunity? Did we consider giving Jane that promotion? What are the reasons why we’re holding her back? Are we saying she lacks ‘seasoning’? What exactly do we mean by that? Does she need to add paprika and stir? Like, what are we saying?”

The people who are willing to do the blocking and tackling to make sure that organizational politics or bias don’t derail your career, those are your sponsors. And so, many people are over-mentored, but under-sponsored. And so, the whole concept of advocacy speaks to an individual using their credibility, their capital on you to advance you and your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then can you tell us, it’s like, “Okay, boys, it’s really important that we have people speaking up for us when we’re not in the room,” how would we even know the extent to which this is or is not happening since we’re not in those rooms?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. You can tell, one, what your boss is saying to you offline. Do you and your manager have a relationship where feedback flows naturally and continuously? Or are you in a situation where your feedback comes mostly in the form of a formal annual or semi-annual review process during which you get blindsided with feedback that sounds off-base? If so, that could be a warning sign that your boss is not going to bat for you when you’re not in the room.

Do you and your boss enjoy a collaborative relationship? Or do you feel like your boss is competing with you? If your boss competes with you, because perhaps they view you as a threat to their advancement, or as a threat to their supremacy, they’re probably not advocating for you.

If you’ve been in a role for three or five years, and there’s never been a conversation about what your future looks like, I mean, let’s be for real, Pete, if you’ve been in a role a year or two, and there hasn’t even been a conversation about what your future looks like, that may be an indication that your boss doesn’t care what your future looks like, and that they’re certainly not advocating for you and for it at tables that you may not even know exist in the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Nicholas, I love what you’re saying in that it’s very candid and blunt, and I think some of us don’t even want to entertain the belief that this harshness, reality is present when we’re hearing a lot of nice things.

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. I have been in spaces personally and have coached leaders, and employees, students of mine who had all the raw ingredients, I mean, had all the learning, all the degrees, all the certifications, all the skills, all the receipts in terms of high performance, and yet found themselves stuck. And what happens for many people is that it’s the ultimate gaslighting. You’re left to wonder, “What did I do wrong? What did I not do right? Is it me? What am I lacking? What do I need to change? Am I too much? Am I too little? Do I need to turn up, turn down? What is it that’s wrong with me?”

And a lot of us wind up falling into cycles of anxiety and depression because we have been trained at a certain level to believe that the problem is always us. And what I’ve discovered is that there are a lot of people who are incredibly gifted and incredible contributors and collaborators who just run into managers and bosses who don’t know how to lead, or don’t know how to be humane, or are insecure.

And because this continues to do incredible damage to people in an era and a season where mental health needs are already at their highest, I feel at some level, Pete, that the truth will set the people free. And to release themselves from the fear or the feeling that they are not enough and to, perhaps, sometimes release their boss from the expectation that they will be a good advocate when perhaps they don’t want to be or don’t know how to be.

Now, I do have to rush and add this, that if you’re just a chronic underperformer, these words don’t apply to you. Like, you need to do better, right? But if you find yourself consistently meeting or exceeding expectations, you’re knocking the ball out of the park, so to speak, on a consistent basis, everyone can see your brilliance and your promise but your boss, maybe it’s not you. It might just be them. And they’re not perfect people. They’re people, they’re not perfect, but it is your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m wondering, if folks find themselves in this position, they might feel kind of stuck. Could you maybe give us a bit of hope, a bit of inspiration, a story of someone who saw a transformation in this department in terms of advocacy wasn’t happening and then it kicked off and good things unfolded?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. One of my coaching clients had this very scenario happen, where the boss was really great in terms of giving mentorship and guidance and coaching and feedback, very warm relationship, their families got together on weekends. I mean, it seemed like a really healthy relationship on one level, but they recognized that, at a certain level, the boss really appreciated them being in that role. Because, let’s just say they got their TPS reports in on time every time, and the concept of losing that individual to another team or to a higher level, perhaps in a different business unit, would create issues for that boss.

And so, that boss, at a level, was conspiring to suboptimize that individual by being nice, being kind, keeping them happy, but not giving them the growth opportunities that they deserved and needed to continue to fulfill their potential. So, this individual had the conversation with their boss and said, “Hey, I really enjoy being on your team. Help me see what future could look like. Help me see what next can be.” And that opened up a healthy conversation where the boss kind of came clean and said, “I knew this day would come. And I’ve really enjoyed having you on the team.”

And they kind of came clean about how there were opportunities that existed in the organization and they were waiting on that individual to come forward to raise their hand and say, “Hey, I actually do want to grow. I don’t just want more money. I don’t just want autonomy. I don’t just want flex hours. I actually want to grow. I want to be able to be my best and become even better at a higher level in the organization.”

And so, that conversation actually opened the door for the boss to advocate because the foundational relationship was in place, high performance was already acknowledged, and so this was just an invitation to the boss to move from mentor to sponsor.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Understood. And I like what you say there. It’s not necessarily evil. Like, they have warm feelings about, it’s like, “No, this person is so amazing. I feel so blessed,” and delighted to have them on their team, but it’s just a little bit of selfishness, which we all are subject to. It’s like, “This is so amazing. I don’t want this person to ever leave.”

But, again, you know that it’s a finite clock. When there’s someone amazing in a role, it’s, like, it’s only a matter of time before they go to a bigger role. And I think this is the way of all things. I think we had a handyman who was awesome and someone said, “Oh, he probably should increase his rates.” And I said, “Inevitably he will.”

Nicholas Pearce
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
“Because we are aware of his awesomeness.”

Nicholas Pearce
Exactly. We don’t want to be the ones to tell him that, or we’re happy to tell him as long as he keeps our rate unchanged, right? But this is exactly it. This happens a lot, you know, Pete. It happens in the nonprofit sector a ton, where you have long-serving executive directors or CEOs or presidents, they’ll be in the seat for 25, 30, 40 years. And they’ll have a talented person underneath them in the organization, who everybody within a mile can see has CEO or executive director capability. But that CEO recognizes, “I’m 55, and I have no intention to retire anytime soon.”

“So, because there’s only one CEO at a time, and I intend to sit in this seat for another 10 to 15 years, I have a choice to make. Either I invest in you becoming the very best you can be, which means losing you, or I continue to suboptimize you to make you question whether you have what it takes to be in my seat. But because I’m not ready to give up my seat to you at this time, now I’m not advocating for you. I’m not bringing your name up in the marketplace because I could lose you, and you fulfill an important part on this team. I value more what you produce than who you are.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nicholas, you are just touching on exactly, I think, some eye-opening stuff for a lot of people, like, “What’s wrong with me?” It’s like, “Oh, this is what’s really going on under the surface. Understood.” So, lay it on us, if we find ourselves in such a position, what do we do about it?

Nicholas Pearce
Well, one very practical thing that we can all do is to look for advocacy elsewhere. Your boss may not be the only advocate you can get in your organization. Ideally, you’d have a direct supervisor who could go to bat for you because they know your work most closely, but there are other influencers who can give you the boost you need. There could be someone in the organization that is even more high ranking than your boss.

Maybe an ally who might bring your name up. Maybe it’s someone you met in the context of an employee resource group. Maybe it’s someone who you met at the company holiday party. Maybe it’s someone you ran into at a company-wide task force. Maybe it’s someone who, when the time came for the company’s intramural softball team to form, they were the person you rode to the games with. Who knows? But there are other people who can speak to you and can perhaps be an accomplice, a co-conspirator, if you will, in advancing your cause and advancing your career.

Another really helpful thing, and this is something that’s hard for a lot of us, is to build our networks outside of our organizations. For many of us, we may be socialized to feel that is disloyal or underhanded or somehow strategic in the most nefarious sense, but I believe that, what I call 360 -degree advocacy, is a gift that we should all take advantage of. We’ve got advocates above us. We’ve got advocates beside us who are our peers. And we can also have advocates in our direct reports.

Not underestimating the value of people beyond your boss in your organization can be helpful, but also people outside of your immediate workplace who may be LinkedIn connections, or are part of professional associations, or alumni groups, or other civic and community service outlets. Those individuals can speak to your promise as well and may be able to help create opportunities for you outside the organization.

And sometimes, as the saying goes, folks won’t miss the water until the well runs dry. And sometimes you give people the gift of goodbye, and it doesn’t have to be messy. It can just be an investment in self. Investing in yourself and your future does not have to be self-ish, right? Because at the end of the day, let’s face it, Pete, if someone lets you sit on the bench for 10 years and they never advocate for you, that’s 10 years of your life that are down the drain.

And they’re not going to come to you at the end of those 10 years and say, “You know what, Pete, I’m sorry you wasted your entire 30s.” It’s going to be on you to make up for that lost time. And an apology is not going to do it. You owe it to yourself. I was having a conversation with a group of executives who are whining and complaining about Millennials and Gen Z being disloyal. And I said, “Listen, y’all can complain and moan about that all day long until you recognize that companies aren’t loyal like they used to be. Unless you’re giving Gen Z a pension, which you’re not, the company’s already said, ‘Ah, we’re not really loyal to you.’”

If you say in your HR policies, that in order for a 401k or 403b to be fully vested, an individual has to work there three years, you’re telling them from the outset, “We’re investing in you, sort of. Until you’ve been here a while, we’re going to claw back part of the money we’ve invested in your retirement.” So, all of these are signals to individuals that companies aren’t loyal. And so, if companies aren’t going to be loyal to their people, how can you expect people to be loyal to their companies in the way that they were 75 years ago. The rules of the game have changed. And so, it’s not about being disloyal or selfish. It’s just about being smart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that absolutely resonates. And that was kind of my philosophy when I started my career, it’s like, “I don’t think I can count on any employer long-term ever.” So, it felt kind of mercenary. It was like, “What can I do to make sure I have skills to do anything?” And I was like, “Strategy consulting seems like a good choice out of undergrad.”

And so, and I think it was serving well with developing some skills and some network and some savings to then go do entrepreneurial things. But, Nicholas, I got to hear, when you dropped these truth bombs on these executives whining about the Millennials, how did they reply?

Nicholas Pearce
Oh, they got it immediately. I said, “Listen, all of the participation trophies and all that stuff is cool when it’s your kid or your grandbaby out there on the soccer field getting the little trophy because they put their cleats on the right feet. But when they become your employee, all the participation trophy stuff, where you’re getting rewarded for effort, that goes out the window. It goes out the window.”

And so, recognize, that it was not the Millennials and Gen Z that made participation trophies. It was the uncles and aunts and moms and dads and coaches who could not handle walking away without a shiny object because they showed up and tried their best, and the participation trophy industry was born, but Millennials didn’t demand it. It was the world into which they came of age. They understood it as an expectation. And if Gen X and Baby Boomers had not put participation trophies in the lexicon, Millennials would not expect them in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. So, we’re getting a lot of good contexts from all over here. So, build the network outside the organization. Any other top tips you’d recommend? If we find ourselves not having that advocacy, what else should we do?

Nicholas Pearce
Absolutely. One of the most common cliches that I have heard that I actually believe has truth underneath it is that sometimes rejection can be protection and redirection.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. It rhymes too.

Nicholas Pearce
And so, if you find your manager not advocating for you, it could very well be an intentionally closed door that is designed to push you in the direction of purpose. This is something that I talk about a fair amount in my book which is entitled The Purpose Path: A Guide to Pursuing Your Authentic Life’s Work. And what I find is that, in many cases, the adversity that we may face, whether personally from a health perspective or otherwise, or even professionally in terms of doors that are slammed shut in our faces, sometimes that adversity is actually the grist of discovering purpose.

Oftentimes, people think that the purpose that we have in life is to just be happy. And I’m not the happiness police. I’m not anti-happiness, Pete. However, I have discovered that, oftentimes, it is those painful circumstances that push us into a place where we discover purpose that we would never have discovered before. And so, while many of us want to organize our lives around the avoidance of pain, if we avoid pain, we actually may be avoiding purpose.

Now, I’m not saying we should be trying to attract pain. Hear me clearly. All I’m saying is that sometimes when a boss doesn’t advocate, when a door closes, it could be a catalyst that is pushing you toward purpose and protecting you from calamity that you had no clue was coming your way. So, really embracing the moment in a different way and reframing it as not so much, “This is a flaw in me,” but perhaps more, “This is giving me an opportunity to reflect, to retool, to perhaps even take a break and rest and really think about how I connect my soul with my role.”

“Maybe I was just doing a job, earning a nine to five paycheck, doing the things, paying down my student loans, making the moves, doing the things. But now I actually want there to be meaning in my work. Yeah, I’ve got skills. Yeah, I work for the big shiny company with the stock options and all of the trinkets. But now I actually want to do something with my life that matters. I want to have purpose in my work. I want to connect my soul with my role.” And maybe that closed door was the catalyst to get you to see that purpose is calling.

Pete Mockaitis
That was well said. Well said. Well, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things?

Nicholas Pearce
Sure. I think that as much as we often think about what happens when others don’t advocate for us, I think that it’s important that we recognize our responsibility to advocate for others. Oftentimes, it’s very easy to think about what your boss is or is not doing for you, and you’re absorbed in what’s happening over your head, and you’re thinking that you are the main character in the organization story, and you are not.

Many of us don’t advocate for others because we’ve never been advocated for. And while that may be understandable, I don’t think that’s a valid excuse. We have to be intentional about lifting as we climb, not having the crabs-in-a-barrel mentality where only one of us can be advocated for at a time, “And if it’s not me, that means you win and I lose.” I think this zero-sum game mentality, this fixed-pie thinking is eroding the fabric of society.

And so, I think for as many people who may be attracted to our conversation today, because they find themselves in spaces where they weren’t getting advocated for, perhaps being the leader you wish you had can be a very important part of your life’s work and your own personal scorecard in terms of how you evaluate your leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. And now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nicholas Pearce
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

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

Nicholas Pearce
A favorite bit of research that I love talking about is this vintage study that was conducted by Kathy Phillips, Katie Liljenquist, and Maggie Neale. They’ve done this study looking at the power of diversity to help teams win. And the science on this from over 20 years ago is quite clear, that diverse teams can outperform homogenous teams when the task calls for creativity, innovation, information-sharing, and tackling complexity. This is a well-stated, well-worn vintage research finding. It is not a part of the recent DEI movement. This is pure science from back in the before times that many organizations know about but haven’t really embraced.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Nicholas Pearce
Necessary Endings by Henry Cloud.

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

Nicholas Pearce
Sabbath.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nicholas Pearce
Favorite habit is prayer for me. It’s time to really refocus.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quoted back to you often?

Nicholas Pearce
Yeah, oftentimes, it’s really in the space of this purpose conversation that we started to explore a little bit toward the end. And it is the fact that you owe it to yourself to live a life on purpose. You were created with a purpose. You have a reason for being. And you owe it to yourself to discover that and to do something about it.

A lot of people say that they are reflecting or meditating or praying for purpose because they need clarity on what their purpose is. And for some people, that is truly the case. But there’s a significant percentage of people who I think are probably with us today, Pete, who don’t need further clarity. They need more courage. And once they acknowledge the fact that they’ve got the clarity they need already, the missing ingredient is courage, now it’s their move.

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

Nicholas Pearce
NicholasPearce.org is a great place. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, social media, Facebook @napphd. I also have a TED Talk that folks have been enjoying entitled, “Don’t Ask Me What I Do.” So, any of those spaces will be great to connect.

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

Nicholas Pearce
Be the change you want to see. If you feel like you’re not getting advocated for, advocate for someone else. If you had a terrible onboarding experience, make someone else’s onboarding a little softer. If you feel like it’s time for you to pivot from a job, don’t be messy on the way out the door. Embrace the gift of the lessons you learned in the previous season and take the high road and walk out with grace, not looking at that past experience as time wasted, but looking at yourself perhaps as an alum of that organization or institution, and always seeking to do your best, no matter where you find yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And, Nicholas, this has been fantastic. I wish you much good advocacy and purpose.

Nicholas Pearce
Thanks, Pete. Likewise.

Mar 18
0

945: How to Master Your Inner World and Flourish During Stress with Mawi Asgedom

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Mawi Asgedom shares four tools anyone can use to master their emotions and thrive.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Easy ways to keep your cool when things go awry
  2. The key investment that improves both happiness and success
  3. The powerful reframe that makes you feel unstoppable 

About Mawi

Mawi Asgedom is an award-winning author and expert on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) who has inspired over 1000 audiences with his uplifting speeches. 

Mawi founded Mawi Learning, an organization that unlocks human potential through evidence-based social emotional learning. Under Mawi’s leadership, Mawi Learning won the prestigious CODiE award for excellence and innovation in educational technology, and achieved CASEL-designation for evidence-based Social Emotional Learning.  

In 2023, Mawi launched his newest venture to help youth unlock their potential: Inner Heroes Universe, a media company that helps parents, educators, and therapists equip kids with crucial mental health and social emotional skills. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you Sponsors!

  • UpliftDesk.com. Build your dream workstation and get 5% off with promo code AWESOME5

Mawi Asgedom Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mawi, welcome back.

Mawi Asgedom

Oh, it is so good to be back, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

This is crazy. So, you were episode number one. That was a wild eight years ago on the show. We’ve been talking in between, but nobody else has been listening.

Mawi Asgedom

Hey, it is incredible. It’s hard to believe. I still remember that first episode. And what is it 800 episodes later now? Like, you’ve been at it 900. How many done?

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right, 940-ish. Totally.

Mawi Asgedom

Oh, my goodness. Well, it’s been fun to see the growth. I’m proud of you. It’s so cool. I’ve got to ask you, Pete. You’ve talked to so many world-class people throughout the years here, what has been the one most important or interesting learning that you’ve gotten? Let’s flip the table on you, get you to answer a question right off the bat. When you think about all the journey that you had here, the whole journey.

Pete Mockaitis

If I boil it down to one thing, it’s caring.” It’s like, “Do you care? Do you care about your job, your colleagues, your teammates, your boss, your customers, your stakeholders, the investors? Do you care or do you not?” It’s like, “I just got to get through the day. I got to try to get through the day, get to the paycheck.”

Versus when you care, it opens everything in terms of, “Well, why do I spend the time to learn this thing? Oh, because I care. Why do I really try to listen and understand where someone’s coming from? Oh, because I care. Why do I invest in learning this stuff when it’s hard or it’s uncomfortable or it’s unpleasant? Oh, because I want to improve it.”

So, I think it just makes all the difference when folks are plugged into that versus just trying to get through it. And so, many of the tidbits of advice in terms of being likable or being persuasive, if you just keep drilling down to the why, why, why, it’s “Well, because this just matters to me.” And being awesome at your job is sometimes, quite literally, a matter of life and death, and other times you’re making an impact on a smaller level.

I was just chatting with someone who sells lots and custom homes for planned developments, and she says, “For me, family is the most important thing, and a house is one of the most important things for a family’s experience of family and togetherness, so it really matters to me.” And it shows in terms of how excellent she was at what she was doing. So, that’s my soapbox, is it really boils down to caring.

Mawi Asgedom

Thanks. So, you reminded me as you talked, Pete, I gave a keynote a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, at Vernon Hills High School in Illinois. They’d all read my book, Of Beetles and Angels, and I gave what I thought was a great speech, and everybody was saying, like, “Wow, that was great.” And then one of the kids came up to me and said, “Hey, are you happy right now, because you don’t seem like you’re really happy up there?” I was like, “Wow, this kid could see right through me. I’ve been having like a bad streak, I hadn’t been doing self-care,” and I really wasn’t happy, and it showed.

And to your point, it’s a tough thing to hear from a kid after you’ve been paid to go present at their school, right? But then it forced you to hold up the mirror and answer the question that you just asked, really, like, “How much do you care right now?” And if you’re not where you need to be, in terms of your happiness, joy, energy, what you bring to the table, well, you need to step back and do something about it. And so, that is one the stories I’ll never forget from over the years.

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, that’s great stuff. Well, it’s good to be back, Pete. Man, the world of podcasting has changed. It was pretty nascent still when you were doing it. It was pre-pandemic when we did the first episode a while back. And to see just how much it’s changed and grown. And to be a part of that must be pretty cool for you.

Pete Mockaitis

It has been, and new fun opportunities have opened up, and it’s been fun to explore those. And I want to talk about your new fun, cool thing, The Inner Hero’s Universe. It’s a series of books for children. So, first, we should address why are we talking about this on “How to Be Awesome at Your Job?” And it’s not just because we’re buddies. Even though we’re buddies, I don’t let people on here who don’t have something to say that sharpens the universal skills required to flourish at work. So lay it on us, you got a book series for kids. I can see how it’s useful for us grown folk, but tell us what are we doing here today?

Mawi Asgedom

Well, look, I just asked you what the sum wisdom was that you collected from people in your 900 interviews with all sorts of leaders and CEOs about how to be successful in the world of work, and it came down to caring, which is really something that we should pick up, start picking up very early when you’re three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, how you’re raised, and the things you’re taught. And there are enduring lessons about all these things.

And so, in any case, the whole Inner Heroes Universe actually has tremendous application, I would argue, for the world of work and just for the world of humanity, of just being adults in life, because it’s really rooted in psychology. And what I wanted to do, Pete, was, my first company focused on what’s called social-emotional learning, which is the way that kids learn about things, like mindset, relationships, goal-setting, all the personal development kind of stuff that you talk about on your podcast, but from an education and kids’ lens.

With the pandemic and the challenges that our country has had in the mental health area, I wanted to translate the world of psychology, that clinical world of psychology, into simple, easy tools that kids could use, and those same tools can be used by your listeners. And we can talk about what that means in each of the four areas of psychology that we started with, but think of us as the Marvel universe of the inner world.

Like that movie “Inside Out” that Pixar did, Pete, where it showed that young girl’s inner journey, but it only focused on emotions. We’re bringing the entire inner world to life through books, through media. And as we continue to talk, I’ll share how these things are so relevant in four of the initial areas of our inner universe.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s so cool and it’s powerful. And I totally resonate with that. And we had Kwame Christian on the show, he’s got the podcast Negotiate Anything, and he’s so cool. I think in his book, Nobody Will Play With Me, he talks about our inner toddler. And I totally connect that notion, is that when I observe my own children, and they’re upset and yelling or crying because they can’t play a game that they wanted to play, and we see we’re not really above that.

I think we are experiencing the same kinds of feelings of disappointment, frustration, “Oh, I was really looking forward to that, and this is being taken from me, and I don’t…aargh, it’s not fair,” we’re feeling all those things, and we just dress it up a little bit more professionally in terms of like, “Oh, this is a disappointing change in schedule. Is there a way we could return to the original agenda?” And so, I think that there’s loads of truth to we have an inner toddler, and the messages that connect for children, and sometimes are among the most profoundly impactful to us at a deep, I don’t know, limbic or something, level of our human experience.

Mawi Asgedom

Exactly. I’ll give you one specific example of how that works. In education, in kid psychology, one of the things that we talk a lot about is regulation and dysregulation. And a good way to think about it is that, as human beings, whether we’re kids or adults, whether you’re a five-year-old or a CEO of a major company, when we go throughout our day, we all detect threats, right? Like our nervous system, our bodies, the way we evolved has learned to wonder, “Hey, is that a lion over there? Is that lion going to come for me? Or is that just a tree?” Like that kind of thing, right?

And so, we all respond differently when we see those threats. A lot of times when we’re a kid, what psychologists talk about is, the kid will go into like the red response or the blue response. That might be a kid who, all of a sudden, runs out of a room and the teacher doesn’t know where they went. Or a kid gets really angry and won’t let go of a point, like they keep arguing, they have low inflexibility, they will not stop talking about something.

I’m wondering if any of your listeners have ever worked with someone in their jobs that is inflexible, that gets attached to something, they won’t let it go, they just will not let it go, or when a conflict comes up, they just kind of like leave, they retreat, and they close off and they lose. What’s happening there is that we’re actually, like when you said limbic, we’re losing access to our thinking brain, and we’re going more in that survivor mode.

Well, with Inner Heroes Universe, what we do is we teach kids very basic, simple strategies to first reconnect with their bodies because it’s the body that’s dysregulated. We try to talk to someone logically, right, and say, “Oh, Johnny didn’t mean to say that to you,” or, “They didn’t mean to exclude you.” You’re using logic. What really needs to happen is we need to connect to the body first. We teach kids things like spider fingers. We teach kids things like box breathing.

And you know what? Some of the best leadership thinkers working today with adults and CEOs, like, I don’t know if you’ve had Shirzad from Positive Intelligence on your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis

Not yet.

Mawi Asgedom

You got to get him on. He’s one of my favorite thinkers. He sits down with CEOs, and he just tells them, “I want you to take 10 seconds and just feel each of your toes. Okay, just feel each one of your toes.” What’s he doing? He’s turning the thinking brain off for a second and reconnecting people to their bodies. And when you do that, you actually think at a higher level.

Like, for type A folks, like us and maybe many of your listeners, who are used to believing that logic and thought and what our conscious brain can do is the sum game of progress and how we should think about things, it can be difficult to accept that these breathing exercises, regulating our bodies, doing things like spider fingers, they’re as important for the 36-year-old, 56-year-old, as they are for the 6-year-old, and it helps us lower our stress. It helps us kind of moderate the temperature of our bodies and our thought. And that’s a very specific example, Pete, of where the world of kids is actually not that different from the world of adults.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mawi, I’ll totally second that, and it’s really fun. We talked about spider fingers. My daughter, Mary, has done this, and I actually was not familiar with spider fingers before reading this book. And if listeners have not heard of it, it is the practice of simply touching your thumb to each of your fingers in succession, “My thumb to my index, my thumb to my middle, my thumb to my ring finger, my thumb to my pinky.” And just doing that with some awareness of, “This is how my body, my fingers are feeling,” gets your brain in a different gear.

And if you’re feeling angry and you can’t go take a walk, you could do spider fingers anywhere and everywhere. And I had not heard of this before. I have found that it’s useful, and my daughter Mary has done it numerous times. So, it was really cool. It’s like these books are full of, like, superheroes, super villains, battling inside the kids’ minds, and yet I’m learning useful stuff here, so spider fingers. Well, Mawi, tell us, where do you even discover it? Like, I Googled it and it wasn’t all that common.

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah. So, the way I discovered it is, so with Inner Heroes Universe, I hired a team of mental health experts that I work with very closely, and my criteria for them was they have to sit down with hundreds of kids every week – like I didn’t want someone who wrote research papers off in some university, no offense to those folks who are listening, but they weren’t grounded in the reality of what kids experience every day.

And what my mental health experts told us is, the kids they see, they’re having problems because someone is messing with them and they can’t control their reaction to that, and they’re getting in a lot of trouble in school. Or, they’re having problems where they’re not able to pay attention and their mind is wandering a lot, and they’re getting in trouble for that. Or, they’re having deep anxiety and they’re afraid to go to school for any of a number of reasons.

And so, the spider fingers were, actually, created by one of my mental health experts, a woman named Carrie, came up with it, and my son uses it. I use it. But it’s really like, “How do we translate all these clinical tools that you have to go to a counselor to get them, typically, or read a dense book on mental health? And how do we translate them and make them accessible for everybody using like art?” So, like this example of a book. Here are some art with the characters and making it interesting and fun.

Pete, let me give probably my most stunning example of regulation from my career, okay?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, please. All right.

Mawi Asgedom

I was working on the most important deal, up to that point in my life, the most important deal I’d ever worked on, and I was having a lot of problems, a lot of problems. It was going very poorly, and I was really struggling. I consider myself to be somebody who gets along with everybody, but sometimes when the stakes are really high, that other part of who we are comes out that we don’t want to acknowledge. Maybe your listeners can identify with that. Like, “Hey, I’m usually a nice person. Everybody loves me. What just happened? How come I’m having all these battles and people don’t seem to like me anymore, and I can’t get…?”

Well, a lot of times it’s because something is at stake and you have to negotiate things and you’re fighting over things. And what that does is that gets us more in that survivor brain I was talking about, and your thinking brain gets compromised. You think you’re being logical, but you’re not. So, I described all this to a friend of mine who’s a very, very wise woman named Ranjini, and I just said to her, “I don’t understand why I’m not getting any progress here?” And you know what she said to me? She’s a woman who teaches at a top business school. She didn’t give me any business advice.

She said, “I want you to start every single day praying for the people that you feel are tormenting you and the problem with this thing not moving forward.” I was like, “It ain’t going to happen. Forget about it. Why would I do that? I’m right, they’re wrong. It’s pretty simple, okay?” A neutral outsider looking into the situation, 99 out of 100 times would say, “Mawi is correct. They’re wrong.” I truly felt like that.

Maybe some of your listeners… Listener, can you identify with that? And in situations where you’re pretty sure you’re right, you’re being jacked up by some folks who shouldn’t be doing whatever they’re doing, and you’re stuck there. And the last thing you’re going to do, the last thing you’re going to do is waste a minute in the morning praying for these people. I was desperate, Pete. I was at a point of desperation where I’ve tried everything else. But I tried it, Pete. No joke. Everything moves forward within like five, six days, things start moving forward.

It turns out, unbeknownst to me, my own energy was having a lot bigger contribution than I thought. And by me praying for them, put that aside. What is that? That’s a regulation technique. That’s like I was dysregulated and didn’t know it. I always thought I was being logical. I thought I was using my best intelligence; I was right. And then this is a simple technique of taking things away from my perspective, a simple act of getting on my knees and praying for someone else who I didn’t think should be prayed for, changed my body, changed my energy, and the transaction ended up being one of the best in my career.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Mawi Asgedom

So, if it was just as smart as me making an Excel sheet and mapping out the pros and cons, and that was the only way to think about business, then you wouldn’t need something like Inner Heroes Universe. You wouldn’t need that world of things, but it’s not like that, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s powerful. So, now, well, hey, I’m a believer in the power of prayer. But as you understand it, it’s not so much that the Almighty parted the seas for you, so much as you were putting out some, I don’t know, hostile, contentious, unpleasant, difficult, inflexible – don’t let me throw you too far under the bus here, Mawi – energies in the course of the negotiation, the conversations, with this deal, and it was just getting things sort of jammed up.

You’re like, “I don’t really know how to make progress with this guy over on their side,” is what was going on. But then through the prayer you got into a more chill vibe that you were able to have some back-and-forth and progress. Is that an accurate summary of what went down there?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, definitely. Another way of thinking about it was in my previous state, I had access to 70% of my intelligence. Like, my previous state had got me so worked up I thought I had access to 100%. And once I started praying, my energy shifted, I started to think differently, and I regained the 30 additional units I would need to understand where I was being inflexible, to understand, “Oh, well, if I don’t like this person, I’m going to find ways to still get it done rather than just being mad at them.” Like, you’re able to kind of make additional distinctions.

So, it wasn’t that the Almighty did this, necessarily, not that I doubt the Almighty. I think that if there is a lesson from the Almighty here, it’s that, “Hey, there might be a plank in your own eye, as the scripture says, while you’re looking at the peck of dust in somebody else’s eye,” and we have to take responsibility for that as leaders. Well, this is the same thing that we can teach a kid. If you’re upset with somebody else, don’t focus on them for a second, like, “Hey, let’s do some box breathing, let’s do some spider fingers, and then after that, we have a few strategies for you that you can use to exit the situation that are now available to you, now that you’re not completely dysregulated.”

And so, it’s similar because we all have bodies, we all have emotions, we all have feelings, and we all get stuck. The inflexible thinking is a big part of it. Inflexible thinking is a big problem that happens when you get so into somebody, like being against you, or out to get you, or the enemy for a particular thing happening, we kind of get stuck in that quicksand of inflexible thinking that I think that prayer helps out. Yeah, and I think that would be something that would work, Pete, in my opinion, for someone who is an atheist, if they took time to just pray and think about, wish good things upon that person’s the way, I would say it, and shift one’s own energy, like that kind of thing. That makes sense?

Pete Mockaitis

That is good. And when you said box breathing a couple times, so just in case folks are not familiar, Mawi, what is box breathing?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah. So, I’m still learning a lot about this from the mental health experts, and it’s a variety of breathing techniques, like box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, where you’re just counting your inhales and your exhales very intentionally. And you could say something like, for example, here’s this book that I have here, shaped like a box, you could say that, and you could breathe in and out, as you’re noticing the contours of the box and feeling that alongside your hands. You could count as you’re doing it.

But the point is you want to pay attention to your breathing. So, it’s all these strategies that are intended to interrupt your thinking through your body or your mind. So, for example, another one, Pete might be something like this. Hey, Pete, tell me your three favorite neighborhoods in the city of Chicago.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure thing. Let’s just go with East Lakeview, Wrigleyville, and Old Town.

Mawi Asgedom

Okay, so that’s an example of something called ABC mindfulness we teach kids. You just ask someone to list off three things that you know they know about. And as they’re thinking about those things, their mind kind of moves away from what they were focused on. And that’s very useful for kids where you’d be like, “Hey, tell us your favorite Pokemon.” As they’re reciting their Pokemon, their five Pokemon, or if the kid is into rollercoasters, “Tell us your five favorite rollercoasters.” They recite those rollercoasters, their bodies are calming down because they’re being distracted, and then when they come back, you can ask them to engage in the problem.

So, whether it’s the spider fingers, whether it’s the breathing techniques, whether it’s ABC mindfulness, each person listening to your podcast should have a repertoire of, like, five to six things that they can do. Like, one simple one that I like to do, that Shirzad talks about from Positive Intelligence is just take your fingers and rub them closely so you can feel the contours of your fingers very closely, and you can kind of feel it.

I would literally do that under the table at certain meetings when I was getting stressed out. When someone was saying something that I didn’t like, I would just do that, calm myself before responding. Nobody knew I was doing it because it was under the table, like while I’m sitting at a meeting, I’m calling myself, reminding myself, “Hey, let’s do a little regulation before you jump into something with somebody.” So, that’s kind of like what that world of regulation is all about. Have a few strategies that work for you.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, you mentioned that these books cover four areas. We’ve talked a good bit about the soothing, the regulation, which is handy if we’re stressed, overwhelmed, getting angry at folks, and not having our full intelligence. What are the three other areas?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah. So, we picked regulation because we’re seeing so many challenges post-pandemic, with that in schools and in society at large. Another one that’s massive for today’s world, Pete, is relationship and connection isolation.

And so, two of our characters deal with…one of our characters, bad guys is, one villain is named Iso, we call him Khans, his name is Iso. Then we have Link, whose job is to connect with people. And, Pete, if there’s anything we learned during the pandemic, I would say it’s that we need each other. We need human connection.

And the Surgeon General has said that loneliness and being isolated is the same as smoking, or just being a heavy smoker in terms of what it does for your life expectancy, for example. It’s a devastating kind of issue. So, I would say relationships are a key area. Like, if regulation is the first area, relationships would be the second area, and I can double-click on that if you like.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yeah, so could you just give us a pro tip or tool that fits in there, sort of like we talked about spider fingers for the regulation? Any relationship power tools?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, definitely. A couple power tools I would say is that, one is that pay attention to who your real champions are. What I mean by that is there’s three to five people in your life, Pete, and in every listener’s life that, for whatever reason, these people have been there for you above and beyond what you might even think is deserved, are there.

These people are your ultimate champions. You might view yourself, let’s say, you just like have amazing self-concept, and you think of yourself as a 10 out of 10. These people think you’re a 50 out of 10. They throw opportunities your way that are 50 out of 10. They treat you like that. And God has provided these people to each of us, I would say it’s like angels that help us, but a lot of times we don’t really value them. We don’t connect with them. We don’t thank them.

And following the 80/20 rule of understanding who these people are, really over-invest in them, I would say, is a top relationship strategy. And I think everyone here can think about two or three folks in their network that have really done that for them. Another one, Pete, is that one thought that’s been really helpful to me, professionally, is that I know a lot of people, I’ve made a lot of friends professionally, it was hard for me to admit, Pete, that my relationships were atrophying, that my relationships were, over time, depreciating.

I still know a lot of people, but I haven’t talked to that person in seven years. I haven’t talked to that person in four years. They moved to a different country and they now have like, you know, they’re busy caring for their kids, or whatever it might be, or they did this. And the reality is if I called them, they might be like, “Why is Mawi calling me?” because they thought either someone died, or you just haven’t talked for so long. So, we have these rich relationships over our time but then understanding that, like, “Hey, we have to continuously intentionally renew and build up our relationships.”

And so, I was talking to you before, briefly before our interview, and I was telling you, for example, I joined a club that does cost money, a decent amount of money, that has been really helpful to me over the last year and a half, it’s called 3i, that has really helped me connect with people all over the country, really fun, and it connects me with people that are more in my current stage of life.

Like, I sold my company, I’m post-job right now, really, in how I live my life. And being able to connect with a lot of folks who are in that same kind of stage of life, and have some of the same interests as me, has been a great fit for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t have my old friends or that I’m not connecting with folks, but I kind of like analyze, currently, from my current stage of life, what do I need?

And I would ask every listener to do that. And I would just ask them, for your current stage of life, like what are the new relationships you have to create? Where have things atrophied? Where have things depreciated? Where do you need to step up and really invest in it? I have four kids, Pete, if they were to ask me what’s the single most important thing that I can tell them, other than their life philosophy around their faith and things like that that will help them the most, it’s the people they have around them, without any doubt. That’s the thing in life that makes you happiest and most successful, is having those relationships from mental health, from professional, from happiness.

And so, that’s why we focus on this area. It’s critical for kids. A lot of mental health challenges are rooted in relationship challenges, or accelerated by them. And as adults, we have to nurture our relationships, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, we got regulation. We got relationships. What’s next?

Mawi Asgedom

I’d say a growth mindset is critical. Growth mindset has been defined many ways by many different people. I actually had a chance to work with Dr. Carol Dweck, who wrote the book Mindset. I created an online class with her, went to her office at Stanford, and so I feel like I got really a bird’s-eye view of just everything that was happening at the industry, but also learning directly from her and her team.

And a growth mindset is really the idea that our skills and abilities, they’re not fixed. They’re malleable. They can always grow, that we can get better at anything. And the fixed mindset is that we can’t grow, we can’t get better at things. And we want to teach kids these concepts because a lot of them think they’re not as good at math, or something like social anxiety where, “I don’t have any friends.” Well, we can help you make a friend.

Like, if any of your listeners who are anxious, for example, there’s a lot of anxiety out there, one of the most powerful therapies and solutions is you don’t run from the things that make you anxious, you get exposure to it. A lot of the counselors we work with, they actually help people take little steps to gain exposure to those things so they can build those muscles and grow.

So, professionally, the best one example I can give you, Pete, of how this mindset really mattered for me, and I’d ask your listeners to think about this, is when I was selling my company, I engaged with DLA Piper to help me sell the company. It’s one of the top law firms in the country. And there was a part of me that wanted to think “I’m just going to let DLA Piper handle this, okay, because that’s what I’m paying them for, they’re the best.”

Then, one of my friends, who’s a lawyer, who I really respect, a really smart guy, works at a private equity firm, and one of my high school friends, he told me, “Hey, you need to understand every single word in that contract even if you didn’t go to law school. Like, it could be hundreds of pages. I don’t care. You have to take it upon yourself as an intelligent person who believes they can learn about anything.”

So, Pete, I did that. Like, I made sure, if I had questions, I got them all answered. And actually, you’d be surprised how many people I found out signed something without having understood everything that’s in it, like, “Well, I’m agreeing to do this for this amount of money.” Well, it’s only because I had a growth mindset that I was able to do that, that I knew about growth mindset. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be afraid. Don’t say things like, “I didn’t go to law school, so I can’t understand this.”

Well, if something’s important, assume you can get better at it and learn about it. And that actually made the deal a lot better because then I could ask a lot of questions and unearth sources of value and not be intimidated. So, I’d ask the listeners, is there an area where you’re currently intimidated, or you think you can’t learn it, or you think it’s only for the pros to learn about and you can’t do it? That’s a fixed mindset. You should assume, even if you don’t have the same knowledge as a lawyer, you can get smart enough, like you can get smarter, you can get better at it, to be able to make some progress in that critical area.

So, that’s why a growth mindset is critical for kids and adults. We all have to be aggressive, avid learners. I actually take it personally, Pete, even with my kids, they’re like, “Well, calculus, they’ll take that when they’re 17.” I’m like, “Nope, I’ll take that challenge. I’m going to teach my five-year-old the basics of calculus. I’m going to get a couple boxes, and I’m going to show them how to calculate the area outside, then we’re going to add those up, and that’s basically what calculus is, kid. And you’re going to be able to use this to estimate how much water is in that water tower in a few years when you take a class on this.”

But if you have that orientation that, “I’m so committed to believing that things can be learned,” that I will even take on the challenge of assuming I can start to teach a four-year-old calculus or a six-year-old calculus, I’m not going to back down. It becomes part of one’s professional orientation and life philosophy.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And when it comes to growth mindset, it’s funny, I think that in some ways, folks think, “Well, yeah, okay, I understand there’s a growth mindset, there’s a fixed mindset, and the growth mindset means I believe that I can grow, learn, change, and improve. And fixed mindset believes, ‘Nope, you’re either good or bad at a given thing.’”

And so, what I think is interesting, as I’ve reflected on this lately, is it’s a lot more than just philosophically aligning yourself to the notion that, “Yes, a growth mindset is true in terms of what humanity is capable of and an individual,” but rather like a day-in, day-out experience or mental discipline of, like, sometimes something happens, like, “Oh, I feel like a loser. I’m just not any good at this.”

And it’s funny, like, I will hear myself say these things to myself, and I know that that’s “wrong,” like, “Oh, that sounds like a fixed mindset. That’s incorrect. I’m supposed to have a growth mindset.” So, do you have any pro tips if folks are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what a growth mindset is, but sometimes I just totally fall back into thinking about things in a fixed mindset kind of a way”? Any hot takes for when you’re in the heat of battle there, what to do?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, no, definitely. It’s one of those terms that’s become a platitude that, like, everyone, “Oh yeah, growth mindset, I have a growth mindset.” A lot of folks have no idea what it is or how to think about it. And, quite frankly, there’s a lot of definitions of it flying around out there, so I was particularly grateful that I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Dweck and do a lot of research on it in my own life.

Pete, one of the most useful ways I think about it that’s really helpful is think of a circle, like imagine my fist here is a circle. Let’s call that the can-do circle. That represents all the things we can currently do right now. Like, I can speak a certain level of Spanish. I know how to make these kinds of friends. And what we teach kids and we find to be really powerful is then to tell them, “Hey, look, outside of that is a not-yet circle, there’s things you haven’t mastered yet right.”

And when you’re feeling that feeling of frustration and despair, what we teach kids is that’s actually like a really exciting thing, and that’s where we can train ourselves to say, “Hey, that emotion that I’m feeling, that despair that I’m feeling, that’s the signal for, eventually, maybe not that second, we’re going to process that, but that’s where our inner dragon slayer is going to come out, and say, “I can grow through this and pass this.” It’s like an exciting thing.

And also understanding, as human beings, it’s only normal to fall back to the can. Everything you just described is perfectly part of the human experience. It’s, “I have a challenge.” “My business is not getting the sales I want it to get.” “I’m not getting the promotions.” “I’m trying to learn this new programming language, and I’m not learning it.” And that’s when we have to ask ourselves, “Hey, are we going to push through?”

And so, having those visuals of the can-do circle that’s right there, but then right outside of is that not-yet circle, and then what I like to do, Pete, is I like to set a small goal into my not-yet circle. Like, let’s say I’m trying to grow sales. I’m not achieving my sales goals. I’m really frustrated. I’m feeling bad.

Well, what I can do is I can set a small goal into my not-yet circle, and go into what we call the almost-circle, just outside your can-do circle, it’s right there, and we’ll set a goal, “You know what? I’m just going to reach out to seven people who I’ve already worked with in the past who know me, to get advice about how I can think about this and how I can expand this. Maybe some of those will turn into sales, maybe some of those won’t.” And then from there, I’ll continue to grow. So, I find, Pete, that taking those little actions in the almost-circle, just outside the can-do circle, helps us to continuously grow at the margins and the edges, and that helps a lot.

One of the tools we taught kids in my previous company that we still teach kids was we’d say, “Set a MAD goal, a measurable, attainable with a deadline, a goal that’s measurable, attainable, and with a deadline.” Smart goals are too confusing. There’s too many to remember, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

There’s five letters. You can’t deal with that.

Mawi Asgedom

It’s too many. It’s too many. What do you think this is? I’m going to have a fixed mindset there and say, “I’m going to go to MAD goals, there’s only three, reduce that,“ but that’s what I’d say. Set a MAD goal just outside your can-do circle and get into it that not-yet circle.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And then the fourth area?

Mawi Asgedom

Fourth area is my favorite, Pete. You heard me talk about the turbo button for a long time. And what that is it’s this area of agency, that as human beings, we’re meant to be agents. That there’s all these external thin

And all that does is it takes away our agency. It makes us feel like we can’t do anything.

And so, it’s a skill, it’s a skill to constantly put oneself back into what we call the turbo zone, like hitting your turbo button, taking action, being able to move by focusing on what you can do. And we teach kids this because a lot of times kids feel like they’re powerless. They live in a world that adults create, and adults are making all the rules, tell them where to go, they got to raise your hand to go to the bathroom, they got to sit in a certain place, they got to eat the like adults do, so they feel like they have no agency, but we show them how to capture that agency and how to recognize that.

I actually thought that one of the most provocative things I ever heard in the world of leadership was when Stephen Covey, in his book, I believe it was The 7 Habits, he says, “The person who takes action, the person with high agency, they’re not a little bit more effective, they’re 5,000 times more effective.” It’s a massive shift, which is a tall claim to make, I mean, to go from twice as effective.

And I actually have found that to be true, that when we’re not acting as agents, Pete, we lose all access to our intelligence, to our relationships, to our connections, to our problem-solving because we’re thinking about something outside of us, by definition, that we don’t control. And so, being able to shift back into agency land is a critical and fundamental tool for any professional who wants to accomplish a lot of things in their life.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And I want to hear your favorite perspectives on how that’s implemented, but one thing I find really handy is if I’m just sort of like, you know, tired, not feeling it, unmotivated, stressed, under stress, whatever, like all the things. I guess, you know, “Hey, there’s some self-regulation.“ But the question I like to ask myself is, “How can I make all this suck 1% less?”

Mawi Asgedom

Ah, I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

Because when I’m in that space, I don’t feel like dreaming big dreams. I don’t feel like much is possible, but I know there’s always a little something I can do. It’s like, “Well, you know what, I can drink a glass of water. You know what, I can stretch. You know what, it’s dreary and rainy outside, and my eyeballs would appreciate some light, so I’m just going to point my eyes at a light bulb for a little while, and that’s a little bit rejuvenating.”

And, sure enough, I find that you just build that momentum, and so it’s like little thing by little thing by little thing. It’s like, “You know what? I’m feeling okay. Let’s go do something.” And likewise, I think that’s often the case with any number of domains. It’s like, “It’s true, we don’t have control over worldwide geopolitics. We don’t. But what do we have control over? Oh, well, I guess I can tidy up this desk, and then I feel like I’m in control. I’m ready to rock and roll.” So, anyway, that’s how I think about agency. What are some of your favorite moves?

Mawi Asgedom

It’s a big one. And you’re right, a lot of agency, the good news is that we can actually plan for a lot of these things. Like, for example, for our podcast today, I know I just perform better in general for anything that involves other people, anything that’s recorded, anything when I’m speaking, if I’ve done a couple things.

One of those things is like if I’ve done a workout. So, I always do a workout before I have any, and that’s an act of agency. Like, I don’t have to wait till I’m tired, or depleted, or having to recover. I just do that, and so I find that even 15 minutes is better than nothing. When you’re talking about like, “Oh, I feel like I can’t do enough,” 15 minutes makes a big difference. If I really get my heartrate up for 15 minutes, bam, I’ll just do that in a hotel room. If I don’t have any weights with me, I’ll do squats, pushups, some circuit training in a room real quick.

Pete, I have this master account, like Google Doc for my life that I recommend to people. It has five or six tabs, but one of those tabs is things I’m grateful for, not just made-up stuff, like, “Oh, yeah, I got to be grateful.” Like, things that I’m genuinely, like, “Wow, like I’m really grateful for…” I have one of the tabs, Pete, has my worst-performing financial year of my history since I was 22. And the reason I look at that is I can’t help but feel tremendous gratitude. I say, “Hey, God, I’m not any smarter today than I was before. I’m not working any harder.”

And that Mawi got that response, got that, and then this other Mawi got this, I’m just going to choose to be grateful for that. And when you see those stark numbers of dismal, abysmal, like, I’m looking at cell phone plans I can switch to, to try to save an extra $3 a month to survive kind of thing, then you feel really grateful because you remember that.

So, I feel you can build things into your life, and I try to look at that Google Sheet each morning while I look at the different tabs, including where I’ve been grateful, where things have been challenging but where things have gone my way. Like, I have a meditation in there, Pete, that I really like, that I look at each day.

And so, I think we can exercise a lot of turbo and agency in recognizing each day presents its own challenges, and we can also put some things in place to boost ourselves each day, to elevate our things each day. There’s certain music that I listen to. It’s not accidental that where I’m doing this call, like the way I structured my office, Pete, is, it’s like out by some windows because I love light. And there’s a guitar right behind me because I’ll screw around on that a little bit.

So, I try to build into my work environment that, if I needed to, I can just look out the window and feel a little happier, because I love light. I got a little guitar I can screw around with really quick, if I’m in one of those moods you were talking about, it’s literally two feet from me. I’ll just grab it. I’ll strum something really quick. I’ll feel better. And so, I think these are the kind of things that I would encourage your listeners to think about how can you surround yourself with those little things? 

One thing I’ll ask myself, too, Pete, is for any situation, if I have the wherewithal and I feel stuck, I’ll just say, “Okay, how can I turbo this thing?” And that just means, “How can I operate from an internal locus of control instead of external locus of control?” Because when you operate from the internal locus of control, it’s like you’ve got that turbo energy. Like, those movies where someone hits a button in the car and it zooms and flies, has all this energy that no one knew was there until that button got hit. Well, I’ll ask myself, that’s a good metaphor for me, Pete. I’ll say, “How can I turbo this thing? Like, I’m stuck right now. I feel bad.”

And it could be, “Play that guitar real quick. Look out the window. Take a walk.” Like, all those little things. It could be like, “Call a friend.” That’s a big one. “Call a friend” is a huge one. They’ll change a different perspective. I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.” So, I think we all got to develop that toolkit to kind of boost ourselves in those moments, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

All right, Pete. So, I know you got a lot of listeners out there, Pete, who are at different stages of their life, and now that I’m becoming a few years, I’m going to be 50, Pete. I got four kids. I’ve got a kid who’s a teenager. So, you know what happens when you get a little older, Pete? You start to think, “Man, what are some of the things that I wish I would have known?” So, I actually wrote some of those down when I was a little bit younger, that I would love to share with your listeners, just purely as an act of like, hey, maybe this is the only time I’ll connect with them, and this will help somebody out there.

A couple things that I think are interesting, and this is random, okay, random stuff that I came across. Pete, I think it’s really interesting that my biggest financial mistakes I’ve ever made in my life have been after I had my biggest financial wins. There’s something that lulls your brain, I believe. Like, right after I got on the Oprah Winfrey Show when I was younger, and I had a big book deal with a publisher in the same year, I was on top of the world, I had more money than I ever thought, I made the dumbest financial moves, and it wasn’t that I bought a Ferrari. I wish I would have. I just made really bad investments and things that I thought would work out and they pretty much all went to zero. I felt like an idiot.

And I say that with humility to all your listeners, to say, “Hey, right when you have your biggest win, be extra humble and talk to your friends.” What would have saved me was if I would have talked to my friends more, smart friends. Talk to your friends, take your time, don’t rush. Just don’t rush. You don’t got to do anything. So, that’s one, Pete.

And another one that I would say is, in terms of entrepreneurship, I’d say my biggest leadership mistake, like CEO mistake, was being attached to things that weren’t working for too long. Meaning, like I would work on the same thing for five years and not pivot when the data was really clear that it wasn’t getting traction.

And that thing I had in my heart from being a former refugee of never give up, it actually can be really bad idea. There are times to give up. When the data is all pointing in the same way, it’s foolish to keep doing it again and again and again. You should pivot. 

It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re dumb. It doesn’t mean that what you did should have never been done. It just means you’re being intelligent. And I didn’t understand that, Pete, because I was trained to always be a hard worker, and I believed one should never give up, and I believed if I could just work harder, things would work out, and that just was fundamentally wrong in some of those situations.

And then in terms of I would say the thing that helped me the most, conversely that is, where I showed the most wisdom was, I noticed in a couple key instances when something was working better than it should have. And then once I saw that it was working better, I over-invested in that. That’s how my company got into online education, and we became the market leader in social-emotional learning from an online perspective, where we trained more students than anybody else before we sold to ACT.

But that was all an industry I knew nothing about in terms of being online but I kept kind of reinvesting in it as the data came in. So, I’d say it’s the converse of what I learned with the first business is, it’s really like, be very curious and listen to the data, and don’t be over-attached emotionally, particularly if you’re passionate about something. Be willing to shift, be willing to shift, and I say that because I’d hate for there to be a brilliant listener out there who could have so much impact had they pivoted a year earlier, two years earlier.

And then they might think, “Well, I just wasn’t cut out for that business. I wasn’t good enough to succeed in that business,” or “I couldn’t make it.” Actually, that’s not true. You could have made it. You were smart enough. You just need to adjust a little quicker, that’s all, and you would have been fine. That’s why I point that out. That’s just something that I experienced as an entrepreneur.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

One that has been very useful to me and my four kids, are those experiments, Pete, that basically show how addicting variable rewards are.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Mawi Asgedom

So, if you give a mouse some cheese, and it’s predictable, it’ll stop asking for the cheese. It just won’t. But if you vary when it gets the cheese, it’ll keep hitting that lever until it dies basically. And I show that to my kids because I wanted them to know that’s how their phones are set up. Like, all those notifications that come up, every time I sign up for a notification, they’re giving permission to somebody else to send them cheese and addict them at that person’s choosing for their own interest.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mawi Asgedom

In the world of fiction, which I’m a big fantasy science fiction advocate, there’s a tremendous author named Robert Jordan. Really sad kind of thing though. He wrote this 15-book series but he died after the 14th book, so somebody else had to finish the book 15. It’s like a huge mega-seller. Actually, Amazon is making a series of his called Wheel of Time. You can watch a couple season of that. It’s really cool.

But his best book that he wrote, in my opinion, is called Dragon Reborn. And the reason I like that story, Pete, is it’s just an incredible fairy tale for adults.

And then, in terms of personal development, the book that I think had the most impact on me, although I didn’t like it the first time I read it, I really didn’t. I thought it was just boring, I couldn’t get through it. But then, I read it again, and I mentioned it before, but I really liked that The 7 Habits book. I like that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. That book makes a lot of sense to me, Pete. 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, tell us, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mawi Asgedom

A lot of us end up doing what we’re doing because we thought it’d make our parents happy. We thought it’s what we should do. We felt like we had to do it. 

And I’m at a spot now where a lot of my friends are asking, like, “Hey, did I even want to do this? Like, why did I do this in the first place? I never wanted to do this.” It’s been pretty tough for me to kind of help my friends think through that. So, I’d say, particularly for those who are younger, but at any age, really like, are you doing what you really want to do? Because we only live once. And it would be really sad to have spent that entire time not at all doing what you want to do. To me, that’s sad. And so, think, take some time to reflect, and think about, “What do you really want to do? What is it?” And it’s not something that anybody else can answer. Nobody else on the planet can answer that other than the listener who’s hearing that question, and being honest with yourself.

And then if you’re not doing what you want to do, well, what are you going to do about it? It doesn’t mean you have to quit your job, but what are you going to do about it? And being honest with yourself about that, because that’s been one of the joys of my life, Pete, I would say, is I have gotten to do what I want to do, and it’s been a joy to like work with kids and to feel like I’m doing what I wanted to do. Even when I was broke, I could wake up and say, “Hey, I’m doing what I want to do,” which gave me a lot of joy.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Well, Mawi, this is fun. Keep doing your awesomeness, hitting the turbo button, being an Inner Hero. This is awesome.

Mawi Asgedom

Hey, fantastic to be on with you again, Pete, and I look forward to the next time, maybe episode 1,742 we’d be back on.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s a good one.

Mawi Asgedom

That’s a good one, right? We’ll be back on. Thank you. Keep it up, Pete.

Jan 04
0

925: How to Stop People-Pleasing and Feeling Guilty with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Aziz Gazipura explains the dangers of people-pleasing tendencies and shares actionable steps for overcoming it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The massive costs of being a people-pleaser
  2. How to not feel guilty when saying no
  3. A surprising strategy to build your discomfort tolerance 

About Aziz

Dr. Aziz is a clinical psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on social confidence. In 2011, Dr. Aziz started The Center For Social Confidence, which is dedicated to helping everyone break through their shyness and social anxiety.

Through confidence coaching, audio and video programs, podcasts, a detailed blog, and intensive weekend workshops, Dr. Aziz has helped thousands of people all over the world increase their confidence and lives out his mission: To help every person who is stuck in shyness liberate themselves to pursue the relationship, career, and life they have always dreamed of.

He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Candace and son Zaim.

Resources Mentioned

Dr. Aziz Gazipura Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Could you kick us off with a dramatic tale about the dangers of people-pleasing?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah. Well, I don’t need to make anything up here. And it’s the kind of, like all good dramatic stories, it’s a slow build, where maybe it’s like imagine a character in a movie where they go out and have some drinks, and they really like it, and it just seems like a good time. And then, flash forward many years later, and they have the shakes in their hands because they have to have a drink of alcohol. And that’s actually what niceness is like, or people-pleasing, specifically.

So, you basically make a choice to not be yourself in order to smooth things over or be liked or be accepted. And maybe a classic tale would be you did it when you were young, you did it to fit in at school, you did it to fit in with family. And that was not all horribly off-kilter then. But then I talk to, man, dozens of people every week, where now they’re 37 or they’re 43 and they’ve done pretty good, like inauthenticity and fitting in works. It’s this somewhat adaptive strategy, but it works the way that that drink worked to take away your anxiety, but it doesn’t actually give you what you really want.

I was just speaking with a woman just two days ago, she’s about mid-40s, successful in her career, has a family, has a husband, and feels incredibly lonely, and doesn’t even really know what to change out there anymore because, “I have all the things.” And she’s lonely because no one, not even her husband, really knows her. And that might not sound bad. Some people might hear that and say, “I’ll take the family and the money and the career, and then I’ll be fine.”

But actually, when you get there, and you don’t feel like anything out there is going to change it, and inside you feel profoundly lonely, it’s a story of a lot of suffering. And it’s a story that hundreds of millions of people live out, and feel like they’re the only one, but they’re not.

Pete Mockaitis

So, can you make that all the more real and clear for us? To feel like no one really knows you, what might be some examples of the false impression others on the outside have in contrast to the reality that is within?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Well, the impression people have on the outside is what you learned will keep them close to you, and it might be different. And I call them the roles that you’re going to play. So, at work, you have a certain role that you play, “I need to be confident-sounding, in charge, certain with my partner. I need to be pleasing. So, what do they want me to be? I’ll agree to things that I think that they’ll want me to agree with. I’ll focus on the things that they want. We’ll talk about what they want.”

“I also know that they don’t like it if I’m irritable, or if I’m sad. So, I’m going to downplay that or hide that.” And that’s true for friends as well, “I got to be up. I got to be on. I don’t want to be boring. I don’t want to be a sad sack. I don’t want to bring people down. I don’t want to burden people with my feelings, and my woes, and my problems.” So, therefore, at work, you’re going to be that way. And inside you might feel nervous, you might feel insecure, you might question yourself but you don’t show any of that.

And that, people can tolerate a certain amount of inauthenticity at work. But then where it really starts to get to them is when they can’t even be themselves around their friends, their loved ones, their family. You got to hide it and pressure yourself, and so you can’t reveal that you’re feeling sad. You can’t reveal that you feel like something is missing. You can’t reveal any of these things. And that’s where the loneliness comes from for people.

And it might not be these big dramatic things, like, “I can’t reveal that I’ve secretly wanted to leave.” Even just, “I am feeling sad today,” and it’s so simple but it’s a world of difference when you have to keep it all inside, all hidden. And sometimes people, really good pleasers, and I know this because I lived this for many years, you’ll even hide it from yourself, “I’m not sad. Everything’s okay. I just have a stomach ache. I just am tired.”

And it becomes this vague thing that you don’t even know. You don’t even know where you are in all of it because then it’s scary to know what that is and maybe share it with others.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, this loneliness, what are the knock-on, follow-on consequences of that?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

There’s a variety of different studies around loneliness, but loneliness is pretty much associated with all negative health outcomes and a much shorter lifespan. That’s like the big hammer, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Yup, dying.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

And quality of life, but sometimes people hear that, and like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s about everything in life. Too much peanut butter kills you. You got to live.” But actually, not only is it a shorter life, but let’s just talk about the quality of life. And there’s the longest study in the history of human psychology, it’s decades. It’s been going so many decades that they’re now the second generation of people.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Waldinger.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

This is the one done with Harvard students, yeah. And the short version is, it’s relationships. That’s what makes us feel good in life, that’s what makes us feel happy in life, that’s what protects us from hard times in life. And not just you got somebody in your house that’s your roommate. No, we’re talking about confidantes, real relationships, people where you’re in life together.

And so, the loneliness, the cost is you don’t have that, or you have a very limited amount of that, and that is the biggest determiner of true success, which, for everybody, I don’t care what they value in life. True success for everybody is actually to feel rich inside, like feel full of success, of love, of meaning, of resources. And so, you can have external success and feel empty inside, and not have the thing that we all really want, which is those real connections with people.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

But other than that, it’s great that we should just keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, can you give us a ray of hope then, an inspiring tale of a people-pleaser reformed?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, the ray of hope is people-pleasing is not who you are. It’s a pattern that you run. And that’s fantastic news because any pattern that you run you can change. It’s an active process, it’s a verb, like walking or eating. And so, you can put down the fork and no longer be eating. You can put down the people-pleasing pattern and no longer be pleasing. And you can still be very loved by more people than you could ever need to be loved by. And you could be more boldly yourself and actually enjoy who you are and stop trying to be somebody that you’re supposed to be for others.

And I think this is the biggest risk, this is the leap of faith, and that’s why I think people who read my books or work with me because there’s some part of them that says, “That sounds a little too good to be true. You’re saying I can be me, and have love, and belonging?” And the good news, the ray of hope is absolutely yes, and it’s on the other side of that risk, the other side of what we fear, which is, “If I’m really me, everything is going to fall apart, and no one’s going to love me.” But that’s the whole source of the problem to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, warm, loving relationships, longer life, higher quality of life, that sounds swell. And then your organization is called the Center for Social Confidence. Tell us about what that confidence picture looks like on the other side of the people-pleasing.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. Well, there is the outer layer, which I think we all may be focused on at first, which is, “I want to be more confident.” What does that mean? Well, that means I can be more bold, I can walk up to people and talk to them, I can initiate conversations, I can network with people, I can just walk into a room and not feel afraid of what people are going to think, I can really just be myself. That means more power in leadership, and influence, and impact.

You can share your idea more directly, more broadly. You can advocate for something. You can advocate for yourself, for your ideas, for your team. Also, that shows up in relationships and love. You can go approach someone that you really are drawn to, who you really want to spend your time and your life with, and you can let them actually see and know the real you. So, those are the outer observable effects.

And then the inner effect as a result of that confidence is that you feel like you belong in this world, and that sense of insufficiency, not enough-ness, and all the scarcity, there’s not going to be enough love, there’s not going to be enough people, like, that dissolves. And that is worth way more than all the promotions, and all the dates, and all the stuff but sometimes we have to start with that outer stuff, and then realize, like, “Wow, me just really feeling that peace inside, that is worth its weight in gold.”

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that does sound absolutely delightful, yes. So, lay it on us, how do we pull this off? I imagine it’s easier said than done.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Yes. So, the good news and the bad news. The good news is this is all possible, the ray of hope stuff we were just talking about. The bad news is you probably are going to feel like you’re going to die on the way there. That’s all. But it just feels that way because, let’s rewind, what is people-pleasing? People-pleasing is a survival strategy that you picked up that’s based upon an idea, a conclusion, that’s not even true. But the conclusion you came to is, “I’m not okay as I am. There’s something just me as I am being totally lovable, I don’t buy it.”

Maybe someone told you that. Maybe you interpreted that. Maybe someone wasn’t there for you. Maybe you were abused. I don’t know, but there is some messaging that you picked up, and you’re like, “Wow, just me being me is not enough, and so now I have to do something. And what I need to do is I need to observe you, and if I can keep you happy, then you’ll probably stick with me. And I got to observe if you’re upset, and make sure that I don’t do the things that upset you. I got to see what makes you smile, and make sure I do more of those.” And now a pleaser is born.

And so, it’s rooted in fear, in the fear of abandonment, fear or not surviving, “Because I’ll be left, I’ll be lost. So, now I’m going to live that out for much of my childhood but as a personality, as a whole life strategy.” And so, why it feels like you might die is because it triggers this kind of fight-flight survival response inside to challenge you, which is why most people don’t.

But if you get up to that, like, fed-up point enough, and you’re like, “Well, I don’t want to keep living this way. All right, let’s take the leap,” you don’t stay in dying forever. You don’t actually die but it feels very ungrounding because there’s a sense of certainty and familiarity in that way of being, and you are going to challenge that. That’s why most people don’t just say, “Oh, I’ll do it,” and then actually execute on it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so then what does the execution look like in practice? What are the step-by-steps? Do I just go give people a piece of my mind, Dr. Aziz, “Let me tell you what I really think”?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

So, I have two books on the subject. One is called Not Nice and the newer one that just came out is called Less Nice, More You. And I talk about the pendulum, where people who have been overly passive and pleasing at some point can swing, “Now, I’m going to let the world have it,” and that’s okay.

Maybe that’s a phase to go through but, ultimately, there is a set point that’s much more effective. And I think the key steps from a higher level are these. Number one, you have to decide that you no longer want to be so people-pleasing and nice. And that might seem like a strange step, but it’s like, “Isn’t that what we’re talking about?” Well, no, because many people have a lot of their identities wrapped in, “But being nice means I’m a good person, and I don’t want to be a bad person.” No one wants to be a bad person.

And so, the first thing we need to do is we need to upgrade our understanding of being people-pleasing is not the same thing as being kind, or generous, or loving, or whatever it is that you actually value as a human. And that people-pleasing is more of a compulsion and not a choice, and so you have to be giving, you cannot say no, and that can be very detrimental.

So, someone is struggling, you take an extra hour to support them seems kind, right? The nice person and the people-pleaser doesn’t have that choice, so they could be being eaten up inside. They’re all stressed.

Pete Mockaitis

Eaten up inside and bitter, they’re like, “This jerk is always hogging my life.”

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

“I got too much on my to-do list.” So, now you’re talking about resentment. So, the compulsion part of it, the “nice” person feels like they have to. And any time we feel like we have to do something, and we don’t want to in that moment, that’s a formula, a human formula for resentment. So, now we’re going to start that.

Now, the kind choice is like, “Okay, this person wants this. Do I want to give it? Does it feel right to give it?” And it doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. Your kid is sick or something is happening, and you’re just like, “You know what, but it feels right, it feels like I want to do it.” Then you do it, and you say, “I want to give it.” Then we won’t feel resentment.

Kindness, true kindness leaves a glow inside, you’re like, “I feel good about that.” Whereas, when we’re like, “I couldn’t say no. I mean, look at them, they need me.” And the nice person likes to create this elaborate world in which everybody is super dependent, like, “They would die without me. They would be, oh, my gosh, if I left this partner, or this boyfriend, girlfriend, they’d be devastated for years,” and they don’t even see how it’s a little bit of a…it’s a way that we’re trying to get some sense of significance, perhaps.

The truth is that people have many ways to meet their needs, and you’re just one of them, and you’re not the only one. So, yes, that’s exactly what you’re talking about. That’s the stew of resentment that can form. And so, back to this first step of, “I need to decide I’m not going to be so nice and pleasing” is actually an important first step because, otherwise, we remain in this pattern where this is the only way to be, this is the right way to be as a good person, everything else is bad. And then we will perpetuate that indefinitely.

Pete Mockaitis

And that decision, boy, it just seems like the distinctions and the commitments are so myriad in terms of the boundaries that we’re down with, in terms of “I am committed to doing this and being generous or loving in these domains. And I’m not so much down to do these other things.” It really kind of feels like we got to go, behavior by behavior, or relationship by relationship, when  we determine what that decision really means in practice.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura
Yeah, that’s a great point. And, yes, it is, and there’s a shortcut to doing that, which is it can be distilled into one question, which is an extremely liberating question but it also, if you’ve been living a people-pleasing life, can make you very uncomfortable. And the question is, “What do I want? In this situation, what do I want?”

And even just asking that can push a lot of the buttons for someone who thinks that that’s selfish, “Your life shouldn’t be about what you want. That’s the problem with the world, is too many selfish people.” But actually, we’re just talking about asking the question. You might still choose to say, “Well, what do I want? I want to not take care of my son.” “Well, he’s five and he needs someone tonight. So, you’re going to find a way to work with it.”

So, it doesn’t mean you instantly just, “I do whatever I want. I don’t even care about anyone.” It’s like, no, but you start that behind that question is not just the data of the answer. It’s actually caring about yourself just like you would with someone you love, “What do you want, honey? It doesn’t mean you get everything you want, but I want to know. I want to know. Maybe we can work with it. Maybe we need to compromise here. But what do you really want? And what do I really want?”

I was just talking with a friend earlier today, and he has some friends visiting out of town, they said, “Hey, we want to come have some dinner with you.” And he’s like, “Oh, that sounds good.” And then they’re like, “Oh, also, we’re flying out somewhere the next day. Can we spend the night at your place then we’ll go to the airport?” And he said, “Well, let me talk to my wife and we’ll make sure.”

So, he’s about to go talk to his wife, and he’s like, “Hold on a second. Before I even talk to my wife, what do I want here?” And that’s such so small, we could just steamroll right over the moment and go on with our lives, and that might seem so trivial but, man, you add up those trivial moments, that’s your whole day, that’s your whole week, that’s your whole life.

And you might say, “Well, that’s horrible. How could you not have your friends stay the night? They need a favor. What a bad friend.” Ah, now we’re looking at the roles of the rule of friend, and many people have extreme rules, “You must always say yes to a friend.” But instead, if you tune in and say, “You know what, it feels kind of, I don’t know, confining.” And he got curious about himself, “Why? Well, I was just hoping to have the one evening a week that I can spend with my wife, one on one. She’s so busy. I’m so busy. I just don’t really want to give that up.”

So, now all of a sudden, we discover that the saying no there is actually a loving act for himself, for his wife, for his relationship, so we’re prioritizing something else. We would not even discover that. Now he’s trying to please his friends, so he says, “Yes,” and then he’s feeling maybe his wife is going to be upset with him, so he’s trying to please her. And then the whole evening, he’s just anxious and secretly resentful, which is a disaster.

So, yes, we want to go, day by day, decision by decision, slow down and start to really ask, “What do I want here?”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. And what’s interesting is by surfacing that, and if you do make the choice, and maybe, well, one, I think that can generate kinds of creative options that you didn’t even think about to start with, it’s like, “Hey, you can come over between 9:30 and 10:00 p.m. and, yeah, it’ll get you to the airport on time.” And so, there it is. So, you had your cake and eat it, too.

Now, sometimes you can’t but then I guess if you do choose to make a sacrifice on behalf of another, I think you can do so all the more eyes wide open, it’s like, “I am choosing to do something for this other person, knowing it’s inconvenient for me, but because I value this relationship more than I value binging Netflix, or whatever I was in the mood to do that evening.”

And then, as you said, there is sort of a glow. You can feel good about that choice. You made a values-driven decision and chose that which is good in your value system above that which is expedient, and you did so, knowing full well the consequences that could flow from it.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, I love that nuance. And sometimes people hear this, and they think you’re going to become this very stingy person, not just with money but with your time. And that’s actually not the case. It is very much more intentional and you’re linking it with your values. My younger son, who’s eight, we eat a pretty similar breakfast every morning. And one of the ingredients is from downstairs, and he doesn’t like to go downstairs because he’s afraid of whatever, monsters. That’s what lives when you’re eight years old, that’s what lives downstairs in the basement, is monsters.

And so, there was this time when we were trying to help him face his fear, but that one was just so kind of just an uphill battle, and I was like, “You know what, as a loving act, I’m really okay just going downstairs to get the thing. I’ll help him fight his fears in other places, and he doesn’t need to tackle every fear because his dad freaking is obsessed with confidence.”

So, I just decided that, and it’s this kind of sweet act of generosity. He’s not going to be eight years old forever. And when he’s a big hulking teenager and could care less about going anywhere in the house, then that’ll be a sweet memory.

And so, you can actually be really loving and generous in all these different ways. It’s just not coming from this pressure that you have to or else. I think that’s the biggest freedom.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, walk us through the next steps.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

All right. So, you’ve decided, “I don’t want to be nice,” and then you start to ask yourself, “What do I want?” Then the next step is going to be you do the things that are “not nice.” And that might be saying to your friends, “Hey, I’d love to see you. You guys can come. We’ll get some dinner. It’ll be awesome. And then you’re going to be staying near the airport or something. I want to have the evening to myself with my wife. It’s our one night and I really want to preserve that.” And it’s, “Oh, my gosh, so you’re saying no in that situation.”

Yeah, another not nice thing might be to inconvenience someone by asking them for something, “Can you help me with this?” or, “Can you do that?” There’s disagreeing with somebody, “Ooh, that’s real unpleasing of you.” So, maybe you have a different opinion, it’s relevant to something in business, a decision, whereby it feels high stakes and it’s important to share it.

It might even be just a different idea or preference that doesn’t even seem that important to share but you just share it instead of smiling, and saying, “Oh, yeah, me, too. Me, too.” You’re like, “Yeah, I actually like the person that you seem to dislike. Hmm, that’s interesting.” So, whatever it is, it’s just a small smattering of the potential behaviors of you being more you, more authentic, more real, more bold.

That’s all the “not nice” behaviors. And every single one of those is going to produce probably some level of anxiety at first because that’s me being testing out what could happen, which is going to be some sort of calamity, “If there’s conflict, the relationship is over. If I say no, the person is going to never do anything for me ever again. If I ask for what I want, they’re going to hate me.”

So, we have these dramatic predictions, and we test them out. And it’s a form of exposure, really, like behavioral training where we need to do the steps, which tends to bring about the discomfort. And then there is another step about working with that, but I’ll pause there to see if there’s anything you wanted to ask about this step.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. That’s good. And what’s funny, though, is the asking for help, we think that’s not nice or imposing or burden, yadda, yadda, but, in reality, when I’m asked for help, I often am delighted to be trusted, relied upon, to be confided in on the matter, and I really like it. And I guess not all the time. Some things are like, “I really don’t want to do that.”

But I think that’s interesting that sometimes these not-nice behaviors are, in fact, what people really value. Maybe some people don’t get people who disagree or challenge them enough.

So, it’s interesting what we think might be not nice could, in fact, be just what the doctor ordered on the other side of the table.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, and that highlights something really important, which is this strategy of people-pleasing is not a very well thought out effective model of human relations. It’s like, “This is the best predictors and most intelligent, socially intelligent model I can…” No, it’s a cautionary model. It’s, “Hey, any of those things might be a problem so don’t do any of them. That person might respond well to that but they might not, so just, no, don’t.” So, it’s not a very sophisticated or intelligent interpersonal model. It’s just safety-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, thank you. You got some more steps?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. So, after you spoke up, you did the thing, and you’re freaking out inside, then it’s time to do the work, which is to upgrade something inside of yourself. That’s where the real transformation is going to occur. People think the real transformation comes from the action, which is part of it, but then we have to upgrade, otherwise we just keep beating our head against the wall. And you can leave that situation, you say, “Oh, I feel so guilty I told them no. I’m so bad.”

If you just grind yourself through that meat grinder for two days, and then you come out of it, you haven’t probably really learned anything. And so, the next time someone asks you for something, and you think, “I should say no because that’s being less nice,” then you might remember the meat grinder, and you’re like, “I don’t want to do that.” And so, then you probably just go back to the old pattern.

So, to really change, after we say no, and then all that stuff starts to come up, then we get to upgrade our map of relationships. And there’s one that I really love, which is I call your bill of rights, so what you’re allowed to do, and the rules, basically. And so, when you feel really guilty, you can examine it, and say, “Wait a minute, what rule did I break? What did I do that was so bad there?” “Well, you said no to people.” “Okay, so what’s the rule?” “You should never say no.” “Well, to who? My friends?” “Yeah, you should never say no to your friends’ requests.”

“Okay. Wow, that’s a pretty extreme rule. Is that how I’m going to live my life? Are there some downsides to that one?” And then we upgrade with much more healthy, and nuanced, intentionally chosen approaches to life, rules for life. So, for example, you might say, and this is where the bill of rights is, “I have a right to say no to requests.” And that might sound like a simple statement, but if you really start to believe that and live that, that’s a whole different life, not just in terms of the behaviors but how you feel on a daily basis.

I don’t think we can totally upgrade these in a vacuum, where we just sit down with a sheet of paper, and we upgrade our bill of rights, and then we venture forth into the world, and everything is perfect. No, we kind of have to go through this process where we take the action, we feel bad, and then that’s the motivation to say, “Whoa, it’s time for something different.”

But if we do it, and we change, and we upgrade, it’s like a step-by-step. It’s almost like pulling out the faulty coding of the pattern and putting in a new coding, new software, that runs so much better. And it’s the software of more authenticity, more boldness, more actually being you in the world. And it turns out to work a lot better on your system than the nice people-pleasing software.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s interesting, it seems like those exposures, those reps, really do build up over time when you work through those steps. I suppose I am a people-pleaser myself, and I’ve just sort of gotten clear that I’m disappointing people every day. Like, there are people, maybe this very minute, Dr. Aziz, someone might be unfollowing this podcast or unsubscribing from the Gold Nugget newsletter, which I don’t recommend taking those actions. But, nonetheless, they are taken.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Someone out there. There’s a loose cannon out there.

Pete Mockaitis

By the hundreds, by the thousands, and so this happens. And so, what’s empowering is to just, for me, as I just sit with that, it’s like, “Yeah, I have displeased someone, and that’s okay. I have not sinned, I have not violated my values, I have not been, I don’t know, fill in the blank: selfish, greedy, lazy, any number of things that seems to kind of be at the core of a lot of this, is we have these value judgments associated with what you’re calling rules. It’s, like, “I feel bad, therefore, I must’ve done something bad. So, I’ve done something bad. I’ve broken a rule. What was the rule? Oh, wait, that rule is kind of ridiculous. Huh.”

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yeah, and there’s what I found, and one of the reasons why when I work with people, and the main ways that I work with people, is in a group environment is because we can identify that rule, and think, “That seems kind of intense,” but it has such momentum of history that I find a lot of this is almost like we’ve been running a propaganda campaign inside of ourselves for 20, 30, 40 years.

And when you’ve heard something for 40 years, it doesn’t matter what’s true or not. It’s hard to challenge. I was working with a gentleman in the program, who has had a hard time, even his relationship with his wife, he’s saying, “This is what I’d like to do on a Saturday.” “I don’t know if I want to do that. Here’s what I want,” like basic stuff.

And so, it almost felt like for the first couple of months he’s in the program, he was, “Hey, it’s okay for me to ask for what I want.” And in some part of the lecture, I’m like, “Of course. Of course.” And then he looks, like, around the room, and like, “Is it really okay for us to do that?” And we need to hear that, we need to get reinforced from outside.

And, hopefully, it’s just reinforcing some new beliefs that are just more sane and healthy. And I think that’s really a key thing to come back to, is, “Hey, is the way I’ve been living really serving me? Is it serving others? Is it really? If I’m getting burnt out, and hurting inside, and experiencing all these mind-body issues, and pain, and illnesses, like is this really how it’s supposed to go?” And I would challenge that, I’d say, “We’re not meant to live and help others at the expense of ourselves.” I think there’s really a beautiful, a much more abundant, win-win way of going through life.

Pete Mockaitis

That is beautiful. And I’m wondering if you recommend starting, if it feels scary, starting big or starting small? Like, “Asking my wife what I want to do on a Saturday,” in that example, is it that you recommend that you have, I mean, a small request might be…?

I guess I’m thinking small might be like you can give a lot of advanced notice. Like, let’s say on a Tuesday, you say, “Hey, honey, I think it’d be really fun on Saturday if we got lunch at Jimmy John’s.” Like, “Okay, that’s an inexpensive restaurant. It’s four days notice. It’s lunch, not dinner. It doesn’t seem as big, primetime of a meal.” So, I’m wondering, is your professional advice to start with some of those smaller, non-pleasing moves or requests, or to go for the bigger ones right off the bat?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

I would say both are beneficial and it’s going to be based upon your discomfort tolerance, which, by the way, is akin to a muscle that is worth building, and you will build it by doing this. And so, if one is going to just completely blow you out of the water, because our goal here is sustainable. Think of it like strength training over many months, and so you don’t want to go to the gym and just blow yourself out where you can’t work out for three weeks. So, maybe you do the lighter weight at first, then it’s a little easier, and that’s great.

You start to build momentum, and success builds on success, so you have a couple wins, and you’re like, “Well, that didn’t go so bad, so I think that’s a completely valid approach.” And if you want to go faster, you feel like, “I have been in this cage for so long that I’m just ready to do whatever. I got to get out,” then you might feel excited and exhilarated as you really test the edge quicker. But I don’t think there’s one approach that’s better or worse.

Pete Mockaitis

You say discomfort tolerance is a muscle, when we work that muscle doing exactly this. If people-pleasing is a diagnosis, that is apt for you. Are there any other pro tips you have on building the discomfort tolerance muscle? I’ve been into cold plunges lately, so if you can justify me that I’m not a weirdo, and this is actually super beneficial to all sorts of elements of my life, I’ll receive that, Dr. Aziz. But, is cold plunges one of the activities that increases the discomfort tolerance muscle? Or what are some of the other top prescriptions here?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

As a matter of fact, the cold plunge is.

Pete Mockaitis

Thank you for that.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

It’s actually cold showers for clients that I work with. And I, about six to eight months ago, invested in an actual cold plunge to take my cold to the next level. And there’s a lot of physical health benefits to them but, honestly, the biggest draw for me is that discomfort tolerance. It’s a training, it’s a visceral training to go into the uncomfortable every day, or however often you do it.

And the cool thing about discomfort tolerance is that it actually does generalize. So, if you took a cold shower that morning, and then later in the day, there’s an opportunity, someone at work is sharing an idea, and you have something you want to add to it, and you’re like, “Well, actually, I think this. I don’t know if they would think that that’s disagreeing, or I’m not sure.” And that back-and-forth kind of hesitant energy, when you’re in the cold shower, about to go in the morning, you’re like, “Uh, should I go into it?” you’re like, “Ah, let’s just…all right, here we go.”

And whatever that is, that ability to go into discomfort, and then withstand the discomfort, it translates because the circumstance might be totally different, one seems physical, one seems social, but on a physiological level in your nervous system, discomfort is discomfort. And when you increase your capacity to do it, you can actually transfer it.

And so, yes, physical feats of discomfort, whether it’s a cold plunge, or just going doing, you know, people will take the elevator instead of the stairs when it’s two flights of stairs. There’s just this unconscious addiction to comfort that we’re living in. So, finding ways, I’d say once a day, on purpose, you could go do a wall sit where you sit against a wall with your back against the wall, and your legs, or your thighs are at parallel to the earth. Hold that for 60 seconds and you’ll be quivering.

Is that going to make you ripped? No, but it’s saying, and it’s all about the framing of it. So, right before I go into a cold plunge, I remind myself, “This is going to make me stronger.” So, it’s framing. It’s the same thing with the wall sit. I’m not doing this just to build muscle or something. I’m doing this to say, “Hey, I can do things that are uncomfortable,” and that will exactly translate over.

And then, of course, there’s dozens of opportunities in your interpersonal social life. And how do you find them? You just know. We all have a radar going on all the time, and saying, “Is that going to be comfortable or uncomfortable?” And most of us are using that radar to say, “Well, if it’s uncomfortable, then go the other way.” And what we actually want to do is you don’t have to go crazy with this. It’s all in the dose. You don’t need to go insane on your dose of medicine here, this discomfort medicine. But a daily dose, even if it’s small, will radically accelerate how quickly you can make these changes in your life.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Well, this one I like, this is Tony Robbins, “The quality of your life is directly proportional to the amount of uncertainty you can comfortably tolerate.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Ah, favorite has got to be The Boulder Study of Back Pain of 2021. There’s a book called The Way Out by Alan Gordon where they talk about it, but the Boulder Back Pain study was done to compare back pain treatment, treatment as usual, medications, physical therapy, and then also something called pain reprocessing therapy, which is treating the back pain with the mind and emotion, which has been fascinating for me with my own history of back pain and chronic pain, as well as nice-people developing pain.

There’s a whole chapter in the book, why it’s not nice about that. And so, randomized, controlled trial, gold standard evidence that we can use these mind-body approaches to not just reduce but completely transform back pain is revolutionary for the chronic pain world, and something I’m really excited about getting out into the world in a big way.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

There’s one I’m reading right now that I really enjoy, it’s called Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt, and I’m finding it really refreshing for how to reclaim your focus and your time.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

It’s the best and the worst, it’s the cold plunge.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes, go to DrAziz.com, that’s D-R-A-Z-I-Z.com, and the goal is for there to be a wealth of resources for free. So, there’s a podcast on that page, under the Resources tab. There’s also a mini-course, a video mini-course called “5 Steps to Unleash Your Inner Confidence” also for free. I have a YouTube channel, you can get a link there as well from the Dr. Aziz’s homepage.

So, lots of resources for free. And then if you want to take things further, we have some training courses, and I also work with people in a 12-month life changing yearlong program. So, however far you want to go, I’d love to support you. And if you just want to start with the free stuff or get a book, that’s a beautiful way to really learn that there’s a pathway. There’s a proven pathway out of this stuff, and I’m here to help as many of us as we can to get across that.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Yes. Whatever is going to make you the most awesome at your job is also the thing that’s probably either scary or uncomfortable. It’s, like, really practicing that boldness and facing what we fear will not only produce just beautiful results in your career but will also make you feel good at your work, you’ll feel way more engaged.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Dr. Aziz, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and minimal people-pleasing.

Dr. Aziz Gazipura

Thank you, Pete. What a fun and interesting and dynamic interview. Really appreciate it.

Dec 10
0

922: How to Reinvent Yourself and Your Career with Herminia Ibarra

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Herminia Ibarra shares counter-intuitive perspectives on how to make successful career transitions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to craft and execute your “identity experiments”
  2. How to figure out your next best option in two questions
  3. How to reach out and build your network

About Herminia

Herminia Ibarra is the Charles Handy Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Prior to joining LBS, she served on the INSEAD and Harvard Business School faculties.

An authority on leadership and career development, Thinkers 50 ranks Herminia among the top management thinkers in the world. She is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, a judge for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the 2018 recipient of the Academy of Management’s Scholar-Practitioner Award for her research’s contribution to management practice.

Herminia is the author of two bestselling books, Act Like a Leader, Think Like a Leader and Working Identity. 

A native of Cuba, Herminia received her MA and PhD from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

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Herminia Ibarra Interview Transcript

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

Herminia Ibarra
Hi, how are you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m doing well. I’m doing well. I’m excited to talk career transitions and your latest edition of the book Working Identity. But to kick us off, I’d love it if you could tell us a couple stories of any particularly memorable career transitions that you’ve had the pleasure of studying or working with. And maybe for funsies, let’s have one be amazingly delightful and one totally disastrous.

Herminia Ibarra
All right. Let me try. Delightful and disastrous, all of them have an aspect of delightful and all of them have their challenges. The one that’s coming to mind is a really fun one was a very straight-laced mid-career person who felt that he had always done what he was supposed to do, got really thinking about what he himself wanted.

And so, at some point, he decided to explore. He took a sabbatical and started to explore. And in his head, one of his big ideas was he loves scuba diving, and, “Could I do this for a living?” And so, one of the things that he did was to take the sabbatical and to get certified, and to explore the financials for buying a scuba diving operation.

And, very fortunately for him, as the sabbatical played out over a couple of months, he realized towards the end of it that it might not be so much fun to spend his whole life doing that, and that the salary he would take relative to the business work that he was doing was probably not worth it. But he was able to say, “I explored this to the hilt, and now I know it’s not what I want but at least I gave it a go.” And so, he was very happy to be able to cross that off his list.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And do you have another side?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah. Well, a disastrous one, I’ll tell you a disastrous one that eventually worked out. The disastrous one was a woman who was leading the change leadership practice of a consulting firm, and she wanted more balance, she wanted to run something, there were a lot of things that were wrong with it.

Pete Mockaitis
She needed to lead a change in her own career, it seems.

Herminia Ibarra

Yeah, and she did not have time to explore other possibilities. This is a challenge a lot of people face, “I work too much. I don’t have the time or the energy.” So, she saved up, she really planned, and got ready to start exploring but, in no time at all, was feeling, like, “Oh, my gosh, what do I do? And what’s going to happen? And what next?” And she would notice that in her networking, that since she was out of job, people didn’t want to network with her. She wasn’t especially useful.

And so, as she got nervous, she ended up taking a role that a headhunter brought her, which was to do something similar in a company to be heading up strategy. And she thought, “Okay, here’s a change,” and she thought she had negotiated more that work-life balance she was seeking, but as soon as she started the job, it became obvious that it was worse from a trial and work-life balance point of view. And not only that, as a newcomer, she hadn’t built up any capital to be able to kind of work around it.

And so, she felt really, really stuck, and came to the conclusion that she had to quit before it really took off because it was just, really, she wouldn’t be able to extricate herself for a couple of years. So, she quit and then really found herself with nothing at all.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that sounds disastrous. Shucks! Well, I hope she’s okay. Do we know what happened after that?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, yeah, yeah, yeah, it ended happily ever after, in the sense that she said, “All right. I obviously am not trusting my instincts here. Let me try to do a bunch of different things.” She set up kind of a freelance advisory that allowed her to pay the bills, which she was able to do because she was very good and she had a great network.

But this time, she set aside a little bit of time to kind of play around with things that she was interested in. She did some nonprofit volunteering. She did a bunch of stuff. And over time, she made her way towards developing a whole new career in the space around consulting for nonprofits, which she was very happy about but it took a while for that to materialize. It really started out as a kind of, “Here’s a hobby. Here’s a thing I enjoy doing. And let me do that. Just stay sane.” And it became her next career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, good news. Thank you for sharing how that unfolded there. Well, these stories are awesome because they’re already pointing to some key points associated with doing this career transition thing effectively, is having the opportunity to try some things out, to get a taste of things in advance, and sometimes you learn, “Oh, wow, cross that off the list. Scuba diving is not the thing,” and that’s valuable.

And that reminds me. I had a conversation, this was funny. There was a period of time in my career in which I did thousands of case interview coaching sessions for aspiring consultants wanting to prepare for those interviews. And one of my favorite sessions, this happened only once, was I worked through the case, and I said, “Okay. Well, hey, here’s some feedback. So, kind of what I was looking for is for you to put forward a hypothesis and then a structure, and then you game plan for what sorts of things you were going to investigate in order to assess whether or not that’s what’s going on, and to drill down into the more relevant issues.”

And he said, “Oh, wow, my brain doesn’t go that way at all. I guess I don’t want to be a consultant.” And it was awesome.

Herminia Ibarra
That’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
He paid for the session, and I was a little worried, like, “Uh-oh, did he get what he paid for?” And he was thrilled, he’s like, “Wow, in one hour, I have determined that I am going to not pursue consulting at all, and look at these other opportunities instead. Thank you so much, Pete.” I was like, “Well, thank you. I’m so glad we had a positive exchange here.”

Herminia Ibarra

See, that’s fantastic because one of the things that I have found is that people have all kinds of ideas in their heads of what they like and they don’t like, and they often don’t check out in reality. Just last week, I was talking to a reporter, a journalist from the Wall Street Journal, and she told me that she had dreamed forever of being able to write for a living, to just write books.

And she gave it a try and she couldn’t stand it. She got her book but jumped right back into a journalism job because she just did not want to do that exclusively. She realized it wasn’t for her. And so, the big lesson is really to try as actively as you can, especially before making any kind of big leap, because we don’t really know whether we would really enjoy these things or not. All we know really well is what we don’t like anymore or what we don’t like about our current job, but we don’t know what we’d like to do instead. And so, exploring and experimenting is really vital.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And that seems to be a real theme associated with the book Working Identity is that we’ve got to try and do things, we have to experiment, get a taste and see how it fits, how it feels. Can you share with us what are some of the alternative viewpoints in terms of doing a career transition? Like, what would you say, Herminia, is what not to do when you’re making a career transition?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, the conventional approach is to figure out what you want and then create a plan to execute it. You know the answer, “Where do you want to be five years from now? And then what are the steps? And then what class do I have to take? Or, who do I need to meet?” And then just kind put it all in place. It works quite well when you do know what you want. And it also works quite well earlier in your career where you’re more likely to go into kind of, like, a structured setup.

It works less well, or not at all, when you don’t know what you want, as is the case for most of the people that I talk to who, for mid-career on, they know what they don’t want, but they do not know what they want instead. And it works less well also when you’re more experienced because there’s just more pathways from A to Z, or from A to D. There’s more different approaches that you could take to get to where you want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
So, figure out what you want is perhaps easier said than done, or folks have a misunderstanding of what they thought they wanted. Or, can you unpack this for us?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah, see, there’s all kinds of things. We pigeonhole ourselves, you say, “Oh, I’m not a creative person,” or, “I’m not an entrepreneurial person,” or whatever. We pigeonhole ourselves. There’s all kinds of things we’ve never been exposed to before. Sometimes you meet somebody by serendipity, discover what they’re doing, think, “Gosh, this would be fascinating.”

So, there’s lots of reasons, you haven’t seen it before, you don’t know it exists. It wasn’t necessarily what you were thinking about. Whereas, we get fixated on this one thing, and the problem is that stresses people up because they don’t know what that one thing might be, and then they think, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t do anything at all because I’m not very self-aware, or I don’t know myself. I need to introspect and discover who I really am.”

But that doesn’t really help either because the only thing that really gets us going is to get exposed to possibilities that are real, and to get into contact with people who do those things, who can help us investigate them further and learn more about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Herminia Ibarra
And serendipity happens, too. I’ll tell you another quick story. This is someone who was in the financial world, and had always dreamed of doing something in interior design, something more artsy, and it just wasn’t going to happen because the financials didn’t work out. And so, she got to stay doing what she was doing.

Kind of out the blue, one of her clients, who had really appreciated her financial savvy, said, “As you know, I have this film company, and I’d really like you to be my chief financial officer and COO. I’d like you to run this.” She’d never thought, “I’d like to be in film.” She’d never thought, “I’d like to run a company.” But this was a relationship that worked very well for her, it was a way of doing something more creative, she knew the person. She took the leap, did it, and has really found it to be a fantastic move for her.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful.

Herminia Ibarra
How could you extract that out of your head? Never.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, lay it on us then, you’ve got some concepts associated with the possible selves and doing some identity experiments to explore the possible selves. Can you define or unpack these terms for us?

Herminia Ibarra
Yes, of course. So, the conventional approach, which I call an implement is you start out with the right answer and then you follow the steps. The less conventional approach, which is what I have found tends to happen when people make career change, I call experiment and learn. And the way that unfolds is you start to envision what I call possible selves.

Possible selves are ideas about who you might become in the future. They could be anything. They could be a very clear idea you have. They could be what other people think you want to do. They could be your feared possible self who you don’t want to become. They could be very nascent, very vague and fuzzy possibilities, “I think I’d like to do something more creative,” for example. So, you start with that, with some hunches. And what I always recommend to people is to not be afraid to make the list long and divergent, kind of the opposite of the conventional wisdom.

The conventional wisdom is “Focus. Know what you want.” This is not. Brainstorm with yourself. What are they? And then start somewhere. Now, for some people, this is pretty organic, and that is they’re working their day job and they’ve started on a project, maybe they were helping a friend who had a startup, maybe they had a side hustle on Etsy, maybe they took a course. Somebody I know took a course in – what’s it called – gemology, having to do with stones and jewelry, and that kind of led her on a path.

So, for a lot of people, you have this side activity that you’re interested in and it leads you on a path towards where you realize this could be your next job and career. And once it’s developed enough, you leave and you take it on. And so, it’s a possible self that is nascent that’s been developing, “Oh, maybe this might be my next career,” “Oh, maybe this could be a good thing to do.”

For other people, they don’t have that. They don’t have that. They’re kind of stuck, “I know I don’t like what I’m doing,” or, “I’ve lost my job,” that happens more and more today, “What should I do instead?” Brainstorm a list of possibilities. Don’t be afraid to have things that are a little bit more conventional or a little bit less conventional.

My friend, the scuba diver who I told you about, he had a three-pronged list. One list was conventional jobs that he talked to headhunters about, kind of his line. Another one was kind more of artsy, folkloric kind of things, the scuba dive, the wine business, a BNB business. And a third was identifying entrepreneurs that he found interesting, and tried to see if he could get a role working with them to learn from them. So, three-pronged kind of approach.

But the idea is to generate a bunch of possibilities and then start exploring one. Maybe you take a course in that area. Maybe some people want to have at least as a side hustle, being on boards of directors so they’ll a course on being a non-executive director. Or, some people, a very popular thing, is to become a coach, an executive coach, a business coach. People will take a course, and they’ll take the course. If they’re still in their job, they take it on the side. If they’re not working, they take it and they practice it.

And that’s a possibility that they’re exploring. It may not be the thing that you move into, but it has the advantage of getting you going. If it’s not it, it makes you understand why not. If it’s promising and it allows you to explore more, it gets you in touch with other people who are also in the process of making changes, and that’s always helpful because you don’t want to be alone in your head, thinking, “I’m the only one who’s taking forever, who’s unsure about what to do.”

It creates a sense of kinship with other people who are going through a journey as well, and it creates a context in which you have to explain yourself all the time, which is also helpful because the more you have to explain yourself, the clearer you become about what you’re trying to do and why. So, any action, basically, is helpful. If you know, follow your nose. If you don’t, take any action and get started on a path.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, I’d love it if we could generate just a big list of experiments and approaches for getting a taste of things. And so, volunteering, taking a course, maybe going to events and meeting the people at the events. I guess there’s even more passive stuff in the earliest of steps, like, “Well, let’s listen to a podcast about artificial intelligence…” if that’s the thing you think you’re into, “…and let’s start having some conversations with people who are there.” Like, “Hey, I read your thing. I listened to your episode,” and sort of step-by-step we get a taste for what’s going on.

What are some of your other favorite experiments or approaches you found really yield a boatload of insight for effort that you put into it?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah, you’ve got the basics of the list there – take a course, volunteer, start up a business on the side, do advisory, get on a board, get class, give a class, all those things, all of those things. And one side is what you do, the activity. The other side is the new networks that gets you into. And the two of those things together help you understand, “Do I want to take the next step or do I not?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that and it’s much less intimidating in terms of all at once, one giant leap, yes or no, launch, don’t launch versus, “Huh, okay. That was cool. How about another step?” I suppose at some points there are big old milestones, like, “No, for real. Like, I got to decide if I’ve got to pursue a doctorate in order to do the science thingy that I think sounds cool, or I’m not.” So, I’m curious, are there any particular questions, either for the internal reflection or for your new network, that you think are supremely useful and insightful as you’re navigating your experiments?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, there’s basically two questions you’re asking yourself, “Is this an attractive option? Yes. No.” “Is this feasible in terms of my need to make a living in the world? Yes. No.” And you are kind of inching your way through those questions, “Is it attractive? Is it feasible?” And feasible is not just only in terms of the money. It’s also in terms of, “Will I be able to develop the skill set necessary to truly plant a foot in that world?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, the consultant in me is creating a two-by-two matrix in my mind’s eye. I can’t help myself. Let’s hear some examples of things that might be in each of those quadrants. And I guess it’ll be super individually specific, like, what’s attractive to one person is totally repulsive to another. But I guess in terms of not feasible, like, I could probably not be an Olympic gymnast now as a 40-year-old man who has not trained in that domain. But I guess I’m such a big dreamer, I think almost anything is possible.

So, maybe you could ground us. You be the dream-killer for a moment, what are some areas where you’ve had to gently encourage folks, like, “You know what, maybe back off or rethink that a little bit. That’s probably highly risky and not quite feasible in its current incarnation”?

Herminia Ibarra
Yeah, that doesn’t really happen. Nobody does to themselves, “At age 45, I want to be an astronaut or I want to be a rocket scientist.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, in a way, I’m a little sad.

Herminia Ibarra
Although, you do have people. You do have people. This is not somebody that I studied but I ran across, somebody told me a story recently of somebody, you know how they tell people, “What did you want to do when you were a kid?” and this person had always wanted to be an astronaut, and he ended up, I don’t know, either training astronauts or coaching astronauts, but kind of found his way into the aerospace industry via some things that he had done before and some things he was able to acquire as skills, and found himself delighted to be in that kind of atmosphere.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I love about that is you may have a desire to be an astronaut, and I guess the right answer is not to dismiss that, “That’s ridiculous. Let’s throw that away,” but rather to dig a little deeper, it’s like, “Well, what is it about being astronaut that seems cool?” It’s like, “I like the idea of being in a rocket going superfast.” Like, okay, maybe you can just start flying small planes as a hobby or something, and you can scratch that itch.”

Or, maybe it’s, “Space is so fascinating.” “Well, there’s many space-adjacent sorts of opportunities that you can go for.” Or, “I always admire the astronauts themselves, their stories and their heroism and their bravery.” It’s like, “Oh, well, then you could train astronauts and get close to them even if you’re not going out into outer space.” So, I think that’s pretty cool that those initial seeds can grow in some handy directions.

Herminia Ibarra
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious on the networking side of things, do you have any pro tips on how you recommend reaching out, asking for help or guidance or input or conversations as you’re navigating these experiments?

Herminia Ibarra
So, the first is start right away. A lot of people don’t start because they say to themselves, “I don’t know what I want. I’m going to sound confused so I’m going to kind of blow a good contact and I’m not going to make a good impression.” However, if you don’t start, you’re not going to figure it out. And so, by this point, everybody is familiar with the informational interview and kind of the exploratory coffee.

Maybe reach out to people who are not the CEO of the company you’d like to work for until you’ve had a little bit of practice. But the most important thing is to start right away and to contact a lot of people. Most people don’t realize how many conversations it takes, how many coffees, how many times reaching out on LinkedIn.

Just recently, I did a webinar online for people who are interested in career change, and we asked them, we did a survey ahead of time, and we asked them, “How confident are you in your ability to make this change, to make a change successfully?” And we also asked them about their networks, we asked them how many conversations they’ve had already about career change, and it varied wildly from hundreds of them, or hundred something, to very few. And there was a very strong correlation.

The more people you talk to, the more confident you felt about the possibility because, as you talk to people, first of all, you find out everybody has got a story about career change. Lots of people do. It’s very reassuring to hear that other people with a similar background as you ended up doing something very different, and successfully so, and happily so. And they’ll encourage you, and you’ll get more ideas about what to do, let alone than actually find leads and referrals for specific positions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Herminia Ibarra
So, start, reach out, be honest. At first, you might be saying, “I’m exploring the possibility of a change. I’m looking into different options. I’m trying to kind of brainstorm some possibilities.” Afterwards, you might say, “I’m really interested in this sector and I’m trying to figure out which way to position myself in or which way to go in it.” After that, “I’m trying to get a foot in this door.” It’s a progression.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. I like those questions. Any particularly magical turns of phrases that you’re fond of?

Herminia Ibarra
No, there’s no magic. Yeah, the magic is, “I’d like your help. I’d like your input. I’d like to hear your story.” It’s very simple things.

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose what I found, and what I really like about your answer, “No, there’s no magic,” is that I have witnessed before, I think there’s one guy in particular, he reached out to me, wants some career advice, and he was a total stranger. I think we were in the same LinkedIn Group, so about the weakest of connections that there can exists, so I had no idea who this person was but, what the heck, I chat with them.

 

And then, I asked him out of curiosity, “Hey, so you just kind of found me out of the blue and in the cold on LinkedIn, like have you been reaching out to other people? And how often do people say yes?” And, to my delight, he had a very detailed notebook of everybody he reached out to, and the results of those reach-outs, and I believe the number was something like 28% of total strangers were willing to have a chat with him. And I thought that was cool.

And his message wasn’t magical. It was short. It was direct. It was clear. He made it easy for me, it’s like, “Hey, I’d love to come get coffee with you wherever it’s convenient, perhaps A, B, C times to hear more about this and that.” And I was like, “Okay, sure.” And I thought that was pretty encouraging.

Herminia Ibarra
That’s it. That’s it.

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

Herminia Ibarra
Well, on that note about the weakest of ties, we know that those are the ones that are the most helpful, in fact, because friends and family and close colleagues, they have the same information you do. And when it comes to career change, they’re more apt to worry that you’re going to do something foolish. Whereas, perfect strangers might think that your kookiest plans are actually wonderful.

And LinkedIn studied this directly because there’s this famous theory about the strength of weak ties, how we tend to get our next job through people we don’t know so well or don’t see that often. And there was an experiment with LinkedIn in which they manipulated what people you were fed as people you might know, and in some cases, they gave you closer connections, and in another case, more distant. And the more distance were indeed the ones that were the most productive for figuring out a next job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Herminia Ibarra
Well, a favorite study is the original strength of weak ties research in which researchers studied how people found jobs and what were the contacts that led them to leads that became their next jobs. And it was all personal contacts by and large. This was before LinkedIn, which is not quite can be personal but also a bit institutionalized. But it was mostly personal contacts that led people to their next job, but the surprising thing was that it was not close colleagues. It was distant acquaintances.

And the reason was not people always think, “It’s because your close colleagues know your fatal flaws.” That’s not it. The reason was that they have the same information you do because they circulate in the same circles and the same waters. Whereas, more distant acquaintances are more likely to be working somewhere else and to be seeing different things, and, therefore, are more likely to suggest something novel to you.

But it’s a wonderful study because it’s counterintuitive, and I see this over and over again. People get started, trying to make a career change, and they turn to friends and family because it’s more reassuring, because they don’t want everybody to know, but it is really these weak ties, these more distant acquaintances that really make a difference. People we used to work with, for example, are huge in terms of generating leads for next possible things to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite book?

Herminia Ibarra
A favorite book. I’m just looking at my bookshelf. I’ve always loved the old classic, William Bridges’ Transitions, about beginnings. No, he goes, endings, middles, and beginnings about the phases of transition and why it’s so difficult. That’s a favorite.

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

Herminia Ibarra
Well, now I use ChatGPT for everything, not to write anything for me but for some basic research and ideas.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now I’ve been playing with it myself. Tell me, what are some of your favorite use cases where you think this thing really shines?

Herminia Ibarra

Well, I had, for example, a bunch of open-ended answers to a survey. It was kind of a long number. And I asked it to code them for me into categories, and then do counts of different categories. So, that’s kind of like a research assistant. It’s very good at outlining things. I’d never taken care of my Wikipedia entry. If somebody had written it, it was not accurate. And so, I asked it to write it for me, and it outlined it very well. It did hallucinate articles I had never written but that’s okay. I knew which ones to put in but it was perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s flattering. The robot assumed that you must’ve written that because of your notoriety and wit and insight. So, with the coding of results, that’s intriguing. Did you just straight up drag and drop a spreadsheet file into it? Or, how did that work in terms of tactical execution?

Herminia Ibarra
When I first did it, yeah, I just entered all the…I don’t remember now if it was in the spreadsheet. Then my research assistant took over, and she did use it with Excel, but I think I just dropped everything in. And it got a little bit overwhelmed, and so we had to work it in some batches but, yeah, it did a pretty good job. And then we kind of negotiated on the categories a bit. You have to work with it but it did a great job.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And could you share a favorite habit, something you do that supports you in being awesome at your job?

Herminia Ibarra
No, this is actually a real thing. My habit is to work from home as long as possible in the morning, which is when my brain is at its best. And so, I try to do any kind of writing or course development that I need to get done at that time, and then go into the office later, or go into the other things later.

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

Herminia Ibarra

It’s this idea that we tend to know what we don’t want but we don’t know what we want instead, but the only way that we figure it out is by going out and exploring as opposed to waiting until we figure it out in our head. That resonates with people. The other thing that resonates a lot is that when people read Working Identity, one of the things they always come back to me on is, “Oh, my gosh, I’m not the only one. It gave me relief I’m not the only one that was so confused or nonlinear.”

And the nugget is that no matter how clear you are in your head about what you want next, career transitions always take longer and are messier than anyone ever imagined, and that’s just part of the process.

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

Herminia Ibarra
HerminiaIbarra.com, Herminia Ibarra at LinkedIn, and Herminia Ibarra at X.

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

Herminia Ibarra
Well, the funny thing is that my subject is not so much about being awesome at your job but being awesome at extricating yourself from that job. But I guess what I would say is if it’s not been awesome for some time, it is really a good moment to start dabbling on the side with other ideas and possibilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Herminia, thank you. This has been a lot of fun.

Herminia Ibarra
Thanks so much, Pete. I really enjoyed it.