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KF #31. Situational Adaptability

Sep 28

1184: How to Know When to Quit with Lindsay Crouse

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Lindsay Crouse reveals the surprising signs that your grit may be working against you.

You’ll Learn

  1. How purposeless endurance keeps you stuck
  2. How small acts of quitting can make bigger decisions better
  3. Why we’re so afraid to quit–and how to get over it

About Lindsay

Lindsay Crouse is an independent producer and journalist and author of The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out. A 15-year veteran of The New York Times, her Emmy-nominated work on women’s sports brought widespread change to the industry, including maternity protections for elite athletes sponsored by Nike. 

In The Times’s Opinion section, she wrote and commissioned widely read essays and produced hundreds of short documentaries, including commissioning The Times’s first Academy Award-winning film. A life-long competitive distance runner, she graduated from Harvard College, and lives in New York City with her family.

Resources Mentioned

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Pete Mockaitis
Lindsay, welcome!

Lindsay Crouse
Thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about quitting. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you made while putting together your book, The Case for Quitting?

Lindsay Crouse
I think, for me, the biggest insight, I’ll just start by saying, like, I am somebody who approached this book by having embraced a life where I did not like to quit.

I think, in hindsight, I think I feared quitting more than I let myself admit and just kind of clung behind this idea that perseverance is inherently noble. It is inherently the moral and correct thing to do in nearly every situation, and that all champions, truly believe, truly persevere by not stopping, like, that is how they succeed.

And so, I think, I really became convinced, over the course of reporting this and from talking to a lot of people who walked away, that quitting is a companion action to perseverance. It is actually an agent of perseverance.

And if you just stick your head down at every obstacle that you face and you don’t recognize futility or you don’t recognize that your energy might be better suited elsewhere, you are the one that loses in the end. And that, to me, was a surprisingly novel epiphany.

Pete Mockaitis
Quitting is a companion to perseverance. A companion as in it helps you persevere more, or a companion as in these things go together like peanut butter and jelly?

Lindsay Crouse
The former. I think if we’re going to achieve our potential, we really need to get better at quitting. And that means understanding the difference between productive hard work versus the performative kind or work that’s pointlessly hard, like, meaningful struggle versus suffering that keeps us stuck, healthy versus harmful persistence.

You need to be able to quit the parts of perseverance that are bad for you in order to be able to go, you know, potentially further than you want to, than you were going if you just stayed on the path that you were on.

And so I really became convinced that quitting is often a courageous first step to finding something better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a fun story that illustrates all this?

Lindsay Crouse
I’ll give you the story of the woman that I open with. She’s a marathon runner whose story kind of overlaps with my own. Her name is Keira D’Amato, and she, for the longest time, all she wanted was one goal, which was to become an Olympian. And she threw everything that she had at this goal. And she got really close.

Like, she would routinely finish on the podium at NCAA’s, which is the national championships for track in America. So, obviously, somebody like her who is incredibly perseverant has used that attribute to get to where she was, she’s going to keep going. After college, she started training, she put everything again into the school of becoming an Olympian.

And, obviously, what came next was she got injured. And so she didn’t want to believe that. And she just kept training and training. And soon the sport that she loved became something that she started to dread. And that happened to me as well. I’m also a competitive marathon runner.

And I realized that, over years, I just started getting injured so much and just kind of, you know, instead of stopping and resetting and letting these injuries kind of fix themselves, I would just, like, ice my shin bone into submission under my desk, and it didn’t work.

And then after about five years, I started to realize, like, I hadn’t even hit a starting line, so I’d, effectively, quit as well. And that’s what Keira did. And instead of continuing to train, and obviously she was devastated, but she just moved on, finally, she let go.

And she got a regular job. She started a family. She started to disentangle her identity from this goal and this way of life that she’d had and kind of built her whole life around. And then she started to come back slowly, like after maybe like a decade or something.

And then she realized, A, talent doesn’t disappear but too much perseverance can kill your talent, and it can definitely kill your drive, and she just kept going. And, this time, there were no expectations, no way of actually assessing success, because the goal wasn’t to win anymore. The goal was to just explore and figure out what she could do.

And she got faster and faster and, ultimately, started actually beating some of the athletes who had single-mindedly devoted their careers to their sport. Ultimately, she wound up setting the national record in the marathon for women, which, to me, was just such an exciting and truly compelling example of how quitting can actually help you succeed.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, that’s quite lovely. It’s not so much she found a totally different thing but, you know, returned to the first thing and came out even better. You said a haunting line, “The thing you loved, you’ve come to dread.” That’s heavy, and I think something many of us can relate to. How does that love turn into dread?

Lindsay Crouse
I think that can really start to happen when we’re persevering in the wrong way. And this can often happen when we really, really care about something. Like, this is why I wrote this book, in fact. It’s for incredibly perseverant people and hardworking people who believe that hard work and never giving up is the only key to success.

And, in fact, if you persevere when you’re failing or when you’re actually just working so hard that you no longer enjoy what you’re doing and it’s starting to diminish your ability to do that thing well, the only way to reset, or the only smart way, really, is to quit, to stop, to pivot, potentially, and then, ideally, regain momentum when you’re ready to come back.

And persevering at something that is failing or that is not working or that you are dreading, it’s just draining and it doesn’t work. But that’s what I was talking about in the beginning of this interview when I was saying that working pointlessly hard does not succeed.

But momentum is energizing and that’s where perseverance really matters and follows through. But I think we don’t always know the difference or we’re not able to recognize it at the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Persevering at something that’s draining, it just doesn’t work.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, it’s just diminishing returns. It takes your energy, it makes you miserable, and, worse, it keeps you from investing all of that energy and work in something that actually might succeed.

Entrepreneurs know this, athletes know this. I mean, this is what champions understand, but I think, for us, we just think of quitting as this blanket negative action and that’s what I’m hoping to correct with this book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us some pro tips on distinguishing? If any of us are thinking, “Uh-oh, there’s something that I love that I’ve come to dread,” what are some good signals to know, “Ahh, that might mean it’s time to quit,” as opposed to, “Oh, well, you know, you just need a little bit of a rest,” “Oh, actually, that’s depression,” “Oh, actually, that’s some other need in life is getting trampled upon and left unmet”? How do we kind of disentangle the complex inner life as we make these decisions?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, I’ve been really frustrated by this in the past, like before I wrote this book, because it always seemed like the answer to “Should I quit or keep going?” was just, “It depends,” and that is so frustrating because it’s like, “Okay, well, it depends on what?”

And, I mean, I think the way that I’d finish that sentence now is the knowing whether to quit or persevere. It depends on the reasons why you’re continuing. And so you just need to understand, “Are you continuing because you love what you’re doing, regardless of the outcome?” So, obviously, for like the intrinsic action of whatever you’re doing.

Or, “Are you continuing because you’re afraid of confronting what might happen if you stop?” And I don’t think we’re taught to ask ourselves those questions enough. It’s often just the answer is, “Persevere. Like, do not relent.”

And so I think if someone’s asking this themselves, “Should they continue or should they quit?” you know, particularly, if they’re pursuing a specific goal, one way to think about this, about whether to persevere or to quit is by assessing your progress.

So are you continuing despite the fact that, instead of getting closer to your goal over time, you’re actually getting farther away? Did you keep moving the goalpost of what it would take to abandon the quest?

Like, do you keep telling yourself, “If I just finish this deadline, if I just file this paper, if I just hit this number, it’s just never enough”? I think when you realize that you’re asking yourself those questions, those are probably times when it actually might be wise to quit. This is not just a setback anymore. This is you grinding with no outcome.

Another thing that I get into in this book that I found really interesting is there’s a lot of neuroscience these days, a lot of research that shows that our brains actually signal futility to us a lot more than we realize. This is true in small animals called zebrafish that scientists are studying to learn more about how and why we quit.

But a lot of humans have learned to suppress those quitting cues, obviously, with our grit and our heroic perseverance. So I think one way to tell, to think about, you know, if you’re facing, if you’re not at this crossroads, but you’re trying to decide, like, “Okay, is this a setback or should I just stop?”

And one way to think about this doesn’t involve much thinking at all because your brain is actually telling you and you already know.

Pete Mockaitis
These neuroscience futility cues, what are they? What do they look like, sound like, feel like when they’re happening?

Lindsay Crouse
So these are called glia. These are small cells in our brain, it’s at a lab called Janelia, which is in Northern Virginia outside of DC, and there’s a neuroscientist there named Misha Ahrens, who’s doing a lot of research on these zebrafish and around how they encounter futility.

So zebrafish, they’re really small, tiny animals. They need to know how to quit in order to survive. And traditionally, they live in these rice paddies in the river Delta of the Ganges in India. And so if they get swept out to sea, that’s devastating for them. They will die. So they need to understand what to do in a current.

And so, in these labs, the zebrafish are made to believe that their effort is failing, and these glia in their brain will actually tell them to stop. And so we have the same, humans have the same mechanisms in our brain, but we suppress those urges. We might call that grit or, you know, something that a champion might do.

But, actually, we should stop as well. Like, when we’re being swept back by a current, the smartest thing to do is stop, save your energy, and wait for a moment or find a path where all of this energy might succeed instead.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, that’s great for these fish. Pretty clever stuff going on there. So our stop signals, outside of water, what are they?

Lindsay Crouse
Well, one way to think about whether to persevere, or to quit if you’re trying to measure your effort over a long period of time, is to consider – I mean, this sounds really obvious – but is your effort working?

If you look back over the past five or 10 years, are you getting closer to your goal or are you getting further away? Optimism. We’ll often tell ourselves, “Oh, we’re actually just one swing away,” when we’re actually much further.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what’s interesting is quit, I suppose, can occur in a micro sense or a macro sense.

Lindsay Crouse
Yes, that’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, if someone is in business, it’s like, “Hmm, you know, this business just isn’t growing, yeah, year after year.” And so we could quit in terms of, “We should dramatically change the approach that we’re using to acquire and retain customers.” Or we could quit in terms of, “Sell this business. Get out of here. This is not for me.”

So I’m thinking there are some subtleties, some nuance, some master-level ways to think about. How big a quit are we talking here?

Lindsay Crouse
Absolutely. I mean, I think that’s 100% right. There’s sort of micro quitting where it’s looking almost doing like a curation of our lives, and excavating the things that are holding us back or kind of weighing us down.

I mean, I think a lot of us, especially the older that we get, if we don’t do that, we’re living with patterns and behaviors and even routines and things that were established by a 20-year-old or even someone younger, even when we were children.

And I think it is a really healthy micro-quitting behavior to, you know, especially as we start to get tired or get frustrated or simply just kind of, I don’t know, experience malaise. We often think that we need to add more to our lives in order to improve them. But, actually, and there’s a lot of research here as well, that the solution, when we do have a problem, is actually to take something away.

And so this, I think, is an example of micro-quitting where you can inventory your life and kind of look at the clutter, like, “Is it digital clutter? Is it schedule clutter? Is it clutter in your home almost?” And it is sort of quitting to throw that stuff away or discard it or end it.

But then, of course, there is that macro-quitting which is very different. It’s taking a path that you’re on and pivoting to something else. But I think, often, doing those kind of micro-quitting exercises can help you build the muscle to make those bigger decisions down the line.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the notion of clutter a lot, metaphorically here, because I think there is a lot of emotional overlap associated with these concepts. I’ve gone through this many times, I guess, every time I’ve moved, and then a few more times after that in terms of, “Let’s really see. Okay, do I really need to take all the stuff with me to the next place? Really?”

And so we go through the closets. Like, “When was the last time I wore that? Wow, you know, I think it’s almost a year ago.” It’s like, “So, obviously, it’s not, you know, a top garment choice for me. It’s not a go-to by any means.” And yet, it feels sort of hard to let go of it.

And, I mean, I’m a semi-tidy person, you know, ups and downs. It doesn’t look like an episode of “Hoarders,” but it’s also not, you know, a masterpiece that Marie Kondo would be proud of. And I’m just sort of, I’m in the middle, with regard to my clutter and tidiness.

And yet, though I prefer, you know, tidy, clear space, it is a bit emotionally challenging to say goodbye to any number of items that aren’t doing much for me, “But, oh, I kind of like them and I might use them someday.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so I think, in that case, I would just kind of, I mean, there’s a lot of things you have to tell yourself that you don’t want to necessarily hear, but the past is gone. Like, you cannot recover what you’ve already spent. All you can do is look forward and think about, “Will this thing make me happy in the future?” not, “How will I feel without it?”

And stepping away or like letting go of an object or a place or a thing or even a relationship, just because you spent so much time in it, that  doesn’t mean that you should continue to do it. Stepping away from something that’s bad for you prevents that loss from actually getting bigger.

And I think you could ask yourself, like, if you were starting over today, would you still keep this thing with you? Again, like, often, that’s an answer where we would say, “Absolutely not,” but we don’t ask ourselves that question, and that’s sunk cost holding us back.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is an excellent de-cluttering question. It’s, like, “Would you buy it again today? Or, even, if you’re at a garage sale and it was a nickel, almost free, would you still pick it up?” So very handy in the clutter world versus, and the other dimensions as well.

So I think what’s intriguing here is, I think, that this might be a tendency in all of us. You tell me, Lindsay, you’ve done the research, that I went right for the hard, complex, tricky, intricate, disentangle-y kinds of questions with regard to quitting.

But sometimes a friend and guest of the show, Kwame Christian, says fear masquerades in many forms and sometimes this is one of them, in terms of there might be complex quitting questions, but I imagine some of them are actually intellectually easy but emotionally hard.

So could you just shine a real bright spotlight on that for us to really, you know, prick our consciences or our souls to say, “Uh-oh, yeah, I think I’ve been avoiding this”?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so, I’m happy to talk about this idea of, well, I think what really holds us back from quitting often, and this is so obvious, but it’s fear, right? We’re afraid. And I think that fear can be paralyzing. And it’s important to recognize, like, that’s smart. Like, this is our brain protecting us. We naturally hate uncertainty.

And, again, that actually means that you’re wise to not want to just kind of, like, flagrantly quit everything. And also, look, you are a hard worker. You don’t just kind of leave things behind easily.

But I think, again, that makes us feel like quitting is this moral failure at times when it is actually the smart choice. So, usually, our fear around quitting, it involves judgment that we made the wrong choice, that we are going to regret what we’re doing. And so, ultimately, this fear really proves unfounded.

And I think we fear two different things. We fear the critiques of others, judgment from other people. And there’s a bias called the spotlight effect that observes that we often think about ourselves as going around with this imaginary, like, light on us, like we’re under an imaginary spotlight. And that means that we assume a lot of, like, the other people around us are paying a lot more attention to us than they actually are.

And so for this book, I talked to an actress, and she quit her career after she noticed that all the other actors around her were actually putting their lives, their actual lives on hold to pursue this dream that they no longer really believed in just because, as she put it, they told everyone in their tiny hometown that if they quit, they were going to be a star, and they just couldn’t seem to let go. Obviously, she felt this pressure, too.

And then she did quit. I mean, she really wanted to stop pursuing this dream. She’d made it, but it was time to stop. And it turned out, when she told everyone, like her friends and family, that they all thought the same thing, that they thought when she headed out to Hollywood like a decade or something before that, like, “Sounds great. We support you.”

And so I think that just means that that fear of other people judging us, we just need to accept that the people that really care about anything, that no one cares. And the people that really do care about us, they’re going to be fine.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. Most people don’t care and those who do will be supportive. So there you go.

Lindsay Crouse
Exactly. And then, of course, we also fear judgment from the scariest judge of all, which is ourselves, and that comes down to regret. Like, what if we regret our decision to leave? But research also shows that this fear is unfounded.

Over the long course of our lives, what we really regret is inaction, decisions that we didn’t make. And quitting is, ultimately, a decision. It’s a bold act. And what we regret in the long course of our lives is, like, being too afraid to act, too afraid to change, like being too timid.

And so I think, again, if you’re listening to your instincts, most likely when you’re looking back when you’re 80 or 100 or whoever knows how old we’ll be, you’re going to be glad that you acted and didn’t wait longer.

And I think that’s the other thing that’s really important to think about quitting and became very persuasive to me. What we should probably fear the most is failing to decide because, then, we’re bouncing these decisions to our five- or 10-years older selves, and we’re leaving those versions of ourselves with the same hard questions and even harder stakes, because it doesn’t get easier to leave. We just get older.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and you have less time to adjust, you know, rescale, etc., to the new world, post-quitting.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, the stakes go up, and it’s harder to leave. And, again, that sets us up for even greater regret down the line.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, also, you’ve got a number of fun terms and definitions. Let’s hear about purposeless endurance. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like so we might be able to better recognize it within ourselves?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, so this is kind of like grit for the sake of it. I mean, another way, I think, to think about it is just kind of like bad work. We think about hard work as just being inherently virtuous, but we can just grind and grind, and almost use that work as a way to distract ourselves from the fact that we’re not actually going anywhere but we feel like the work itself is valuable.

And I think there a number of costs to this. Obviously, the cost of grinding really hard, I don’t like the word burnout, but you can’t grind really hard forever. But, also, you’re grinding with this idea that there is going to be a finish line, and that it is all going to stop, and that it is going to get you somewhere. And work for the sake of work, it doesn’t necessarily work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we’re enduring, but it’s purposeless in that there’s no purpose. And yet, we’ve almost affixed, superimposed a purpose, like, “Hard work is virtuous in and of itself because it makes me disciplined or gritty or virtuously holy or moral or, in some way, desirable and admirable because I’m hustling, I’m grinding, I’m exerting effort, and that is to be celebrated.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah. I think society bombards us, men and women alike, with inspiration to keep going and go harder and do more. And we can almost use this idea that we can keep going as a proxy for believing that we should. And, yeah, this is purposeless.

And I think the other thing that does is it helps us, or it encourages us, to ignore the costs that pile up while we’re busy doing all this heroic but also purposeless endurance. And so you really have to take yourself out of this. And, I mean, it’s such a simple question, but you could even just ask yourself like, “Why am I still doing this?”

And if you find yourself just reaching for the answer, “Because I can,” as opposed to, you know, a better reason, that would be an example of purposeless endurance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very nice. And then on the flip side, there’s a Finnish term. Can you pronounce it for us, S-I-S-U? What does this mean?

Lindsay Crouse
Sisu, yeah. I’m probably saying it wrong, but, yeah, so Finland is the happiest country in the world, according to these studies, like year after year after year. And one reason, if you talk to Finnish people, like one attribute that really sets themselves apart is this idea of Sisu.

The idea that Finns can endure any obstacle that comes their way, grimly, obviously. But they will get through it. And so I talked to this Finnish scholar, her name is Emilia Lahti – and she talks about how there are actually different kinds of Sisu. I mean, this is obvious, but there’s good Sisu and bad Sisu.

And good Sisu, obviously, is resilience. Like, this is where we put perseverance in it. Like, this is how we think of perseverance and what we actually want it to get us, which is like when we face a setback, we can push through it.

But then there’s also harmful Sisu where you just find yourself grinding and grinding. It’s not getting you what you want. And, meanwhile, you’re expecting others to do the same. It’s almost like that reliance on yourself even when it’s not working.

And what bad Sisu does is it keeps us from understanding that we could actually go around the boulder. We don’t just have to push through, that there are better options. Like, bad Sisu can actually make us feel more helpless about how we approach problems and make us think that the only option is to push through when there are better ways to get what we want.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s funny, a good Sisu, bad Sisu, Finland, I can’t help but think of a sauna.

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, absolutely. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
It is sauna, you know? Sometimes it’s good, and it’s, “Oh, yeah, this is really…hmm, this is just what I needed, you know? This is relaxing. It’s just melting away the tension.” And then there’s, like, “I got to hold on for 20 whole minutes.” And it’s just brutal at the end, and it’s like, “Is that really beneficial for anyone? I don’t know.”

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, like, “What did this get me?” And, yeah, I don’t get into sauna, specifically, in the book, but I think that’s exactly the right thinking. It’s just, like, “Why am I still…? Like, if I’m pushing in the sauna to the point of, you know, potentially passing out, like, why am I still doing this? Like, has it flipped into, you know? It has something that was fundamentally good for me, flipped into something bad?”

I mean, I think, for me, that’s actually the driving theme of this book, especially for somebody like me who does enjoy extremes, right? Like, I love to push as hard as I can and to, ideally, succeed. But I think it’s this idea that our strengths can also be our weaknesses.

And if our strength is this, like, amazing ability to endure, that can become a weakness. It can start to take us down. And I think your sauna analogy is exactly that. Like, you want to do something that’s good for you, you want to push in that sauna, and experience the rejuvenation that it gives you, and then you stay in so long that you actually come out more depleted than when you went in.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I want to get your take on – in a way, we’ve sort of been, this has been in the background for this whole conversation – the notion of sunk costs. I learned about that in finance, like, “Oh, the sunk cost fallacy. Pay no mind to that.” And yet, we do. It looms large for us. Do you have any pro tips on, well, first, defining that for folks who are unfamiliar? And, two, how do we get over it and think right?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, well, so a sunk cost is money or time or effort that we already put into something that we can never get back. And it will keep us in bad jobs, it’ll keep us in bad relationships, it’ll keep us pushing at projects just because, again, this idea of fear. We don’t want to lose what we already put in, especially, and understandably, when we don’t know what we’re going to get in its place.

And so, again, I think if you don’t know, if you’re confronting a situation where you’re finding yourself continuing, if you ask yourself, “Why am I continuing?” and the answer is that, “I’ve already put so much into this,” you just need to tell yourself, like, “The past is gone. And if I stay, what I’ve invested, that loss is only going to expand.”

And, again, if you think about yourself in 10 years or 20 years from now, that person is only going to have to deal with even greater stakes, but probably greater reasons why they need to leave.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Lindsay, as we’ve been talking, you’ve dropped a couple of these real gems in terms of, “These are terrible reasons to persist.” So could you, perhaps, as almost like a grand finale of a fireworks show, give us in rapid fire, multiple terrible reasons to persist, how we tend to vocalize it to ourselves, “So I’ve been doing it for so long, I’ve missed it so much because I can, because I can stick it out,” all bad reasons to persist? Lay some more on us.

Lindsay Crouse
I think you just gave us some really good ones. Well, I think this idea that rest is only for the person who is beating you is one that I’ve had for a really long time, especially as I was training for a marathon. This idea of just one more, and it’s this idea of the arrival fallacy, right?

That if you achieve your goal, you’ll finally be happy, like, that will finally be it. And then you find yourself bereft and so you just want, “Just one more.” If you start telling yourself that, you’ve probably grown into this cycle where achievement and striving is actually becoming a little bit of an addiction. And you need to ask yourself, like, “What would it take for me to be satisfied and stick with that?”

One thing that – this isn’t exactly probably what you were asking – but one thing that I found incredibly persuasive in the course of writing this book, I mean, again, a lot of these things are obvious, and our intense conviction around perseverance keeps us from noticing.

But this idea of the law of holes, where if you find yourself in a hole, the first rule is that you have to stop digging. But we don’t do that. Like, if we’re in a hole, our commitment to succeeding, we escalate and we just dig harder. And so this idea that, like, if you are in a hole, you have to stop.

The second rule is that you’re in a hole and you need to get out. But, yeah, there are so many things around quitting and perseverance where they’re so obvious and yet there’s something around our culture that keeps us from believing.

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

Lindsay Crouse
No, this is great.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lindsay Crouse
Yeah, I’ve always thought that TR quote about, “The credit goes to the man that’s in the arena.” It was my high school yearbook quote, and I’ve always been really inspired by people who try.

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

Lindsay Crouse
I think Ellen Langer’s research around mindfulness has always been really fascinating for me. She was a professor that I had when I was in college. And there was one study that she did around, it was like this aging hotel. But it was this idea that framing and how you think about your life can actually make your life true.

And so there was one study that she did where she sent a bunch of really elderly people to, I want to say it was like a 1950s resort. And basically, the elderly people basically were put back in a context where they were in their 20s.

And in this study, they actually started to become younger. It was, literally, rejuvenating for them. And I thought, when I heard about that, it just made me think, “Where in my life can I reframe things that I think have to be this way? And how much control, like how much mindfulness do I have over, I guess, almost like determining my own fate?”

It was this idea, it was incredibly empowering that we have more control over our reality than we sometimes believe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Lindsay Crouse
It’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which I always like.

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

Lindsay Crouse
Pen and paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Lindsay Crouse
Running. Distance running.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks as you talk about quitting?

Lindsay Crouse
This idea that perseverance can work against us.

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

Lindsay Crouse
I’m on Instagram, @lindsaycrouse. I have a website, LindsayCrouse.com, And you can buy my book, The Case for Quitting, wherever books are sold.

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

Lindsay Crouse
Don’t just continue and persevere because you can.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lindsay, thank you.

Lindsay Crouse
Thank you. It’s great to be on.

Mar 30

1141: How to Stop Burnout Before It Starts with Guy Winch

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Guy Winch shares the simple strategies for taking back control of your mind, energy, and attention from work.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to stop rumination loops
  2. The trick to dealing with difficult situations beyond your control
  3. The overlooked key to build into your weekly schedule

About Guy

Guy Winch Ph.D. is an internationally renowned psychologist who advocates for integrating the science of emotional health into our daily lives. His science based self-help books have been translated into 30 languages and his 3 viral TED Talks have garnered over 35 million views. 

He advises start-ups in the mental health space, worked with the US and UK governments, and has created emotional health programs for fortune 500 companies. His work has been featured in the NY Times, WSJ, the Boston Globe, CNN, Time, Psychology Today, and other major outlets. He is the co-host of the Ambie Nominated Dear Therapists podcast. He lives and maintains a private practice in Manhattan.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Guy, welcome!

Guy Winch
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about Mind Over Grind. Could you kick us off with your dramatic story about being stuck in an elevator?

Guy Winch
Yes. So this is actually a story of how I learned, or figured out, rather, that I had burnout because I was a year in to my career, one year. So it’s not exactly what you tend to think of when you think about burnout. But it occurred to me when I was, that was a Friday night, I was coming back from work. I was in the elevator with a neighbor and the elevator stalled and shuddered and just stopped between floors.

And the neighbor actually happened to be a physician in an ER, used to emergencies, one would think, started hitting all the buttons, pounding on the door, and going, “This is my nightmare! This is my nightmare!” And I was so depleted, what came out of my mouth is I just looked at him, and I said, “And this is my nightmare.” And it was such a cruel, unempathetic thing to say.

I am a psychologist, I do know the right thing to say, “Here’s a person in distress. This is literally what I trained for,” and that’s what came out of my mouth. And so when you act out of character in a very substantial way, at least for me, you ask yourself, “What’s going on? Why would I do something like that?” And then when I got home, I realized, “Wow, I am just so drained. I feel like I’ve been doing this for 50 years. I just had nothing left.”

And I realized, “Wow, I’m a year in. That is a major problem.” And the thing is, you don’t learn about burnout in graduate school. At least I didn’t. You know, the PhD never mentioned. So it’s not as if it was something I was alerted to. It just wasn’t something that occurred to me. But that’s what was going on. I was totally burnt out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a nice alert right there. So when we act out of character in kind of a snippy, snappy, unkind, impatient sort of a way, that could be a clue, “Oh, I’m not a jerk. Well, maybe. Maybe I am.”

Guy Winch
No, you qualified with the out of character part when you said that.

Pete Mockaitis
Out of character, right. So that could well be an indicator, a little sign, “Hmm, there may be burnout afoot here.”

Guy Winch
Burnout, you might be depressed, but there’s something going on, is the thing. Something is going on. If it’s that uncharacteristic for you, you have to ask yourself, “What’s happening?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, that’s one sort of dramatic illustration, like, “Oh, something’s going on here.” Could you give us a couple other signs that, “Oh, maybe I need to pay attention here”?

Guy Winch
Well, with burnout, I mean, the primary symptom is exhaustion. And it’s the kind of bone-tired, this kind of deep feeling of exhaustion that, you know, it’s not a good night’s sleep will remedy that. Neither will a good weekend remedy that. It feels like every day is a slog.

You feel very jaded about what you’re doing. You don’t know if you’re doing a good job. You don’t necessarily care all that much anymore. And you feel so overloaded that every new thing that comes down the pike, every new, like, for me, it was like, I was, to the point where any new request someone, you know, I hadn’t seen for a while, “Oh, do you have time for a session?” I would get so angry or resentful.

Like, “No, I don’t. Just leave me alone. I’m doing enough.” It was that kind of feeling of like, I am taxed beyond what I have and I can’t. But you have to keep going. So you keep going, there’s this kind of numbness that develops.

And it impacts you inside the workplace and without. It’s not as if you can’t be burnt out, totally burnt out at work and be absolutely jovial at home. That doesn’t happen. So it’s impacting you in every area of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we’re going to dig into a lot of potential interventions, strategies, things you can do. But maybe, first, could you share with us any particularly surprising discoveries that you’ve made in the world of burnout that maybe a lot of folks haven’t heard?

Guy Winch
Well, one thing that’s interesting to me, and this is part of what I got when I decided to actually really start to look into this more seriously. I mean, obviously from year one in my career, I was alerted. But the pandemic was an interesting time because the pandemic, especially the shutdowns that happened at the beginning, there was a moment for emotional health in the workplace.

Like, all the companies were like, “Oh, my goodness, we’re so worried about now everyone’s virtual.” I was giving like, I don’t know, like 15, 20 talks a week to companies about how to maintain emotional health at work in teams when you’re all virtual. All the companies were flooding, their resource pages were here, resources and help, and everyone was aware.

And the discussion of work-life balance came into the picture. People were going on job interviews and asking, “What’s the work-life balance in this company?” Nobody would have dared ask that before. It’s like, “Why? Are you planning to slack off? That’s not necessarily making us want to hire you.” But, suddenly, that became legit. So awareness went up.

Companies were putting a lot of resources into it. And individual workers, both with quiet quitting and their own prioritizing, were trying to do something about work-life balance. And yet, as that was happening, as that moment was happening, work stress and burnout were peaking and have remained at all-time highs in the workplace. And that’s a paradox.

How is it everyone is so aware, everyone on both ends, both the employees and the employers, are trying to do something about it, and it keeps going up? That’s the thing. And so what got me interested is that. And what I found and why I wrote my book, Mind Over Grind, is that the answer is that it works a little bit like a pinball machine.

The work stress shoots out, but then it starts dinging around in your life within and outside of work. And so it makes it harder to, you know, you get home, you’re more likely to have a conflict with your partner, which is going to make you more stressed the next day, which is going to make you come home and ruminate about the bad things that happen, which is going to impair your sleep, which is going to make you more susceptible and more irritable, so more bad things will happen.

It just keeps digging around back and forth. And the ball of stress, as it were, remains in play for much, much longer, and that’s why the burnout is happening and the stress is so high, because it’s escaped the workplace. It’s now operating outside the workplace in our lives in all kinds of ways, some of which we’re aware of, many of which we’re not. And that’s why things keep getting bad, because unless we turn off all those dingers, not just at work, then it will remain problematic.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a spooky, scary picture there in terms of the cascade, the doom loop that one thing begets another and another and another, like an avalanche, snowball going downhill. So then what do you recommend? If we find ourselves in the early or the later stages of this kind of situation, what are the top things that we should be doing?

Guy Winch
So, first of all, I don’t think it’s a big if. In other words, the workplace right now is really difficult. It’s very demanding for many people. You don’t have to be burnt out to be susceptible to some of these things that are going on. And I’ll give you just one example.

If you have a very difficult day at work, something went wrong, you had a conflict with a co-worker, your boss treated you really poorly, you were one of the many people who were subject to either harassment, or bias, or bullying, or truly even incivility, which is incredibly common in the workplace, just rudeness, you are likely to come home and stew about that.

Ruminate is the word we use professionally. To ruminate means to chew over. You’re likely to come home and chew over about those things because they’re going to bother you, and you’re like, “Why would they say that to me? And why would they do that? And I wish I wouldn’t.”

And then you’re starting to, you’ll spend the evening like imagining having this fantasy conversation with your boss that you actually never have because he’ll fire you, but you’re like, “I wish I could say this to her. And I wish I could say that to him,” and all these mic drop moments that you imagine. It is going to be extremely difficult after those kinds of days to switch off and be present in whatever your family life, personal life is that evening.

Work will hijack your thoughts, and that is extremely, extremely common. And when it does, we are not aware that we’re being hijacked. We think, “Well, we’re processing. Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t a psychologist say processing is good?”

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds wholesome. PhD approved.

Guy Winch
“Sounds wholesome. I’m thinking things through.” You’re not thinking things through. You’re churning. You’re spinning. You’re in an emotional hamster wheel. Thinking things through, by definition, means that there’s a start point and an end point. That end point is a takeaway, a conclusion, an insight, an action item.

But what you’re doing is, again, when you’re doing fantasy conversations about how you’ll tell someone off that you’ll never have, there’s nothing. You’re not doing anything there. But what you are doing, mind you, when you’re ruminating, is, number one, you’re flooding your system with cortisol. You’re stressing yourself out. You are picking the scabs off whatever emotional wounds that left.

So all the irritation, the annoyance, the upset, the insult that you experienced during the workday, by replaying it, you are re-experiencing all those things. You are adding hours of unpaid overtime into your evening. You are checked out from whatever it is and whoever is around you. So you’re actually doing a significant amount and you’re impairing your sleep. You’re more likely to eat unhealthy foods.

There’s just this list of things that are bad when you’re ruminating, and most people are not aware when they’re doing it, but it’s actually quite damaging.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so very clear. Rumination, bad. So how do we knock it off? Sometimes that’s easier said than done.

Guy Winch
First all, it actually is a little bit easier said than done, but it has to start with the awareness that what you’re doing isn’t useful. And the way you know that is, because when you’re trying to figure something out, that’s a mental process. You’re in your head. You’re strategizing. You’re thinking. You’re analyzing.

When you’re ruminating, you’re in your chest. It’s visceral because you’re upset again, you’re charged again, you’re angry again. And so you know it because, A, you’ve had that thought for the tenth time. You’re not actually getting anywhere.

You’re just replaying how upsetting something was, or your fantasy arguments, or like just imagining, or remembering all the other times they said the insulting thing to you, just literally replaying the greatest hits. That’s when you’re ruminating.

So, first of all, step one, catch it. Label it as rumination. Label it as unuseful and damaging thought. There’s two kinds of self-reflection. There’s more, but just for the sake of argument. There’s healthy and unhealthy. Productive, unproductive. This is unhealthy and unproductive.

The solution, therefore, is to convert the ruminating into healthy and productive self-reflection. Healthy and productive self-reflection has a point. It has a goal. So, in this case, whatever it is that’s troubling you, ask yourself, “What is the problem I need to solve here? Is it, do I need to speak to that co-worker who was so dismissive of me, etc.? Should I go to Human Resources to talk about the bias or the harassment or the bullying?”

“Do I need to get support from somebody else, etc? Do I need to address this rudeness? How do I avoid that coworker who constantly upsets me when I see them?” You’re asking questions that you actually need to figure out and answer. Now, what you’re thinking is actually productive because you’re trying to actually figure something out and know how to handle it and have takeaways from that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really useful distinction there. We’re thinking it through, so we’re landing somewhere. It’s a plan, a decision, a next to action. I think some of the trickiest parts for me with rumination, because I love figuring stuff out, strategizing, and problem solving, getting to the bottom of stuff. But I think what I have the hardest time is when it seems like there’s not really a solution to the external circumstances.

Guy Winch
Give me a “for instance.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess, but perhaps the for instance would be you have had conversations with a manager or colleague about the matter at hand multiple times. And they have demonstrated a fundamental unwillingness to adjust their behavior in a manner that you would like.

So, in a way, you’re kind of stuck. And I guess, in a way, we always have a choice, “Well, you could leave. You could find a new workplace.” And I guess that’s true, but sometimes, at least in the short term…

Guy Winch 
That’s a nuclear option, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis 
Yeah, in the short term, we find ourselves somewhat stuck like, “Well, you know what, at the moment, I need this job, I need this income. Boss is not responding to my previous requests to adjust their behavior in a way that would accommodate me. He’s done this again and again, and it makes me angry again and again. So it’s not as though I’m going to arrive at a solution or a magical script. All right.”

Guy Winch
No, but here’s what you can arrive at. Yes, but here’s what you can arrive at. There are numerous things you can do. Number one, you can look around and say, “Who does this boss not do it to? Why do they not do it to them? Is there something I can learn from that?”

Number two, “If they’re doing it to everyone, it’s something about the boss. Is there a way I can understand why the boss does this that would make it easier for me to tolerate? Because I have a little bit of understanding, insight into what’s going on with them. Are they simply obtuse, so they’re not aware that they’re being insulting or annoying?”

“Is it that that’s what they get from their manager and, therefore, they’re just passing that down the line? Is it that they have a really difficult home situation, and so they just take out their frustrations and anger on their subordinates at work?”

You can try and reframe the situation so that it’s less activating for you. If you’re stuck there, “How do I make this feel less annoying? It’s going to occur. How do I avoid some of it? And how do I think of it in a different way?”

For example, some people – I’m just giving this as an example – literally do not have the emotional intelligence to recognize and realize when they’re doing something that’s rude and offensive. They literally don’t get it. You can try and point it out, it doesn’t stick. It’s not something that crosses their radar in that way. It’s just they don’t have the apparatus to.

And so it’s not necessarily on purpose. They don’t realize they’re being that difficult. And if you think about it that way, for example, then it’s like a blind person who just like stepped on your foot because they didn’t see it. Like, it’s hurtful, it’s annoying, but there’s only so angry you can get.

So, in other words, I’m just giving examples of you, if you can’t change it, then change how you feel about it so that you don’t have to live in that anger and resentment as much as you have been. Do you know what mean? So there’s always something that you can do to try and better your situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some cool examples of reframes that have been really transformational for folks and within their situations?

Guy Winch
Look, it can be as simple as, “I’ve tried so many ways to manage the situation and I’m not managing. Therefore, this is the sign that I actually do need to look at the nuclear option because I’ve done everything before.” But, again, that’s a nuclear option of leaving.

But another one is to understand, you know, people sometimes when they get the backstory of who the person is, why they’re behaving the way they are, develop some empathy for them. They understand that, “Oh, they have a sick kid at home. They’re stressed out beyond belief.”

“They got passed up for this promotion and they’re really, really hurting. And, no, they’re certainly not managing it well, but they’re not, you know, skipping through the tulips while they’re making all of us eat crap.” You know, that’s not the case. Empathy, perspective taking so that you get some kind of empathy and insight for the person and why they’re doing it often helps mitigate the feelings of frustration and anger.

But often it is something that’s more workable because, you know, again, if you see the person doing it to everyone, then it’s about them, but sometimes it’s just, it’s not to everyone, “So what’s different? What am I doing to step on someone’s toes to make them, to make me a target for them?” I’m not talking about bullying, but just about a boss who’s not treating you nicely or respectfully.

Is it bias? And if it’s bias, you can’t do anything about it. You can think of collecting other incidences of it, finding people who will join with you, and consider going to HR. But, again, that can be dangerous and iffy depending on the company.

But just look first at your behavior. Because a lot of people will say to me sometimes, “You know, I realize that every time I come up with an idea, my boss shoots it down. But the only place I come up with these ideas are in these meetings. And he doesn’t like it when people come up with great ideas in the meetings because they’re supposed to be about his ideas, not our ideas.”

“I need to go to him on the side. And then when I go to him on the side, he’s actually, one-on-one, he’s much nicer than in the public forum.” You know what mean? Like, you have to try and figure out the method behind the madness, and that can really transform your perception and your strategy and your handling of the situation.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share a specific story of a person who had a transformational reframe?

Guy Winch
In my book, I follow five characters, you know, clients of mine throughout. And this is a reframe in the other direction, mind you, but the first person I talk about is a guy called Tony. He’s a trader and he’s in this political fight… he’s the number one trader on the desk with the number two trader on the desk.

And he keeps thinking that the number two trader on the desk is just jealous of him and tries to sabotage him or tries to kind of turn people against him. And so he kind of doesn’t take it seriously enough. When he understands what the number two person on the desk is trying to do is actually oust him entirely, literally sabotage his entire career, that’s transformational for him.

He suddenly looks at everything with very different eyes, with very different levels of alarm, which are appropriate. And sometimes we don’t fully understand the reasons other people at work are doing what they’re doing. And we really need to, because that will reveal a chess game that we might not be aware of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And I’m thinking about movies like “Fight Club” or “The Sixth Sense” where there’s a big reveal that sort of recasts your understanding of everything. It’s like, “Oh, now I have to watch this movie again.” And so that is big in terms of uncovering those things really does bring new things to light.

And what’s so interesting is when, I think a lot of times, when someone’s behavior just doesn’t make any sense to us, it seems there’s often another element that when you understand that, it is that unlock. Like, “Oh, so that’s why you do what you do.” “Oh, you’re trying to oust me.” “Oh, you have a super stressful home life situation.” “Oh, you’ve always learned that had to be tough in certain situations.” “Oh, you think this meeting is about you looking like a brilliant, innovative, creative genius. Okay.”

So it’s like when we’re flummoxed by others’ behavior, there may very well be just a missing piece of the puzzle that can put everything into the right perspective.

Guy Winch
Right. Another example is, “Oh, your self-esteem is so fragile, you are so incapable of owning a mistake that you will, literally, look to blame the most ridiculous people rather than take any ownership or responsibility because you’re constitutionally too threatened by that notion,” let’s say.

Pete Mockaitis
You might not say that out loud to your boss, unprompted.

Guy Winch
No, but it would be useful to understand because then any kind of effort to try and make them see or make them get is like it’s going to be useless and a waste of energy because they cannot, they will not take ownership of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is useful. Thank you. Well, in your book, you’ve got a fun structure in terms of chapter one, Monday morning, chapter two, Monday afternoon, kind of like moving through a work week. Can you share with us what are some of the most transformational practices, not just in the moment when, oh, rumination is striking, but, in general, to have our mind over grind?

Guy Winch
So when we have a difficult and demanding job, when we’re very, very busy, our tendency is, for most people, is, you know, anyone who’s gotten up in the morning are like, “I just need to get through this day,” or, “I just need to get through this week. There’s just so much going on. I just need to get through it.”

That kind of thought, or that kind of strategy, is problematic because what it’s going to do, what that means is it means you’re putting your head down and you’re going from task to task to task. You’re just getting through. What it means you’re not doing is you’re not actually looking at the week more strategically and more intentionally planning out, “How do I manage my energies through this week?”

“How do I utilize my time out of work to recover from this very, very difficult and demanding week? How do I break up the day? If I have 10 minutes here and five minutes there..” you know, some people literally running all the time “…where can I schedule those 10 minutes? What can I do within them that will refresh me a little bit rather than just keep grinding through and just praying for the end of the day to arrive?”

“How can I be more intentional in the breaks that I choose, where I choose to take them, what I choose to do in them, because the default is going to be serve social media or distract myself in some way, as opposed to doing something that will actually revitalize me even in five minutes?”

In the book, I have this whole section about mini breaks, like two minutes here, five minutes here, what you can do that will actually be useful, as opposed to what most people do that is not. So how we curate the rest period, the break period, the recovery options, is super important and it’s the last thing we think of doing when we need it most because we just put our head down and let’s just get through it.

But we need to be more strategic and more deliberate in how we do that. And that makes a huge difference because when we just get through, by the second part of the day, our creativity, our decision-making, our attention to detail, most of our executive functioning is depleted, is on the decline because we don’t, you know, we’re not computers, we don’t keep going at the same level until we crash.

There’s a downward slope that happens quite quickly. So unless you’re really planning for breaks that will refresh you and will revitalize you and kind of restore your functioning to a higher level, you’re not going to do as good work as you might if you are more thoughtful about doing that.

And the second part is what happens after hours. The more stressed and pressured you are at work, the more essential it is to use those times to recover. And the research shows the less likely we are to do that in any way that’s effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a huge nice bright light for us there. If you’re having the thought, “Ooh, just got to get through this day,” it’s like, you know, “Time out, you know, that is probably exactly the wrong thought to be having,” versus, “Where do I get my energy replenished? And I’m going to have to look harder for those opportunities given that there is a whole lot competing for my hours in this day.”

So share with us what are some of the most rejuvenating mini breaks that really go a long way for people?

Guy Winch
So, for example, if you’re sitting all day, and then stand up, go up and down some stairs, do some push-ups if you’re inclined to do that, do something physical for a few minutes, number one. Number two, you have 10 minutes. If you can take a walk around the block, if there’s any nature to be parked in, nature is very restorative. Just sitting among trees, even if it’s for 10 minutes, can really kind of refresh.

If you have a very difficult, you know, say, some people say to me like, “Oh, I have three hours of the most obnoxious client meetings. They always are so hostile and so tense and I have to smile through it because they’re critical clients. I always feel so like, you know, yucky afterwards.”

I’m like, “Great. That’s after those meetings is when you need to make a plan with a coworker to go so you can vent, so you can get support, call your grandmother with a smiling face. If you’re working from home, that’s when you bring the puppy over to get some cuddles. Like, do something to help you recover from the tension of those meetings.”

Meditation can be done in five minutes. If you have a very, very difficult day, like, “Wednesday’s going to be hump day. I just need to get through Wednesday,” what’s your favorite thing you can make yourself for lunch and take it to work on Wednesday?

So even though that’s the hardest day, you can look forward to, “But you know what, I’m going to have this thing at lunch and take 15 minutes and I really enjoy this thing that I’m bringing, and so I’m going to look forward to having that over that day and give myself the treat at lunch that day.”

Be thoughtful about what you can do so it’s not torture all the time, because that’s how the stress happens. We go into fight or flight, the workplace is a modern-day battlefield. Even though it’s not a battlefield, it’s a conference room, but it’s same thing. It’s a cubicle, it doesn’t matter. It’s like we’re on alert all the time. Our bodies are activated in fight or flight. You need to have breaks from that.

And if you come home and you’re ruminating about stuff, you’re still in fight or flight. Or if you come home and you’re so tense that, you know, everyone’s avoiding you, you’re still in fight or flight. So we have to be aware that that’s how burnout happens.

Our systems did not evolve. Our mental and physical body systems, you know, functioning, did not evolve to be activated like that for many, many hours, for most of the day, day after day after day after day. That’s never our evolution. Even in times of war, there was R&R. Nobody stayed at the front forever. And now we are at the front forever.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I really resonate with what you said about lunch. I have actually had days where, “Oh, my gosh, this day is so brutal. But you know what? I’ve got those delicious chicken pineapple meatballs from Costco. And, really, it’s like a bright light.”

Guy Winch
It is though, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Well, so you mentioned social media is the default. Guy, is your good doctor’s opinion that that is not an efficacious means of rejuvenation?

Guy Winch
No, it’s the researchers’ opinion that it’s not an efficacious means of rejuvenation. There are studies done about it. And, look, when you’re working, if you’re going to, if your social media, there’s two kinds, really, right? It’s your social, actual social media, what your friends are doing.

Tell me how many friends you have that post pictures of them looking absolutely harassed during the workday, looking miserable in a cubicle, crying in the toilets after they got chewed out by their boss. No one posts that. What you will see, they’re drinking Mai Tais on the beach or the time they went out with their coworkers and they’re all semi-drunk and having a great time.

Whatever the thing is, it’s going to make you feel like, “Oh, wow, everybody’s living except me.” It’s not going to make you feel good. That’s one type. And the other type is news and all kinds of things like that. And those algorithms, all of them, are slanted toward getting your attention and activating you and making you upset and outraged and angry, is what will get your attention.

And so they will feed you content that you’re going to be like, “I cannot believe that happened. I can’t believe this.” It will, literally, be activating in all the wrong ways. Relaxing, it will not be. No one’s feed shows like a Philharmonic playing casual classical music with aromatherapy wafting through your phone. We don’t get that. So that’s not going to be useful.

My phone, I don’t, you know, like I post on social media. I have somebody who does it for me, but what I use my phone for, I have trained my algorithm so that if I am going to do that, it is going to show me stuff that is going to make me smile.

And I can show you my phone, you can go to the search, the only thing it will show you is stand-up clips and puppies. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting. In other words, I’ve trained it, I’m not interested in anything else. If I’m coming to you, it’s for like a few seconds of relief. So that’s what it knows to show me. You can train your algorithm.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was just going to ask, because I find that sometimes when I turn to social media or news, what I’m really after is a quick hit of, like, a palate cleanser. Like, I want something that’s interesting, that’s stimulating, that makes me go, “Hmm.”

Guy Winch
Can you see that you’re going to get that on the news?

Pete Mockaitis 
And is novel and different. Well, I guess usually I don’t but sometimes I do. I think that’s the thing. It’s like the gambler, like pull on the the slot machine one more time. It’s like, “Oh, maybe this time, you know, I’ll hit something makes me go, ‘Huh, that’s really interesting.’”

But I’m gathering, from my own experience and from all the research that, yeah, this isn’t really a great place to to get what I’m after. So one approach is, you’ve just trained it, “Give me puppies and comedy and nothing else.” Are there perhaps superior substitutions? We’ve talked about nature and having a walk and some exercise. That’s cool. Any nice intellectual substitutions for social media?

Guy Winch
Yes, but what you want to do on break from work is you actually want to use the intellectual muscles that are not the same ones that you’ve just used. So, if you’re in a job that’s just very rote or analytical, you might want something that stimulates your feelings of creativity, right?

If you’re in a creative job that’s just very, very artistic, you might want something that gives you puzzles, or something that just uses different, you know, it’s like you want to use a different area of the brain. If those muscles are tired, let’s use other muscles and give them a little bit of a workout.

If you’re working from home, you know what’s great to do for five or 10 minutes if you can? If you play a musical instrument, play it for five or 10 minutes. If you’re a singer, sing for five or 10 minutes. If you’re a dancer, dance for five or 10 minutes.

Like, I know that’s not a lot of time, but it’s enough time to kind of, really, it does two things. Number one, it’s so different from what you’re doing probably for work. And secondly, it’s giving some oxygen to other parts of your personality and your identity that you don’t really get to express that much. So that’s quite refreshing to do.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Well, Guy, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Guy Winch
Yes, one other thing. I talked about the recovery after work, too. Our brain doesn’t distinguish that well between physical exhaustion and mental exhaustion. So a lot of people get home after eight, nine hours, let’s say even in the office where they sat all day and they feel, “I am wiped out. All I can do now is veg four to five hours of TV or shows or screens in some kind of ways, but I couldn’t move because I’m wiped out.”

You’re not wiped out physically. You’re drained mentally. And, in fact, doing something physical or doing something, and so they rest for four or five hours, right? They over-index on resting. Resting is half the equation. Resting doesn’t deplete your batteries further, but it doesn’t recharge them.

To recharge your batteries after work, you actually need to do something that you can’t do on a couch. Again, if you’re creative, you need to do the creative endeavor. If you’re a social person, you actually need to meet people and interact.

If you’re athletic, you have to work out in some kind of way. If you’re artistic, you’ve got to practice your art, you’ve got to practice your music, you’ve got to practice your writing, you’ve got to tinker in the garage, you’ve got to organize if you’re an organizer.

You have to do the thing that recharges you. Not every night is that possible. And people say to me, like, “Well…” I have an example of somebody in the book who used to do improv. And they’re like, “Well, I can’t do it. I can’t join a troupe, I can’t perform. I don’t have that kind of time.”

I’m like, “You don’t need a lot of time to do it for 10 or 15 minutes a day with your kids. Ask them what character they want you to be and be that character to fool around.” Like, you play the violin, 15 minutes of, and, again, it’s not a lot, it’s not enough, but picking it up and doing something is enough to kind of make you feel recharged again, remind you that it’s not all about work.

You know, the life part of the work-life balance is the you part as well. It’s not just add an hour of yoga. It’s about live. Be present in the life that you do have. Be present in doing homework with the kids and putting them to bed and having a date night with your partner. Hanging out with your friends. Be present in that.

But people are like, “No, I’m too drained.” So you have to remind yourself that you’re not physically tired. You’re mentally tired. Your body is deceiving you. Your mind is deceiving you into thinking that you’re physically tired.

And everyone has done that and forced themselves up from the couch and forced themselves to then do the recharging thing has come back with a second wind in which they actually expended energy but now they feel more energized.

Everybody knows the ROI is significant but you have to remind yourself of that because if you don’t, if you just veg all evening, you’ll wake up tired the next day, you won’t feel recharged or refreshed. So that’s the biggest mistake. And the more stressed you are at work, the more likely you are to fall into that trap. So you really have to override it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well. now could you share your favourite quote, something you find inspiring?

Guy Winch
So I forget who said it, maybe it was Carl Sagan who said, “The human brain might be the most brilliant machine in the universe.” And so that’s the quote.

“So the human brain might be the most brilliant machine in the entire universe…” Here’s my addition, “…but it requires adult supervision.” In other words, we have to be mindful. We have to be intentional. We can’t just let our mind be on autopilot because it’s smart and it’s brilliant, but not when it comes to emotional and psychological sophistication. It defaults to easy solutions.

It’ll distract us by just, “Go to social media. Just zombie out on the couch.” It’ll tell us all those things, and we have to be able to be the adult and to make the managerial decision about, “That’s not what I need. Here’s what I need. I have to get my ass off the couch and do this. I have to get the chicken pineapple thing from…” I forgot now what it was.

Pete Mockaitis
Hell, yeah, chicken pineapple meatballs.

Guy Winch
But, yes, chicken pineapple meatballs from Costco. “I need to get up and heat that up because that’s what’s going to put a smile on my face, even though I don’t feel like it.” You know, we have to do the adult thing and we have to manage our mind and not just let it be because it doesn’t make the best decisions for us when it’s on autopilot.

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

Guy Winch
One of the studies that really caught my attention when working on this book is that when one person in a relationship is really stressed out at work for a long period, their partner will start to develop symptoms of burnout because it transfers that substantially to the other people in the house.

And people, most people think like, “No, no, no, I keep it under wraps. I don’t stress everybody out.” Even when you don’t intend to, we do. So there’s one. I’ll just throw in one other one of the same example. When one person in their job is really stressed out, their partner is likely to lose their sex drive, because, you know, again, those things cross over and they impact our loved ones way more than we realize.

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

Guy Winch
Here’s one on topic. And I don’t know if this person has been on your podcast, Mita Mallick. Has she been on your podcast? She wrote a book that just came out a few months ago. It’s called The Devil Emails at Midnight. And it’s about difficult bosses and how to handle them, and that she had fallen into the trap of being a difficult boss herself, but it’s a great book about the workplace that’s also quite funny.

One that’s not on this topic at all, but just one that I read recently that I absolutely loved, it’s called Eve. It’s a New York Times bestseller, how female evolution drove 200 million years, how the female body drove 200 million years of evolution. It looks through at evolution, starting literally 200 million years ago, through the lens of women and the female body. And it’s remarkable.

As much as you think as you know about the female body, as much as women think they know about their own body, you will learn so much from this book. And it’s written in such a way that almost every page you want to pause and call someone and say, “Look what I just found out,” you know? It’s great.

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

Guy Winch
One of the tools that I use daily is gratitude exercises. I really believe in them. And the gratitude exercises is that you really write a paragraph about something that you’re grateful for every day. If something bad happens, you deal with it, you process it, but you also try and find some good in it.

It’s a great balancing act. We’ve evolved to be predisposed to notice the bad, the danger, the difficult stuff that’s coming on the horizon. We need to counterbalance that by intentionally looking for the good and the positive because that comes much less naturally to all of us.

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

Guy Winch
It’s from earlier in my work, but that nugget is that we need to treat psychological and emotional wounds the same way that we do physical wounds. When we are upset, when we are injured emotionally or psychologically, there’s a wound there a lot of the time that we actually have to be informed about and do something to treat.

Much as we would put a bandaid, or a bandage on something, or an ice pack on a sprain, there are ways we need to recover from experiences like rejection and failure. And little exercises that we can do, that will be those bandages and ice packs and pain relievers. And we need to get sophisticated enough to be able to recognize when we’re injured and apply these small little tools and techniques to feel better more quickly.

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

Guy Winch
GuyWinch.com is my website, that’s G-U-Y-W-I-N-C-H.com, where they can get links to all my social media, my books, and my newsletter on Substack. It’s only every two weeks, so it’s not too burdensome, but GuyWinch.com is the place to go for all of 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?

Guy Winch
Yes, I would like you to be much more thoughtful about how you are managing yourself during the work day. Make informed decisions. Be deliberate. Don’t be on autopilot. Autopilot will fly the plane into a cliff without you realizing it. So just be much more mindful.

Lift up your head and ask yourself, “What do I need this day? What do I need this week? How do I make this intentionally? What do I need to get from Costco that will put a smile on my face?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Guy, thank you.

Guy Winch
Thank you.

Aug 14

1084: How to Navigate Change and Encourage Innovation with Jeff DeGraff

By Podcasts No Comments

Jeff DeGraff shows you how to go from managing change to mastering it.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why facts don’t actually change minds—and what does
  2. Why you should seek out constructive conflict
  3. What to do when you’re overwhelmed with choice

About Jeff

Jeff DeGraff is the Dean of Innovation – an author, speaker, and advisor to Fortune 500 companies and mission-driven organizations worldwide. He’s the CEO and Founder of Innovatrium, Founder of Intellectual Edge Alliance, and Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. Jeff co-created the Competing Values Framework and developed the Innovation Code and Innovation Genome methodologies which provide organizations with practical tools to reconcile competing priorities and drive breakthrough performance. His mission is the democratization of innovation: making systematic innovation accessible to everyone, everywhere, every day.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis
Jeff, welcome back!

Jeff DeGraff
Thanks, Pete. Thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat. And I’d love to hear, since we last chatted eight years ago, what’s one of the most fascinating things you’ve discovered about us humans and change in that time?

Jeff DeGraff
One, that we’re hypocrites, starting with me. We know how things work, but it’s sort of like knowing you need to lose a little weight, but we don’t want to do that. And then sort of really using that to our advantage, kind of working through our own resistance to help not only ourselves change, but other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. So, we’re hypocrites in the world of change. What’s one of the top ways that we are hypocritical?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, all of us know, because we’re on social media, that facts don’t change minds. And yet, whenever we’re trying to change, what’s the first thing we do? We use facts. So, it’s a paradox. It’s one of the first paradoxes in the book. And the challenge is, even though we know it, we still do it because it’s habitual.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Well, we’re going to go in all kinds of fun directions. But while we’re here, okay, Jeff, lay it on us. If facts don’t change minds, what does?

Jeff DeGraff
Experiences. You know, one of the things I worked on during COVID, I worked on the acquisition process for the COVID vaccine. So, I got a letter of marque from Congress, and one of the few people that was called in to try and work on this. And what was really interesting to me was, when we started looking at the data, and this is not a political comment, this is just a comment about how powerful beliefs are.

It depends on whether you look at the Johns Hopkins data or the Brown University data, the first million people who died, somewhere between 25 and 40% of the people who died had a vaccine available to them. Meaning, people would rather die than change their mind. That’s how powerful that is. I’m not trying to be a provocateur, and I’m not trying to make a political statement. I’m trying to say that’s what belief systems do.

And the whole challenge of that is that the only thing that really changes minds is experiences. Experiences change minds. So, you’ve had something happen, you learned from it, now you have a different point of view. Learning and innovation and change are all sort of inextricably interrelated. So that becomes the big thing, “How do we help people get those experiences?”

What I mean by that is ask your listeners to think about a bell curve. At one end of the bell curve, there’s a crisis, and at the other end of the bell curve there’s exceptional, “Are you doing really well?” Think about when people really change. They lose their job, they lose their health, they get a divorce. And the reason they change at the edge of the bell curve is the risk of trying something radical, and the reward of staying where you’re at is reversed at the edge of a bell curve. The same is true when you’re on a roll.

When everything’s working, you got promoted, you graduated, you’re in love, whatever it is. So, the thing that people get wrong is it’s not the 80-20 rule. That’s a terrible rule for change. It’s the opposite of what change is. It’s the 20-80 rule. And what that means is it’s easier to change 20% of your life 80% than it is to change 80% of your life 20%. Let me repeat that. It’s easier to change 20% of your life 80% than it is to change 80% of your life 20%.

What you have to understand is that change is almost always going to happen when there’s an inflection point, a crisis, or exceptional. And part of the reason that I think people changed during COVID was that 20-80 rule. There was a crisis. They had to, right? When it ended, that everybody went back to their own finger pointing and yelling at each other. But during it, that’s the galvanizing piece, the inflection event.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think that’s interesting when you talk about the crisis is on one side and on a roll is on the other, I’m thinking about how it could also happen in a good way and it’s still an experience. And this is so mundane, but I’ll say it. So, I am all about cold plunging now.

And it used to be when I saw this expensive cold plunge device, like tubs, and all like the hip, sexy Instagram influencers, you know, plugging it, I was like, “Oh, brother, it’s really like, this is something. If it works, maybe, I don’t know. A second, it’s like ancient and we’ve found a way to make this really expensive and monetize it.”

So, I had all kinds of skepticism, but I saw a scientific paper, which sounded very compelling in terms of like dopamine release, whatever. And I did, I had the experience, like, “Well, let’s just put some ice in a bathtub. It doesn’t cost much. See what happens.” And I was like, “Oh, wow, this is amazing.”

Jeff DeGraff
You’ve hit the nail on the head here, Pete, about something really important. The main reason people don’t change is they’re stuck in the planning cycle. The meeting about the meeting, the report about the report. They’re gathering, gathering, gathering, gathering data. They’re getting no real feedback from the world.

So, what you do is you hedge. All you got to do is pay attention to kind of how the COVID vaccine got developed, or anything else. Meaning you give things very little money and very little time and you spread them out and you make them radical. So, you did a radical experiment.

You said, “Let’s go down and get some ice, put it in the bathtub.” It cost you very little money. If it didn’t work, you would have gotten out of the bathtub. It would have been the end of it. And you probably had three or four other experiments after that. You probably tried different kinds of devices, or you talked to people who are athletes and what they did with cold plunge. And you talked to the Finns and how they did it from sauna, right?

So, you probably had some pieces in there before you decided that this was really the thing for you. And that’s how most of us actually do it. The people who say, “Go big or go home,” what I’m delighted about is most of them go home. They’re obnoxious. It doesn’t work that way. And if it did, you got lucky.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so you’re saying, sprinkling a little bit of resource in a lot of places and see where something radical happens. Can you give us a work example of that?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah. So, let’s say that I was trying to, I’m a nurse and I really want to start a bakery, right? So, what I’m going to do, rather than I’m going to plan for five years and then I’m going to quit being a nurse and try and buy a bakery and then I’m going to fail, you hear these all the time, what I’m going to do is, instead, I’m going to try my Italian grandmother’s, you know, her tiramisu. And I’m going to go to three different kinds of restaurants.

I’m going to go to an Italian restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and a German restaurant. And I’m going to see if they’ll sell a little bit of this tiramisu. So, I’m going to take the risk of maybe making some of this up.

What I’m going to find out is that the Italian restaurant doesn’t want it. The German restaurant has a different name for it, but they actually like it. And the Mexican restaurant actually really likes it, but they’d like some differences to it. So, in the next round, you get rid of the Italian restaurant. Now you’re trying the other two restaurants, and you stumble onto something that makes your tiramisu radically different.

You put cayenne pepper or something, I don’t know, I’m not a cook. You put something radically different in it and it starts to catch on. So, what happens is think about it like a funnel, right? What you’re trying to do at the top of the funnel is not only see how wide you can go with experiments, but you’re also trying to mitigate risks. You’re trying to manage risks and you’re trying to accelerate failure. And the reason you’re doing that is you’re getting real information from the world and very quickly you’re drawing down.

You don’t have to have money or have a big thing like a COVID vaccine. You could just be trying to sell tiramisu. But you got to hedge at the beginning. You’ve got to get real information from the market before you draw down.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, so in your book, The Art of Change: Transforming Paradoxes into Breakthroughs, you lay out seven paradoxes of change. I’d love to hear a quick rundown of what they are, but first tell us what makes them paradoxes?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, I think most of us in modernity are living in this world where things are either incongruous, antithetical, or, most importantly, ambiguous. And we do know, going back to the ‘40s, there was two very famous scientists, one called E. Paul Torrance, the other called Calvin Wilson, and they started studying highly creative people. And this was really kind of for the Korean War, that kind of period, the Vietnam War.

And what they noticed was very creative people had a high tolerance for ambiguity. And what that meant was that they had a highly adaptive mindset. They were able to kind of make it up as they go along. Well, one of the big challenges in modernity, I believe, Pete, is that strategy is dead. And more and more people are trying to go to futuring. Again, God bless them, but the truth of the matter is events and technology is now moving faster than strategy does.

Ask yourself this, “How many people in their 2019 plan had a pandemic?” Well, pandemics have been around since Thucydides, Herodotus, they were in the Bible, right? How many had that there’d be a Russian invasion of Europe? How many, right? Go down the list of these events and almost no one had them. So, the issue becomes planning has become obsolete.

I’ll give you a perfect example of this. During COVID, all the big tech companies were not prepared for what happened. Remember the first day of COVID, Microsoft Teams collapsed. And yet there was this small company, Zoom, that didn’t have a great strategy, but was highly agile. Does this make sense? And they won the day. So, we’re now in this era of strategic thinking as opposed to just strategic planning, right? And, yes, we have to try and predict the future, but we should all look at the future like it’s Jello.

There’s a lot of things we don’t know about the future. How fast things are moving in the magnitude is an inflection point. People love to talk about that, Pete. They love to say, “This is the greatest period of change, and I’m very skeptical.” You’re living in Europe during the Crusades. They march back through your village in France, and three quarters of your village dies. Or the infidel’s at the door. That’s the human condition.

But we are going through this sort of punctuated piece where…and it’s not, I don’t think it’s going to be AI that drives everybody crazy. I think it’s what AI allows us to do. It’s going to change power generation big time. It’s going to change biology. What’s everybody going to do now that we’ve mapped all 200 million proteins in the genome, right? We’re pretty close to figuring out how to build a person, right?

So, the notion is the whole idea of work that we’ve got to handle on this, I think we have to say we don’t. I think we have to say we’re making it up as we go along.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that is so wise. And I think about that as I watch the pundits say what will happen with AI. It’s like, “You don’t know. You don’t know.” And I guess that’s what I find. Here’s my little joke, Jeff. Maybe you could appreciate it. It doesn’t get much, many laughs when I share it with my friends, but here it goes, Jeff, “Obviously, overconfidence is the most destructive force in the universe.”

Okay, thank you. Thank you. But I believe it. We don’t know, we don’t know, but we say we know and because we act with such confidence, when we ought not to, we get ourselves into some trouble.

Jeff DeGraff
We sure do, and that’s particularly true for change, change and innovation. These are what we call convex forms of value, which means they pay in the future, for which we have no data. So, the interesting thing is you got to know who actually knows, and that doesn’t mean you went to school.

If you want to know about raising children, talk to a woman who’s got five of them. You want to know about how to fix your toilet, talk to a plumber. The notion is somebody who has experience with it, somebody who has real trade, what I call trade craft. They understand how things work.

That’s why for my 36 years here Michigan, I’ve always had a very active portfolio of building companies and trying to turn things around. Because theories of practice don’t come from theories. They come from practice. They come from getting dirty. You have to. Otherwise, you don’t really understand.

Surgeons have to do surgery. Engineers have to build machines. Business school professors, my belief, should build businesses. That’s what we do. And it’s kind of vocational. I know it sounds terrible, but it is kind of vocational. It’s a how-to kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so let’s hear some of these paradoxes.

Jeff DeGraff
So, one of my favorite paradoxes is that we seek to change others but we can only change ourselves. And I start the book with this interesting story. I learned this as a young man. I had a girlfriend in college named Katie.

She was really pretty and really smart and I liked her. And I came to college as a wrestler. So, I’m training all the time. I wasn’t bad, but I wasn’t as good as maybe I could have been. And Katie was a chain smoker. So, every time I would see her, it always felt like my training was being undone, because she just smoked a lot of cigarettes. So, you do the three things that everybody does.

You start out with trying to inform her. So, you show her the surgeon general stuff, you show her the reports. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. Next thing you do, you try and be charming. You try and really get Katie to, you know, so I was doing some work in New York City and really invited her to go with me to New York with the caveat that she couldn’t in the hotel room, couldn’t smoke the whole time or I’d have to go out and smoke. She passed. She didn’t want to do that.

And, of course, the third thing you go through is what everybody does, “Well, you know, if you’re going to smoke like this, maybe this relationship isn’t what I think it is.” And you can imagine she dumped me. Right? So, I tried all the things that you try to change another person. None of it worked. Well, there’s a postscript to it. About graduation time, I was in a grocery store and I ran into her. And I noticed she wasn’t smoking. So, I had to ask, Pete, “Why aren’t you smoking?” And she said, “I met a guy.” So, I felt about two inches tall.

And then she said, “He never pressured me. He just really loved me and I started to love myself and so I decided that I would quit smoking. I decided it was really good for me to quit smoking.” Well, here’s the moral of the story. The moral of the story was this guy, who’s obviously quite a bit smarter than I was, had created a situation where he was very supportive to her. And she kind of figured things out for herself, right, because you can’t change other people.

And that’s one of the big things that people do all the time in these change books. They’re about how to use bonuses or how to use fear. Those things don’t last and they don’t really work. So, the question becomes, “How do you get to understand a person in a deep way, understand what they really want, understand how they really function, and put them in a situation where they can correct their own behavior, assuming that you want that to happen?”

And then they have a choice whether they make the change or not. And some changes are really hard to make and some are easy. If you’re talking about skill or things like showing up on time at the office, those are relatively easy. If you’re talking about how people handle stress or whatever, those are harder and those are things that you probably need some professional help for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Thank you. So how about the second paradox?

Jeff DeGraff
Well, I think one of the other ones that I really like is we set goals for change, but the goals for change, change with the change. So, people get really upset. We do this big program for the United States Air Force, and one of things that we start out with is to say, “What’s your challenge statement?” It’s usually somebody who’s a commanding officer is given a challenge.

Well, we say, “That’s great. That’s what everybody thinks the problem is now. But the truth of the matter is you’re going to start turning over rocks, talking to people, you’re going start running experiments, and what you’re going to find out very quickly in two weeks, if you’re really going, if you’re really doing this, you’re going to find out that’s not the problem at all. You’re going to find out it’s a different problem.”

Anybody who’s ever worked on their house gets this. You know, there’s a leak in your house. So, you get an Allen wrench and you go up, or you go downstairs, and you turn the wrench and that leak stops and you feel good. And then the next day the leak happens in the bathroom upstairs. And it’s much more active and you’re not sure what that is. So, you try and watch a YouTube video and figure that out.

And then what happens is you figure that out and the next day the pantry is flooded and you have to call a plumber. And everybody who owns a home has had this experience. Well, the challenge is the problem wasn’t the problem. And it almost never is.

It’s the same thing when people, you know, they go to WebMD, and they go to somebody who spent, you know, they spent four years in medical school and have medical certificates, which another four years, they’ll come in and say, “This is what’s wrong with me.” And inevitably, most of the time, it’s just a symptom of something that’s more endemic.

So, the change changes with the change. So that means you have to get rid of X marks the spot. You have to start thinking of yourself like you’re a scout, like you’re constantly looking for disconfirming information, “Where is it that I’ve tried something and it’s not working?”

So, the confirming information doesn’t help. All your friends on Facebook who like you are not going to help you get to the next place. The people who are going to help you get to the next place are people who have different ideas than you do. They have constructive conflict. Constructive is the key word here. Constructive.

They love you. They care about you. They want to help you get there, but they don’t agree with you. Those are the best people in the world to have around you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have an overarching theme associated with, you know, be emergent and see what happens and go where the trail is leading you. Find the disconfirming information, solve the real problem and not sort of the upfront stated problem, and change and flow and roll with it. At the same time, we humans sure don’t care for this uncertainty business, Jeff.

Jeff DeGraff
I’m a total hypocrite.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jeff DeGraff
I hate change. I drive the same car I’ve driven for 15 years. My wife says, “Get a new car. People will think you’re not doing okay.” I’m like, “No, I like this car.” I sit in the same seats in the stadium I’ve sat in for 40 years. I don’t like change. I need your listeners to understand, I don’t like it either. Incidentally, some of the best innovators I know don’t like innovation either.

I don’t buy new stuff. Most the stuff that’s new I look at, and go, “Meh, it doesn’t, really, it’s not a game changer.” So, I’m not that guy. So, the first thing is, nobody likes to change. And there’s two modalities of change. I can tell you how I get through it.

If it becomes, I have to change something that I’ve got, I’m in a reactive position. I don’t like doing that. That’s when you tell somebody about your new idea, but it’s not their new idea, they’re going to tell you everything is wrong with it because you’ve left him in a reactive position. Right?

This is the problem with change. Somebody goes, “I hate your change plan.” And what people forget is the next question should be, “Okay, good point. What would you do?” Because that one question takes you from a reactive position to you now have to participate. You’re not a proactive position. You have to show your hand. So what changes, and this is what I do, is I stop thinking about the past and I start thinking about what I want.

Now, this is important about how people are going to deal with it. Now, one is, how do we do this without being uncomfortable? We don’t. We don’t. We become uncomfortable. You have to make that normative. How do you deal with it at work when there’s conflict? Well, you have to keep the conflict constructive. I want to repeat this. Anybody who’s ever worked on a great team knows everybody doesn’t agree, but you want to be safe. You want to feel safe, right? But the notion is ideas are in play.

So, if you feel safe, you feel comfortable back and forth about ideas, which is important. So, it’s the creative power of constructive conflict, not destructive. It’s hard to keep that in front of you, between the buoys. Now, what’s important about this? People who just kind of make it up as they go along seldom accomplish anything. So, you have to have a North Star.

But what you’re doing is like navigating. You’re constantly correcting to that North Star. And as the North Star maybe looks differently depending on what hemisphere you’re in, etc., you have to make those adjustments. It doesn’t mean that you’re rudderless. It doesn’t mean that you’re going just anywhere. It’s not improvisation. It means that the road to it is going to be circuitous. That’s the first piece.

Second piece. The place in which you almost always want to start your journey is a place where the current situation seems intolerable. And that doesn’t mean it’s difficult. It could be you feel stuck. It could feel in your career like, you know, “I was trained as a doctor. I’m now 50 years old. I’ve been a doctor for X amounts of years. I think I’ve done as much as I can as a doctor. I’m stuck.” So that’s a place where you’re, because risk and reward there is reversed, you’re going to try stuff. You’re going to be willing to try stuff. Remember hedging.

The third thing. Nobody makes the journey alone. I’m so tired of the self-help stuff about, “Here’s how you’re going to do it alone.” Nobody gets there alone. We all get there with other people, and if the other people who are with you all agree with you, you’re probably not going to get there because you’ve added no skill, no wayfinding, nothing that you have on your own. So, you need to find people who follow the same North Star or people really care about you and love you but are different than you. Sort of think about like your mom.

Your mom, hopefully in your life, was very supportive, maybe your dad too, hopefully he was very supportive, really liked the stuff that you did. But didn’t they also provide some real differences in views than you had about things that maybe you needed to do? It doesn’t mean that mom or dad were always right, but it means that they probably had your best interest at heart.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay. Good. Thank you. All right. So, it’s just going to be uncomfortable. Just is. And so, we have to learn to deal with that constructive conflict. Any thoughts in terms of our own internal emotional management? Any mantras or practices?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I do. I think that the issue is you have to be able to take a higher point of view about your life. And, again, I am not an evolved being. I have the same problems your listeners are going to have with this. But think about it this way. Think about it like one of the big contemporary issues that we have is the freedom of choice paradox. We can make any, you know, I talk to people all the time. I spend a lot of my year abroad. I’m one of those guys that’s coming up on three million miles on Delta Airlines alone. So, I’m in a lot of different parts of the world.

Well, somebody made a comment to me recently in Asia, and they said, “You know, it’s really funny to me, America is one of the freest places in the world, but nobody acts like they’re free.” And I went, “Yeah, that’s true,” right? Because unlimited freedom to do whatever you think, you know, within morality and within the law is scary, right?

So, the one hand, you like that you have all that freedom, but on the other hand, you don’t want all that freedom because it’s kind of overwhelming the responsibility you have for your life, right? So that becomes kind of a paradox.

So, one of the things I think we have to do in modern life is to take a higher point of view, which would mean, “What’s best for me? What’s best for my family, my community? What’s the balance I’m looking for in here? How do I work through that we’re free? But too much freedom brings too much responsibility and that might be overwhelming to me.”

So, it’s like gauging. It’s like gauging how much sweetness do you want in your coffee? Are you a one Splenda person? Are you a three Splenda person? I don’t know. You have to figure that out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just really an intriguing, provocative statement from your friend in Asia there. Americans are so free and yet we don’t act like it. What are some of the top ways that Americans do not take advantage of their freedoms? It’s like, “Hey, you could do this, but you never do. It’d probably be good and wonderful for you.”

Jeff DeGraff
People vote one party, typically vote that party all their life. People belong to one religion, belong to it. People who drive to work, usually take the same route to work. People like a certain type of music seldom move to a different station or to a different streaming service than they like. People have a tendency to want to feel comfortable, which is, of course, part of the human condition, right? But they have the freedom to change all of that.

And often they don’t. And I come back to you have to pay attention to when people change and why they change. And this is an important part about the book. I’m looking at this from a situational standpoint. So, this is not a Myers-Briggs test. I’m an ENTP or an INFJ. Okay, that’s great. It’s important. Isabel Briggs Myers actually is from here in Ann Arbor, right?

But here’s the issue. Think of it like it’s a bull market or a bear market. If it’s a bull market and you’re a bear trader, you’re not going to make any money. If it’s a bear market and you’re a bull trader, you’re going to lose your butt. You have to trade according to what the market is. If you like football, is it a running down, a passing down, or are we playing offensive? Pick whatever it is.

There’s a situation in which a certain skill is optimized. And this is true for all professors too. There are periods of time when being the change and innovation professor is like, “Oh, now everybody calls.” But then what will happen five years from now when everything kind of settles? No one will call. Well, that’s because it’s not – does this make sense? It’s not my situation, right? So, what people have to understand is that they have to fit within the system. Families have it, companies have it, churches have it. Understand who you are and what character you are in that movie.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds like you’re not saying, “Hey, find what way the wind is blowing and then rock and roll with it,” so much as, “Accept that this is your time, this is not your time.”

Jeff DeGraff
And adjust to where you can adjust. I think everybody, like companies, they used to, you know, CK Prahalad, the late great CK Prahalad, of course, coined the term core competencies. I think the same is true for people. And CK would famously say, “Is it valuable, rare, difficult to imitate? And are you organized for it?” Right? What do you call the VRIO? Is it valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and you’re organized for it? I think the same is true for people.

I think most of us have one or two things that we’re really good at. And even though the situation changes, how do we use that one or two things, because they’ll be useful? But how do we use it in that situation? And what frustrates people is they’ll say, “I used to be really great at this and then the situation changed.” I’m like, “Yeah, it does.” And again, that’s outside change. None of us like that. I don’t like it either. The inside change is, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I want to grow.” And this is the fundamental tension, Pete, below everything.

Just like people, organizations have two states. They have a state of sustainability and they have a state of growth. In an organization, the state of sustainability is basically management. And the state of growth is change and innovation. Change and innovation, by definition, is a form of deviance. Hopefully positive deviance. It’s negative too. I mean, wars create innovation, I’m sorry to say.

But the notion is, the whole idea of being the same and growing is not just a style issue. It’s a fundamental issue about value. So, think of it this way. You have a small company. You’re trying to be really efficient. So, you keep track of everything and you’re really a hawk on top of everything. That’s great.

There’s no resources or no opportunity for somebody to explore a new market because that’s the opposite. You have to have slack resources to do that. You have to have non-accountable resources to do that. And what happens is these small companies will say, “What we’re going to do is we’re going to innovate. And we’re going to innovate under the kind of efficiencies that we normally do.”

And what they get is they get product improvements, etc., and they get left behind by the companies that basically say, “This is a different season now. Now we’re going to try and get into something new.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Thank you. Okay. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, I’d love it if you have any final top do’s or don’ts when it comes to change.

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I think my big top do when it comes to change is, understand the limits of what you actually know, and understand where your blind spots are. Know who does actually know. Stop trying to figure everything out yourself.

Start calling other people. Start bringing other people in that have different ideas than you do. I know I do this all the time because the way in which I build these change teams is they’re very cognitively diverse and they’re different. They’re very diverse in the skillsets that they’ve got. And that’s really important.

Now, people will say, “But we share a common culture.” I’m not even sure that’s required. I think what’s required is you have fond regard for each other and you have a similar goal, right? So, the notion is you’re not trying to destroy anybody or whatever. You’re basically understanding that they have commensurate skills that you have.

The other thing that I think is really very important is that the paradox you’re looking for, the things that seem incongruous to you, it’s not that this is an element of change, it is the change. It is the change. So, think about what’s going on right now globally with AI. Think about this for just a minute. Think about the sustainability paradox.

Here’s the paradox. In order to get to the kind of devices we need to have a low footprint, almost low emissions, we’re going to need a lot of artificial intelligence in all different areas, right? On the other hand, in order to have artificial intelligence, it basically drinks energy. It’s a huge energy. It consumes a large amount of energy. So it’s not that we need a change. The change is in the paradox.

The change is implicit in, “How do we get to the next place without destroying the planet in the next place?” Now let’s bring this down to a listener so it’s not so highfalutin, right? Somebody’s got a company that they’re trying to run. It’s a small company. You’ve got a company that does electrical wiring. And you’ve got a bunch of high schools in your community that you wire. And you keep track of all that’s going on.

And what goes on is you’ve got contracts, but because of federal laws, all of sudden, the cost of the wire that you’re putting everywhere or the, you know, whatever we’re using these days, right? Because of the cost of doing that has gone up exponentially, you’re going to go bankrupt if you keep doing things the way you’re doing it.

So, your paradox is, “How do I keep the business and keep myself at the center of this using new technology and maintaining cost containment? So, I’ve got an innovation piece and I’ve got an efficiency piece that I have to do at the same time.” So, think about this.

So, somebody’s going to find out that there’s devices that basically can move energy in different ways or there’s different ways of routing energy in different ways. And you’ve got to go back to school and maybe hire a couple different people. Maybe you have to lay off a couple people. But it’s in the paradox itself that the success of the change exists. The paradox is not a sidebar, it’s not something along the way, it’s fundamental.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if that’s the case, then what are we doing wrong if we fail to acknowledge that?

Jeff DeGraff
So, the issue becomes, even in our own life, “How do we get to the next place before we’re required to get to the next place?”

And, again, I come back to get out of a reactive position. Once you’re in a reactive position, it’s what you’re trying to not make happen. Get into a proactive position saying, “What should it be? Is this an opportunity for career change? Is this an opportunity to write that novel you wanted? Is this an opportunity to semi-retire?”

There’s a whole bunch of freedom in the middle of this that I think people could take advantage of. And we have to get out of this either/or thinking.

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

Jeff DeGraff
I love Bertrand Russell’s quote, which we now see everywhere, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are so certain of themselves. And wiser people so full of doubts.” I hope your listeners are like me, I’m full of doubts. I think that’s the only way to go through life.

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

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, I think one my favorite experiments, is going back to sort of a classic one, which is the prison experiment at Stanford and how people, when they’re around other people, have a tendency to defer their moral judgment. And I think there’s a lot of that that goes on in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jeff DeGraff
I love a book by Henryk Skolimowski, as I think how you say his last name. He wrote a book called The Participatory Mind. And I love the book and it’s kind of weird. It’s almost new age-y.

But what he’s basically saying in the book, which I think is so important, is that our thinking is largely informed by the world around us and we largely inform that as well. And there’s a whole kind of philosophy behind this called emergence philosophy, if your listeners are interested in this whole idea. But it basically means that we can never really transcend our world, we have to live in it.

And we can imagine what the world is like beyond this world or whatever, whatever you believe about the world, but you’re still in the fishbowl. And so, the good news is you’re a fish and you have some agency. The bad news is you’re in a fishbowl and you can’t get out of the fishbowl.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Jeff DeGraff
Yes, napping. Every day after lunch, I lock the door and turn the lights out. And I don’t have to have an alarm or anything, I nap for 20 minutes and I feel completely different.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share, a Jeff original that really seems to resonate and connect with folks?

Jeff DeGraff
Yeah, “Nobody cares about your innovation.” They care about you solving their problem. Nobody cares about your innovation, so stop showing it to them. Show it how it solves their problem. Everybody reads their own horoscope first.

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

Jeff DeGraff
Number one, I would go to LinkedIn. So, I’m one of the original LinkedIn influencers. So go to LinkedIn, look up Jeff DeGraff and connect.

The other thing is I would go to TheArtofChange.net, which has all of the stuff about the new book, and I would go to JeffDeGraff.com. That would be probably the easiest way to reach me.

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

Jeff DeGraff
I do. My final call of action would be what I call the democratization of innovation. And that is, I think we think about our own selves and what we’re doing. I would say apprentice somebody. If you’re an innovator out there, apprentice someone. I’m very much concerned that kind of the way I came up in America, behind these kinds of grizzled old innovators who’d been through the war and all this stuff, we learned to be great that way.

I think we’re missing some of that. We’re missing some of that human connection, somebody who’s got some trade skills, somebody’s got some trade craft about change and innovation. Find somebody who’s the next generation, who’s going to carry the torch beyond your generation, because that’s what matters. It’s what we do to keep us moving forward, all of us moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jeff, thank you.

Jeff DeGraff
Pete, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Good seeing you again.

Sep 23

996: Tackling Work Stressors and Transitions with Dr. Tessa West

By Podcasts One Comment

 

Tessa West shares her method for making the necessary changes that lead to greater job satisfaction.

You’ll Learn

  1. How your body tells you when it’s time to change jobs
  2. How to not be overwhelmed by the stresses at work 
  3. The hidden curriculum that helps you succeed at work 

About Tessa

Tessa West is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and a leading expert in the science of interpersonal communication. Her work focuses on questions such as, why is it so hard to give honest, critical feedback? and how do class, race, and cultural differences make communication in the workplace so difficult, and what can we do to improve it?

Tessa’s work has been covered by Scientific American, the New York Times, ABC World News, TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, the Financial Times, Forbes, CNBC, CNN, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Bloomberg, Strategy and Business, and the US Supreme Court. She has appeared on the Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, CNN, and Good Morning America, and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of the book Jerks at Work: Toxic Coworkers and What To Do About Them and the upcoming Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works For You. 

Resources Mentioned

Pete Mockaitis
Tessa, welcome back.

Tessa West
Thank you so much for having me back. I’m super excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to talk about your book, Job Therapy, and I just think we’ve got to hear of a job story you had at a Hollywood Video. Lay it on us.

Tessa West
All right. When I was in high school, I worked at Hollywood Video, which for you, young people, is a place where you would actually physically go to rent a movie in VHS format, which I don’t think even exists anymore. And I had this amazing manager who was dealing coke from the back room.

Pete Mockaitis
Cocaine. Illegal drug.

Tessa West
Yeah, cocaine. Cocaine from the back room, and, also, was probably stealing from the cash register. And we all got fired one day, corporate came in and axed us all. And this was a little bit of a problem for me because when I went to college at UC Santa Barbara, I was just blacklisted from all Hollywood Videos, and that was kind of the only video rental store in the neighborhood where I lived. And so, I could never rent from them again. I not only lost my job because of the cocaine-dealing boss, but I also could never open an account in a Hollywood Video ever again, and that just totally cramped my style for, like, the four years I was in college.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m imagining you like hanging out outside the Hollywood Video, it’s like, “Hey, hey, Mister, can you rent me a movie?”

Tessa West
Totally. I’m like, “I’ll pay you an extra dollar. You give me, like, the latest new release wall,” whatever came out. I think it was “The Negotiator” came out, and I was pretty bummed. Yeah, it was not great.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they thought you were involved in these illegal activities, but you were just around him.

Tessa West
I was 16. I mean, I knew some shady stuff was going on in the back room. There were times I wasn’t allowed back there. But it’s a minimum-wage teenager job, and it was just much easier for corporate to just come in, clean house, fire all of us, instead of sort of interrogating who was involved and who wasn’t.

And I think a lot of people kind of end up getting caught in these situations at work where there’s a baddie and they get sucked into all that drama, and it’s just much easier to fire all 20 employees and just start fresh than to figure out who’s guilty of dealing the cocaine, or aiding and abetting in the cocaine dealing, or whatever.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. You know, it’s amazing that last time we talked about bad bosses and toxic coworkers, and this didn’t even come up.

Tessa West
I know. This isn’t even my worst boss. This is like my 10th worst boss. The weird part was I didn’t even really care until I couldn’t rent there anymore. That’s when I got pissed.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we’re talking now about your book Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. So, I guess that’s one tip, avoid Hollywood Video and cocaine-dealing bosses as a first piece on the checklist. But you have much more wisdom, I know, than that to share with us. Could you kick us off with anything that’s particularly surprising that you’ve discovered here?

Tessa West
Yes, I think a lot of us have really mixed feelings about our jobs. I was surprised when I interviewed people for this book at how ambivalent people feel. It was a lot kind of in the air with people being really miserable at work, tons of Gallup polls, all that business of everyone wants to quit, no one’s happy. But when I actually sat down with people, they would talk out of both sides of their mouth, “I love this job.” “I hate this job.”

“I’m totally committed to this job. It’s what defines me. It’s my identity. But I fantasize about doing this other thing that’s completely different from that. But just to remind you, Tessa, during this interview, I really do love this job. I promise.” And so, you see kind of those mixed emotions you see when people are thinking about any kind of relationship they have, even if that’s with a parent that they have a fraught relationship with, or a romantic relationship.

It’s kind of this love, hate, back and forth, hot, cold business that I think a lot of us are actually struggling with, which is much more realistic than just people loving or hating something or wanting to quit. I think there’s just a lot of kind of ambivalence out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that really resonates and hits home with regard to, it is a mixed bag, every job, every relationship. I’m reminded of a comedian who talked about the city of Chicago, which is like, “The long, cold, miserable winters,” and say, “What are you doing here? You should just leave. You should just leave,” like a bad relationship. He’s like, “No, you should see how Chicago treats me in the summer.”

Tessa West
Yeah, New Yorkers are the same, we’re like, “I hate this place but I really couldn’t live anywhere else because every other place I would hate even more, but I really do hate it here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what a complicated relationship we have then with our jobs. How do we even begin to unpack then whether we are in our New York of a job or we really do need to get out of here?

Tessa West
I really think the only way to really unpack this is to measure your feelings for a while. I’m a scientist, so I’m a huge fan of collecting data on yourself, and really doing it, not just trying to recall how you feel, or how you felt over the past month, because I think a lot of us fall victim to some of the basic biases that we fall victim to when we’re falling out of love with a person.

So, we’re super sensitive to things like intermittent reinforcement. When we’re questioning our careers, if your boss is really nice to you, or maybe you just get an added bonus you didn’t expect. That actually makes you feel a hundred times better about your job than it probably should because you’re in this fragile place, and so you don’t actually realize that you’re falling victim to these kinds of things, that you’re overly-sensitive to reinforcement when you’re questioning your career, that you’re misremembering how you were treated or how you felt.

The only way to really get a handle on that is to look for consistency in how you feel and to measure yourself for a couple of weeks, or even up to a month, and really look for those patterns. And so, in this book, I just put a ton of questionnaires that have been vetted and created by psychologists, and really try to help people play scientists to their own experience so that they can understand it from almost like a third-party perspective, from an objective observer’s perspective, to kind of remove some of those biases that we’re all going to fall victim to when we start questioning something, when we start falling out of love with something.

Pete Mockaitis
Very intriguing. So then, as we measure things, well, I’m tempted to go into all kinds of detail about how we do that, and let’s do some of that. I’m thinking about dating again, in terms of, there are folks, it’s like, yes, they would love to date the super-rich, super brilliant, super gorgeous, super hilarious, super kind, whatever mythical human that doesn’t actually exist. And if that person did, they’d probably wouldn’t want to be with you. No offense. No offense, Tessa. You’re delightful.

But I mean, when I hear people, sometimes I’ve heard those who are single and not yet settled down, it’s like, “Well, you know, I just haven’t met the person.” “Well, what are you looking for?” It’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t think that person is real or exists.” I think, likewise, we can do that with our jobs, it’s like, “Oh, I guess I just haven’t really found the perfect job yet or the one of a job yet.”

So can you just maybe give us some very rough guidelines in terms of, “If you’re in this kind of zone, probably wrong job, get out of there. If you’re in this kind of zone, you got it pretty good, you know. And if you’re in if you’re looking for this kind of zone, I’m sorry that’s not real”? Can you just kindly orient us to reality for a bit?

Tessa West
Yes, I’m happy to do that. I studied dating and relationships, too, so you will hear all those metaphors come out of my mouth today. So, I think the first thing is, you need to really think seriously about what stresses you out at work, and how much you can anticipate those stressors. The number one reason why people are actually miserable at work is because they, (a), can’t anticipate stressors, or they’re doing a bad job at it. Most of the time, we actually can, if we write it down, see it coming.

And, (b), they’re very bad at bouncing back from how those stressful situations impact their productivity, their sleep, and their other relationships. And so, if you are in a job where, if you say in the morning, think about what’s going to stress you out, in the evening, write down what actually stressed you out, and you can’t predict that.

And those unanticipated stressors screw up your communication with your spouse, make you task-switch too much, make you self-interrupt, interfere with your ability to communicate, all these kinds of distal outcomes, you’re in a bad place. I don’t care how great the job is on paper, unanticipated stressors, and your inability to kind of put stopgaps in place and prevent the bleed from that stressful event to your productivity and to your other aspects of your life that you care about, you’re in trouble.

And that’s different for everyone. For some people, that’s being interrupted all the time. They can’t control the flow of work. For other people, it’s just being late. They can’t stand it when they can’t control how long it’s going to take them to drive to work and where they’re going to park. So, you have to figure out what those triggers are. And I think most of us don’t actually put enough weight on low-level daily stressors and how much they impact us, but they really can screw you up because they can affect your sleep, how often you get colds, your diet, and all of this other stuff that has nothing to do with work, that then feeds back into work.

So, I’d say measure those things. That’s kind of, you know, it really comes down to control over those things. I’d say the other dimension that really matters is how identified you want to be with your career, how much you want it to define you, and how much that career is loving you back. And if there’s a huge mismatch, if you are, like, in love with this career, it’s everything to you, when it’s going well, you feel good, when it’s going poorly, you feel terrible, and it’s just not giving you those signs that it’s loving you as much as you want to love it, it’s an unrequited love situation. That’s a bad place to be.

I think, and, again, all of us can be, we can find that match in different places. Anchoring just on income and things like that, I think is a mistake, as you talked about, you know, finding the model who’s funny and rich, there’s going to be a mismatch there because you’re going to fall in love with that person and they’re not going to love you back.

So, I’d say that identity match and control over your stressors, those are the main things. I think if you have those things in check, you can kind of play around with those other dimensions and find happiness at work. But those are really those things that are kind of deal breakers, I think, for most people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really intriguing to zero in on these elements. Because it sounds like, is it fair to say, in your research, these trump the other things in terms of, I say, “Hey, you know what? I find my job meaningful. I find it challenging. I enjoy my co-workers. I feel like I’m learning and growing and attaining mastery. Like, I’ve got a lot of good things that make this job good”? But, if the stressor situation and the identity situation isn’t working for me, is that enough to just outweigh it and say, “I should probably get out of here”?

Tessa West
Definitely the stressors are. I think the things you just mentioned feed into the identity. So, if your colleagues love you, if you’re finding purpose in the work, the job is probably loving you back as much as you’re loving it. And so, I’d see those as sort of like an outcome of that identity match, “You know, I feel highly identified with this job and it’s bringing me satisfaction.” Both pieces of identity are important. You need to feel satisfied with that identity and also feel like you’re getting something from it.

And then when you have those pieces, you love your coworkers, you’re willing to kind of step in at 10:00 p.m. and do the extra thing because you feel like the job is loving you back, so those are outcomes of those things. Stressors are like throwing wrenches into all of those things, “I have great communication at work, but I never know how long it’s going to take me to get there. And some days I get there an hour early, and it’s great. Other times, I get there an hour late and I’m sweating and stressed the rest of the day.” Those things absolutely throw a wrench in the relationship with your career.

So, I think you just really have to pay attention to those things, and don’t let yourself be talked out of them because the income is good, because the comp package is good, and people do this with relationships, “I’m dating a rich guy. Who cares if he treats me like crap.” It does, it matters. You’re not going to care about the money when he’s yelling at you or calling you ugly. You’re just not. And the same is true at work.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us a rundown of some of these unanticipated stressors that pack a big punch and show up all the time for folks?

Tessa West
I think the main ones are things like your boss shows up and puts a meeting on your calendar that you didn’t plan for. Commute is another huge one that people can’t stand. Senior leadership showing up. Absorbing the roles of other people. So, I did a study for this book based on an NPR kind of short called “Nobody Told Me That,” where I asked people what are the biggest surprises they encountered at work.

And it’s almost always, “I was hired to do X and now I’m doing Y. I was hired to showcase art in a gallery but really all I do is lift 120-pound boxes of art, but no one told me that like lifting heavy objects was part of the job.” And those kinds of, like, tack-on tasks are super common at work. I think 80% of us are doing them, but they take away from your job. They often have nothing to do with what gets you promoted, and they’re super stressful because you don’t know how to fit them into your job.

And so, you have to do a lot of digging to kind of figure out if those are going to crop up. But those unanticipated extra roles or jobs of the person who called in sick, or they fire the person who’s in charge of that, those are huge, and they tend to be small asks, 10-, 20-minute asks, not heavy lifts, but they really eat into people’s wellbeing. And you can feel your blood pressure going up when you’re in the middle of something and someone comes and asks you to do one of these things, like lifting a heavy box for them that you did not sign up for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, these are the kinds of stressors. And then, I’m curious, just how much is too much? I mean, it sounds like every job is going to have a little bit of ebb and flow and unpredictability. How do we make that determination?

Tessa West
The best way to do this isn’t to ask yourself, “Have I hit my wall?” It’s to actually map out what the outcomes of those stressors are. And so, our instinct is to think about the things that stress us out and then try to kind of reframe them in a positive way, “Yes, I had to lift that heavy box, but this is part of what it takes to climb up at work.”

I urge you not to try to do that kind of reframing exercise. Instead, measure how often you’re lifting those heavy boxes, and measure your sleep every night. If what you find is, if you have three days in a row of, say, an unexpected stressor, a late commute, a calendar invite with no notice, a heavy box, and then you can see that, say, for the next five days your sleep is screwed up, this is what happens to me, my unanticipated stressors are cumulative.

One, I’m fine; two or more, I don’t sleep for a week, that’s when you know you’re in trouble, and so you really have to see those associations. Don’t assume you know what they are because they’re often a little bit distal. The way stressors work is they tend to not impact us immediately. They tend to be cumulative and distal.

So, if you’re stressed out right now, you’re going to get a cold in two weeks. That’s how long it takes for your immune system to take the hit, for it to get down, for you to get infected with something, for you to be symptomatic. So, we often don’t see the connection between the stressor and the outcome. The only way to know is to measure it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s talk about these measurings. So, one is sleep, and I’m sporting an Oura ring right now, and that’s cool. Or you could have a Fitbit or Apple Watch or something or just notice, “Hey, that sleep was short. I woke up at 5:00 a.m. against my will. What’s that about?” Or, “I went to bed at 11:00, and somehow didn’t end up actually falling asleep until much later.”

So, you just sort of, you notice. Sleep is worse, outside my control. It’s not like I was having the time of my life partying somewhere and I got to bed late. But rather, my body just did not comply with my sleep request. So, there’s one indicator. What are some of the other things we should be observing and tracking?

Tessa West
Weird diet, skipping meals, eating junk food, eating your feelings, drinking, those types of things. Low-level conflict is another one that we often see. So, if you have, say, two or three days of low-level stressors at work, you’re going to end up fighting more with your kids, with your spouse. You’re going to yell at your kid for watching too much iPad, those kinds of things, which in the moment, you have a reason, “My kid was really grinding me. He refused to put down the iPad, so I yelled at him.”

The real reason is, “You know, I had a fight with my boss this morning, and I never came down from that kind of cortisol boost, and now I’m exhausted. I have no ability to sort of cognitively override that,” so low-level conflict at home. And then the other kind of unanticipated one is self-interruptions at work. So, I have a chapter in my book called “The Torn Between Places,” where I figured out that most of the time when we are interrupted at work, we do it to ourselves.

We self-distract. We check our phones. We minimize windows to open other windows. We shop on Zoom calls. And we often do this when we are cognitively depleted, meaning like we’re out of mental resources to not do it. And when you’re stressed, you tend to kind of eat away at those resources, and so you find yourself texting, checking your phone constantly at work. That’s another outcome of feeling kind of chronic low-level stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing and good to flag because if we’re stressed, tired, out of cognitive resources, sometimes you might assume, “Well, the thing you’re going to do is immediately go to sleep.” And yet, it’s funny, it’s like the suppression power of being depleted means that, “No, what we do is just what we really want to do and have been suppressing.”

I remember back in the pandemic days, there was a time my wife was sick and it was all me. Full, 100% childcare, it’s Pete, the dad’s time to shine, and it’s like, “Okay.” And so, I thought it’s always kind of intense and kind of exhausting, and I always also try to keep a few things in the air, a little bit with work in terms of, like, respond to a few things and whatnot. Just not totally dropping the ball there.

And it was so funny, you would think that after those days, I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m just going to just collapse immediately into bed.” And what I found myself doing, it was so weird, it was like, I went and played video games, and I don’t do much of that in general, but it’s just like, “This just really is what needs to happen right now.”

And so, you’re highlighting an interesting phenomenon in the human experience. I don’t think I’ve heard someone articulate quite this way before, is when that’s happening, that’s a sign that we are mentally depleted and/or stressed.

Tessa West
I think if you find yourself seeking out alone time at weird hours to do weird things that you never used to do, and you’re sort of justifying that as alone time, “I went through this as a new parent,” “I went through this in the pandemic,” and not because you really don’t get any alone time but because you’re too depleted to do any work, and your cortisol hasn’t dropped enough so you can’t fall asleep. So, there’s kind of this, like, bottom-up top-down problem of like physiologically your body can’t actually relax enough to sleep.

You know, things like cortisol, they peak in the morning, they peak in the afternoon, and then they’re supposed to go down, so that by the time you’re ready to go to sleep, you don’t have all this, like, adrenaline and all this cort in your body. But when you’ve been stressed, you break out of that cycle and so your brain can’t do anything, but it wants to play video games, it wants to watch Netflix, it wants to do something distracting that isn’t sleep but doesn’t involve social interaction, which is kind of depleting.

So, if you find yourself wanting to play video games at 2:00 o’clock in the morning or watching TV instead of sleep, that’s usually a sign that your body is too physiologically strained to sleep, but your mind is too exhausted to do anything real, and I think that’s just a red flag a lot of us aren’t really trained to look out for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, thanks for flagging that one. Flag of the flag. Anything else we should be observing?

Tessa West
In terms of stress, I think anything with disrupted patterns. If you usually exercise and then, all of a sudden, you’re not motivated to. If you want to disengage socially, that’s a huge kind of red flag that you’re probably pretty stressed out. Social interactions tend to be depleting for most people in some way, even if they’re good, even if they’re engaging. Those are the kinds of things we tend to be a little bit withdrawing from.

And then I think the other thing you should be really attuned to is stress contagion. So, I do a lot of research on how the stress we feel spreads to other people, and how, when we’re really stressed, we’re actually hyper-attuned to the stress cues of others. So, if I’m stressed and then I interact with a co-worker whose voice is a little bit hyper, who’s really fidgety, who is avoiding eye contact, I’m going to be like super sensitive to those cues and even more susceptible to catching that person’s stress.

So, if you find yourself getting ramped up when you’re around a hyper or stressed-out colleague, you can feel your heart rate going up, you can feel your palms sweating, you’re probably already kind of at a disadvantage. You’re a little bit stressed out, and you’re going to be super susceptible to catching the stress of other people around you, and so you kind of have to regulate that and take yourself out of those social contexts.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’re also talking about some assessments and questions that you can ask yourself and record answers to regularly. What are some of the potentially insightful items on those assessments?

Tessa West
I think if you want to go at this really simply, the easiest thing you can do is, in the morning, ask yourself what you’re the most worried about going into the day, and how your sleep was that night. And in the evening, ask yourself was that thing that you were worried about actually that stressful and what unanticipated stressors you faced?

What I find in my book is that about 50% of the time, the things we’re the most worried about in the morning tend to not actually be that bad, mostly because we can put steps in place to make ourselves feel better, to prepare for them mentally so that we are challenged, we’re not threatened. But when we looked at people’s so-called unanticipated stressors, they were things that they actually encounter really regularly.

So, the irony is they’re not actually that unanticipated when they thought about it. They just didn’t anticipate them in the moment. And those are those things I talked about, like a commute running late, or that calendar invite, that in the moment you didn’t anticipate, but if I asked you, “How often has this happened?” most people say, “Oh, it actually happens pretty frequently.”

So, they’re not actually processing these things as frequent stressors. They’re processing them as unanticipated until I tell them to write them down, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, actually, I actually deal with this like once a week.” So, I think that’s the simplest thing you can do is kind of measure those patterns.

And then I think the key reason why you should do this, not only just to learn about your own body, your own experiences, but if you are to look for a new job, if you’re to start networking with people, you know exactly sort of what to ask for, what red flags are going to spike your blood pressure. So, you can ask questions like, “How often does the boss put unanticipated meetings on the calendar?”

If you’ve identified that as something that really stresses you out, you want to avoid that in your next job. But you really have to be like very kind of systematic and learning your own triggers so that you know exactly what to ask and when during those networking conversations during those job interviews.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it sounds like merely identifying the patterns and anticipating the stressors prior to them occurring is useful and powerful for your own resilience in and of itself. So that’s cool. Great.

Tessa West
Yeah, absolutely. We got to learn what makes us not sleep, and, surprisingly, people don’t actually know. Scientists know. We can run statistics on you and tell you, but if I was to ask you, “Why didn’t you sleep last night?” You’re going to make up all kinds of things, from the room was too hot, to this or that, and it probably has very little to do with those things. You just don’t know because it’s something that happened three days ago that’s impacting your sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then I’m curious, one thing that’s in our control is to say, “Oh, this job has a ton of the things that trigger me. It’s time for another job.” So that’s one thing we could do, is make the switch. I’m curious about what are some of the things we might be able to do to, since you’re highlighting here, that stress can be a sneaky little bugger who has negative impacts days and weeks later than the actual inciting incident occurred? So that seems to suggest that it would be in our interest to proactively do some things about how we are handling stress so as to flourish all the better. So, lay it on us, what should we do there?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think here’s the good news. You have a lot more control over the impact of stress and how frequently you encounter these things than you realize. I think the good news is most of the stressors that are actually anticipated are things you can control to some degree. So, if you figure out, for instance, that your boss tends to put those unanticipated meetings on your calendar, once you sort of track the data, you realize it’s occurring every other Thursday or something like that, or you can figure out what that pattern is with your boss, then you can kind of put those blocks in your day.

I think one of the main things that stress people out is not getting their list of things done in the day, but if they actually figure out why, it’s through self-interruptions. There are things you can do to kind of prevent self-interruptions. If you’re being interrupted by other people, I talk in this book about how you can look around the environment and figure out sort of who’s interrupting you and when. Is it because their office is close? Is it because their office is not close, and they don’t know how to systematically interrupt you?

So, tracking these things, learning your own environment, and then putting stopgaps in place is huge. I think once I figured out what stressed me out, which was disappointing people, not getting them something done in time, and then I was thinking, “Okay, why am I disappointing them? Am I taking on too much? Sure, maybe I’m taking on too much,” but that wasn’t actually the reason. The real reason was, during my smart time every day, which was from 8:00 to 10:00 a.m., I was interrupting myself up to 15 times to check my LinkedIn to see who liked a post.

This is embarrassing, but I will admit that this happened. And once I started tracking my own behaviors, I realized I have this weird tick where I want to see how popular I am on LinkedIn, and it’s usually in the morning and that’s conflicting with my smart time, and when I don’t get my smart time, and I don’t get the thing done, that then leads me to disappoint people. So, if I’m 100% honest with myself, I have complete control over that daisy chain of events that’s leading to the stressor.

It took me a really long time to figure out what it was. But once I did, all I did was put away LinkedIn for those two hours, and it totally solved the problem. And that’s kind of a simple example, but I think, once you are honest with yourself about what you’re actually doing, what situations you’re putting yourself in to potentially exacerbate these triggers or allow them to happen, if you have a commute, you just have to plan for the max. You know, if it’s between 30 and 60 minutes, just always assume 60 minutes.

Things like that, I think we have a lot more control over, but you do have to play detective of your own behaviors, of your own triggers, of your own weaknesses, and admit that you have them, and then instead of band-aiding problems, my sleep deprivation, I bought all those cold sheets that they tell you, “Okay, well, it’s probably too warm in your room.” So, I bought those.

That wasn’t really the issue. It was conflict with someone at work that had happened like up to two days before that. Once I figured that out, I didn’t need the cold sheets and my sleep was fine. But you do have to do the homework and do the digging, but most people can actually figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And that’s really cool how sometimes, when you do the detective work, you’re on the case and you see, “Aha, it’s because of this, and I can make this shift. And then as a result, things will things be hunky-dory.” So that’s super. I’m curious, if you discover some stuff that is less in your control, sort of like no matter what you do, this colleague is going to critique your work.

And not that they’re being a total jerk about it, but they’re just going to be like, “Oh, you know, you should do this. Oh, why didn’t you do that? You know, and that’s just, okay.” That’s just kind of the way they are. Maybe you’ve even asked them, “Hey, you know, I’d really appreciate it. You know, I work best under these kinds of collaborative conditions.” Okay, whatever. You’ve done all you could do and still, stuff happens, and it’s being served at you. How do we best deal with those pieces?

Tessa West
Yeah, I think, you know, my first book is called Jerks at Work, and it’s like, try all those strategies, and if it doesn’t work, then you need to go into Job Therapy and learn how to network to find a new job. I do think, I don’t want to be Pollyannish and think you can solve all your problems. I do think controllability is a huge piece.

Once you figure out what needs to be controlled, what the problem is, if you can’t control that in much the same way that you can’t fix a marriage by yourself, if your partner is like, “Screw this, I’m not interested in therapy. I’m not interested in doing any reparative work,” that’s when you have to start exploring new things.

What I don’t want people to do is think that that means quit and then start applying. I think you need to start having those kind of 15-minute conversations with strangers while you’re still employed, because a lot of us have a grass-is-greener idea, and we don’t actually know whether we’re going to face the same thing in another job that we’re facing now.

And I think the easiest thing you can do is reach out to people who are in your organization or outside of it, or in your industry, and I know people don’t like networking, but I think of networking conversations more about information-seeking and asking them about their jobs and less about talking about yourself, just to get a feel for what the day-in-the-life is of other jobs, and that should be your only goal, “What is the day in the life like of this job, at this company, at this role?”

Really simple mundane questions about, “What do you do every day? What does it look like? How loud is it? Who are your colleagues? How much control do you have over how you see them?” Those kinds of low-level things. You want to reach out to as many people as you can to have those conversations to see what it’s like on the other side, instead of assuming that it’s going to be better because often it’s actually not so great on the other side, and you kind of have to bide your time a little bit before you start reaching out or you start applying for new things.

But I think that that very first step is just talking to people in those companies, and just saying, “Hey, can you tell me, like, what your day-to-day is? What do you do like from 9:00 to 5:00, from 9:00 to 10:00, 10:00 to 11:00? What’s that look like?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that specificity there. And I’m curious, while we’re biding our time, we’re doing our research, we’re talking to some people, are there any sort of like first-aid strategies you recommend for, we’re getting blasted by work stressors all the time? How do we just kind of deal and cope better? You suggested not reframing, “Well, this is just part of what you have to do to get ahead.” So, if that’s something that we don’t want to do, what’s something we do want to do?

Tessa West
I think the easiest thing you can do to kind of regulate, and this, actually, this is going to sound like a weird connection, but it comes out of the “Intimate Partner Violence” literature. So, how do you get from ten to one on, like, that anger scale? Is just taking yourself out of the situation, going for a walk, or shutting yourself in your office for ten minutes alone? Don’t interact with anyone. Don’t go complain immediately to a colleague if you’re stressed.

Our instinct is to want to sort of, like, explode our negative emotions onto others in an effort to get them to regulate it for us, to get them to make us feel better, to complain. And I think that instinct is fine for maybe later on, but at first just take a couple minutes, I think, and go for a walk, or have a cup of coffee. I think the best emotion regulation strategy in the “Intimate Partner Violence” literature is count to 100 alone in a room. That’s the best predictor of getting people to, like, not want to punch someone because it actually helps downregulate emotions at the basic physiologic level.

So, your blood pressure goes down, your heart rate goes down. You need to do the things to get your body to change before your mind can. And I think for some people, they’re good at meditating, I’m not. But I can take 10 minutes to, like, listen to music or something like that. Just do that a couple of times, I think, is the easiest and the best strategy people can do.

And I think building your physical space in a way that’s comfortable is also really important. And temperature matters, sound matters, so as much control over your little environmental, you know, whatever kind of makes you happy in your environment, those creature comforts is really important.

Pete Mockaitis
You talk about “Intimate Partner Violence” literature, I guess I’m just thinking about, like, children and their emotional regulation pieces. It seems like many of these really do still apply to us.

Tessa West
Yeah, timeout, self-induced time out. It’s the same. When it comes to emotion regulation, there’s only so many ways to skin a cat, and you don’t actually need to be that complicated about it. It really just comes down to taking deep breaths and getting your heart rate down. Once your body is calm, then your mind will follow.

But I think we often want to do something immediately that feels good, that feels like a release, and that usually means word vomiting to our colleague. And that’s the thing I would avoid because that leads to stress contagion and all that kind of yucky business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve immediately managed our stresses, we’re doing some research. What are some of the other key steps you recommend that we undergo when we’ve determined, “Yep, it’s time to make a switch”?

Tessa West
I think that kind of the number one thing is talking to strangers. I think 15-minute conversations are key. In the book, I talk about how you can reach, how you can write a cold email to someone and get them to actually write you back. I had to do this for the book. I was shocked at how much people were willing to talk about themselves. What they weren’t willing to do is have a conversation where I sold myself to them for no reason, you know, like, “I’m on the job market, I’m looking for something, and I’m going to tell you how great I am.”

No one would reply to emails like that. Not that I was doing that, but people often reach out in an effort to impress. And I think, instead, you want to reach out and say, “I have these three questions about before you started this job, nobody told me that. How would you answer that?” I think little things like that. I think the job interview process is a place where we often have terrible communication. We don’t have honest interviews, like we don’t have first dates.

I think it’s really important to remind yourself that, during that early kind of sourcing stage where you’re learning about a job, you’re talking to a hiring manager, you need a little bit of tension in those conversations where you’re asking tough questions. People avoid that because they think it makes them look bad or ungrateful, but you can onlDy kind of build intimacy with some tension in close relationships, and I think that’s true with job interviews.

You want to ask those tough questions. People like it. It turns out it looks like you’re looking for long-term fit. So, I think asking some difficult questions to assess fit, to find red flags. My favorite question is, “What does it look like to fail at this job?” People always can answer that one because they’ve seen it a million times. It’s better than asking, “What does it look like to succeed?” because that tends to be vague. Failure tends to be specific. So, questions like that. I think you just have to be willing to have like super honest conversations and listen to people and not sell yourself. At least, that’s not your initial goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Any other tips as we’re all walking this journey?

Tessa West
Don’t feel afraid to get rejected when you’re reaching out to people you don’t know. People are very nervous these days about looking awkward. I study social awkwardness, and it largely lives in our heads more than how it manifests behaviorally. And we’re a little out of practice with talking to people we don’t know, and I think that’s why people aren’t dating as much. It’s why they are afraid to have coffee or a Zoom call with a stranger. But everyone’s in the same boat, so it’s okay.

Do not think that you can learn about a job by sitting on your couch and reading websites and Glassdoor stuff, or even and getting those LinkedIn certifications, or whatever. You really can only learn about it through interpersonal communication and talking to people. I’m convinced that websites and passive learning, video watching, can only get you so far. You need to get in there and learn about the hidden curriculum and all that juicy stuff that people don’t advertise about jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say the hidden curriculum, what do you mean by this?

Tessa West
This is all the stuff that leads you to succeed at work that nobody talks about. Sometimes that means that company policies go against what it takes to actually succeed. The dark side is like taking maternity leave is a bad idea because someone else will take your job. That’s a piece of hidden curriculum. Sometimes it’s weird norms.

So I asked people, I did a study where I asked them about all the weird norms they encountered at work, and sometimes it’s like where you’re allowed to sit, who you can email to ask questions, whose orange juice you can drink from the office fridge, little things like that, but also things like knowledge transfer, which is a complex concept of, like, “If I know something from my old job, do people give a crap in my new job? Are they interested in learning about that? Or do they have their own set of rules here that contradict that?”

And I think a lot of us have a hard time getting over a newcomer hump at work because we assume the knowledge from our old job will carry over to a new one, when in reality there’s like a whole new set of norms and rules and even jargon. That’s another thing that we don’t like at work, but it’s super common. Everyone has their own terms, their own acronyms they use at work. They tend to be pretty idiosyncratic to companies. So, the ones you know now at your job now are going to be different than the ones that the new company uses.

So, just like, “How much of that do I have to learn? How steep is that hill to climb?” And what I think will I need to succeed, is that really what the people who’ve succeeded have? I’ll say one more thing which is job ads often have a list of requirements that are not the real requirements needed. And the reason why is because it’s for the sourcing for hiring managers. They want to cast a wide net so they tend to sort of underwrite ads, but what they’re really looking for is often not written in that ad.

And so, you have to do some digging to figure out, “Okay, they actually left out this really important thing that everyone who’s ever gotten this job had but it’s not in the ad because if they put it there, they’d only get three applicants,” or something like that. There’s lots of kind of mundane reasons but even at the level of the job ad, there’s a hidden curriculum of like what’s missing from that that you really do need to land the job and to succeed at it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. That’s really nice, and it’s pretty substantial just how much is hidden, and just how skewed and inaccurate a picture we could get if we only rely on what’s published.

Tessa West
Yeah, think about it like a dating app. Imagine that you meet someone based on their app profile. Would you think that that app is 100% accurate and representative of the person? Most of us would laugh and say, “Of course not. That photo is 15 years old. They overestimated their height and their income and all this other stuff.” We know that, right? We intuitively know that our dating profile is not representative of us, so why do we think a job ad is representative of a job?

It’s the same kind of logic that I think you should apply. And when you meet someone on a first date, you want to do a little bit of digging to see how accurate that profile was. A lot of us are feeling catfished. We show up and we’re like, “That’s not you.” And I think that can happen with jobs, but we’re feeling much more vulnerable than when we’re dating, where we’re afraid to kind of dig for the truth because we want to get to the next stage.

So, we don’t ask those questions like, “Who wrote the ad?” and “Has my future boss even seen this ad?” Most of the time the answer is no. Some hiring manager wrote it, scraping from Indeed. And so, we have to treat it with that same level of kind of circumspect perspective that we would a dating app.

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

Tessa West
I’m a professor so I give you a lot of homework. It’s going to feel like a lot, but once you get the hang of kind of measuring yourself and learning about yourself by collecting these data, you’re going to be, hopefully, pleasantly surprised at the new things you’re going to uncover. And I think don’t be afraid to reach out to people and have those conversations. That’d be the one piece of advice I give people.

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

Tessa West
Probably “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” is one of my favorite quotes. I think that it just kind of encompasses this idea that workplace vibes, culture, zeitgeist can really override anything that we do to plan. I think that is something that I kind of like live by. Don’t ask me who said it. I can’t remember.

Pete Mockaitis
I think Drucker.

Tessa West
Drucker, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study.

Tessa West
Probably be something on morality and norms. I’m doing a lot of research these days on how we interact with people who make us incredibly uncomfortable. So, one of my favorite studies in this space is by Wendy Mendez on the brittle smiles effect.

So the more uncomfortable we are interacting with someone who’s different from us, the more likely we are to smile, be nice, engage in friendly overtures, let them win negotiations, but at the same time our physiology suggests we’re incredibly stressed out. And so, I love that because it’s this juxtaposition between what our bodies are saying, which is stress, and what our minds are trying to override, which is overt friendliness in an effort to compensate for that. And I think that can explain why we often suck at giving feedback because it’s uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Tessa West
I only read fantasy novels these days, “Shadow Daddies,” that kind of thing, Sarah J. Maas.

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

Tessa West
Noise-canceling headphones.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love noise-canceling headphones. Which one are you working with?

Tessa West
These are not it but I use Bose headphones because my office is all glass walls, and I can hear everything around me all the time, and I’m one of those noise-sensitive people, so I can’t concentrate if I can hear a conversation going on. So, I live by the noise. Sometimes I layer them on with wireless headphones. I’m going to sound totally crazy. Wireless headphones underneath with a noise machine going on on my iPhone, like a fan, and then the noise-canceling headphones over those so I really can’t hear anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, I love it. I would put earplugs in and then headphones over the earplugs.

Tessa West
I do that too, but it’s not enough. You got to get the fan sound on the earbuds, and then the noise cancelling over that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Tessa West
Getting a latte four times a day.

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

Tessa West
Keep it real. Just say the thing. At the end of the day, you’re going to get it out. It’s going to take you a while, so just say the thing.

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

Tessa West
You can check out TessaWestAuthor.com, which has all the quizzes for my book. There’s also going to be just a whole bunch of downloadable materials, little guides on how to do the stress test, how to measure yourself, how to network, all that fun business. If you’re interested in my research, you can check me out at TessaWestLab.com.

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

Tessa West
Yeah, reach out to five strangers this weekend and set up chats. Just cold reach out, follow the guide I give you, and just frame up three questions that you want to ask them, where you want to learn about their job. They can be completely outside of your industry. You’re just looking to learn new things.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Tessa, thank you. This is awesome.

Tessa West
Thank you so much.

Feb 29

940: How to Find the Best Job for You that Actually Exists with Lauren McGoodwin

By Podcasts One Comment

Lauren McGoodwin challenges the notion of the “dream job” and makes the case for pursuing the “good-enough” job.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why the dream job actually doesn’t exist 
  2. The true drivers of happiness at work 
  3. Why to become invaluable–not indispensable 

About Lauren

Lauren founded Career Contessa in 2013 after experiencing a gap in career development resources for women who might be job searching, soul searching, leading and managing, or trying to find new ways to advance within their careers. With women accounting for more than 50% of the workforce and the workforce being less defined than ever before, it seemed crazy (and outdated) that a resource for us didn’t exist.

Fast-forward to today, Career Contessa is now the largest online career site built inclusively for women. Lauren is also author of Power Moves: How Women Can Pivot, Reboot, and Build a Career of Purpose (2020), co-host of The Career Contessa podcast, and an educator/speaker on a variety of career topics. 

Formerly, Lauren was a University Recruiter for Hulu focused on hiring, employer branding, and program management. Lauren has a Bachelors in Education from the University of Oregon and a Masters in Communication Management from the University of Southern California where she wrote her thesis on millennials and career resources. 

When not Contessa-ing, you can find Lauren spending time with her family in Redondo Beach, CA where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Lauren McGoodwin

Hi, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I am super excited to dig into your wisdom. And could you start us off by sharing, so you’ve been in this Career Contessa game for a while, great brand.

Lauren McGoodwin
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis

And it even existed before How to be Awesome at Your Job, so kudos on a long run here. Can you share with us a particularly surprising or counterintuitive piece of career advice that you’ve come to learn and adopt and share during your reign as the Career Contessa?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been around for 10 years, I’ve talked to a lot of successful, very fulfilled people. I think the biggest thing, the biggest misconception I’m sort of very much on brand for that millennial woman who was striving for perfect, was that the dream job does not exist, it’s a myth. It’s a myth that kind of keeps you perpetually stuck. So, that’s probably the biggest one from talking, and basically having the job that I do, which is finding out “What does make a successful career? People who are fulfilled, how do they do it?”

And that’s a big one, I think, because it starts to sort of managing your expectations and actually not expecting to have this dream job that checks every box in your life. It’s similar to trying to find a perfect partner, right? But with jobs, for some reason, we believe not only do dream jobs exist but that, “I should have one. And if I don’t have one, something about me is missing and wrong, and I’ve messed up,” and turn yourself into this personal DIY project to fix that part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s good. That’s good. So, the implications of that then is if we’re not in a dream job, that’s okay, nobody is because they don’t exist. That’s your view on the world?

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, it is my view on the working world, that there is no such thing as a dream job. And you’ll see it makes a really good saying as a meme on Instagram and TikTok and whatnot of the dream job exists and hustle harder to get that dream job, and a job should check all these multiple boxes but what I find is that, really, what the dream job is made up of is this elusive kind of lifestyle piece of a job, where it doesn’t include hellish commutes or return-to-office mandates that you don’t agree with, it doesn’t include manipulative coworkers or bad bosses who actually don’t know how to manage.

And so, you’re sort of looking for this thing that doesn’t exist, and so your expectations are consistently misaligned with reality. That is equivalent, for me, of someone who has a very fixed mindset versus having a growth mindset, someone who can say, “Hey, my ability to learn and adapt is more important than, okay, my ability to be perfect at this presentation.”

So, I think what happens is dream job isn’t just like your job title and your company. It’s really inclusive more of like a lifestyle, and a mindset, and these realities that, one, don’t exist, as COVID, I think, is such a good reminder of, like, things can change quickly, and being able to be adaptable, and be able to lean into uncertainty, is really kind of the stuff that makes you more invaluable at work versus the person who’s like, “I found the perfect job title, and it looks really good on LinkedIn, and I’m able to share these…” I call it, like, glitter and glue moments, “All these glitter moments in my career but the glue is what holds the career together.”

And so, that’s why I’m actually a big advocate for people who always say, “Well, if I’m not looking for a dream job, what am I looking for?” And I will advocate for a good-enough job. A good-enough is really practical, it’s not perfect, and that’s the problem. But dream jobs is you’re stuck there.

One of the things that people will ask me “If I’m not looking for a dream job, what should I be striving for?” which this is unique for each person, but this is why I’m a huge advocate for the good-enough job. The good-enough job is practical. It’s not perfect. It’s not having you strive for that perfectionist tendency that can keep you stuck. And so, the good-enough job, again, it’s practical. It allows you to still have a life outside of work. It doesn’t ask that work check every box of your life and fulfill every part of you.

And I think COVID was a good reminder of that for people, and I worry that now, in 2024, we’re starting to forget about that and try to go back to those tendencies. So, I would just say, to answer kind of the very first question, the piece of advice I have learned the most that kind of counteracts, actually, building a fulfilling career is trying to go after that dream job.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so that’s a cool distinction there, a dream job versus a good-enough job, and I like what you had to say with regard to partners in terms of, like, no human being is perfect, and no job is perfect. And so, I would say, I think that my dear bride is a good wife, and she’s not perfect, and I’m not perfect. So, help us orient to things a little bit in terms of good-enough.

Lauren, lay it on us, four levels of job, if I may.

One, unacceptable, you should probably get out of there as soon as you can. Two, good enough, yeah, you should probably hold on to this. All right. Three, about as good as actually exists in real life, so hold on with all your might. And, four, just unrealistic, like, that probably doesn’t exist for anybody, so disabuse yourself from that notion readily. So, I put you on the spot there, Lauren. Give us four levels of job, starting with a rung that’s, “Yeah, I should probably get out of here.”

Lauren McGoodwin
Yeah. So, an example of this is like the person who has their “dream job,” they’re a lawyer, they worked their whole life for this, this is the thing they wanted to do, they’ve got that corner office, but they’re miserable. They’re working nonstop. Maybe they’re paid well but it doesn’t matter because they have no life, they have no friends, they’re not able to have any hobby.

And so, it’s that mix of, like, “But this is what I thought I wanted so I need to continue it.” They’re burnt out, they’re all the negative things. That’s sort of what I would think is the rung of like, “But this was supposed to be my dream job. I worked so hard to get this.” It just never, never goes away.

So, then the good-enough job, again, it’s practical but it’s not perfect. Maybe it’s something that you’re really good, you’re not particularly, like, dying over passion for whatever industry, you work in manufacturing, but you’re really good at your job, and it gives you work-life balance that works for you. Maybe for you that means, “I want a really high salary, and I’m willing to sacrifice having to go into an office and commute every day.” That works for the chapter you’re in right now.

Like, stages of your life are similar to stages of your career. I talked to someone the other day, who she got a new job, and she’s been working at a startup, but she has kids now, and the startup has a lot of it can feel a little unpredictable about what’s going to happen, so she’s like, “I really like that but I kind of made a little bit of a career pivot, and I wanted to go to a bigger company because I was looking for something that was more stable, offered me remote role, was an increase in pay because a lot of times startups will give equity.”

And so, again, that is a good-enough job for her. She’s like, “I like this thing well enough, I don’t have to be a die-hard for it, but also it’s not asking more from me than what I think is reasonable given the exchange of money,” the exchange of the paycheck part for her. That can be a good-enough job. Then you have the person who maybe go even like a step further, where they have this deep passion of being able to reclaim their life from work.

And so, they have a job that allows them to have more PTO, or maybe they do, like I talked to someone the other day, she’s a teacher and she’s doing like a job-share with somebody else. So, for her, that’s a good-enough situation. She doesn’t want to totally leave the workplace but she wants to reimagine how it works for her.

So, there’s all these variations of what the good-enough job can be for you. The teacher is deeply passionate about what she’s working on. She’s just struggling with how to make that work with her life, so a job-share works. Then you have the other person who’s like, “I’m not deeply passionate about it but I’m good at it and I’m paid well for it, and so that works.”

And then the top, or the first rung I said is the person who’s like, “I thought I was passionate about this. This is a dream job, it looks good on paper, I’m working for the right company, I’ve reached all these achievements, and it’s not working for me. And now I have this piece of me where I feel like I failed or, somehow, I have this expectation hangover of this isn’t what I expected to be, on top of the fact that I’m burnt out and all these other things.”

So, I think there’s obviously a lot of variations, careers are super personal, but I think what it comes down to is managing those expectations, understanding that the dream job, this concept of a dream job is more about the lifestyle that goes with it. And so, restudying those expectations and then going out, and kind of I always tell people, like when I was a recruiter, “You don’t get everything.” It’s like, the realtor will ask, “What are the top three most important things to you? Neighborhood? Number of bedrooms?”

I think that’s also important to do in your career, and I think it starts with aligning with your values. So, thinking about, “What do you really value personally? And then, how can you translate your top values into the career that you have?” Those are just all good starting places. There’s obviously a lot of intricacies to this but when you are trying to make the shift from dream job to good-enough job, I think that’s a really good starting place.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I dig it. So, we’ve got a picture of the lowest level of job, bad, and then a picture of good enough. Could you also paint a picture for us for the highest levels, like about as good as it gets in the real world, as well as this is just impossible and unrealistic in the world of reality?

Lauren McGoodwin

Like, this job doesn’t actually exist, but if we could make it exist, this is what it would look like?

Pete Mockaitis

Kind of like a fantasy dream job people have that is harmful because they are comparing it to an unrealistic thing?

Lauren McGoodwin
I think that’s a little bit like lazy girl job, which is this TikTok phenomenon that went off, where it’s like you basically don’t have to do anything, and you don’t have to be involved or engaged in any way, but you’re paid really well. I think of that as almost like this true fantasy. Like, one, it is an exchange for you creating impact and value for the company, the exchanges they’re going to pay you. So, you’re not going to be able to actually gives you or never asks you to take a call that’s inconvenient. The realities of life are sort of that is going to happen.

So, to paint that picture, I almost think the comparison is this lazy-girl job thing that people were talking about. I’m not saying that it doesn’t exist but, for me, I look at a “lazy-girl job” which I hate because you wouldn’t hear a lazy-boy job, but, anyway, that’s a whole other topic. But, for me, it’s like I actually have had a job before. My very first job, I was an admin assistant. My only job was to basically wait for the phone to ring.

Now, I wasn’t well-paid, and I had to show up to an office so I wasn’t able to just do what I want all day long, but, for me, I was, as a human being, part of our wellbeing is we want to be engaged, we want to create something, we want to use our brains. And, for me, that was really mind-numbing work, but if we wanted to paint this picture of this “lazy-girl job” or this ultimate job that really doesn’t ask you to do anything, I think people think that would be fulfilling, but I don’t think it would.

I think us, as human beings, we want to move forward, we want to make an impact, and you wouldn’t get that in that situation, but I could see that being this, like, ultimate dream job for somebody.

Pete Mockaitis

Lauren, I love that so much, that notion of a dream scenario would be that you don’t have to do much but you get tons of money. And what’s interesting is, I think, we can see that in real life in terms of if you’ve been on vacation for a while, it’s like you’re actually kind of bored, “And I want to get to it and start being able, contributing somewhere,” there’s that.

And if you look at folks who, I don’t think you can even call them jobs but they have some sort of a subsidized living situation, like a trust fund or some kinds of funds are just flowing into their life without effort, and often these folks are as susceptible or more so, I think the data show, to depression and other kinds of challenges because there’s something that’s not quite being met there.

So, I think that’s a great thing to call out, that you might imagine this thing exists but it kind of doesn’t from a job perspective. And even if you were subsidized magically, that often has its own perils with regard to mental health and fulfillment. So, give us that level that’s maybe just below that in terms of, “This is about as good as it really gets in terms of, I wouldn’t call it a dream job because it doesn’t exist, but this is as close to optimal as one might hope for in this life.”

Well, now can you paint a picture for, if we’ve got four levels, like terrible job, good-enough job, then as good as is realistically optimally possible in real-life job, and then the fake dream job. I think we covered levels one, two, and four. But paint a picture for number three, the best realistically optimal job we might have in life.

Lauren McGoodwin

I think going back to the example of my friend, she was working in one type of marketing, and she’s transitioning to a different type of marketing. She was working for more of a startup-type company that had a little unpredictability with it, she’s going to go to a manufacturing company. So, on the surface, working for a big brand name, way cooler. The type of marketing she was doing? Flashy, cool, really, again, kind of that glitter and glue metaphor, it’s using that, fits into the glitter side.

But she is moving over to manufacturing, definitely not as flashy and cool, doesn’t look as good as a big brand name on LinkedIn, and she’s going to be doing kind of a more traditional marketing route. Now, for someone who’s looking at this, they’re like, “Wait, she’s going from this really cool job to this really boring job.”

But that, for her, she maybe sees this shift from being like, “I had my dream job and it hasn’t necessarily been a ‘dream.’ I’m really ready to go to a good-enough job, a job that I can close my laptop at 5:00 p.m. because I do have young kids, and I want to be able to spend time with them. I get flexibility. I have remote work status with this one. Instead of getting equity, I’m getting a higher paycheck.”

So, again, thinking about “What are my top priorities? And I’m going to get them at this place. Even though it might not be the ‘dream’ on paper to somebody, for me it’s a good-enough job. It doesn’t ask me to give up my life in exchange for the job.” And that is something that I think is really important. A good-enough job is going to take you out of that tunnel vision you have or that fixed mindset that you have.

It’s maybe going to take the pressure off you that you’re feeling right now. Maybe it’s going to give you clarity because you’re not going to see your workplace as your dream, so maybe you’ll be able to recognize when there’s toxicity happening in a workplace more often, things like that. And so, for me, when I hear someone who saying, “You know, I’m kind of leaving the cool, flashy thing. I’m going to go over here but I’m being paid more. It seems like I’m going to have really good work-life balance. So far, from the people I’ve interviewed with, I really like them.”

It’s like they have this surprise factor, where they’re like, “But I should like this big, cool company, checking the box for me.” And I think that is the dream job versus good-enough job kind of conundrum, is sort of this mindset of, like, “I should want this thing. This thing should kind fulfill me, and why doesn’t it?” And so, I’m really proud of people who can make the shift over to “those good-enough jobs” for them.

And it’s not easy to make those decisions and determine, “What are my values? What are my top priorities? Now I have to find a company that fits.” I’m making this sound like it just landed onto their lap but I think it does take some internal work of getting over these preconceived misconceptions of what you should want.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s really cool. And this conversation about dream jobs is making me think about, I guess, there’s been a recent trend of big personalities on YouTube quitting YouTube, which is funny because I understand that the data reveal that young people now, more than they want to be teachers or firefighters, they want to be YouTubers. So, that’s the job, I guess, everyone wants. They think it’s the coolest. Not an astronaut but a YouTuber.

And so, folks who are YouTubers, who are collecting over half a million dollars of income for creatively making videos, are like, “I can’t take this anymore,” which is fascinating in terms of a picture of the dream job doesn’t exist. And if you dig deeper, you sort of learn that, “Oh, well, behind the surface of just making cool videos, they got to manage a team, and brand deals, and books, and accounting, and everyone wants a piece of them.”

Lauren McGoodwin

And the comments, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s like, the reality is, “Huh, it’s not just a creative wonderland of nonstop adulation for me being me, but there’s a ton of responsibilities that are sufficient to overwhelm a portion of these people who have what appears to be an ultimate dream job.”

Lauren McGoodwin

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s tough, I’m sure. It’s very hard for them to walk away from that because it’s that feeling of, like, “You’re not just going to get this back if you change your mind,” meaning, like, the person who worked all the way to become the partner of a law firm, and I’m only using that as an example because I feel we hear a lot about lawyers who are, like, “It wasn’t what I thought it’s going to be.”

But anybody who kind of gets in that golden handcuff rut sort of thing in their career, it’s very hard to walk away from that. And that’s why I think it’s important to kind of share the message early on about good-enough job versus dream jobs. Careers are long and windy, and you take U-turns and left turns and right turns, and up and down. It’s not this linear career path.

And the more we can kind of, I think, spread this education about what a career is, or what a career path looks like, I mean, I came from the generation very much of, like, this ladder and the lean in, just lean in to saying yes to things. That just hasn’t been the reality I’ve experienced, and I think many of the women I’ve talked to and interviewed, or experts that I’ve interviewed, that hasn’t been their experience.

And same with our audience at Career Contessa, it’s like your best skillset to building a fulfilling career is a person who is being proactive in the driver’s seat of their career versus the reactive to whatever is coming your way. And then, again, also studying this mindset of, like, “I’m part of that world, too,” just thinking about your values, determining kind of your purpose, thinking about, again, I have this phrase about how to be invaluable at work.

And people are always asking because they’re like, “Oh, I thought you want to be indispensable.” And I always say, “Look, but if you’re indispensable to a role, how can you grow because they can’t afford to lose you?” So, that’s a different mentality when you’re indispensable, the company is saying you’re primed for overwork because they can’t afford to lose you versus the mentality of, “We don’t want to lose you,” so you’re primed for more valuable work, for example.

So, again, these are just like this is the lessons that I think is kind of one can learn early on. It’s actually very helpful throughout your career. A lot of us, to your point about the YouTuber that many of us learn at mid-life or later on, and so that’s why I’m here to spread this information

Pete Mockaitis

That’s lovely. Well, I do want to hear more about your unique vantage point. So, with the Career Contessa podcast and YouTube channel and speaking, you have a fun vantage point. And I know when I dork out and look into all my analytics and things, and emails from listeners and see, “Okay, what’s really the hot stuff in terms of what people really want to know, and what kind of content advice, wisdom, is resonantly transformational for them?”

So, Lauren, if I could put you on the spot to share with us maybe three super nuggets that you’ve collected from your time podcasting and engaging with so many folks, what have been some of your favorite discoveries?

Lauren McGoodwin

I interviewed a woman once on what actually drives happiness at work, and I still love this conversation, and they were relationships, purpose, and autonomy. And I really loved that because I feel like happiness at work sometimes feel like this very elusive thing, and I guess in a way it is, but I thought that was a really fun conversation. Sometimes you have conversations where you learn something, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s certainly a puzzle piece to the career puzzle.”

I think another big piece for me is the difference between, like I said, being invaluable at work versus being indispensable. I really fit this millennial woman stereotype of the, like, work hard until they recognize your work. I very much learned through my own experiences, but also through our audience and talking to people, it’s really important to advocate for yourself.

There are good ways to advocate, bragging, however you want to call it. Some people don’t like it. They’re like, instead of advocating, think of it as self-expression. However you need to see this, it is very important that you are able to talk about your wins, and your accomplishments, and your achievements. So, those have been some big wins for me.

The other thing, I think, that’s been kind of eye-opening in terms of stuff I’d learned is, like, it’s interesting that you can outperform someone and not necessarily be better than them, and I think that’s a hard reality. And part of that comes down to they might be better at telling their story, they’re better at managing that, I guess, “playing the game.” And I think that sometimes, again, like a hard reality to come to terms with, but I also think it’s very true.

And so, again, self-advocating, learning how to tell your story, making sure that you’re aligned with the right stakeholders and getting in front of them, that’s really important. And, also, that confidence is not something you’re born with. It’s built by taking action. So, nothing is going to just come to you. You have to have the confidence and the willingness to try something in order to start getting traction.

So, if I could drop it into three nuggets of wisdom, those are like some three big takeaways I’ve had in the last year of talking. I have the best job because, through the podcast, YouTube channel, what we do at the side, our whole job is basically trying to find out, “How can you build a healthy fulfilling and successful career?” It is not a perfect black and white formula that fits in a box for everybody. But there are certain trends that I hear over and over again, and those are a few of them.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Well, could you tell us a cool story of someone that you’ve worked with who saw a real cool transformation in terms of they had one perspective, and then they learned some things, changed some things, and saw a fantastic result on the other side of things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, I have a couple. I have a friend who recently was working for a thing company, and their whole career was, like, the Googles, the LinkedIns, the Amazons, the Facebook, very much like you look at her career path, you’d be like, “You’ve got one very linear career path at a certain type of company,” was part of the layoffs that happened, has been searching for a job, and was kind of only searching one way for a job, which was, essentially, using her network, referrals, applying, things like that, introductions to hire, relying on her network.

For a whole year, she’s been looking for a job. She’s incredibly talented. And one of the things that I thought was really interesting is she recently hit the Easy Apply button on LinkedIn to a job that had been reposted a couple of times, had less than 50 people apply for it, it was a very different industry than she had been in before but a similar job, like job function, and ended up going for two interviews, got a job offer, meaning the process was like weeks’ long versus multi-months long.

And I was talking to her, and she was like, “I’m almost afraid to take this because it’s the complete opposite of anything I’ve ever done, and it flips all the logic I’ve thought of on its head.” And so, it was almost like she was uncomfortable with this unknown for herself, of like, “Shouldn’t I just keep sticking with what I’m doing even if it’s not working? Eventually it will work.” And she ultimately decided she’s going to take this new job, couldn’t be happier. It very much fits the description of this “good-enough job.”

She goes into the office once a month. They really value her experience in a certain industry. She was feeling very discouraged from the job search before. And I feel this breathes new life into her, and watching her just have this new motivation. And I thought that was really interesting because so many of us sometimes do have this fear of the unknown, or the fear or doing something different. And there were a couple of takeaways from it.

One, there’s no right way to job search. So, if you’re job searching right now, try a lot of different strategies. Yes, tap your network. Yes, try to get referrals. Also hit Easy Apply to the jobs that you think are really interesting to you, or the companies where you’re like, “I like the company well enough. I need to learn more about them.”

So, I love that story. I love the fact that it reminds you that find a target company, network, absolutely. This job market, absolutely has taught me that there are no rules so you have to try a little bit of everything and test out, and see what strategy works best for you. But ultimately, I think, also, going in with if you can manage your expectations to not be too fixed mindset on it has to go a certain way, if you take some those, I think it’s a really freeing thing as well.

Pete Mockaitis

Cool. Thank you. Well, now I’m curious, anything else you really make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Lauren McGoodwin

Well, my book is called Power Moves so if you’re interested in exploring more of these topics related to the dream job and going after the good-enough job, Power Moves is really a framework on how to build a career that is based in a proactive approach versus a reactive approach. And then, of course, my podcast is called Career Contessa. I’ve really made it easy, and that’s where I get to talk to people who share what drives happiness at work. And I love being able to have those interesting conversations. So, if you’re interested in podcast advice, or career advice, check out Career Contessa as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My favorite quote that I learned from someone the other day is, “This or something better.” And I think that is an incredible quote especially for 2024 with this economic climate, this tough job market, it’s “This or something better.” So, remind yourself of that when you feel like, “I’m not making any progress. I’ve got a rejection.” And I always try to remind people, if they don’t look at your resume, they’re not rejecting you. My point being they look at your resume for seven seconds, or not at all, having a fresh mindset of, “That’s not necessarily a rejection that way,” but it’s, “This or something better.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lauren McGoodwin

I’m loving people who are doing research on remote work or distributed work. So, there’s a lot of CEOs out there who want to call everyone back to the office because of productivity, collaboration. And what these people who do this research are finding is, like, absolutely not necessary to be in office to collaborate, to be productive. And they’re actually doing a lot of research on what does drive those things.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. And a favorite book?

Lauren McGoodwin

A favorite book, Atomic Habits. I love that book. I quote it a lot. That and Essentialism I think they were like books I’ve read at the right time of my life to help me kind of get organized and focus, and gave me that fresh perspective that was really important.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Loom video recordings where, basically, you’re able to audio record yourself, or you can be on video, and then a screenshare. So, I’ll use it for trainings. It’s great for asynchronous work where you want to be able to send feedback to someone on something. So, on our team, we’re a fully remote company, so I will use Loom to send feedback on, “Hey, I read this article. Here’s something I would change. I’m going to edit here, edit there.” Sometimes we’ll use it for resume reviews for clients, too. So, I love Loom absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Lauren McGoodwin

Favorite habit, probably a to-do list. Definitely a to-do list. And I’m not fancy. I use pen and paper but that’s probably one of my favorite habits. I also am really big on 10,000 steps a day, so I just got a walking pad, and I have a standing desk, so that’s a big part of my personality is I’m a very 10,000 steps a day.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Lauren McGoodwin

Certainly, just the dream job myth, I think, is something that people are starting to know me by, is that they’ll say, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but I’m looking for a dream job,” or something like that. Or, “I know you don’t believe in dream jobs, but then what do I find instead?” So, I would say the dream job myth is definitely something I’m quoted back and used on myself a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

Everything is on the Career Contessa website, so CareerContessa.com. Podcast is called Career Contessa, and the book is Power Moves. And then you can connect with me on LinkedIn, I’m Lauren McGoodwin on LinkedIn, and I post tips daily on there, and I would love to connect with you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Lauren McGoodwin

My final action, I think, going back to one of the nuggets of things I’ve learned is “How can you advocate for yourself this week? Or, how can you make your accomplishments or achievements known this week?” Does that mean you can send a quick email to your boss, of, “Here’s a quick recap of what I’ve been working on”? Can you mention yourself in that Slack channel, like, “Here’s my win for the week”? What can you do to make sure that you are advocating and letting your wins be known?

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lauren, thank you and good luck.

Lauren McGoodwin

Thank you.