Tag

KF #31. Situational Adaptability Archives - Page 2 of 4 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Apr 03
0

853: The Four Workarounds that Help Solve Nearly any Problem with Paulo Savaget

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Paulo Savaget says: "The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well."

Paulo Savaget reveals unconventional tactics to solve just about any problem.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four workarounds–and how to use them.
  2. How to maximize incentives to start change.
  3. Why you shouldn’t let limited resources stop you.

About Paulo

Paulo Savaget is associate professor at Oxford University’s Engineering Sciences Department and the Saïd Business School. He holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge as a Gates Scholar and has a background working as a lecturer, consultant, entrepreneur, and researcher finding innovative solutions for a more inclusive world. As a consultant, he worked on projects for large companies, non-profits, government agencies in Latin America, and the OECD. He currently resides in Oxford.

Resources Mentioned

Paulo Savaget Interview Transcript

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

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much for inviting me, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’m excited to be chatting about your wisdom. And I’d love to hear, you’ve seen a lot of creative solutions to a lot of interesting problems. Could you point to any particularly intriguing and creative solutions that have really stuck with you over time?

Paulo Savaget
I think I have to start with an example before defining the concept that I introduced in this book of workarounds. I work with these organizations in Zambia that address lack of access to diarrhea treatment. It’s an organization composed only by two staffs, so very small organization but feisty and creative in the ways they address the problem.

If you think of why medicines and many, including lifesaving medicines, that are cheap over the counter, that even populations living in extreme poverty could possibly afford, and if you try to understand the bottlenecks preventing these medicines from being found, you’re going to identify things like very poor infrastructure, or logistics, or governance issues, things that are very difficult to tackle.

And many organizations worldwide have been trying to address these bottlenecks but they might be very costly, there are many failures that arise throughout the process, failures that you may not be able to conceive from the outset.

So, what did this organization do? They realized that you don’t find these lifesaving medicines in remote regions, but you find things like Coca-Cola everywhere, even in the remotest places on earth, you find Coca-Cola and other fast moving consumer goods, like sugar, coffee, cooking oil. So, they started, literally, taking a free ride with Coca-Cola bottles to make medicines available in remote regions.

That’s what I call a workaround. It’s this idea that you don’t have to necessarily tackle an obstacle to get things done. There are many creative ways of addressing problems. And, in this case, as you can see, Pete, they bridge across silos, they addressed a problem in healthcare by piggybacking on the success of fast moving consumer goods.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when we talk about a free ride in the Coca-Cola bottles, the medicines are literally placed inside the bottles of Coke?

Paulo Savaget
In the beginning, they started fitting medicines between bottles in a Coca-Cola crate. When I went to Zambia, I saw how the distribution of Coca-Cola happens, and it’s very decentralized. So, Coca-Cola doesn’t necessarily know where the bottles travel to. Let’s say that Coca-Cola produces Coca-Cola, and then there’s a local bottler that is outsourced, then many wholesalers, retailers, supermarkets, and people transporting Coca-Cola ranging from vans of hospitals, so even bicycles when they’re reaching the last mile.

I’ve seen, for example, someone riding a bike with a crate of Coca-Cola and, like, a goat strapped around the bike. So, it’s a very decentralized value chain that Coca-Cola doesn’t even know where the bottles end up going to sometimes. And it’s fascinating how robust and resilient the value chain is because these glass bottles, they return. They go and they return to the origin.

So, the idea that was initially fitting medicines between the bottles in Coca-Cola crates, so the medicine can take a free ride. And as they started this intervention, they realized that they could build and piggyback on the entire distribution chain that makes fast moving consumer goods so successful. It’s not simply fitting medicines between bottles to take a free ride, you can actually use the same actors that distribute and sell Coca-Cola to do that for diarrhea treatments, which is over the counter.

There’s no prescription and it doesn’t require refrigeration. People who live in even extreme poverty could afford this medicine. So, that’s how they evolve the intervention. And the uptake of the medicine, in a very short period of time, we’re talking about six, seven years, increased the intervention districts from less than 1% to more than 50%, saving thousands of lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, there’s one right there, the piggyback, and so there, it’s quite literally distribution of something on top of something else. That’s really cool and beautiful to see the impact when that’s implemented.

Paulo Savaget
Pete, it doesn’t necessarily have to be distribution. You might piggyback, for example, in a marketing budget from another organization. For example, let me give an example that is not distribution-related. Airbnb, when it was very small, it started with this value proposition of matching people who had lodging to offer with people who needed lodging.

At that time, most people who didn’t want to stay at hotels and wanted these sorts of arrangements, would go to Craigslist, but Craigslist didn’t have a very good user experience because it had, literally, everything bad. It was sort of the yellow pages on the internet. So, when Airbnb started, they had a better platform with better user experience and offered a more customized service, including professional photography of the houses that would be listed.

The problem was that people didn’t know about Airbnb. So, what did they do, which was genius, this workaround that they pursued? They started piggybacking on their rival, on Craigslist, to increase the visibility for their listings. And how did they do that? Let’s say that I’m Airbnb and you are someone who want to list your house on Airbnb, and you are a first mover, you identified Airbnb pretty early and you post your listing to your own Airbnb. And then I would send you a message saying, “Hey, Pete, you listed your house here with us. And if we cross-post your listing on Craigslist, it’s going to increase your visibility because a lot of people use Craigslist, and it’s free, and we’re going to do that for you.”

And, of course, you would say, “Yes, go ahead,” because you have nothing to lose, not going to take any of your time or money, and it would increase your chances of getting your house rented. So, they did that, they cross-posted on Craigslist. And let’s say that someone else who’s going on Craigslist who did not know about the existence of Airbnb, and then they tried to find accommodation, then they see your listing that was much better, it looked better, it had professional photographs, once they click on it, they are redirected to Airbnb’s website.

So, what would happen to these people? They started going directly to Airbnb the next time they were searching for lodging. And that happened to a lot of people and it had an exponential impact as well because of word of mouth, they started talking about Airbnb. That was a way of scaling and increasing massively the user base of Airbnb without having to draw up diamond ads. They simply piggybacked on their rival. And when Craigslist realized that Airbnb was trying to poach their users, it was already late. Many users were already using Airbnb, and Airbnb took off.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. So, we got a piggyback there in the marketing domain, so beautiful. All right. Well, so we’ve got a couple fun examples of piggybacking, which is one of the four workarounds. Can we zoom out a bit and tell me what’s sort of the big idea or main thesis behind the book The Four Workarounds?

Paulo Savaget
The main idea is that we often find ourselves in complex situations, problems that you may not necessarily be able to solve, or that make you feel paralyzed, and workarounds can help you with that. They allow you to get things done in a very effective way but also in a resourceful way, getting quick results, and sometimes allowing you to make outsized impact as well.

So, workarounds are very accessible imperfection-loving methods that allow you to get things done in very different contexts. And I try to show that based on the knowledge and this research that I’ve done starting with computer hackers to see how they hack systems to make change so resourcefully, and sometimes with meager resources. They make these huge impacts in computer systems. And then with very scrappy organizations worldwide that were being hacky as they approached their own problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense as I imagine being in a computer situation, like, “Huh, how do we get this thing to go everywhere fast? Well, piggyback off something that’s already going everywhere fast. Okay, there’s a resourceful thing we just did there without a lot of developer time, without a lot of money. We made that happen.”

So, we talked about the piggyback. I understand there’s three other categories of workarounds in the book: the loophole, the roundabout, and the next best. Could you define and then give an example of each of these? For example, with the loophole, I was intrigued by the Brazilian ventilator case study. Can you lay it on us?

Paulo Savaget
Sure. The loophole consists of these approaches that reinterpret rules and that leverage ambiguity, and sometimes tap into different systems of rules that are not necessarily the most obvious but are applicable to your circumstance as well. In this case that came from Brazil was from a governor of the poorest state in Brazil, called Flavio Dino.

At the time, well, he’s a former judge, and he had a very good understanding of what the rules allow but also what they don’t, and he was an enemy of the then president Jair Bolsonaro, and he saw himself, as many other politicians at the time, struggling to get ventilators for the hospitals in the time that COVID hit in the very beginning. And it’s a state that is particularly challenged to offer healthcare because it’s one of the poorest ones.

So, he got some funds from local partners, many partners that were in the private sector, to buy ventilators but the problem was that every time they tried to purchase these ventilators something happened. So, once, for example, they tried to purchase ventilators, and because the ventilators were coming from China, and they had to stop somewhere to refuel because there’s no direct flight from China to Brazil, they first went to the United States, and because there was a shortage of ventilators, the ventilators were confiscated.

Then the second time they did that in Germany, and the same thing happened. The ventilators were confiscated in Germany. Then they thought, “We have to work around this,” and they worked around a series of obstacles to get these ventilators into his state, and they had to stack workaround after workaround.

So, the first one was that, because of the accountability and the bureaucracy from the state, it would take a lot of time to be able to procure directly these ventilators from the manufacturer in China. So, instead of getting the funds from the companies and purchasing through the government, the companies themselves were purchasing the ventilators and then donating to the state. So, that was a first way of speeding things up.

Then, because one of them was a supermarket, and the other one was a mining company, and both had operations in China and many suppliers in China, they had local connections, and these local connections went to these manufacturers, procured, and also waited until they actually got the ventilators.

Then they took a flight that wasn’t a commercial flight, as in the previous times that they failed. So, they got a plane to do this flight, and instead of going through more conventional routes, they stopped in Ethiopia to refuel because the chances of getting the ventilators confiscated in Ethiopia, or even monitored by local authorities, was not as high.

After refueling, they had to go to São Paulo. They couldn’t go directly to that state, so when they went there, the challenge was that all ventilators, at the time, were being controlled by the federal government, and redistributed by the federal government to the states. But these were being procured by a single state, the state of Maranhão. So, what did they do?

They went to São Paulo at the time in which they already had a second flight arranged in a way that they wouldn’t have to go through customs in São Paulo. They could do that in Maranhão because there was also custom services at the airport in Maranhão. But when they landed in Maranhão and everything was planned, it was a time that people who worked at customs were no longer working because it was after their work hours.

So, when it landed in Maranhão, the team of the governor took the ventilators to the hospital and signed the documents saying, “We’re going to come back here later to do the customs procedures, the necessary customs procedures that are our responsibility from the federal government.” So, they took the ventilators to the hospitals, they started being used immediately, and next day, they went there to file the paperwork for the federal government to do the customs procedure.

When the federal government realized, they were not happy because these ventilators were supposed to be taken by the federal government and redistributed, but they couldn’t go to the hospitals and take these ventilators that were already being used and already saving lives of people. They would never be able to do that. And when they tried to bring this case to court, they didn’t really have a strong case because the process was technically right, and it was a state of emergency as well, so they didn’t necessarily violate any rule.

They did the technical administrative procedure to get these ventilators through and to the hospitals in Maranhão but they found these ingenious ways of circumventing all these obstacles in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, keep them coming. Let’s hear about the roundabout.

Paulo Savaget
So, the first one, the piggyback, was about leveraging these different relationships, cross silos, finding unconventional pairings, like addressing lack of access in medicines with Coca-Cola’s value chain. And the second one, as I said, it’s about rules, reinterpreting or leveraging ambiguity, different sets of rules. The third one is about self-reinforcing behaviors.

Self-reinforcing behaviors, when I teach systems change here at Oxford, we describe them as positive feedback loops. It’s another terminology for that. That means that there are some behaviors that spiral out of control, and that normally they become…they’re seen as if they were inevitable. So, let me give a few examples, a very trivial one.

When I was a child and I have an older brother, I would fight against my brother very often, and I would flick him, he would slap me, I would punch him, and then, suddenly, like he was trying to choke me, and we were trying to kill each other. So, things spiral out of control. The same with a snowball, for example, that’s what we call self-reinforcing behavior.

And the workaround that I call roundabout offers the possibility of disturbing or disrupting a self-reinforcing behavior. A very critical example that I like to share is one that I noticed when I was in India. I was in Delhi, and I realized that some walls were drenched in urine because public urination is a very normalized behavior, and it’s a very gendered issue because women do not necessarily urinate in public spaces but men do.

And every time you talk to someone, and say, like, “Why is this issue still such a big problem here?” people would say, “Ah, it’s inevitable. It’s culture. It has existed for so long.” So, it’s this kind of self-reinforcing behavior that is very difficult to change, to tackle. Even the efforts, for example, to provide public toilet facilities have not necessarily generated the results that the policymakers expected.

So, this roundabout workaround that is so small but so genius was that some wall owners, who had their walls drenched in urine, started putting tiles of Hindu gods on the walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Tiles of what?

Paulo Savaget
Hindu gods, like Shiva.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Hindu gods. Okay.

Paulo Savaget
Yeah, because a man, regardless of their religion, in a country where the majority of the population is Hindu, they would not dare to urinate on a god. So, by putting these tiles of Hindu gods, they disturbed these self-reinforcing behaviors, and the walls that were once drenched in urine became cleaner, and cleaner, and cleaner, and they diverted the stream of urine to other places, not to their walls.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Paulo, this is fresh. We haven’t had a good urine example across 840 plus episodes, so I dig this. When I was reading through your book a bit, I don’t know if this example fits neatly into this categorization, but it kind of reminded me, like the reinforcing, the roundabout, when we invert it, we’d get a different result.

I remember one time I did some speeding. Naughty Pete. Drive safely, everybody. But I did some speeding, I was young and foolish, and I didn’t know that the speed limit changed quickly from a state route to, like, we’re inside a village. So, anyway, I got a ticket for big speeding, and they said, “Hey, if you go to this driver safety class, then we can reduce the fine and prevent it from being on your record and causing problems and insurance, whatever.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.”

And I thought I was so brilliant; this state police officer was teaching this class on safe driving that nobody wanted to be at. All of us just wanted to just, like, tuned out but that doesn’t make for a great educational environment in which you can really learn and retain things. So, he did what I think – Paulo, you tell me, this might be a roundabout. He ingeniously said, “Okay, every time you answer a question, or you contribute, I want to make a tally mark on this chalkboard, and that represents one minute that you get to leave earlier.”

So, the class was maybe four hours, I don’t know. And so then, suddenly the incentives were turned around, like, “Oh, well, we would like to leave sooner, and even though this is boring, we can achieve the objective of leaving sooner by participating.” And, sure enough, it made for a pretty engaging class on safe driving that none of us wanted to be at because he inverted our incentives on us.

Paulo Savaget
Exactly. That’s a great example that I hadn’t heard before, and it reminded me of an example that I didn’t include in the book but it’s kind of similar to what you said, also about speeding in Sweden, that they created this policy that they took the fines from people who were speeding, and created a lottery for people who did not speed.

So, let’s say that you didn’t get a fine that month, you would be joining the lottery, like you might make some money out of this. But, of course, we like the gamification aspect of this. We like lottery. We like the thrill. So, a lot of people stopped speeding, not because they didn’t want to pay the fine but because they wanted to be part of the lottery.

And that’s similar to what you’re saying, you change the incentive. You turn something negative into something positive. Or, the language of many economists, it would be turning the sticks into carrots, the idea of carrots and sticks.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, let’s hear about the fourth workaround here, the next best. You got a cool drone example. Could you share that?

Paulo Savaget
Of course, yeah. So, the next best is about repurposing resources or recombining them in ways that are unconventional and beyond the original design of these resources. And resources can be tangible or intangible. The drone example is from an organization called Zipline. As you know, there’s a lot of expectations about drones as technologies.

Perhaps the company Amazon will soon be delivering your products, Amazon Prime, Next Day with drones in New York, like going in San Francisco, but the reality is that it’s not viable yet. So, the many organizations that are interested in investing in drone delivery in places, where at places that are not as busy, and in a way that they can build capabilities, they can develop themselves, they can patent, and then later have this competitive advantage when a drone becomes viable in many places.

So, these organizations, I thought it was genius how they used drones to forge a hand in this game, and they used drones in Rwanda. Also, a case about the last mile, these very remote regions where healthcare is very difficult to get, and they deliver to remote regions, blood for blood transfusions, because blood is very challenging to deliver or to store in remote regions with very poor electricity and healthcare facilities but they are needed urgently, like you don’t have a lot of time, it cannot wait much if you need a blood transfusion.

So, they started shipping from a central facility in Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, blood to these many rural regions that are so hard to reach via roads or normal more conventional transportation methods. And this has been extremely successful and has scaled to other places as well. And as they did this, they created patents, they understood better how to operate drones, to make deliveries with drones, and they built all these skill and knowledge while saving lives and contributing a lot to healthcare in Rwanda.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, beautiful, Paulo. So, we got a nice little rundown of these four workarounds. I’m curious, is there a type or category of problem or trigger that gets you thinking, since you know this stuff really well, “Ah, there’s probably one of the four workarounds I can use here.” What are some of those triggers or signals?

Paulo Savaget
They boil down to the core attributes. If there’s something that you think is paralyzing you because it’s a very normalized behavior, go with the roundabout. If there’s a rule, for example, that is constraining you, a legislation, a customary rule, something that is habit, for example, or something that is in the constitution but you think is unfair, go with the loophole.

If you have these possibilities of crossing boundaries and these lines that managers often draw, but they might be arbitrary. We don’t have to address healthcare problems only with the methods from healthcare. We can use fast moving consumer goods to deliver medicines to remote regions. That’s a good way of thinking of a piggyback, how you benefit or leverage the success of orders for your benefit as well.

And if you have resources at your disposal, and that you can repurpose or combine them in different ways beyond the original functions or the most conventional ways of using them, then go with the next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. All right. Well, let me just put you on the spot and throw some problems on you that I hear from listeners frequently. One, “I’m overwhelmed by too many projects, responsibilities, action items, emails, meetings.” How can we work around some of that?

Paulo Savaget
That’s great. I also face similar challenges and I try to constantly work around some of them. The idea of working around requires adaptation, flexibility, and it is imperfection learning as well. Like, you do something that is good enough. So, when you start with pursuing workarounds, it conduces to planning less and being more adaptive. It’s more pragmatic. It’s more practical. It’s less about long-term changes and behaviors.

Let me give an example of something that I’ve done that was related to sending emails that I think might resonate with some of our listeners. A long time ago, before I started studying workarounds, I was an intern and I had a boss who, very erratically, answered emails. And, of course, I was frustrated because I wanted my emails to be answered. Then I started talking to other people who worked with him, and I realized that he had a certain pattern of email answering that he normally started from the top of his emails, and he started answering emails very early in the morning because he was an early bird.

So, let’s say he woke up at, like, 5:00 a.m., and then he would answer emails for, like, two hours starting from the top. I infer that based on conversations and from the many emails I had sent him that were answered or not. So, what I started doing, I programmed my emails to be sent in the wee hours of the morning.

So, let’s say that I wrote the email at 6:00 p.m., I would program that email to be sent at, like, 3:47 a.m. because then it would go to the top of his pile of emails. And that increased a lot the rate of response for all these emails that I wanted to get answered. That was a workaround in our workplace that might…I still haven’t told that former boss what I’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, he’s not listening. And just to reinforce the learning, I guess we might call that a piggyback, in that you are piggybacking your way into the golden timeframe via simple software a bit. Or, what category would you put on that?

Paulo Savaget
I would actually consider that a next best because the next best is about resources and repurposing resources. I thought of emails and use them in different ways to communicate and identify the times that work best for my emails to be sent. We don’t normally think of the times that your email will be sent, and that’s how I repurposed, yeah, the ways I communicated. So, I would call it a next best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s hear another one. This might be tricky when it’s about interpersonal relations. Like, let’s say someone says, “My boss, or my key colleague, I got to work with is just a jerk. They’re engaged in some toxic and narcissistic behaviors, and it is just tough being around them.” Any clever workarounds that can be put to this thorny interpersonal stuff?

Paulo Savaget
Definitely. One of the chapters in my book describes how you can pursue workarounds in your organization. And I try to challenge a little bit this idea that collaboration is necessarily beneficial or better in every circumstance. Sometimes you will face people that are toxic, that you don’t want to work with, or that might be too slow or not contributing much to your projects.

So, many of the cases and the ways that I describe workarounds is not about pleasing people. It’s about getting things done, and things that will benefit you or whichever goals you have in mind. Let me give an example that I covered. It’s a roundabout workaround.

In many organizations, the bosses will not necessarily allow employees to pursue their own innovative projects because it might not be the priority for the organization, it might not align with the goals or priorities of the organization. So, what do many employees do? It’s what is called boot lagging by innovation management scholars and has resulted into some of our most beloved projects, like the aspirin, or blue LED lights, or large screens by HP.

And the idea is that instead of getting the support or endorsement from bosses, they work around these direct orders, sometimes simply ignoring rules, sometimes actually ignoring what bosses said, so they can develop the innovative projects when the idea is still very rough in the beginning of innovations. It’s what we call sometimes hopeful monstrosities. They are hopeful but they are monstrous. They might not align. You don’t really know necessarily how it’s going to turn out to look like.

And then by working around direct orders, people can invest in these ideas, going underground, and develop the projects until the moment is right to communicate to others in the company. So, you pretty much buy time while developing your solution, your product, or technology. And once that becomes more viable and more attractive, then you make it public and you go to your bosses, and that will be a much better time for presenting that idea instead of in the early stages when the idea is still very crude.

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

Paulo Savaget
No, I think we’re good to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Paulo Savaget
That’s very difficult for a nerd like myself who works with so many quotes. But one that I use a lot is from this organization called Alight in Zambia and they describe how they embrace complexity, and instead of building riverbeds if there’s water flowing, you go with the water. You try to embrace those flows and make use of what is already there instead of trying to create things that might not be viable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Paulo Savaget
Wow, that’s also a very difficult for a nerd like myself. The many books that I really enjoy in business, for example, some of the most recent ones that I’ve read includes Originals by Adam Grant that is very nicely written. I really enjoy the books by Malcolm Gladwell, for example.

And there’s a book by Caroline Criado-Perez called Invisible Women that is fascinating as well, describing how gender inequality impacts data, and how this data that we pretty much collect only from men impact the products we use and the services we have available to us as well.

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

Paulo Savaget
Well, l would say that my favorite tool or technology is a coffee machine because I need a lot of coffee. As a Brazilian, I’m constantly caffeinated. And in order to also get things done, I need to get a lot of coffee.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do to be awesome at your job?

Paulo Savaget
I’m a bit hyperactive so I need to exercise very often, and it also helps me focus. So, I try to exercise every day. I swim, cycle, play tennis, do many different kinds of sports.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share, something that really seems to connect and resonate with folks when they’re talking about your stuff, they quote back to you often? Or, do you have any quotable Paulo original gems that folks, they’re Kindle book highlighting, they’re retweeting, they’re saying, “Man, when you said this, that really stuck with me.”

Paulo Savaget
One of the quotes that I have in the book that a lot of people enjoy, and I’ve heard many comments about, that was about deviants, that I said that deviants are frowned upon but I think we don’t deviate enough. And then I try to bake a case about how deviants is important as means of challenging the status quo, and how it’s different from disobedience.

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

Paulo Savaget
I would say reach out. I’m always very happy to talk and exchange. I really enjoy learning about workarounds that people have pursued after being exposed to my work or before as well, that they hadn’t really given much thought about. And, of course, my website and the profile that I have available on the Oxford website.

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

Paulo Savaget
I would say working with others can be much better and much more fruitful but sometimes we got to be adaptive and make sure that we don’t necessarily go for the people-pleasing solutions, that we can think of different ways of addressing our problems, and that workarounds might help you with that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paulo, this has been a treat. I wish much fun and many good workarounds.

Paulo Savaget
Thank you very much. I hope you’re going to also face with many workarounds.

Mar 23
0

850: How to Reinvent Yourself in Life and Work with Joanne Lipman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Joanne Lipman says: "Everybody else’s journey looks so nice and neat, and we feel like we’re the only ones who are a mess, but, frankly, we all go through that struggle."

Joanne Lipman reveals her strategies for reinventing how you live, work, and lead.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How struggle makes you better.
  2. Three tricks to make any transition easier.
  3. How to take the most efficient brain breaks.

About Joanne

Joanne Lipman is a pioneering journalist and the author of the No. 1 bestseller THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID: What Men and Women Need to Know About Working Together and NEXT! The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work. She has served as Editor-in-Chief of USA Today, USA Today Network, Conde Nast Portfolio, and The Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Journal, leading those organizations to six Pulitzer Prizes. She is also an on-air CNBC contributor and Yale University journalism lecturer.

Resources Mentioned

Joanne Lipman Interview Transcript

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

Joanne Lipman
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the wisdom of your book Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work but, first, I just got to know, you have had such an impressive career in the heights of senior journalism.

Pete Mockaitis
So, given your perspectives from having worked in journalism for a long time, what can you tell us about humanity, those of us here who make and choose to consume the news? What have you discovered that most of us don’t know?

Joanne Lipman
One of the things that I’ve discovered is that I really, really, really respond and appreciate the audience, the people who are listening. I think that our best insights come from when we’re talking to lots of people, when we’re out and about, when we also listen to people throughout the country. I think that one of the issues that we’ve had with trust in media is the idea that there are…we have media centers on both coasts.

We don’t have as much national media in the middle of the country, and I think it’s really important to have people represented in the newsroom from every community, from different localities, different genders experiences, socioeconomic backgrounds. And that, to me, is what builds trust in the news. And, to me, that’s the most exciting part of being in the newsroom when you’re surrounded by people who come from all different perspectives, and everybody brings something else to the party, which is, I think, helpful for all of us.

Pete Mockaitis
And then what happens when that’s not done, in terms of what’s the vibe or the impact?

Joanne Lipman
Yeah, I think there’s been some legitimate criticism that we’ve had too much sort of parachuting in. So, you’ve got your…because media is, and this is a whole other conversation, but media is under pressure, financial pressure, and there’s been a lot of cuts to journalism jobs. And, as a result, what sometimes ends up happening is there’s a story somewhere where there’s not a big news organization, and one of the big national news organizations, we call it they parachute in. Like, it’s every presidential election, there’s 50 big-time journalists who descend on Iowa and go to a diner.

Diner journalism is not great journalism. What you really want are the people who live there to be the reporters, to tell you to really understand what’s happening on the ground. And I think this is a reason why the media has – and this is all legitimate criticism – missed a lot of the rise of populism, the rise of Trump, certainly, but also just sort of through the last 20 years, the rise of the Tea Party. There’s a lot of really smart, informed people throughout the country whose voices are not heard.

And I think anything we can do to elevate those voices and have a broader perspective about…and an on-the-ground perspective of what’s happening. This is actually one of the great things when I was working with Gannett, which owns over a hundred local newspapers, and it was fantastic to be able to have when there’s an earthquake, a fire, a natural disaster, a shooting, to have local reporters who are on the ground who understood the community, and it really helps to understand the whole country. We’re a very diverse place with lots of perspectives and we need to understand ourselves better.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now can you tell us your book Next! what’s the big idea here?

Joanne Lipman
Sure. So, Next! it’s the power of reinvention in life and work, and I’m so excited about this book because it grew out of what we are all going through right now at this moment, which is we’ve had three years, we’re at the three-year mark, which is crazy, from the start of the pandemic, and the entire world was sort of upended.

No matter what you do or who you are, your life was upended, and it really got so many people rethinking, “What are our priorities? Am I in the right job? Is this the career I want? Is this the life I want? Is this where I want to live?” So many questions, and it occurred to me very early in the pandemic that we’re all going to have to figure out what’s next.

And so, the big idea is I wanted to help people to navigate big changes, navigate change in how we live, how we work, how we lead, and really to help people to move toward finding their real purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so when it comes to doing that, you’ve got a reinvention roadmap. Can you walk us through how that works?

Joanne Lipman
Sure. So, I’ll tell you a little bit about what the reporting was. When I started reporting the book, it was so interesting. I was looking for stories of people, and I did hundreds of interviews, there’s tons of research, scientific research in the book Next! And what I started with was talking with people who had already gone through these major transformations in different ways.

Some had had huge career changes, like one of my favorites. A guy named Chris Donovan who spent years, decades, as a telephone repairman but he secretly would, like, doodle pictures of shoes. And at the age of 50, left the phone company, went back to school, and now is a couture women shoe designer who was named Best of Boston, Boston Magazine, best shoe designer. It’s a beautiful story.

I found all these wonderful stories where people had these amazing transformations, but then what I did was I went back and talked to the academics, the researchers, who study these different kinds of change. And what was so fascinating was I talked to people who had gone through very different kinds of transformations, some were career, some were people who came back from, like, huge failures, some were people who had had trauma in their life, and some were actually people who had these grand aha moments that just changed their life.

So, these all seemed, on the face of it, to be very different kinds of transformation. And then I went and talked to these academics. There’s different academics who study each kind of change that I’ve just gone through, and they all walked me through sort of the steps of transformation, and they all used different words, different language, but they were all describing the same set of steps. And it was such a revelation to understand how this works.

So, they’re basically there’s four steps that pretty much everyone will go through. So, the first step, like, I will tell you the four steps, what we call them are search, struggle, stop, solution, and I will walk you through them. So, the search, almost everyone who I spoke to, no matter what kind of transformation they went through, they actually started before they even knew they started. They started moving in this direction, they started collecting information.

So, if you think about someone who changes careers, that is somebody who maybe has a hobby, or a side hustle, or even just some random interest that just grows and grows. I talked to everybody from James Patterson, the mega-selling novelist, who spent 30 years at an ad agency. He was actually at an ad agency, and he wrote books on the side, some of which got published, many of them kind of did not do well. He was, like, finding his voice, but he was working toward it.

The shoe designer I mentioned was doodling shoes. One of my other favorites was a bank economist. He worked for years, for decades, at JP Morgan, and he had a weekend house. And on the weekend house, it was a farmhouse, and he leased out the land around it to a cattle farmer. And when the cattle farmer died, he just bought the cows, he said, “I just thought all they do is eat grass. It doesn’t really take any work.”

Well, fast forward 20 years later, the guy is a full-time cattle farmer. He used to be a Harvard-educated economist, and now he’s, like, a guy who gets up and shoos the cows from one pasture to another and could not be happier. So, anyway, that’s the search, that people start moving in that direction. The struggle is very often particularly with careers, this is true. You leave one identity behind but you haven’t quite gotten to the other.

There’s a wonderful professor, Herminia Ibarra, who studies career transitions. She calls this the liminal period. It’s where it’s an uncomfortable period where you’re still haven’t quite figured out the future but you’re escaping the past.

The third step, which not everyone goes through but very often they do, which we call the stop. Very, very often, I found that there is a moment, and it’s either you choose it or it chooses you, where you just stop. So, where it’s either you’re banging your head against the wall and you can’t figure out that next step, again, uncomfortable, or, in some cases, for example, the shoe designer who I was mentioning, what prompted him was he got struck by cancer.

He had prostate cancer, and it was one of those moments where he said, “Wait a second. I’ve got to stop and think. Is this the life I want to have? Or, is this the life that I need to follow the path that I think I was put on this earth to do?” and he had that stop. And so many people do. And, by the way, if you talked to creativity researchers, people who study that, this is why we all have those aha moments.

I bet you’ve had this, right, where you wake up in the middle of the night, or you’re in the shower, or you’re going for a run, and suddenly you have that aha moment. It’s because you’re puzzling through something, and you can’t quite figure it out, and then what ends up happening is you have to put it out of your mind, you have to shut off the conscious thinking about it, and that’s what allows all these sorts of random thoughts in the back of your head kind of coalesce in your subconscious and then emerge as this aha moment.

So, there’s your stop. And then that is, again, what takes you finally to the solution. So, these four steps are very common to every kind of transition, and I found that very, very encouraging to understand how that process works.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Yes, very much. And that struggle, it’s interesting that notion of identity. So, our identities are often quite wrapped up in our work careers. Is that a finding you saw again and again?

Joanne Lipman
A thousand percent, yes. Very often, somebody said to me, “You are, like, your title, and when somebody takes that away from you, you lose that title, people are really lost.” There really is an issue with, there’s an Atlantic writer who calls workism, which is it’s almost like a religion where we are so focused on work, and it is so much of our identity, and when that goes away, it’s very hard to come back.

But that struggle is also sort of the pathway. It’s really uncomfortable. What I found almost universally is when you’re going through that struggle, whoever it is that’s going through that struggle, you think you’re the only person in the world who’s dealing with that. You feel like, “I’m a loser, and everybody around me is getting ahead, and they’ve figured it out and I haven’t.” But it is actually a universal feeling.

And it’s also where the really, really important work gets done. It’s not necessarily fun but it’s helpful to know that, first of all, everyone goes through it, and, secondly, it is actually where the most important part gets done. And I think one of the issues that we have in this, with society at large, is we have this sort of fantasy of instant overnight success, overnight transformation, and it starts from childhood with Cinderella, and then it goes to adolescence with Superman and Spiderman, and then it goes to adulthood with American Idol.

And then we hear these amazing stories, like John Legend was a management consultant, and now he’s a superstar. And Mark Zuckerberg was a college kid, and now he’s a tech billionaire. We hear these stories and it just seems so far from our own experience. It just seems like it’s impossible we shouldn’t even try because we’ll never get there.

And it’s really a damaging myth. It’s a complete myth that the important thing is we all need to go through that middle period. It’s really important, great work is being done in that middle period. We all go through it. And so, again, it’s something that we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you mentioned John Legend, a management consultant to music, and I remember when I was making my transition, I was in management consulting at Bain. And I remember when I was sort of an odd duck, like people typically didn’t believe that company to go be speaker-author-people. So, I did feel that discomfort, it’s just like, “Oh, so what do you do?” I was like, “Oh, I’m a speaker and an author, and I’m kind of still figuring it out. My market is in topics and audiences, but I was a consultant at Bain.”

So, it’s like, “But I’m not a loser, I promise.” I don’t know, it’s like that insecurity that I had in that moment, it’s like, “I’m still figuring out what the heck that I’m doing here, but before I had a pretty prestigious role, so don’t think less of me.”

Joanne Lipman
Everybody. Everybody has been in your position because so many people, they meet you and they’re like, “Okay, what do you do?” and it leaves you tongue-tied. I’ve experienced that myself. I ran a magazine that closed, and then I was meeting people, and they’re like, “What do you do?” I’m like, “I used to…” What do you say, right? It’s a very awkward situation.

I have a whole chapter, by the way, on what I call necessity entrepreneurs, which is women, people of color, and, increasingly, Baby Boomers, people who are actually being squeezed out of the traditional workforce or the traditional jobs, and very often end up with far more fulfilling careers, actually, as a result. But the women who I talked to, in particular, said, “You feel invisible.”

There’s a fabulous woman I talked to who had a big consulting career, and left to raise her children, and for 12 years, she was out of the workforce, and she said, “These 12 years of feeling invisible, it’s tough. It’s tough.” I do love, by the way, that LinkedIn now allows you to have that career gap as, like, a legitimate part of your resume because I think those are…these career gaps, we’re increasingly in a nonlinear world with careers, which is so much about what Next! is about, is this sort of nonlinear life and how do you navigate the nonlinear life.

And we see it with Boomers, and now we’re seeing it with the younger generation, which they expect to have, 10 or 12 careers in the course of their working life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me intrigued. So, LinkedIn, so gaps, you have the option, you have a start date and end date for things that don’t have to overlap within the programming. Is that what you’re saying?

Joanne Lipman
Yeah, exactly. And it’s made for people who have career gaps or people who maybe dropped out of the workforce, paid workforce, I should say, because they’re still working, but paid workforce, you know, they raised their kids or for other reasons, they take care of older relatives, for whatever reason it is. And I think that’s incredibly important.

I also think that there’s an increasing recognition that during those gaps in paid employment, there’s a lot of learning that’s going on, and there are a lot of people who I’ve talked to who had these wonderful career transitions because of what they learned during these gaps in their careers. The woman who I just referenced, who said she felt invisible for 12 years, she poured her energy and her business skills into community issues.

So, the zoning board, and getting a playground by the school, and getting a stop sign, and joining the PTA. All these kinds of things, civic engagement, and she met a lot of women like herself. Ultimately, what this woman did was she did two things, which is so awesome. She started a nonprofit that she is now the CEO of, that is expanding nationally, called The Acceleration Project. Its volunteers like herself and other moms who had big careers, and they mentor local business owners to help them with things like marketing and finance.

She did that, and then she was elected mayor of Scarsdale, New York, her town, and she now gives speeches all over. And she told me when she gives these speeches, she says, “When I talk about my career path, it sounds like it was so intentional, and that you can tie it up with a bow. But, frankly, when you’re in the middle of it, when you’re in that struggle,” she said, “you have no idea where it’s going.”

And this is sort of that myth that we were talking about. Everybody else’s journey looks so nice and neat, and we feel like we’re the only ones who are a mess, but, frankly, we all go through that struggle.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we touched on a number of stories as examples here and there. Could you walk us through a story from beginning to end that you find the most clearly illustrative of these stages, “Hey, here’s the search, here’s the struggle, here’s the stop, here’s the solution”?

Joanne Lipman
Yes, okay. So, there’s a fabulous woman who I met, named Marla Ginsburg. So, Marla Ginsburg was a big-time television executive, and she had a great job, and she told me this story about how she got a promotion, she moves to California, gets the big house with the pool, and the nannies for the kids, the whole works, then comes a writers’ strike, and she loses the job.

And so, now she has to think about, “What am I going to do next?” And she says the only thing she can think of is she was always really interested in clothing design, and she’d always hoped to be, in her dream, her dream life was to be a television host. And she said the only problem was she didn’t know how to sew, she didn’t know how to design, and she’d never done television.

So, she, though, was in this struggle phase of, like, “What do I do next?” As she said, she was over 50 in a town that really prizes youth. Her old life, she could see, was fading away but she was in the midst of this struggle, saying, “How do I get to this new life?” And so, she went out, she bought a sewing machine at Sears, she Googled how to use it, and she Googled how to sew.

She Googled everything about design, she starts trying to put together these designs, and then she’s learning, she’s struggling, she’s hoping to get to this next step, and then she gets slammed again, that her son gets ill, he needs treatment. She no longer has insurance, and it’s one of those stop moments. He goes overseas, where her ex-husband is, to get treatment, and she follows.

She’s in a bar department, and this was her stop. She’s struggling, and now this is a dead stop. She is only there to be there for her son. And she said she was all alone, like while he was getting his treatments and such, she’s all by herself and she’s in a new place where she doesn’t know anybody. And she says, “You know, for some reason, during this moment, it was a dead stop, and yet,” she said, “my creativity just flourished.”

And she had all of these ideas about creating new designs and new ways that she could…she thought about the women who could use the designs for, particularly women in her age group, over 50 kinds of women, and she said it was the most creative period of her life. It was an amazing thing. Thankfully, her son recovered. She came back to the United States, she found a manufacturer, and fast forward to today, Marla Ginsburg is one of the biggest stars on Home Shopping Network.

She has a line called MarlaWynne. And PS, she is the face of MarlaWynne, so she, actually, made both of her dreams come true. She’s a clothing designer and she’s, essentially, a talk show host because you can find her on TV talking. And she’s awesome on TV talking about her designs. And it was an amazing thing to see for someone who went through such a struggle and had that stop that was just forced on her that was just horrendous, and yet that was…everything that happened to her was what allowed her to be what she considers the best expression of herself as a clothing designer and being on television.

So, so many stories work out in that manner. It’s been pretty amazing to speak to so many of these people from different walks of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a lovely story, and it’s cool to see the pattern and the life cycle there. Could you share with us some mistakes, things not to do when we are thinking about making a switch and reinventing?

Joanne Lipman
Yes. So, one thing is if you read all of the traditional business books, they will tell you, you have to have the goal in mind and work backwards. So, if you read like Think and Grow Rich or any of these books that have been around for many decades, that’s how they lay it out but, in fact, that is a myth also. Almost all of the people that I spoke to, some had a goal in mind, but many of the people that I spoke to kind of had the sort of circuitous paths. They would never imagine that this is where they would end up.

And so, one thing is to really keep an open mind. One of the best examples of that, sports fans will remember Len Elmore, who was on the Knicks and on the Pacers and various other teams, big basketball star in the ‘80s. And Len, after he retired, he actually went on to Harvard Law School, he’s had an illustrious career both as a commentator and also practicing law and management in sports.

And his stop was he turned 65 years old and he just had this just series of terrible things. He was hospitalized, and he had a terrible illness, which he had a heart attack. He was let go from his sports commentating job. So, he’s 65 and, suddenly, he’s done all of these, had this great career, and, suddenly, he’s like, “Wait a second. Who am I? What is my identity? What can I do?”

And he said, “I felt like I had so much more to offer.” And he said, “You know what I did, instead of saying ‘Here’s where I want to go’” he said, “I sat down and I actually wrote down what are all of the skills that I bring to the party. And then I looked to see what are opportunities I never would’ve thought of that my skills matched.”

And guess what? He ended up being, now, and he is currently a Columbia University professor, which is not the career he ever thought he would end up in when he was playing for the Knicks, but all of his skills, the fact that he had this law degree and had practice, and the fact he was interested in social justice with athletes, and his knowledge of sports management, all of it rolled into becoming a professor and a scholar, which is, again, not where he thought his career was taking him.

And we saw that a lot, but there are also things that you can do, which perhaps we want to talk about. Things that you can do to help figure out where it is that you want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. Let’s hear it.

Joanne Lipman
Yeah. Well, there’s a number but I’ll just mention three. So, the first is there is a concept that is called possible selves. This is a concept in psychology, a couple psychologists actually coined this phrase, and it means you’re imagining who you might be, who you might become. And that is something that a lot of people sort of felt was very helpful.

James Patterson told me that while he was an ad executive, he imagined himself as a bestselling novelist. It was the kind of thing, it seemed like a far-off dream. Marla Ginsburg did the same with thinking about being a clothing designer. But just imagining it isn’t sufficient. You actually want to do something. So, you want to either take some action as in a hobby or something.

But the second thing that I would say, because this ties in with this first idea of possible selves, is talk to what we would call, I’m calling an expert companion. Expert companion is somebody who knows you really, really well, who can reflect back to you what are your strengths that you may not even be aware of. Again, I saw this very frequently with people who, they’re so close to their own strengths that they don’t even see that they have them.

And then the third thing I would say is reach out to your network, particularly weak ties and dormant ties. And I think you’ve talked about this on the show before. Your most helpful career advice very often will come from, not from your direct circle – you kind of all know the same things and the same people – but from somebody who either you lost touch with, or somebody who you know tangentially. There’s been a lot of research that’s been done on this over the past 50 years. And for people who switched careers, the majority will tell you, it came through weak ties or dormant ties, people who you lost touch with.

There was a really cool experiment that was done fairly recently where executives were asked to reach out to try and solve a business problem that they had by reaching out to someone who they hadn’t spoken to in at least five years. And the results were quite remarkable. They were like, first of all, they got better advice than they got from their inner circle but, also, they just found that it was really gratifying to reconnect with these people.

And they also said, “It was also quite efficient because they could kind of pick up where they left off,” so you didn’t have that sort of awkward get-to-know-you kind of thing. They could kind of dive right into it. So, it was really a win-win for everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very cool. Well, Joanne, tell me. Anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Joanne Lipman
Yeah, you know what, there’s two things I want to mention, actually, that I came across that I think can be really helpful to people. I know you’ve done some shows about burnout. There’s a lot of burnout in this particular moment, and I think it is with the pandemic, it really did get people to rethink and reprioritize. And one of the things that I found, and I found this to be true in the research as well as with the people I talked to, is listen to your gut.

If your gut is telling you you’re not in the right place, listen. It turns out there’s a lot of research behind gut instinct, and very often your gut instinct is correct. And I would also say give yourself a break. This is also so important. When I talk about that stop phase, sometimes it was somebody who either shows to take a career break or had one forced on them when they were, let’s say, laid off.

And every piece of research will tell you that when you take that break, it is a way for your brain to reset, but also when you’re not so actively thinking and focusing and losing sleep over trying to solve a problem, that is when your brain is at its best. When the thoughts that are swirling around in your head can coalesce into some fabulous new idea.

And, by the way, and I think a lot of listeners probably know this, but you cannot say it enough that it’s so important, even during the course of your day, take a walk, take a break. One of the great pieces of advice I got was what we call the 90-minute rule. And the 90-minute rule is if you’re working on a project, you focus intensely on it with no distractions for 90 minutes. So, you turn off the cellphone and you don’t look at your email, you just focus on whatever you’re doing, this task at hand, for 90 minutes. But then, after 90 minutes, you must take a break.

And it doesn’t matter what you do during your break. You can go for a run, you can eat something, you can do whatever you feel like doing but you have to take that break, and then you can do another 90-minute segment. And you can do about three of these in one day and get far more work done than if you just, like, sit at your desk and stare at your computer for eight hours.

There’s the famous research that was done that Malcolm Gladwell popularized about you need 10,000 hours, but the professor who actually did that research on the 10,000 hours, that was only one piece of what makes you an expert. The other piece of it was exactly what I just talked about, which is that his research was on violinists that needed 10,000 hours to be an expert. But what these violinists did is they practiced for 90 minutes, they took a break, they practiced for another 90 minutes, and they did it no more than three times a day. So, it’s so important to take that break to allow your brain to reset.

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

Joanne Lipman
Absolutely. I don’t know who said this but I repeat it almost every day, which is, “If something is bothering you, and it won’t matter five years from today, it doesn’t matter now.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And we heard about a favorite study, so how about a favorite book?

Joanne Lipman
So, favorite book, my favorite book of all time is Anna Karenina. However, I would say there’s a book that I absolutely love that I highly recommend called The Eureka Factor, and it’s by two academics, John Kounios and Mark Beeman, who are the reigning experts on aha moments, why they happen, and how you can have more of them.

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

Joanne Lipman
Yeah, one that I came across while researching the book is a CV of Failure. And I found that people who are highly successful, some of them, there’s an academic who I met along the way, who, she said the best thing she ever did was she sat down and created a resume, not of all her great successes, but of everything she failed at, every research project she didn’t get, or grant she didn’t get, and every rejection she got.

And she said it was really helpful in helping her understand, first of all, all the amazing things she tried, but also it helped her understand where her strengths were, and it actually led her to a different field of research. So, I love the idea of a CV of Failure.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Joanne Lipman
My favorite habit is definitely the 90-minute rule that I referred to earlier. I use it every day.

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

Joanne Lipman
Yes. Yes. I was once asked, “What advice would you give to your younger self?” and I said, “Exhale.” I hear that all the time. All the time. The idea that we get so caught up in our careers, and we worry so much about the future, and just if you exhale.

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

Joanne Lipman
My website is JoanneLipman.com, and you can find Next!: The Power of Reinvention in Life and Work on Amazon or anywhere where you buy books.

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

Joanne Lipman
Two things related. First is if you have a hobby or an interest or something that you think possibly you might be interested in, take action, learn about it, talk about it, follow somebody in the field. And second, and so related to this, is be open to the unexpected. You never know where your interests may take you. And for the people who I interviewed for Next! so many of them ended up in places they never dreamed, and they’re so much more fulfilled in their careers because of it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Joanne, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and many quality reinventions.

Joanne Lipman
Thank you, and you as well. This has been a terrific conversation.

Mar 20
0

849: How to Build Better Teams through Better Inclusion with Sally Helgesen

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Sally Helgesen says: "It’s easier to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting."

Sally Helgesen provides practical ways to foster solidarity and inclusion rather than division.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The merits of true inclusivity.
  2. Why it pays to give the benefit of the doubt.
  3. How to manage your triggers effectively.

About Sally

Sally Helgesen, cited in Forbes as the world’s premier expert on women’s leadership, is an internationally best-selling author, speaker and leadership coach, honored by the Thinkers 50 Hall of Fame. Her most recent book, How Women Rise, co-authored with Marshall Goldsmith, examines the behaviors most likely to get in the way of successful women, and its rights have been sold in 22 languages.

Her previous books include The Female Advantage: Women’s Ways of Leadership, hailed as the classic in its field and continuously in print since 1990, and The Female Vision: Women’s Real Power at Work, which explores how women’s strategic insights can strengthen their careers. The Web of Inclusion: A New Architecture for Building Great Organizations, was cited in The Wall Street Journal as one of the best books on leadership of all time and is credited with bringing the language of inclusion into business.

Resources Mentioned

Sally Helgesen Interview Transcript

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

Sally Helgesen
Thank you, Pete. It’s wonderful to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your book Rising Together: How We Can Bridge Divides and Create a More Inclusive Workplace. Well, Sally, I’d love to kick it off by hearing about a particularly surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discovery you’ve made along the way when it comes to this inclusion stuff since you’ve been studying it for quite some time.

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, Pete, I’d say the thing that most jumps out at me is that the approach to inclusive culture that’s taken in many organizations, which focuses on unconscious bias, is possibly the least effective focus that we can take. And I know a lot of people have been through unconscious bias trainings, and sometimes they can stir real insights, and sometimes they can make us pretty angry, but whatever the response, they usually don’t lead us with much of a path forward to creating more inclusive relationships, getting along better with people we perceive of as different from ourselves, or creating inclusive teams or cultures in the organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s intriguing. Let’s dig into that. And maybe, first, just to make sure we’re all on the same page with regard to terms. What do we mean by being inclusive, fundamentally?

Sally Helgesen
I think an inclusive culture, whether it’s a team, whether it’s an organization, whether it’s a community, we always know it because it is one in which the largest possible percentage of people feel that they are valued for their potential, not just their contributions, so they really feel seen and feel as if they are part of a ‘we’ not a ‘they.’ So, it’s a real cultural belonging in that sense, and that’s why it’s kind of the acid test. If you have a culture and people talk about the organization, say, or the team as a ‘they,’ you can be pretty sure that they’re not perceiving it as inclusive.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful, or corporate, or ‘they,’ it’s like the other folks.

Sally Helgesen
Yup, exactly. So, there’s no possible way that the person who’s using the word ‘they’ perceives themselves as really seen or valued, and so that’s how we know.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, fundamentally, what are some of the key drivers that get in the way of having a real big ‘we’?

Sally Helgesen
A lot of times people are concerned about, or shy about, or fearful of saying things, for what they might imagine would offend somebody who they perceive as having a different background, different values, people across gender, race, age, ethnicity, etc., so people may feel and sort of do a self-censuring so they don’t really feel like they’re being themselves when they’re talking to people who they perceive as being different. And then the other person picks up on that and recognizes that they’re rather stiff because of this perception of difference. So, that’s one of the things that can get in the way.

On the other hand, another thing that can get in the way is we can have an awareness of what someone else might perceive as problematic. So, a lot of it comes down to both of those situations I’m describing, is trying to read other people’s minds and figure out what they might be thinking. Much better to be really transparent and to just ask questions, “How do you like to be spoken to? How do you like to…? What enables you to bring your best talents to work? What talents do you have that may not be viewed? Is there anything that really upsets you when people say it?”

Those kinds of conversations are really helpful at building relationships across boundaries in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you say something that often is not getting the job done is unconscious bias training. Could you paint a picture for what does unconscious bias training look, sound, feel like in practice so folks can sort of recognize that, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I did one of those a few years ago”? And then why isn’t it getting the job done?

Sally Helgesen
Well, what it looks like in practice often, and, of course, there is some unconscious bias training is more effective than others, but, basically, what it looks like is people being asked, either through a test or through a conversation to understand where they might have biases, prejudices, beliefs about people. It can be anything. It can be gender or race, but it could also be people with tattoos on their necks or whatever it is.

So, something that really tests and helps you identify what your beliefs are is where it’s focused. And that can be fine as far as it goes, but there’s no how there, there’s no, “How do you move forward from that?” As someone I worked with once said, “It’s all aha moment, and no ‘now what?’ We don’t know how to proceed.”

And what I’ve tried to do in Rising Together and in the work I’ve been doing, generally, for decades is focus on the how, what are the practices. People perceive us based on our behaviors not on our biases. Really, whatever happens to be running through our heads at the time, that’s how they’re impacted, that’s how they’re affected.

So, I think a stronger approach is to start by practicing more inclusive behaviors with people. It’s also easier to, as I like to say, to act our way into new ways of thinking as opposed to thinking our way into new ways of acting, because once we try out something, we may learn something about it. And so, then we’ll think, “Okay.”

Well, for example, you might think, “Well, this person seems to be this way.” And then you have a conversation with them, and you realize that your presumption was wrong. But if you were trying first to address what was in your head, what your thoughts were, you wouldn’t have any evidence to begin changing.

So, it’s interesting that we seem to often get it backward. We think we need to change our minds so that we can change our behaviors rather than change our behaviors so that we can change our minds.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is powerful, Sally. And I was just about to ask, if some folks have had the unconscious bias training, and they had the aha moments, but not the ‘now what?’ I was just going to ask, so folks have determined, “Okay, I’ve got some unconscious bias against people with tattoos, or trans people, or Trump voters,” I mean, you name it, you have some unconscious bias about any grouping of folk. What is the ‘now what?’ And maybe it sounds like your answer is maybe don’t even bother to think yourself into new ways of acting. Is that fair? Or are there some useful thought-to-action approaches as well?

Sally Helgesen
No, I think it should be action to thought rather than thought to action. It can really keep us stuck because when we’re thinking, “Well, what about this person? Or, what if they…?” etc. So, I would really recommend in those situations going to action. We’ve all had this experience where you go into a store and it looks like you’re going to have a slightly hostile encounter.

So, you practice being almost aggressively nice to that person. You act as if you never noticed any hostility from them. You act as if they were treating you superbly, “Thank you. Thank you. I really appreciate that,” without being too sucky-up but acting as if you don’t notice that they’re treating you in a slightly disrespectful way.

Often, not always, but often they will kind of…you’ll be cuing them, “Oh, yeah, you know, I am a nice person. This person, okay, they seem to be responding to me in a positive way.” And nine times out of ten, they’ll switch their response to you. I know, I’ve watched this be true throughout my life. Somebody’s water is dripping down from their bathtub in an apartment above mine, and I know it’s because they were having kind of a lost weekend, and I knock on the door, and say, “I can’t believe you would…” and all that kind of stuff. Well, it’s going to escalate.

If I go up there and trying to diffuse the situation by giving them the benefit of the doubt, “I’m sure you didn’t realize this but the water in your bathtub overflowed and it’s doing whatever it is. And I’m sure this isn’t something that you had any awareness of,” then they’ll, “Oh, well, okay. I’m so sorry,” etc. We don’t do this, and part of the issue in the workplace today is people are kind of primed to be on the search often for microaggressions or, “Does that person think…?” or, “What about their response?” and so we’re not accustomed to diffusing those situations. We feel like we have to react to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was going to ask specifically about getting people a benefit of the doubt. I think most folks are, generally, familiar with what that phrase means. But could you expand upon, in practice, what are the thoughts, the assumptions, the practices, that one embodies when they are just habitually giving people the benefit of the doubt as their default way of being?

Sally Helgesen
Well, I’m not advocating passivity because passivity, when we do that…what I’m really talking about is being able to write a script for yourself. Okay, somebody, let’s talk about gender. So, a woman thinks, “Oh, men just can’t listen to women.” She feels unheard in a situation, “Men just can’t listen to women.” If we just kind of passively accept that, or grab a friend and complain, “I can’t believe that guy. Men can’t…” etc. that’s not an approach that’s going to be helpful.

But often, just saying, “You weren’t listening to me. Men can never listen to women,” that’s not a good path forward either. So, we want a way to give that person the benefit of the doubt. So, in our head, we can write a script, “You know, maybe he couldn’t hear what I was saying because there was noise in the room,” or, “Maybe I didn’t phrase this using language that was that familiar to him. I think I’ll give it another shot.”

Then you go to the person and you say, “I noted that you didn’t seem to hear what I said in that meeting, and I figured it might be helpful to you if I were to rephrase it,” and then you do that. Well, usually, they’re not going to say, “No, I didn’t hear what you said because I wasn’t interested,” or “because I have a terrible time hearing women.” Generally, they’re going to say, “Oh, okay, thank you.” Then you have a way to begin a constructive situation. So, it’s neither defensive nor is it passive.

Now, what is so remarkable, and I’ve used this in coaching for quite a while, what is so remarkable about this technique of writing a new script is that it is effective whether or not we believe that person really earned the benefit of the doubt. If we think that they might have intentionally said something to us in a way that bothered us, or if we think this is part of a pattern with them that they never really listen to us in a fruitful or effective way, even if we think that, if we write that script and then act as if we believe it, it will usually serve us better than the stock response or negative script that we’ve been invested in, in the past.

It will usually serve us better and it will also give us a path to potentially building more of a relationship with that person where they could serve in some way as an ally for us, and we could serve as an ally for them. So, it’s very effective even if we don’t necessarily buy it. And knowing that you don’t necessarily buy it is where part of your power lies in doing this because it’s not a Pollyanna, “Oh, they must be a wonderful person even though…” It’s a very realistic testing and probing to see, to discern an alternate path so that you can connect with that person.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That’s beautiful. Thank you. Well, now I want to hear, in your book Rising Together, you identify eight common triggers that undermine our ability to connect. Could you first define what do you mean by trigger? And then could you give us the quick rundown of each of these eight?

Sally Helgesen
Sure. What I mean by trigger is any situation or stimulus in our environment that stirs an emotional response in us.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is this a negative emotion response?

Sally Helgesen
It can be a negative or it can be a positive response. It could be positive as well as negative.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “I’m delighted by this.”

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
“You triggered delight in me, Sally.” Okay.

Sally Helgesen
Wonderful, Pete. I’m so glad to hear it. So, they can be negative or they can be positive, but it’s the negative ones, obviously, that are more likely to undermine us in the workplace, so that’s why I’m focusing on triggers that can often stir a negative response. But what’s important to recognize is that they’re environmental. They happen in the environment so we can’t really control what triggers us.

They lie outside our circle of control, if you will. We can only find a more effective way to manage them than we may already be doing. So, I think we waste our time by trying to create an environment in which we are shielded from any potential triggers, and that’s what’s happened to a lot of younger people coming into the workplace because, in their colleges and universities, there’s such an emphasis on trigger warning, etc.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, really?

Sally Helgesen
Guess what? Our environment is always going to give us trigger warnings. What we need is to understand an effective way to address them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you then share with us some of these common triggers?

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, a couple of them that really stand out, one is visibility, which we don’t necessarily think of as a trigger but it really can operate, and it can operate in a number of ways. Number one, we can feel triggered by people we feel are very good at being visible, “Oh, he’s such a showboat. He’s always talking about himself. He’s that kind of person. I’m a wonderful person. I’m not like that.”

Or, we can just simply feel triggered by our own lack of visibility, “Oh, nobody ever notices me. I guess I’m just not the kind of person who grabs attention. Oh, well, I know that I’m a good person, and this, that, or the other, couple of my friends like me,” but we’re being triggered by that, by that reaction. Or, we can, if we are really good at it, and I’ve seen this with senior executives I’ve worked with, if we’re really good at it, we can be triggered by people who are not good at positioning themselves to be visible.

We think we can dismiss them, “Oh, well, he’s not a player. He’s not very good at bragging on himself or tooting his own horn. He seems to have some moralistic inhibition against doing it, so I’m not going to waste my time with him.” I heard that a lot from people who are good at it. So, it can trigger us in all kinds of ways.

But, here, you see this is a really good demonstration of how triggers work. What they do is they stir up a kind of automatic or stock response in us, “Well, he’s a showboat. I don’t want to be like him.” And I’ve heard people say this for years, “Yeah, well, if I act out like that jerk down the hall to get noticed in this organization, no, thank you.” Why is he a jerk, because he gets noticed? Maybe learn from him.

So, they stir up a stock response, and then that response keeps us from being able to think of a more positive way to address the situation, “Hmm, okay, I see that I am being triggered by that person’s skill at getting noticed. I wouldn’t necessarily want to use the same techniques, but I think that there is probably something I can learn here. Maybe I’m going to start watching him and thinking about how I might rephrase things he says in a different way, a way that’s more comfortable for me.”

“So, for example, if he’s saying, ‘Well, I had that client eating out of my hand,’ we might think, ‘Okay, that’s helpful.’ Maybe it would be more useful for me to phrase it, ‘Well, that client and I really bonded together.” But it’s helpful to understand and watch what he’s doing in a constructive way so that we’re rewriting that script, “Hey, here’s someone I can learn from.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful in terms of the notion of our automatic response, and it just closes down the whole universe of possibility and opportunity. And I think we do this all the time with so many things.

Sally Helgesen
We do. We do.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell us, Sally, what are some ways to catch ourselves in the moment regardless of what the trigger is?

Sally Helgesen
Well, I think, number one, when we recognize ourselves going into telling ourselves a story that’s kind of negative and defensive, or telling ourselves, in particular, a story that’s very self-serving about who we are, “Well, I’m not the kind of person who would ever…” The minute we hear ourselves telling ourselves that kind of story in our heads, we should recognize that, “Ah, okay, I’m probably being triggered.”

“Now what is triggering me here? In this case, it’s the fact that I feel that that person is better at getting noticed than I am. Okay, that’s triggering me. How could I rewrite this or take a different path of action that would be more helpful to me, that would serve me better and might also help me figure out a way to connect better with this person instead of, judgmentally, dismissing them?”

So, defensiveness, judgment, self-serving narratives, these are all keys that we are being triggered. And if we want to address them, we should take heed and then think about how we might more skillfully and usefully respond.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so given those things to be on the look out for, could you share with us another one of the common triggers called ‘that’s not funny’?

Sally Helgesen
‘That’s not funny.’ Exactly. These are triggers that are based around humor. And humor has become, I think, are really challenging thing to deal with in today’s workplace because people have different perceptions in terms of what they think is funny. Also, jokes, especially jokes that would’ve been acceptable and thought of as sort of fresh and interesting a number of years ago, now have a way of giving offense to a lot of people. And that has made humor, to some degree, really challenging in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Sally, could you give us an example of a joke or piece of humor or reference that might’ve been fine and dandy five to ten years ago, and now is, ooh, risky business?

Sally Helgesen
Yeah, any joke that has to do with gender, lots of jokes that were in the workplace – I don’t want to necessarily repeat them right now – that had to do with women who were sort of hot quantities or a presumption that men were always trying to seduce women in one way or another, those kinds of jokes. I came of age; I was in the Mad Men era when I started working. I worked in advertising and it was really like Mad Men, and there were all kinds of stuff that, today, would get somebody fired on the spot that was happening.

So, there are a lot of people who kind of come from that era, or just a bit afterwards, when it was sort of rock and roll time, and anything would go. And there could be jokes about who somebody picked up at the bar last night. Well, that’s fine, that was then, but now that’s going to rile up a lot of people. Anything that pertains specifically to someone’s looks or appearances is really out of bounds. Even very simple things.

Like one example I give in the book, which is a classic sort of golf joke where the husband comes home, and the wife said, “Well, how did it go?” And he said, “Well, it was fine until the sixth hole when Charlie had a heart attack.” And the wife says, “Oh, poor Charlie. What happened?” And he said, “Well, he expired on the sixth hole, so it really was a drag after that because it was all hit the ball, drag Charlie, hit the ball, drag Charlie.”

I heard this joke told probably far too many times at various conferences in Palm Springs, right up through the ‘90s into the end of the last century, as it were. And people would always laugh, depending on if the joke teller, number one, was skilled in telling it, and, number two, if he had a high-enough rank in the organization, everybody would yuck it up. But today it wouldn’t work.

For example, a lot of younger people would think, “How is this relevant? It sounds like the wife is at home waiting for the husband to come back from a golf game. This isn’t a situation I identify with.” Or, people who had had a relative who had a heart attack would be prone to think, “Well, that’s not funny.” That wasn’t how people thought 30, 40, 50 years ago. It just wasn’t.

So, people need to be a little more careful but, very importantly, we cannot ban humor from the workplace. We absolutely can’t do it. It is one of the most important qualities that helps people bond and create relationships, and it makes work more fun, so we can’t get into a very uptight situation where we’re constantly scanning the room to think, “Who could this offend? Who could this offend? Oh, better not do this. Oh, better keep my mouth shut.”

Much better is to create an environment where we look at things that are obviously meant to be offensive, and there are a lot of them, and things that might misfire a little bit, like that ‘hit the ball, drag Charlie’ joke. They might misfire, somebody thinks, “Wow, so and so just had a heart attack. How is that going to play with them?”

And we need to be, I think, a little less hard on people, unless we perceive that they were really trying to be provocative and offensive. It’s also important to try to find the humor in situations rather than dragging in jokes, because jokes rely for their power on their capacity to be provocative and, to some degree, outrageous. They cross boundaries. That’s what they do. That’s where that sort of twist that makes a joke funny comes from.

And so, having an awareness that, “Let’s find the humor in our situation,” in self-deprecating humor, making fun of yourself, not too much, but enough when something goes wrong, when you say something stupid, that is especially effective if you’re in a position with some degree of power.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Sally, we talked about a few behaviors and habits that are great in terms of giving people the benefit of the doubt, and watching yourself and your triggers, and if you’re just riling people off, and constructing self-flattering narratives that are defensive left and right. Are there any other key inclusive behaviors that make a world of difference for folks in organizations?

Sally Helgesen
Oh, certainly. One of the things that I really heard a lot about when I was working on the book was the power of nominating other people for awards. And one of the women I interviewed, she said, “I really learned a lot about creating allies from a much older executive when I was very early in my career. And this executive came up to me, and he said, ‘I am trying to see if I can get a certain number of nominations for some big award in the industry.’ And he said, ‘I’m wondering if you would nominate me.’”

So, she said she was shocked on two fronts. Number one, she said she was shocked because she didn’t know that that’s how it was done, that people who got awards often lobbied for it. She said, “I just thought they got awards.” She said, “I never really thought it through.” She was early in her career at that time.

But she said, “I was also astonished that someone who was at such a senior level would ask someone junior like me.” She said, “Again, that really, really…I didn’t know you could do that.” She said it made her very aware that this is something that you can do that earns you tremendous gratitude from your colleagues. It’s not only agreeing to nominate them but volunteering to nominate them, “You know, you’ve really been in this job, and I saw that…” whatever it is, whatever entity it is “…is taking nominations for people who are outstanding in our sector. I thought that I might nominate you. How would that be?”

Well, this is something that people really, really respond to. And, again, I think it’s important to recognize that this is something that we can do really early in our careers. We can also ask people what would be helpful to them. And, again, we can do this even if we’re very junior in our career. We can recognize that part of our job is always going to be trying to make our bosses, our leaders, the people we work for, part of our job is making them look good, so we can be clear about this.

So, we can say, “I understand that I want you to look good in this initiative. Is there anything I can do that would be especially useful to you in letting the people in the organization know what a terrific job our team is doing, and, therefore, you, as our team leader.” So, asking a question like that can really be eye-opening and it does a couple of things.

“You solicit my ideas for how you could be helpful,” but it also suggests to the person that you say that to, that you really understand how things work in an organization, and that you’re not naïve about it. You understand and accept that part of your job is making them look good. So, that kind of puts you on a different footing than you might’ve been before.

Of course, there are plenty of things senior people can do as well, “What talents do you have that you feel you may not be using? Do you have any skills in this job that you would particularly like to develop? Is there anybody you would like to meet that I might know who could be helpful to you in the future?” Those kinds of questions, we don’t ask those kinds of questions enough wherever we are in our careers.

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

Sally Helgesen
A couple of things I do want to mention is it’s very hard to try to identify when we’re being triggered and then think of a different path of action. And we will always be more successful at it if we are bringing other people along on our journey. This is part of this theme of asking, of saying, “You know, one thing I’m really trying to work on…”

Fairness is a trigger in the book we didn’t talk about, “One thing I’m really trying to work on is coming to a better understanding of what is fair and what isn’t fair in this organization because I realize that I often think something is unfair but it may not be as unfair as I think it is, or I often recognize that something is actually much more unfair than I was thinking it was. Can I bounce my ideas off you once I have a perception about this and kind of get your thoughts on it?”

So, it’s a kind of seat-of-the-pants pure coaching where we engage other people in our own development. In this case, our development as we try to think about what undermines us in terms of building strong relationships really broadly.

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

Sally Helgesen
I think a favorite quote of mine, because it’s one that I use virtually every day, and I referenced it a bit earlier, comes from the really terrific old self-help book by Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And it was, “Always seek to discern what lies within your circle of control, and to align it with your circle of concern.”

In other words, don’t waste your time trying to address whatever concerns you but you can’t control. And, in fact, probably don’t spend too much time being concerned about it if you can’t control it.

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

Sally Helgesen
I would say that the research done by Daniel Kahneman, who basically invented the whole field of behavioral economics, about how people don’t always, or even often do what really serves their own long-term interests, that we’re often a lot more irrational and reactive in terms of how we respond to everything, ranging from how we manage our financial lives, to the decisions we make about where we live or how we interact with our families, that we often make decisions that don’t serve our own interests.

And I think this work was so important because it brought a whole recognition of the fact that humans are not as rational as they imagine themselves to be into the discussion. And, in fact, that’s really influenced a lot of my thinking about how triggers operate. We tend to be triggered by things and respond in ways that do not serve our interests.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Sally Helgesen
I think my favorite book, in fact, I know this because I start most of my days reading it, is Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, which translates as a manual for power. It is a complete listing of deeply counterintuitive insights about the nature of power and how we use it, especially in the RW Wing translation. I find it a fantastic way to begin every day. Real insights into human behavior and how to understand human behavior but also use it in ways that serve what we’re trying to be and contribute in the world.

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

Sally Helgesen
What I use to be awesome at my job is basically Word documents. I’m a writer and my preferred method for communicating with the world is, and always has been since I was a little child, writing. And I find Word such an improvement upon typewriters, and that sort of stuff we used to use to erase words on typewriters. So, I just absolutely love it and couldn’t live without it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Sally Helgesen
My favorite habit, I think, is my ability to admit vulnerability. When I don’t have a skill, when I’m not good at something, I don’t try to cover it up. And I think that really helps me. I deal with a lot of things all day long, and if I had to spend energy trying to pretend I was good at what I’m not good at, I don’t think I’d have much success.

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

Sally Helgesen
I think it relates to something that I said earlier, that it’s easier to act our way into new ways of thinking than to think our way into new ways of acting. Since my work has been focused upon the ‘hows’ for the last 35, 40 years, that really resonates with me. I think we want to act in thoughtful ways, learn from how we act, and then let that shape what our opinions and our views are.

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

Sally Helgesen
Well, to my website, SallyHelgesen.com. And I’m active on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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

Sally Helgesen
Yes, I do. Being awesome at your job requires a little bit of humility, a little bit of willingness to recognize when your stock responses do not serve you, but it doesn’t require self-effacement. We should never equate being humble with being humiliated. We can be humble and acknowledge what we need to learn without beating ourselves up or telling ourselves a negative story about who we are or what we’re trying to do in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sally, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in rising.

Sally Helgesen
Thank you, Pete. Thank you so much.

Nov 18
0

721: How to Balance Caregiving with Your Career with Liz O’Donnell

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Liz O'Donnell says: "Sometimes the most important work we do is not in the cube or an office; it is at home."

Liz O’Donnell shares her tips on how to deal with the stresses of taking care of your aging parents while managing your career.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The mindset that eases the burden of caregiving 
  2. The most important thing you can do when things get overwhelming
  3. The motto to remember when times get tough 

About Liz

Liz O’Donnell is the founder of Working Daughter, a community for women balancing eldercare, career, and more. An award-winning writer, her book, Working Daughter: A Guide to Caring for Your Aging Parents While Earning A Living, was named one of the Best Books of 2019 by Library Journal. 

Liz is a recognized expert on working while caregiving and has written on the topic for many outlets including The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Forbes, TIME, WBUR and PBS’ Next Avenue, and has been featured in Health and Ozy Media. She also works with companies to create programs in support of working caregivers.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Liz O'Donnell Interview Transcript

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

Liz O’Donnell
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. It is a tricky topic that a few listeners have requested and you are one of the top experts in the field, so maybe you can orient us a bit. What’s the backstory behind the book Working Daughter?

Liz O’Donnell
The backstory is that both of my parents were diagnosed with terminal illnesses on the exact same day. So, I went from one hospital where the team told me my father had Alzheimer’s and could never go home. And before I even left the parking lot after that meeting, I got a call from another hospital where my mother had been brought a couple of days before, it was stomach pains, and they told me she had ovarian cancer and probably three months to live, and could I come right away and we could tell her together the news.

And I was working full time at a marketing agency, I had two kids in elementary school, I had my first book that had just come out, and I already thought I was as busy as could be, and I felt completely alone and completely unprepared, and working through elder care was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. So, I vowed no one else should feel this way.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, that’s powerful. And thank you for sharing your story and your journey with us here, and the book to enrich folks. Boy, what a day. So, tell us maybe a little bit of the story in terms of a little bit of the ups and downs and key best practices and discoveries you made that somehow make it possible to make things kind of still somehow work?

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah. Well, I’ll start backwards, I’ll start at the end. And the end was realizing that sometimes the most important work we do is not in the cube or an office; it is at home. And so, we have to forgive ourselves when we’re not on our career paths because I was the breadwinner in my family. My husband and I had an agreement that he would be home with the kids and I would go to work. And I laugh now thinking, “What was I thinking?” But at one point, I was all in on my career so I couldn’t not show up for work. And I worked for a small company, and I was really lucky that I had paid time off and I had flexibility because so many caregivers don’t.

And so, I had all of these things going for me as far as trying to make this work but, again, probably the hardest thing I ever had to do. I lost a lot of influence at work. I lost key clients. I still had a seat at the table but I could tell that my voice didn’t carry as much weight. And so, like I said, if I start at the end, I just had to really forgive myself and realize that, one, you should never feel guilty for showing up for your family, and, two, you should never feel guilty for having to go to work and earn a living. And in between, do the best you can.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we definitely want to hear a little bit about sort of the how one forgives one’s self because that’s so much easier said than done. But, first, can we hear a little bit about sort of, in practice, in terms of like at the ground level, how is it that you lost influence at work and key clients? Like, how did that translation unfold?

Liz O’Donnell
The next six months of my life after those two diagnoses, I can only describe them as completely wild. I had an Excel spreadsheet, I had at the time 196 items on it. I would wake up every morning and highlight the ones that had to happen that day. So, it’s things like I had to find a memory care facility for my dad. My mom was an hour away but, now that she had a terminal diagnosis, I wanted to move her closer to me but I wasn’t moving her in with me, “So, was I moving them to the same facility?” They had different care needs. I was digesting these two diagnoses and what they meant and trying to learn about them.

I end up moving my parents four times. So, if you can imagine four phone calls to the phone company for a hookup and four calls for a change, so that alone, I think, could kill a person, waiting on line on hold for the phone company, and medications, and hiring nurses, and looking for wills, and I had no sense of their financial package, so literally digging through Rubbermaid bins where my parents, who were Depression-era, which meant they kept everything. So, digging through trying to figure out what their financial picture was, what they could afford, if they had burial plots, like all of that stuff had to happen every day.

And so, I don’t know how else to describe it but I was kind of a mess. And in the middle of all of this, or on top of all of this, I still had to show up at this very demanding job. And so, as I said, I was really lucky in that I had flexibility. So, I went to my boss and asked if I could extend my flex time and my paid time off, basically, so that I didn’t take any one chunk of time off but every week I would set a new schedule, and that was such a God-send.

But that’s one thing, I know I’m kind of jumping ahead, but one thing that when people think about elder care in the workplace, they think, “Well, it’s like child care.” But assuming you have a healthy child, child care is much more predictable. You know when your kid will start preschool, and when they’ll start kindergarten, and when they’ll start first grade, and when their vacations will be, and when their well-checks at the doctor will be, and you can put all that on a calendar.

With elder care, I didn’t know, “Was my mother going to live three months? Was my dad going to live ten years? When were these moments that I needed to drop everything and show up? When were they going to happen?” And so, I was flaky.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. So, flaky as in you ended up making additional errors and not following through on some commitments at work due the sheer overwhelm and stress of all this stuff happening unpredictably day after day.

Liz O’Donnell
Absolutely. The hardest thing I think was caring about work. As I said, at one point when my husband and I were planning a family, I was like, “I love my job. I’m not giving it up.” And now, here I am, and I’m literally dealing with life and death, end-of-life decisions, and the fact knowing that my parents…we all know our parents are going to die someday, we’re all going to die someday, but now it’s imminent and it’s being discussed.

And to show up at work and care about you’re on conference calls and people are like circling back, and parallel pathing, and strategic paradigm shifts, and it’s like, “People are dying. I don’t care about any of this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow. Well, Liz, you’ve really painted quite a picture in terms of so that’s what life…that’s what the experience of life was like in the midst of that. And so then, you learned a few things in terms of some principles and some practices and some tools in order to cope with that, whether our listeners are specifically dealing with exactly this, parent elder care, or other realms of illness or wild stress and unpredictability in the personal life.

Share with us, what are some of the key principles and practices? You mentioned forgiveness, and so just to make sure we don’t lose it because it sounds huge, tell us, how does one go about forgiving one’s self? Because I think it might be easier to know intellectually, “Hey, this is a difficult time right now, there’s some special unique demands that need my attention, they’re very important, and so I’m going to need to tend to those.” And, yet, we could still feel some guilt about the tradeoffs that we have no choice to make. So, how do you wrestle with that?

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah. To be perfectly transparent, I don’t think I came to this conclusion, forgave myself, until later when I was writing about the experience. And, for me, it’s through writing I realized what I was thinking. So, if people are wrestling with it right now and not figuring out how to do it, I would say you’re right on path. You’re totally normal. Don’t beat yourself up.

You asked me, well, your question has a lot of parts to it, so I’ll start with the practical stuff that I learned at work. And what I learned at work is that I needed to be prepared every day for an emergency. So, years prior, I went out on maternity leave twice. And leading up to maternity leave, which, again, is predictable. You get a date. It might not be the exact date but you kind of know when you’re going out on leave. And so, I started to keep a running list of projects and what the status was, and I made it really easy for whoever was going to fill in for me to be able to fill in for me.

When I got these two diagnoses and when this crisis first sort of erupted in my family, my house, if you will, at work, was not in order. I hadn’t filed an expense report in months. I was storing stuff on my hard drive, not on the Google Drive or the server. I wasn’t really good about cc’ing co-workers. So, one of the things I learned through the whole experience – my dad lived for, I don’t know, maybe another five years, so I was a caregiver for quite a while – was to always keep your house in order, and, like I said, keep stuff on the hard drive, I mean, on the Google Docs and Google Drive, and cc everybody in the company, and make it really easy for your co-workers to help you out.

And then just know. I was a Gen X worker with a lot of younger millennial co-workers, so they had not been through this experience yet. They also hadn’t seen all the equity I had built into my career, the years of sweat equity, to sort of earn that flexibility. They just knew that this older woman was a flake. She was leaving a lot, just taking lots of personal calls. I just had to trust in the process that we don’t always get to see what comes around but know that someday they would experience it too, and that there’s just sort of this cosmic payback in the workplace. And maybe my reputation was taking a hit with them and they didn’t understand what I was going through, but there had been people ahead of me that I had filled in for, and there are going to be people later that you need to be filled in.

So, a lot of it was mindset. So, there were those practical things I did at work to hopefully make it easier for people to cover for me, but a lot of it was just mindset, constantly telling myself, “This is okay. This is normal, and you really can’t worry about your reputation at work right now. It’s is not the most important thing.” And death has a way of kind of giving you perspective.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And that’s beautiful as we’re talking about forgiveness. So, it’s not only forgiving yourself, but then forgiving others and the co-workers. Like, if you see them, I don’t know, gossiping or chattering about you, or maybe just a look on their face, or whatever, that a subtle or not too subtle contempt or frustration, that that is a beautiful perspective in terms of not so much like, “I hate them, they suck,” but rather, “Hey, you might not realize it yet, but there will come a day when you, too, need and will appreciate this flexibility, and right now happens to be my time. And so, that’s where we are.”

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah. And that’s easier said than done, and part of that is because we all have so many jobs now. It’s not like we’re all working at the same company for 20 or 30 years and we sort of evolved together. So, I had to know that I might never see my co-workers go through this. They did not see my early stages of my career in sort of a, “So, what now?” kind of perspective. And I don’t mean to minimize this process because I think, for many of us who are career-oriented, being mediocre at work is really hard. It’s a big adjustment.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know what, that reminds me of, this is under the most random of connections, but I think it was Ronda Rousey, the ultimate fighter, who was defeated and she gave an interview. She’s very vulnerable in which she just started crying, and she’s like, “If I’m not this, what am I or who am I?” in terms of her identity was so wrapped up in like winning and victory and being a champion. And that can happen amongst folks who like being awesome at their jobs when there’s a period of time in which the environment is not so conducive to awesomeness at the moment.

And so, you shared a couple mindset bits. Did you have any other kind of phrases, or mantras, or mottos, or kind of go-to things you reminded yourself of in those moments?

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah so, prior to the crisis, the two diagnoses, my parents were needing more and more care, and I was finding it quite disruptive to my life and my career. I was working. I was traveling. On the weekends, I want to be with my kids. I was spending at least one day a weekend helping my parents with shopping and bills and mowing the lawn and all of that stuff, and I was really resentful of it.

And I remember after this crisis and coming home that night after being at the two hospitals, and it was really late by the time I got home, everyone was in bed, and I just sort of sat on the sofa in the dark, and I remember thinking to myself, “You know what, the only way through this is through this,” which is a bad paraphrase of the Robert Frost quote. I didn’t know that at the time but I just remember thinking, like, “You can’t get around this so you might as well just get in it and just figure it out.” So, the only way through is through kind of kept me going.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And that sounds simple but I think the alternative thoughts to that are numerous and tempting, like, “There must be some kind of a trick, or approach, or a strategy, or a tactic, or a resource, or a something that’s going to make this all better.” And we’re chatting about some things that kind of help a bit but, ultimately, the fundamental difficult circumstances are there and are not just going away.

Liz O’Donnell
Right. And I had been thinking about elder care, as I mentioned, for a couple of years prior to the crisis because my parents were needing more, I was giving it to them, I was feeling squeezed already as a busy working mother. So, I had been waking up at 2:00 in the morning, thinking, “I know they need more care but I don’t know exactly what, I don’t know exactly how I’d fit it in.” I’d been Googling and finding these websites that were all, I call them halo and angel websites back then. And this was like 2013, 2014, and it was just like, “What a blessing to be a caregiver and just sit down and chat with your family, and divide the work, and everybody will be okay.” Useless. Completely useless.

So, I’d been searching for the tools and the resources up until this point and I hadn’t been able to find them, and so that’s why I thought to myself. And so, I was just…I wasn’t getting anywhere. And so, this concept of the only way through is through was really, for me, about how you’re going to use your energy. You only have so much energy. Energy is probably boundless and all of that good stuff, but at the time I was feeling depleted.

And so, was I going to use up my energy resisting, like, “I don’t want to do this. Why is this happening?” or was I just going to use my energy to get it done?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And, let’s hear, inside your mind, what is resisting sound like, so we can readily recognize it in our own minds and curtail it sooner rather than later?

Liz O’Donnell
It sounded like, “This isn’t fair.” It sounded like, for me, the typical family caregiver of elder care is, I mean, I fit the profile. I was a woman in her late 40s, early 50s, with a parent over the age of 65, and a child under the age of 18, she’s working outside the home, and she’s busy. So, I fit the poster child for this, but the difference is it’s usually the oldest daughter, and I’m the youngest of three, so there’s a lot of, “Why me? And what about my siblings? And why don’t they step up?” And I bet if any of your listeners are going through that, because siblings come up all the time, it’s like one of the top two questions I get, “So, where are my siblings? This isn’t fair.”

And the other thing that I was feeling, and I hear from caregivers all the time, was, “This is putting my life on hold.” And so, again, I learned after the fact, after I wrote about this and processed this, that it didn’t actually put my life on hold. It’s just the turn that my life took. And I think if people can learn to live through these life crises as opposed to wait until, that’s another huge step.

And I think, whether it’s elder care or anything else, we tend to, “When I get the next promotion,” “When I find the right partner,” “When I drop 20 pounds,” this whole concept of waiting until, if we can figure out how to wake up every day, and be like, “Okay, this is my life. How am I going to make it work? It might be ugly today but…” then I think that’s just freeing.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, so in your book, your chapter titles are imperative verbs, which is a style we like to use in our gold nuggets actually, so it resonates. So, it sounds like you’ve done some talking about how you accept and how you absolved. And you teased a little bit about prioritizing with 196 items in Excel, and you have limited energy. How do you prioritize well in the midst of these difficulties?

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah, the 196 items, those were the tactics. And, for me and what I talk about in the book, the prioritizing is when something, some kind of wrench comes into your life, or your career plans, or whatever it might be, like elder care did for me, and when you realize that the path you thought you were taking and the ladder you thought you were climbing isn’t quite what can happen right now, figuring out what’s most important and what you can shed.

So, back to that concept that I hear from other working daughters all the time, which is, “Caregiving has interrupted my life, or stopped my life, or put my life on hold,” I understand that concept, I felt that concept, but not necessarily true. Your life just needs to shift right now. So, what are the top three things in your life that are non-negotiable.

And so, for me, it was staying employed, because I was the breadwinner. I couldn’t lose my job. And it was showing up at some level as a parent. And I don’t remember what the third thing was at this time, but what are those three things? And so, everything else was a no. I said yes to those three things every day. I was going to be there for my parents. I was going to not lose my job. And I was going to be an okay parent myself. And everything else fell off for a while.

I was very involved in local politics. I was an appointed official. I resigned from that position and I had been promoting my first book, and I decided I was going to give that a B or a C effort. I had these three things that were most important in my life, and that’s what I was going to do. So, prioritizing for me was more bigger bucket items, and realizing that there were other things, so many other things in my life. I knew I wanted my first book to do well enough that I could write a second book. And I knew that I wanted to be an okay enough mother so that my kids wouldn’t be talking about me in therapy in a few years.

So, what were the things? And I knew that I had to stay employed but I wasn’t going to keep fast-tracking at that point. So, what were the things that I wanted to have in place when caregiving was over? And what was the minimum I had to do to make sure that I could step back into those roles?

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s a question that many of us haven’t asked much and don’t like asking, “What’s the minimum I can do?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, Liz, so you’ve got some other great verbs here: deflect, choose, manage, disrupt, renew, plan, reflect. I’m intrigued about the renew, in particular. So, could we hear about some of the best practices there and another one or two things that you think made all the difference?

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah, so renew is in that chapter, I talk about, I think, it’s seven most annoying words that a caregiver hears, which is, “You should take care of yourself.” And, in my case, when I finally told my boss what was going on in my life, that’s what she said. And, luckily, I had worked for her off and on almost all of my career so I was able to take her head off and keep my job and the responses.

We know we’re supposed to take care of ourselves. What we can’t figure out is how and when with the 196 items, waking up every day, going through all of this stuff. And so, she said to me, she goes, “Well, why don’t you start with hydrating?” And it was so simple. I had been waking up every morning, starting the coffee, caffeinating all day long, drinking Diet Coke all day just trying to stay awake and go, go, go. And then at night, I would be so caffeinated that I would have a glass of wine to try to unwind, so I was definitely dehydrated through this whole experience.

And it was such a simple thing to do. Who can’t fill a CamelBak or a plastic water bottle and walk around all day? And so, I said, “Okay.” And because I had promised my boss, I committed to it, and I started just adding more water to the day. And then eventually I started keeping a pair of sneakers, or trainers, or tennies, depending on what part of the country you’re from, in the trunk of my car, and going for walks when my parents were sleeping, if I was bedside or waiting. There’s a lot of waiting in elder care. There’s hospital time. There were doctors who were late. So, I just started throwing on a pair of sneakers and walking around whenever I could. And little by little, I was adding these small things. So, in my book, I write about, I think, 50 things you can do for self-care.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, 5-0. Nice.

Liz O’Donnell
Well, they’re really small and simple, and some of them are physical and some of them are mindset. This is kind of embarrassing, but what the heck. I had certain songs that I would play at certain times in the day to just sort of shift my mind and put me in a good mood. Like, there was a song I always turned on as I was driving up to…my mom eventually moved into a hospice home, and I never knew on any given day what I was walking into, and I worked from the hospice home a lot of times. I worked remotely so I wanted to be as upbeat and positive.

So, I’d clicked on my iTunes. If it’s singing in the shower, if it’s sometimes helping other people out, it didn’t have to be hit the gym every day because that wasn’t realistic. But what are the little things we can do to feel better every day? And it really makes a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. You know, it’s so funny, hydration, that’s a great place to start because it’s easy to neglect, and that makes a big impact. So, suddenly, I’m looking at a pair of eye drops on my desk, which is true. Sometimes I like tough through a day with dry eyes for no reason, all day. It’s like I just don’t have to live like that, or dry lips with ChapStick.

Liz O’Donnell
Right. Exactly. Yeah, I just kept going to the soda machine for Diet Coke. I didn’t have to live like that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Liz O’Donnell
You’re actually less tired when you drink water.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, water, songs, walking, sing in the shower, helping others. Any other thing that leaps to mind of the 50 that’s huge for renewal?

Liz O’Donnell
I think anything that helps you escape, that helps you sort of shift out of the stress that you’re in. So, reading, comedy, podcasts, all of those things might not sound like the traditional self-care that we talk about, but anything that can give your mind, which is on overdrive, a break is really helpful. So, are crafts as a parent. I didn’t practice this but my research shows that doing any kinds of crafts, knitting or…because they take your brain away from the stress that you’re thinking about.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay. Well, so outside of renewing, any other top tips or best practices you want to make sure to share with listeners who are dealing with elder care and career at the same time, or other, just personal challenges with work at the same time?

Liz O’Donnell
I want to go back to that planning what happens after because I think it can be really uncomfortable. Because when you’re thinking about what happens after, you’re actually thinking about, “What happens when my parent dies?” And we have a term in the Working Daughter community that we call grelief, and it’s a combination of grief and relief, and that’s often how we feel when our parents die. And it can feel really uncomfortable to admit that there’s an element of relief there.

But the person you love is no longer suffering, you’re no longer struggling, and so I think it’s really important that we’re honest about this. And so, thinking about, “Okay, someday this is going to be over. What are my goals and how do I keep moving towards them?”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, Liz, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Liz O’Donnell
You know, the other thing I want to mention, and thank you for asking that, is just to talk about this at work. As recently as 2013, 2014, when I was first going through it, nobody was really talking about this. And more and more, we’re seeing articles about elder care, there’s a lot of conversation about workers who are parents, but there haven’t been that many about workers with parents.

And it’s not just elder care; it’s spousal care, it’s sibling care. COVID has made us all caregivers at some level, so I think being comfortable, and trailblazing a little at work, and talking about caregiving, and when your companies might be talking about parents, reminding them it’s not just parents. Because the more we talk about it, the more normal it’s going to become. And it is, there’s like 54 million of people out there who are going through some kind of caregiving and working. So, why isn’t it more discussed?

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

Liz O’Donnell
My favorite quote now is “Action is the antidote to despair,” which is attributed to Joan Baez, the folk singer. And, for me, it’s the things that have you stressed out, if you just take one small step, you’re going to feel that much better. And, specifically the elder care, part of the reason we are so unprepared when it comes to elder care is nobody wants to talk about these things. We all know we should be talking about our wills. We all know we should be talking about burial plots. And often, like, “Eww, who wants to talk about that?” But if you just take one little action and move in that direction, ooh, your stress just goes away.

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

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah, I found these two professors when I was writing the book. One is at Johns Hopkins and one is at University of South Florida, and they have been studying the impact of caregiving on people. And they have found all the things that I just told you that it is stressful, it impacts your health, your relationships, etc. However, they also found something they call the caregiver’s gain.

And when they looked at non-caregivers compared to caregivers, they found that caregivers have better physical strength, cognitive ability, self-esteem, and actually longevity. So, I think the more we can talk about the caregiver’s gain, the more people will realize that caregiving, while it often feels like something that takes from you, it actually gives you something tremendous as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. You know what came to mind is, “So, those deadbeat siblings can suck on that.” That’s not the kindest.

Liz O’Donnell
That’s exactly the kind of conversation you’d hear if you joined the Working Daughter Facebook group.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m not too out of line. Okay. All right.

Liz O’Donnell
No. And that’s part of the reason I wrote the book, and I started the community, was back to that, like, it was all angel wings and halos, and people would always like they kind of tilt their head, and their voice gets sappy, and they’re like, “You’re a caregiver. It’s a blessing.” But I wanted a place where people could say things just like that. And that’s what I love about that research and what these two professors have done, is that their research doesn’t say that caregiving is all wonderful and it’s going to be better for you. They say both things can be true at once. And I think I just answered one of your upcoming questions, but I’ll wait till you get there.

Pete Mockaitis
A favorite book?

Liz O’Donnell
Oh, no, not that one. My favorite book is Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. Just can’t say enough good things about it.

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

Liz O’Donnell
I think it’s Spotify. I have a playlist for like every scenario. Like, if I wake up and I’m feeling stressed, I have a playlist for that. And if I’m giving a big presentation, and I’m having impostor syndrome, I have a playlist for that. And I have a Working Daughter playlist that reminds working daughters that they’re doing amazing work. So, I think Spotify is actually one of my best career tools.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Liz O’Donnell
A favorite habit? I think it’s water.

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

Liz O’Donnell
And that’s what I was just alluding to a second ago. In the Working Daughter community, we say all the time that two things can be true at once. And it’s we can say, “This completely sucks,” and also know at the same time that we’re glad that we have the opportunity to do it. We can feel grief and relief at the same time. Not something that people always embrace but we can hold two opposing truths.

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

Liz O’Donnell
WorkingDaughter.com, that points you to the private Facebook group and the book and all kinds of stuff.

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

Liz O’Donnell
Yeah. It would be to think about how we can be more compassionate at work because it was First Lady Rosalynn Carter who said, “There are four types of people in the world. Those who have been caregivers, those who are caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who need caregivers.” So, this is a workplace issue, and it requires that we’re compassionate with each other as we go through it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Liz, thank you. This has been powerful and helpful, I hope, to so many. I wish you the best in all of your adventures.

Liz O’Donnell
I appreciate you talking about it. Thank you.

Jun 10
0

675: How to Boost Your Brain for Better Happiness & Performance with Eric Karpinski

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Eric Karpinski reveals why investing in your happiness leads to better performance at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The secret to boosting your brain power at work
  2. The one question to jumpstart your happiness habit
  3. How to make stress work for you

About Eric

Eric Karpinski has been on the cutting edge of bringing positive psychology tools to workplaces for over 10 years, with clients that include Intel, Facebook, TIAA, IBM, T-Mobile, Kaiser Permanente, SAP, Deloitte, Eli Lilly, Genentech and many others. 

He is a key member of Shawn Achor’s GoodThink team, and developer of the Orange Frog in-house certification program, where he’s trained more than 100 facilitators to lead positive cultural transformation at their organizations. He was trained as a scientist at Brown University and has an MBA from the Wharton School.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank you, sponsors!

  • Care.com. Find the perfect caregiver for your child, parents, and home.

Eric Karpinski Interview Transcript

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

Eric Karpinski
Pete, I’m super excited. I’ve been listening to a bunch of your podcast. You get in deep and I love listening, so I hope I can step up to the quality of everything else you’ve done.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I have no doubts. But I think the first thing we need to cover is beekeeping. What’s the story here?

Eric Karpinski
So, I wanted to be a beekeeper for years and years. They’re fascinating, fascinating little creatures. And so, yeah, it’s something I’ve been doing the last four or five years, and I learned so much about community and teamwork from them, and you get the occasional sting and you get the occasional jar of honey. It’s perfect balance.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I imagine having your work product repeatedly robbed from you might be disengaging in terms of happiness at work.

Eric Karpinski
They just keep working. I’ve got this fun device called a Flow Hive, and so it kind of drains part of the honey out without them even noticing. They still get mad at me when I have to do hive inspections and stuff but, obviously, you need to make sure you leave them plenty for the dry summer here in San Diego but, no, they don’t seem to be bothered by that as much they are about me coming in and looking in trying to find the queen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Duly noted. And how about the stings? What’s the story there?

Eric Karpinski
It just happens. I wear a suit. I like to use feral bees, which is I save bees from people’s walls and their gardens and the trees where they don’t want bees. I’ll come and sort of capture them and bring them home. Sometimes you get a little more Africanized genetics, and sometimes that really…they get a little ornery when you start looking in instead of the nice European bees that you can buy and manage really easily, but bees are fun. You take stings with the territory, that’s what part of beekeeping is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m sure this can be a whole podcast episode but I must ask in brief, to what extent is the human species at risk of extinction because of bees not being able to pollinate stuff in the future?

Eric Karpinski
What I love is the Flow Hive that I mentioned. It is making so many people into hobby beekeepers, and for those that are, especially those that are taking local honey, like hives, and local colonies and bringing them, you’re maintaining the genetic diversity of the bees. And so, there’s a huge benefit, so lots of hobbyists, because the commercial ones need to have very predictable bees but the rest of us can just go. We don’t need things really efficient so we can come in and nurture the genetic diversity that I think is really important for countering a lot of the things with the colony collapse issues.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, good to know. Now, we’re going to talk about happiness.

Eric Karpinski
Let’s talk about happiness. Bees make me happy but there’s more direct ways to do it than having to get your own hive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you’ve got a book Put Happiness to Work. Can you tell us, what’s one of the most surprising, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way about happiness and engagement when you were working on this stuff?

[03:12]

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. So, starting at the top, we spent over a third of our waking hours working, so we should invest in our happiness. In our relationships at work and finding meaning at work, we spend so much time, it makes sense that we actually focus on those things, and the ties between happiness at work. I think one of the biggest things is, over the last 10 years, really understanding how much being happy at work actually ties, and specific types of happiness, really ties to being awesome at your job.

So many people think of happiness as that thing that happens once you get what you want. And the most surprising thing and the most important thing is happiness is the way to get a lot of the other things that you want, the way to success. I spent years working on my own, “Look, if I can be as successful as I can be then I’m going to be happy.”

And so, I worked hard, did all the things except that “work hard and success thing” became this loop of, “Hey, all right, I got a degree from Brown University. Awesome. I got this great job. Great. I got an MBA from Wharton. Awesome. Look at all the success I have. I have this incredible job where I’m doing a venture capital job, and I’ve got all these things.” Well, I kept milking at those success and then I would stress so much about the next level of success, the next promotion, the next raise, the next thing, and I never stepped from that success down to the happiness piece.

And I got stuck in this loop and I ended up stress turned into anxiety, anxiety turned to insomnia and then depression, and I’m supposed to be getting happy by the success and instead I’m driving it into the therapist chair and Paxil, not the path. So, when I found positive psychology research though, I realized you can flip that around. There are so many things we can do right now in our lives and in our work. And, actually, when we’re happier, our brain works better. And there’s specific types of happiness, we can talk about, really helps drive engagement at work and all the positive emotions that come with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so I think that’s a huge idea, and I think I first learned this from Shawn Achor and his TED Talk, and I understand you worked with Shawn, which is cool.

Eric Karpinski
Yeah, for almost 10 years we’ve been working together. He’s incredible. He helped shift the world and the boardroom from happiness is one of those little things that you don’t really need to worry about at work to say, “This can be central.” And, obviously, the work is still ongoing in terms of creating that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Well, we love positive psychology stuff over here and we had his wife, Michelle Gielan, on the show and she was great.

Eric Karpinski
Yeah, she’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s get into it a little bit. So, what are some of the top things we can do to boost our happiness and engagement at work?

[06:05]

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. If I can take a second to sort of round out sort of the idea behind the book which is there is so much in the positive psychology research, 20 years of positive psychology, neuroscience, organizational psychology research, and I’ve spent 10 years actually implementing that with organizations. And I think 80% of this book is really good for any of us that want to be happier and spread that happiness and be awesome at their jobs. The other 20% is really focused on managers and leaders and how they can help create engagement at work through a specific set of strategies and using positive emotions.

So, with that sort of frame, let’s get into the topics, let’s get into, “How do we apply it?” One of the topics that I think is most important, particularly right now at this moment, as we’re 14 months into the pandemic, so many of us have just lost our ability to socially connect. And maybe we’ve got that ability still with a few people, but we’re out of practice. And as the vaccines get more well-distributed, there are so many opportunities for us to reactivate that and to bring that. And I think that that’s true for our personal lives for sure and I think it’s really true with our work lives.

We’ve gotten so stuck with sort of Zoom fatigue and all these different issues and we just aren’t spending the time. Most of us aren’t spending the time connecting with people as much as we’d like. As Adam Grant says in his recent New York Times article, “We’re all languishing. We’re just sort of sitting in this pause mode, not everybody, but many of us, many more than normal.”

And so, when I think about social connection, and there’s a whole strategy about this about work, and I wanted to bring a couple of the habits that I talk about in the book that I think are really good at retraining us, reopening us to connection, and then helping us actually motivate and start doing things. So, one of them, the first one is a simple one.

Everyone that talks about positive psychology talks about gratitude, and targeting this really for gratitude for others. Sitting down and just spending a couple minutes each day writing down three people that you appreciate in your life and something specific you appreciate about them. So, it can’t just be, “I love my mom because she’s always there for me,” or, “I love my partner because…” something else. Like, not just “Because I love my partner,” but what specifically do you love about your partner or your children?

Like, my son is 16. He’s just got his driver’s license, he’s driving around the world now, but he also is always willing to give me a hug. He’s always wanting to just stop his day and hug me.

Pete Mockaitis
At 16 years old.

Eric Karpinski
Touch being one of my love languages, it’s really huge. So, that’s one of my gratitude that pops up from time to time. And this idea just opens you. And make sure you include one person from work, a work-related person each day. So, that’s one. Another one is something Shawn did on the original research on, we call it conscious acts of kindness message. It’s an email or a text.

[09:16]

When you first get to your phone or you first get to your email, just send one two-line, two-sentence email each day to someone appreciating them, sharing some good news, sending some encouragement, just something that’s kind, something that’s thoughtful. It just takes two minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to dig into that a little bit because I’ve heard of that. And so, I like the conscious kindness communication. Is that how you called it?

Eric Karpinski
Yeah, conscious acts of kindness.

Pete Mockaitis
Conscious acts of kinds and its message. And so, that’s broader than only thinking, or sorry, thanking and/or praising. It can have a variety of flavors there, which I like. You’re expanding this for me. So, we can also have encouragement. How about you just give us a few examples of some recent messages you’ve sent out that fall into those categories? It could be thanking, it could be praising, it could be encouraging, it could be any of those.

Eric Karpinski
Sure. Well, I just launched a book so there’s so many people that have helped me and that have encouraged me. Every time I get someone who posts a photo of them with my book, I’ll send them that authentic message of, “I really appreciate that you…it wasn’t just you bought it but you bought it and you’re reading it and you’re sharing with the world that you got it.” So, I sent a couple of those each day just because this is still the time when everyone is still getting the book and sharing it.

Then another good one is my wife helped write the book. She was there. She read it all. She was there to bounce ideas off of, and she’s got a full-time job. She’s a senior executive in a healthcare organization, and she makes the time to do it, so I told her that yesterday. When someone is in person, you can absolutely do it in person. The idea is make sure you do it. And so, the easiest way is to just say, every time you get to your email, every time, when you first get to your phone, send that message. Make it the first thing you do and it’ll happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I love it. Well, hey, keep them coming. Keep them coming. What else can we do?

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. So, the third one that is really awesome. Some people, it’ll strike as kind of hippy dippy woo-woo except I want to say it’s got total backing from researches at Stanford, from the University of North Carolina. It’s something I call connection meditation.

Connection meditation is really what’s known as a loving kindness meditation. And this evolved along with mindfulness meditation for years, for thousands of years, and what’s awesome is it brings…by the way, all three of these are things that bring happiness to us immediately. It’s not just about creating connection. It’s also about it feels good to do these things. And so, that reinforces sort of the need.

So, to describe it then, if you’re talking about connection meditation, you envision someone that is really easy for you to love. Maybe it’s a wonderful niece or nephew, or a grandparent, maybe it’s your partner if you’re not in some kind of conflict with them or have something that’s kind of dragging you down. But bring someone to mind that you love easily, that love comes easily, and then you just bring them to mind and you send them little wishes, “May you be happy. May you be healthy. May you find peace in your life.”

And while you’re saying those things, just opening yourself to the love and really trying to connect with them and open yourself to those emotions. You do that once or twice. And once you get a good head of steam going, then you bring it to someone else that you love. Maybe this is your partner, or maybe it’s one of your children, or something else, but someone that maybe there’s a little bit of conflict and a little bit of holding back, and you bring the love to them, and you bring the same statements to them.

And then you bring it to someone who’s kind of neutral, someone you don’t know that well. It could be a neighbor, it could be someone at work that you just haven’t spent much time with, or it could be, again, someone who at work that you kind of have a little bit of conflict with but you want to overcome that. And then you bring them to mind and you bring the same wishes to them.

And what’s so cool, Barbara Fredrickson did a lot of research in this space and said, “We feel so good when we do that.” Now, not 100% of the time, not always, but people stick with this connection loving kindness meditation longer than they do mindfulness meditation. She actually did a head-to-head study which was really cool.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s not surprising. Mindfulness meditation is hard.

Eric Karpinski
It is. It is.

Pete Mockaitis
This feels good.

Eric Karpinski
And we feel so…we get so judge-y about, “Oh, I didn’t stick with it. No, now this,” the same stuff we’re not supposed to do when we’re doing mindfulness meditation but, anyway. Then the Stanford group saw increases in empathy, increased desire to actually reach out to others. It’s a great way to just prepare your mind for connection and it feels really good, so that’s one that I really integrate that and mix it up with my mindfulness meditation from time to time, so highly recommend that.

And not a lot of people talk about that, especially in a work context. I haven’t heard anybody else mention this in kind of a work context but it’s really useful to help build those social connections, build your own preparation for social connections. And then I think I’ve got a couple really good ones that can help you connect with others and help create that connection amongst your teams.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. Well, let’s talk about the loving kindness meditation a bit. So, I think it may feel, I don’t know, woo-woo or hippy dippy for some folks. So, when you mentioned science, it’s awesome. So, we talked the boost in empathy, I think that just makes sense. Can you share any particulars associated with the studies, the results, or the numbers?

I mean, I can sort of imagine or extrapolate, like, “Oh, well, if you have an increased in empathy, you’re more likely to be patient with the people that you work with, and much less likely to be overly critical, and improve your working relationship with them such that they like to…they enjoy being with you and you feel more comfortable sharing feedback, positive and negative, which improves performance.” So, I can just imagine how these turns into improved work results. Can you share any hard-hitting stats?

Eric Karpinski
They haven’t done those studies yet. They measured the increased empathy, so I see all the benefits that could happen but I haven’t seen it actually put into practice in an environment where you’re then looking at downstream benefits. So, that’s a study that’s going to be there but, as you say, I can imagine so many of them, and just the ability to…and I actually recommend this for people that don’t feel like they are that caring or that they care that much about connection. And I try to avoid the should. You shouldn’t be picking things that you should do.

Pete Mockaitis
“Don’t be a selfish jerk.”

Eric Karpinski
Right. So, only if it sounds intriguing. We’ll talk about that in a second. But a big thing is to pick these habits by which ones get you, are drawn towards and that bring you energy, you get excited about. But, at the same time, if you know that caring for others is something that can often derail you, it’s a nice practice to try out for a little while and see if you take to it.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool.

Eric Karpinski
So, anyway. But that increased in empathy and the ability to take someone else’s side. And I remember hearing one of your other podcast, someone was talking about compassion and activated empathy is kind of an important aspect, that you can’t be like, “Oh, yeah, I know what they feel like, and I’m going to utilize it to make myself better.” Like, compassion and action, putting empathy to act is kind of an important step on that. So, it’s not just about increasing that empathy, but then how do we actually then do things for others and help relieve the challenges that they’re facing, or share positive emotions that they’re feeling? Both of them are important.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And I think about some people who work within a religious or wisdom tradition could very readily integrate this right into their existing prayer or whatever time since a lot of it feels like kind of morning ritual prep, get a great start to the day type stuff here.

Eric Karpinski
Yup, yup, it integrates with so many different prayers and different types of meditation. It’s nice to just slot in if you’ve already got…and anytime you’re doing a habit, if you can lock it next to a habit that you’ve already got. So, if you’re already sitting and doing a little prayer, maybe this fits as an add-on to that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. What else?

Eric Karpinski
So, let’s talk about when we’re at work and some things we can do because these are habits that we can do individually. One of my favorites that I just learned about because of writing the book, Scott Cabtree is a friend of mine who works, he does happiness talks and things up in the Northwest in Oregon, and he talks about something called a “Pecha Kucha” presentation. Now, the name doesn’t matter. But what it matters is that you ask everyone in the team to collect 10 photos of their life outside of work that they’re willing to share. And you have them put it together in a presentation, and then you ask one person at the weekly meeting to just spend two minutes, because here’s the ticket, you only get 20 seconds per photo, so you can’t tell any kind of long story. You can just mention a couple things.

I’ve done this with several different groups I’ve been with and so when I present it, it’s like all you can say is, “Hey, I’ve lived in these 12 cities,” is one of mine, “I struggled with cancer this year,” and give them a couple facts about that. “I’m a beekeeper.” And those are the things that you show a photo, and you something, you show your family, you show the important people to you too, but then it creates these opportunities. You can’t tell whole stories but it creates all this, “I’ve been curious about beekeeping.” Just like you and I had that conversation at the beginning. Some people are going to be like, “Oh, wow. Don’t you get stung all the time?” and they’re going to come asking me on the side, and that’s going to create a fun conversation even if we didn’t have that connection before.

And, for me, that’s the real thing. We get knowledge about our coworkers and we get a chance to seed some really cool conversations that might create these high-quality connections, these experiences of positivity resonance when we’re like connecting and kid each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s so cool. And I think about managers or teammates, I mean, that can just be fun to have either in your cubicle or somewhere, a home office as the case may be, on display in terms of, “Okay, that’s Eric…”

Eric Karpinski
Visible in the Zoom window, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s Eric and there are these 10 photos,” and that’s helpful just in terms of just continually reminding yourself because it’s obvious, but we forget it, I think, at the emotional experiential level that, “Oh, this is a human being with needs and values and priorities and concerns outside of work. And, oh, yeah, and here they are right on display visually. Okay, cool.”

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. And I envision that usually in a sort of a PowerPoint kind of setup but to then transfer it over is perfect because then it’s always there, it’d be like, “Wait, there was something I wasn’t curious about.” And once we’re, for people that are in their offices, “Oh, wow, right, beekeeping. I wanted to ask you that question. It’s super cool.”

And you mentioned managers, like one of my favorite habits for a supervisor or manager or someone who’s got direct reports is to start those one-on-one meetings, we all have one-on-one meetings with some of our key people, asking, “What’s one awesome thing someone on your team has done today?” or, “What’s one awesome thing that someone at work has done this week?”

And if you just take a minute or two right at the start of your meeting, and ask that question, and you don’t let them off the hook. Some people will be like, “Oh, I can’t think of anything.” That’s all right. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing. It can be something small. Just think of something and they’ll come up with one.

And then in the next week, or next Tuesday at 2:00 p.m. when you’ve got your weekly standing meeting, you ask the same question. And then, by the third time, they’re coming with…they’re often coming with answers with, “Oh, here, Eric is going to ask this question. Here’s the thing I’m going to say.” And so, it starts to actually train the people that you’re working with to start noticing the good stuff at work and sharing it with you so that you, now as a supervisor, if you’ve got three or four of this every week, you can create a list of all these great things.

And I love to ask them after they tell me, “Have you shared this with them? Have you told them that you thought this?” And they’re like, “No, but I should,” is often the response you’ll get. Sometimes it’s inappropriate. And then I’ll ask, “Would you mind if I mentioned it to them too?” And now you’ve got three things, three incredible benefits.

First, you’re helping them do, essentially, gratitude for people at work practice. They’re starting to learn. And, hopefully, over the course of you doing this consistently, they’re going to start noticing things as they’re working. They’d be like, “Oh, that’s awesome. I’m going to bring that to Eric, and I’m going to tell them right now.”

And then, I, as the supervisor, I get this long list of all these great things that are happening in the team and for the team. And then you’re also starting the conversation off in a positive way. You talked about Michelle Gielan, she talks about those power leads, those happiness questions that you start with. This is a powerful one because it starts the conversation in a positive way that then makes the rest of your agenda much more productive and much more creative and much more flexible in their thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
And then just some good contagious emotional stuff because we’ve got a bit of a natural negativity bias in our thinking to have these things being surfaced again and again and again, just kind of puts you in a better groove in terms of, “You know what, work doesn’t really suck as a matter of fact.”

Eric Karpinski
That’s the hope of all of us. You realize there are so many opportunities for connecting and smiling and laughing. Look, we don’t have to be happy all the time. All we need is, two or three times a day where we just get a nice little pop of positive emotions. And all we’re doing, all these habits are just about planting seeds for that to potentially happen. If we don’t create space for it, it’s not going to happen nearly as often. So, let’s create space. That’s what these habits are for, that’s what these interpersonal sorts of habits do, is create space for potential connection, for potential happiness. That’s the best we can do when we’re going to work, is create space for others to have those experiences and for ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Any other key practices?

Eric Karpinski
There’s lots of things that we can do. I don’t want to pooh-pooh the whole idea of doing a picnic or a happy hour. I think those are important but I think the most important thing is that we find ways to integrate it into our day, just like in these one-on-ones, just like in our weekly team meeting, like we have someone do their Pecha Kucha each week till everyone has done one. Finding ways to make it part of our day, make it part of our routine is the key because if we don’t, then if we only rely on the happy hours and the picnics, it’s just not going to happen very often, and then we’re going to continue sort of languishing and not really creating that positive thing.

So, I want to make sure that we do those things. I’m not saying don’t do picnics. I’m just saying make sure you also pick some things that can create those daily and weekly experiences of one another and of happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think the high frequency makes a world of difference there. Well, let’s talk a little bit about stress here. How do we think about it? How do we use it well?

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. So, there is some really powerful research that’s coming to light and that more people are talking about. But what we know is that most of what we hear about stress is how it’s such a problem, that it’s a problem for our productivity, that it’s a huge problem for our health. And, of course, that’s only been multiplied with all the stress that we have from the pandemic and from COVID.

But the thing is we evolved stress for a reason. When we’re stressed, like our hearts start to beat faster, we also start to breathe faster, our liver releases glucose and fats into the bloodstream. All of this is to help us get ready to act. And recent research has really talked about how we can actually change and put a mindset around stress that can help us actually experience that benefit.

So much of what we think about sort of one stress response is fight or flight. And, actually, there’s a lot more sort of a continuum. There’s what we call the threat response, what researchers call the threat response which is what hear so much about. This is when we initially hear about something that we don’t think we have the resources to respond.

And this response is to really address the issue that’s caused there, and we get this flood of cortisol and it has these negative effects on our performance and on our health. Blood is actually centered away when we have this threat response, away from the evolved parts of the brain so we can’t think clearly and we can’t choose how to react. So, when we’re in this reactive place of avoiding what’s happening and trying to kind of run away or just totally freeze and just forget about it, that’s not good.

And, by the way, we’re also narrowing a lot of the arteries in our whole body that causes the high blood pressure which causes a lot of health problems associated with stress.

The other side of the continuum is something we call the challenge response. The sciences have really understood now this challenge response, and this happens naturally when we see that something difficult is coming but we believe we have the resources to actually address it or at least try to address it and start moving it, moving towards fixing it. And what’s cool here, we still get cortisol and we still get a stress response, but it’s countered by this other stress hormone called DHEA.

And what happens then is actually that combination of the two hormones opens the vascular backup in your brain and in your body. You get access to the full of your brain, so you get access to the prefrontal cortex, which is the home of reason and logic and of choice, and we actually get to choose then how we’ll respond and what we’re going to do. Our hearts are still beating fast but those open vessels drive our blood pressure down, and that’s a much healthier state for us to be experiencing.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, challenge response sounds lovely relative to the alternative. So, how do we have more of those?

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. So, I have an acronym called ASPIRE. I’m aspiring to utilize the stress that I feel and so there’s a lot of things. I’ll just hit on a couple. The A of ASPIRE is acknowledge your stress. Notice when you’re stressed and call it out. Now, some of us, we’re so reactive to our stress we don’t even know when we’re in it. And so, there’s work in the book about how do we notice, what are our signal for stress.

And then, “Oh, man, I’m feeling stressed right now,” or, “I’m feeling a little bit of stress right now,” whatever it is. Just by calling it out, we change where we process that stress from the amygdala and the limbic centers of our brain, which are much more primal, to the prefrontal cortex, which is, I said, is a place where once we activated that, we have choice. We can actually decide how to move forward and so it shifts us. Just that alone, acknowledging it can shift us towards the challenge.

The other is S of ASPIRE is shifting your mindset. Simply recognizing that stress can be helpful changes how you respond to it. So, just listening to this podcast, reminding yourself when you’re feeling stressed, “Oh, wait, didn’t Eric say that stress can be good for us?” And they’ve done studies with LinkedIn employees, with investment bankers, with college students at MIT, with high schools, with students preparing for the GREs, again and again, just by teaching a simple, sometimes just a five-minute exercise, reading a couple of articles about how stress can be helpful changes the way that people respond. It moves them to a challenge response.

So, simply remembering this podcast and what we talked about already can change how we respond here.

So, P is purpose. What’s really interesting, and Kelly McGonagal has done a lot of work in this space and shared a lot about this, talks about the stress paradox, that when we are stressed, behind every stress is something that matters to us or we wouldn’t be stressed. We care about the outcome in some way. So, if we can spend the time thinking, “All right, why am I so stressed about this? What’s underneath it? Not that someone said something bad to me but that respect is a value of mine and I don’t feel like they respected me.” Okay. Well, let’s go deeper in that. And what is most important about this?

And if we can find things in that meaning, particular that somebody else, what benefit might there be if we’re successful, to my family, to end users, to patients, to whoever it is? Tapping into the meaning behind why we’re feeling that much stress and just understanding who this is for, what this is for, can help us switch over to the challenge response.

Eric Karpinski
So, I is inventory your resources. When we hear about a stressor, we do this lightning quick, so fast we can’t even have conscious thoughts response, “Oh, my God, I can’t do it. I’m overwhelmed. There’s no way it’s going to happen,” and it throws us into the threat response. If when we notice that, we can just pause, take a breath, step back a little bit, be like, “Okay, this is big. This is going to be hard. But what resources do we have? What strengths can I bring into this? What experiences, when have I had something like this before, and what happened? What skills do I have?”

“Who’s in this with me? Who’s the team that’s going to help us do this? What skills and experiences and knowledge do they have? And can we reach out beyond just our team? Like, who else in the organization has seen this? Or, can we bring in some outside expertise for people that have dealt with this? Is there technology that might be able to address this problem?”

And just by categorizing and inventorying the things that we have, it often brings us into that sort of natural challenge response, like, “Oh, there’s more here than I thought. Maybe we can do it.” And it starts to bring you, it activates you into bringing energy towards the problem rather than stepping away. And then the final one is, the RE is reach out to others.

There’s Shelley Taylor at UCLA has done all this work about the tend and befriend response to stress. A lot of people, when they first feel stress, they want to bake cookies for others, they want to bring them into the office, and they want to reach out to others and just connect and help others. Obviously, you can’t, you’re stressed about your own work, you can’t spend hours and hours helping others. But if there’s some five-minute favors in your inbox, someone asked you for a reference to somebody, or someone asked you for a quick advice, go and do that. And then when you come back, it feeds your courage and your hope to sort of address your own challenges. It helps you move, again, into that challenge response.

So, these are the four. I’ve got a whole worksheet on my website at PutHappinessToWork.com/resources, I’ve got a worksheet that people can just download and it’s great to do when you’re feeling stressed or when you’re doing your planning for the day or the week. Just bring that out and everything that you know is going to stress you, run through the ASPIRE toolset real quick, “How can I shift my mindset? What’s the purpose and the meaning behind this? Let me inventory my resources.” Whichever one works for you, try them out, experiment with it, and then see how you respond and how your stress changes.

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

Eric Karpinski
Yeah, one of the other things I think that is a fun one to do, two of the chapters really need some introspection before you can get value out of them. One of them is really about strengths. And the thing that we need to do there, there’s lots of great strengths assessments. I love CliftonStrengths. It’s a great place to start. The University of Michigan talks about your best self, and you ask 10 people that know you really well for stories of you at your best, and then you harvest that for the things that you’re good at.

But then the important thing that you have to do personally is then think, “Which of these strengths actually energize me when I do them? Which ones give me energy?” And then prioritize those strengths that came out of the assessment, whatever. Feel free to add ones. Like, one of my strengths was, for years, analytical. I’m really good at taking datasets and pulling it out and figuring out what the answer is, but I hate it. It drains me of energy now. I used to love it but now it drains me so I knocked that one off the list and I looked for something else to pop into that top five, and then prioritized those by how much energy they give you when you do them.

And once you’ve got that list, now there’s lots of things you can do with your work, like how you view your work, “How am I actually using this strength that I didn’t even know? Or, what are some things that I can take on that will allow me to use these strengths more?” And that’s magical. That’ll really get you. That provides the energy that really helps us be happier and more engaged all at once.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, thank you. Now, can you share with us a favorite study?

Eric Karpinski
Yeah. So, Harvard Business School, this goes back to the stress stuff I talked about. She did this study where she had a group of students that were going to have to do a last-minute public speaking opportunity. They were going to be recorded and they were going to be evaluated by their peers. And she told one group to say, “I’m calm. I’m calm. I try to calm down this stress and this anxiety. Try to counter it.” So many people think that that’s the right thing to do.

But the other group, she said, “Hey, just tell yourself you’re excited. Yeah, your heart is beating fast, you’re breathing faster. This is excitement, getting ready for it.” And the objective evaluation of that study were incredible, how much better the “I’m excited group” performed. They were more confident, they made their points better, they were fully understood, versus the “I’m calm” group which is kind of going against their biology. They physiology was going, “Ahh, I’m getting up here,” and they’re trying to say, “Calm down. Calm down. I need to calm down,” instead of the excited it goes with what’s happening with the physiology.

And so, that one thing. When you’ve got like an explicit event that’s happening, like you’ve got a difficult conversation coming up, or you’re doing a presentation, or you’ve got something that you’re worried about, hey, when you feel that stress, this is, “I’m excited. I’m excited about this. This is going to help me.” Just that one little switch can change you into that challenge response. So, that’s my favorite.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a favorite tool?

Eric Karpinski
I’m going to go back to the connection meditation, that habit is something that I do regularly, and I want to reinforce that that’s something worth trying even if it sounds a little weird to listeners.

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

Eric Karpinski
So, PutHappinessToWork.com, all one word, is the book website. And so, learn about the book and it’s got all the purchase links there too when you’re ready to buy it. And then my full website is at EricKarpinski.com. And Eric is with a C at the end, and Karpinski starts with a K, K-A-R-P-I-N-S-K-I.com.

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

Eric Karpinski
Pick one thing and do it now. If there was something, I like to refer to this, when I do talks and when I do podcasts and in the book itself, I like to refer to it as an action buffet. There are literally dozens of tools and ideas in there. Don’t wait till you can do multiple of them. As soon as you find one that sounds interesting, take a little helping. Try it out for a day or two, or a week, never just one day, never just one time. You always got to try it two or three times. And any time you do something new, it’s going to be a little awkward and weird. But after three or four times, hey, if it doesn’t take, that’s okay. Go back to the list and pick something else.

But if it does take, now figure how do you really take a full helping, how do you integrate into your day, how do you make a habit of it. Number one is move to action. Stop just reading, stop just listening, and actually pick one thing. And it only has to be a couple minutes a day but do something, move to action.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eric, this has been a treat. Thanks so much. I wish you much happiness at work.

Eric Karpinski
Thank you so much. This was fun. Yeah, I appreciate it. This was really good. It was really energizing to talk to you and I love your questions. So, thanks for that.