KF #33. Strategic Mindset Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome back!

Amy Morin
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get mentally strong with you here today. You’ve got 50 whole tools for us at The Mental Strength Playbook. We’re probably not going to talk about all 50, I’m guessing. But give us the big picture in terms of a big discovery that you had when putting this all together.

Amy Morin
Well, you know, I’ve been writing books about mental strength for years, but most of them are about what not to do. And the biggest thing I realized was the skills and tools that work at home don’t always work in the office.

I can’t put off something that I’m anxious about at work. If I want to keep my job, I might have to figure out how to work through my anxiety, or if I’m bored, I can’t just be like, “I know, I’m going to wait till that report is feeling a little more fun.” But we can do those things at home.

So I wanted to write a book that was about what do you do when you’re sitting at your desk at 2:00 p.m. and you’re struggling with something, and the tools and skills that you might use at your house aren’t available to you.

And also when you’re struggling maybe with something in your personal life, how do you keep showing up at work? For me it was when my mother died, my husband died, like my 20s were like a bad country song. Everything that could have gone wrong did, and I was a therapist and I had to keep going to work.

And there was no playbook back then for, “How do you keep showing up when your own life is in shambles and how do you get through the day?” And one of the big pieces of this was like, if you’re going through grief or you’re going through stress or a hard time, you don’t want to push it down.

We know that suppressing things tends to make it pop up even worse. But at the same time, you probably can’t cry in the middle of a business meeting. You have to figure out, “How do I put it on the shelf and save it until later?”

And that’s really what I wanted this book to be about is, “How do you get through tough times, difficult emotions, maybe just temporary anxiety, maybe get anxiety from sales calls? But what are some tricks you can have up your sleeve so that you can still think, feel, and do your best, despite whatever your boss throws your way?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s super handy, and, yes, I want to talk through a few of those. For starters, though, could you share with us a cool story about someone who made use of some of these tools and saw some great results?

Amy Morin
Well, I will share my own story because, I will say, I used all 50 of these strategies in my and they’re what has gotten me through some of my toughest times. But when I first wrote my first book, I was a social worker in rural Maine.

I wrote an article that went viral, got invited to get on a big stage and I accepted without even really knowing what I was walking into. It was like this huge conference where pretty much everybody else on the stage was a household name.

So the day I got there, I’m watching Gary Vee up on this giant stage, and I’m thinking, “Oh, good, and I, like, have to give a presentation tomorrow. I literally have no idea what I’m doing.” So I had, like, 24 hours, and I thought, “What do I do? Do I go cram my notes? Do I call in sick tomorrow? How am I going to get through this?” because I knew I just really didn’t have, like, the skills and expertise to be there.

But I decided my best strategy at that moment was to act as if. I’m going to act as if I feel confident. So I watched other people that day to figure out like, “What do you do? Where do you step on stage? What do you do when you come out? How do you stand there? How do you look at the audience when you have this massive audience in front of you?”

And that’s what I spent the evening doing is saying, “If I stepped out on stage feeling completely confident, what would that look like, as opposed to the sheer terror that I knew that I was actually going to feel when I stepped out there?” But got it all down, okay, “If I were really confident, I’d step out there like this, I’d hold my head like this, I’d look at the audience this way.”

And I knew if I just did those things, then somehow my brain would be like, “Oh, I don’t know, maybe we are confident.” And I could at least get through it that day. And it worked. I felt like, “Okay, it’s not quite the same as like fake it till you make it, where people think you’re just going to get out there and act like somebody you’re not.”

That wasn’t my goal, but it was like, “How do I step into this as the most confident version of myself, even though I don’t feel confident?” And that strategy got me through it that day and, fortunately, they invited me back to speak and I still get to speak now, but I feel much better about it because I’ve had a lot more practice.

But sometimes, that’s the best strategy you can have is when you get on a sales call and you’re nervous or you’re filled with self-doubt, just ask yourself, “If I felt completely confident, what would I look like and how would I pull it off?” And then try to step into that persona even when you don’t feel it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, what’s on the other side of those questions? Like, what would it look like in terms of, are you talking about, specifically, how you’re holding your body, how you’re talking to yourself? What are some of the bullet points that come as the answers to that question?

Amy Morin
So if I had stepped out there and allowed myself to just act like I felt, which would have been terrified, scared that I was going to bomb, worried that I was going to stumble over my words, I probably would have done all of those things, right? And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So when I watched the other speakers, I was like, “All right, they stepped out into the middle of that stage like they own the place. So how do I do that?” Or, when I saw, like, how they made eye contact and interacted with the audience, like, “Okay, how do I do that to make sure that when I get up there, I literally make sure that I’m standing up straight, I’m making eye contact, I’m trying to take up space while I’m up there?”

As opposed to what I felt like, which would have been like stand in the very back corner of the stage, speak as fast as you can to get out of there and try to exit before something horrible happens.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And then I’m curious about some of the other acts as if that have been transformational for you.

Amy Morin
Well, you know, as a therapist, it’s a play that I’ve run with lots of clients over the years. So, for example, I had a woman who said, “I need you to give me some confidence. I really want to go back to college, but I’m not sure I can do it later in life. I wasn’t the best student before, and now I’ve taken all these years off. How do I make sure that I feel like I’m confident?”

Well, the answer was, “Let’s act as if you feel confident now. Like, call the college, sign up for a class, and it’s really about the experience so that you can finally feel confident, but you have to take the action first.”

“So what would happen if you felt confident in yourself, what might that first phone call look like when you call the school? You might be asking for information, you might be really clear on, ‘This is what I’d like to do. How do I sign up?’ as opposed to giving them your whole spiel of, ‘I don’t know if I can get through school. I’m not really sure I’m meant to be there.’ If you do all of that, you’re less likely to get what you want.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. All right. Well, let’s maybe zoom out and talk about mental strength, generally. First, what is it and is it learnable, build-able, doable for all of us, as opposed to like a trait like, “Oh, they’ve just got it”?

Amy Morin
Right. So, yeah, mental strength has got three parts to it: the way you think, the way you feel, and the way you behave. And the thinking part is your brain lies to you a lot. It will tell you that you can’t do something. It will overestimate how bad something is going to be, underestimates your ability to cope with it, and it will try to keep you safe.

So it will talk you out of doing anything where you might embarrass yourself or where things might not turn out well. So part of being mentally strong is knowing you don’t have to believe everything you think, and you can be in charge of talking back to the thoughts that aren’t helpful.

And then the other part is your feelings, and again knowing that whatever you feel is okay, but there’s times when your feelings don’t serve you well. If I’m incredibly sad, the last thing I want to do is ask for a raise, because research shows, if I try to negotiate when I’m sad, I’ll take a pretty bad deal and I won’t offer a counteroffer or anything because I’ll be like, “Ugh, my self-esteem can’t handle it.”

So just knowing, “How do I feel today? How might that affect my decisions? And what can I do about it? Maybe I woke up sad, but I don’t have to stay sad. I could choose to do something to boost my mood.” And then the third part is about the action that we take. It’s one thing to say, “Okay, I think positive,” but what are you going to do about it?

And at work, we don’t get paid for thinking positively. Most people get paid for what you produce or what you do. So how do you get through a day when you just don’t feel like doing anything? Or how do you take the positive action when it’s scary?

And I do believe everybody has the ability to build mental strength. Just like you could choose to go to the gym and build bigger biceps, you can certainly choose to build your mental muscle. It’s all about the little choices that you make every single day. And we always have opportunities to build strength when we want to. And I think no matter how strong people are, there’s always room for improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so how you think, how you feel, and what you do, those three components. What’s intriguing about how you feel is it seems like, also maybe it’s just my own experience, the amount of influence/control I have over how I feel seems to be quite variable.

In that some days, it’s like, “Oh, I’m not motivated. Well, I’ll just do this, and now I’m motivated. That was easy.” And other days, it’s just like, “I’m not motivated.” And I do the things like I remain unmotivated.

And so help us with that. If we’re mentally strong in the dimension of how we feel, just what’s possible for humanity with regard to how much influence we could wield over our feelings?

Amy Morin
Yeah, so I think the first question is to ask, “Is what I’m feeling right now helpful or hurtful?” Or some people say, “Is it a friend or an enemy?” Because we talk so much about emotions as if they’re positive or negative, people will be like, “Well, anger is a negative emotion.” But it’s not.

Like, anger can really help you. Like, it gives you the courage sometimes to speak up for yourself or somebody else. Or, people might think sadness is a negative emotion, but sadness helps you honor something that you’ve lost. So you don’t want to get rid of it.

But again, at the same time, if you’re about to walk into your boss’s office, or you’re about to lead a team meeting and you’re so sad that you have no energy, like, by all means, it’s important to pull yourself out of it so you can do your best.

And we have choices of how we respond to our feelings. Sometimes it makes sense to just sit in them. If I’m sitting on my couch at home on a Friday night and I’m sad, maybe I just allow myself to be sad. But if I’m about to walk into my boss’s office and ask an important question, maybe I need to boost my mood.

And there’s two ways that we can do that. It’s about the way you think or about the actions that you take. So if I’m thinking about all the sad things that have happened in my life, I’ll probably feel sad. So maybe I do something like visit my smile file.

That’s a play from the book, where you just have some like positive pictures, maybe some pictures of what you did last fall, some pictures of your kids, your latest vacation, any pictures that bring a little smile to your face can give you a boost in your mood.

So then it would be my job to know, “Hey, I’m about to lead this team meeting, feeling really low energy and sad. Let me just pull this out for a minute.” I pull out a funny photo of my dog and I start to laugh for a minute, my mood gets a little bit better. We’re not going from a zero to a 10, but maybe I go from like a 2 to at least a 4. So then I feel a little bit better before I walk into that meeting.

And then it’s about what we do as well. So I could spend my lunch break being stressed out about something, staring at my computer and not doing anything, or I could say, “You know what? I’m going to take 15 minutes to go for a walk around the block because I know being in nature and moving my body helps. So that’s what I’m going to do to try to shift my energy before I come back for the rest of the afternoon.”

And I think when we decide that, when an emotion isn’t helpful, we can either change what we think, change what we do, or sometimes a combination of both to make it so that we take a little more charge of our feelings.

And you won’t get rid of those emotions altogether. If you’re anxious about something going on at home, or you’re waiting for a call back from your doctor about some test results and you’re pretty anxious about it, you probably aren’t going to make it disappear, but you might bring it down to a level where you can say, “Okay, I can concentrate on this task right in front of me right now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, well, we got 50 tools here. Can you share with us what are some faves to shift how we feel? We got the ‘act as if,’ we got the ‘smile file.’ Any other just wildly effective ones that your clients just love?

Amy Morin
So another one is to visit your ‘victory vault.’ We know that when we get rejected for something, it stings. And the problem is, suddenly, your brain will bring up all the other times that you felt that emotion. So maybe I apply for a promotion and I don’t get it.

Suddenly I’m like, “Oh, gosh, I also didn’t get picked for the basketball team in the seventh grade. Three years ago, I applied for a different job. I didn’t get that.” Like, it’ll just bring up all the rejection in your life. And before you know it, you might feel like a loser because you’re remembering every single time in your life you’ve been turned down or passed over or rejected.

So the strategy then is to have a list of some of the biggest victories you have in life. And they don’t even have to be just be professional ones. They can be the personal ones, too. Maybe you advocated for your mom at a doctor’s appointment once and got her the medication that she needed. Like, that is a huge victory in life.

And then you say, “Well, what did you learn from that? Well, I learned I could speak up when it’s important.” Great. That’s a wonderful victory to put in your victory vault list. Or, think of the time when maybe the odds were stacked against you.

Maybe in college, there was a test that you didn’t think you could pass, and maybe nobody else thought you could, too, but you stayed up all night cramming, and, lo and behold, you passed the class, and you learned not to give up.

Or, maybe there was a job that you went for at some point and you knew it was a long shot, but because you showed and you nailed the interview, you got the job. Like, these are all amazing things. But we don’t remember those. We tend to kind of tuck those away and forget about them.

So I think we should all have a written list. It might be a written list on a piece of paper, maybe you keep it on your phone, that you can visit when you’re feeling down, when you’re filled with self-doubt, or when you’ve been rejected, just pull out that list and read it. And there’s something really powerful about seeing this list of, “Here’s the things I’ve actually done in life.”

And it’s written in my own words, because it’s one thing when you have a friend who says, “Oh, no, you can do anything. You’ll get the next job.” This doesn’t quite sit the same as if I look at this list of things that I’ve created and reminded myself, “There’s been times when the odds were against me, or times when the chips were down, times when I really wasn’t expected to rise to the occasion, and look what I did.” Just reminding yourself of that in some of your lowest moments can give you a huge boost.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I also want to hear, you’ve got some specific tools in the universe of dread. Walk us through some of these.

Amy Morin
So dread is one of those things, right? Like, you dread the meeting on Thursday, and it’s only Tuesday and you’re already thinking about it, and it’s already ruining your Tuesday afternoon because you’re like, “Ugh, it’s going to be terrible, horrible, and awful.”

Or, maybe you dread working with a particular coworker and you spend six hours dreading the meeting, and it’s only a 30-minute meeting. So I think we all need some dread diffusers to make sure that that emotion doesn’t take over the whole day.

Pete Mockaitis
Give us some.

Amy Morin
So sometimes we’ll take, like, the 10-minute rule. That’s one of my favorites. So let’s say I have a report I have to write and it’s really boring. And I don’t want to do it because I know it’s going to be boring. And so in my head I’m like, “Ugh, I have to write that report.” Maybe I put it off for two more days and I’m procrastinating because it just seems like it’s going to be too boring and painful to do.

Use the 10-minute rule, which means I’m going to tell myself, “I’m going to spend the next 10 minutes writing this report. If at the end of 10 minutes, I don’t feel like doing it anymore, I’ll give myself permission to quit.”

And, like, 99% of the time, once you do something for 10 minutes, you’ll be like, “Oh, I’ll keep going now,” because getting started is the hardest part. And we realize it’s not as bad as we thought it was. And we start to build some momentum. And once you start to build some momentum, it’s easy enough to keep going.

And this works with stuff outside the office, too. Maybe you’re like, “Ugh, I should work out today, but I don’t feel like it.” Just decide you’re going to do it for 10 minutes. And then if you get to 10 minutes and it’s really as bad as you expect, quit. But I don’t think you’ll find that very often. Most of the time you’ll say, “I could do it with this for another 10 minutes,” and you keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I want to hear more of them. You’ve got ‘create the mood,’ ‘behavior bingo,’ ‘curiosity quest.’ Can we hear about them?

Amy Morin
Yeah, well, I’m going to give you one of my other favorites, which is ‘text to motivation buddy.’ This one is, again, for like a task that you’re struggling to do. Maybe you’re procrastinating or you’re just staring at the blank page. You send a message to somebody that you know will hold you accountable.

So maybe you have a friend who will understand or a coworker, or maybe it’s your grandmother. It really doesn’t matter, but you just send a text message and say, “Hey, I’m working on my slide deck. Check in with me in an hour and ask me how it’s going.”

And as soon as you send that message and somebody says, “Hey, I got you,” all of a sudden, you’ve just created a deadline for yourself and some social pressure, but some positive social pressure, because you’re like, “Okay, I really want to have some progress to report back in an hour.”

You will probably get more done in that hour than maybe you did all week because, suddenly, you’re motivated to get to work. And then if the person checks in with you in an hour, you might be like, “Hey, I’m half done,” or, “I got three-quarters of the way through this. I’m going to finish it up.”

It is an amazing strategy that works a lot better than just this vague idea of, “Well, I have an accountability buddy, and we check in every Friday.” That doesn’t work. Most of us need a really short-term objective of, “I have one hour, 60 minutes. The clock is ticking.” You can get way more done in that hour than you probably expect that you can.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And having that ticking clock, I really do think is transformational because I’ve had accountability groups and people and experiences and it’s been swell and, you know, meeting weekly or whatnot, and we had these spreadsheets of all these things we were going to do, and say, “Hey, so what happened with your sheet?” But, yeah, zooming way in on one hour amplifies that a whole lot.

Amy Morin
It does. I use this. I’ve used it when I’m writing on the days where I’m like, “Oh, gosh, I got a lot of words to write. Here we are. It’s already 11:00 a.m. and I pretty much haven’t written anything.” I swear if I text somebody, my friend who’s also a writer, and say, ‘Check in with me in an hour,’” suddenly, that next hour, I will get so much more done. It’s amazing what that does to us.

And when it’s somebody that we like to, it’s not like your boss looking over your shoulder to ask what you got done, it’s like, “Hey, I want my friend to be proud of me,” or, “I want this person to congratulate me.” So it’s a different kind of pressure and it can be a really positive way to say, “Yeah, I’m going to get some work done.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And what’s the ‘curiosity quest’?

Amy Morin
So that one is just really when we’re doing something boring, maybe I’m working on a spreadsheet, maybe I’ve done these spreadsheets every week and it’s just one of those things that I hate doing. We know that curiosity is the antidote to dread.

If I decide, “All right, even though I’ve done eight million of these spreadsheets before, and I don’t really learn much when I do it, but what could I learn? Maybe I just learn something about myself. Like, maybe every three minutes, I actually just pick up my phone.”

But I didn’t know that until I got curious to be like, “Well, what do I do? What am I feeling while I’m writing this spreadsheet? How do I handle that emotion? Maybe while I’m doing the spreadsheet, it’s that every 20 minutes, I get up and I take a break and I don’t come back for an hour.”

Sometimes when we get curious about, “What is it I’m doing?” that we then see these patterns that start to break out. Or, you can give yourself a challenge to get curious, too, like, “All right, if it weren’t an option to use my computer, how would I get a spreadsheet like this done?”

You don’t really have to do it on paper, but just in thinking about it, sometimes that opens up new neural pathways and, suddenly, you’re like, “Oh, you know what? I actually found a shortcut or a way that would make this better, or something I hadn’t even thought about.”

Because when we have repetitive tasks, we tend to just do them the same way today as I did yesterday and the day before that, without really looking at any other opportunities or ways to make it easier or even more fun. But if you start asking yourself some questions that help you to get curious, you might find it opens up some new strategies you hadn’t thought of before.

I think any way that we can add curiosity to our lives is going to help us to be more patient and help us to see things just a little bit different than we did before.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, on to the action side of things, can you tell us about ‘calibrating your state’?

Amy Morin
Yeah, when we are going to do something at a certain task, knowing what state you do it best in is important, but often we have no idea. So we’re talking about our energy level. So if I’m going to lead a team meeting, I kind of want to have some energy for that.

But if I’m going to sit down and, say, edit a boring report, I probably need to be in a bit of a calmer state. Otherwise, if I have tons of energy, I’m just not going to sit still and concentrate. So this one is all about knowing, “What state do I need to be in to do something?”

So we’ll take public speaking. Some people I know like to calm themselves down. They’re backstage meditating and listening to really calming music so that they step out on stage and they feel like they can be present.

But other people, myself included, I’m going to do better if I pump myself up. If I walk out there feeling all calm and zen, one of two things is going to happen. I’m either just going to kind of mumble through my speech.

Or, if I were to get anxiety, then I’m like, “Ah, my anxiety doesn’t quite match that meditation I was just doing. This is terrible, horrible, and awful.” So I do better when I pump myself up. So I’m going to listen to more upbeat music, or I might be the person who’s moving around behind the stage. I’m not going to sit still and meditate.

But if I were to sit down and do a spreadsheet, that’s when I want to say, “Okay, how do I calm my brain and my body a bit so I can focus?” And any task we face, I think we should know like, “What’s the best energy state to be in?” You’re about to make a sales call, like, “What’s the best state? And then how do I get myself in that?”

So for some people, it’s, you know, “I do a couple laps around the office before I make an important sales call.” Or somebody else might say, “You know, I listen to some calming music before I get on a sales call, so I can just really feel like I’m present.” But you don’t know these things until you do some trial and error. But when you do, you figure out what state you perform best in for each task.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and as you describe state, I’m hearing mostly sort of a level of energy or arousal that’s ideal. But now in my mind’s eye, I’m seeing the How We Feel app with those like 144 beautiful bubbles. It’s totally free. I recommend it, How We Feel app, so good.

So are you thinking about a state primarily in terms of just like energy level low, medium, high, or more precise in terms of, “I want to be curious. I want to be enthusiastic. I want to be thoughtful”?

Amy Morin
For this one, I’m thinking more about your energy state, and so the state of mind. So again, sometimes, clients will be like, “You know, if I do three laps around the building before I make a call, that, like, gets out a little bit of energy, but also makes sure that I’m still, the blood’s still flowing and I’m in a good state for that phone call.”

Somebody else might be like, “You know, I’m actually better off to, like, I water my plants, kind of take a few minutes to myself to get my thoughts together. And then I walk into that meeting and I feel like, ‘Okay, I can be present right now because my desk is cleaned off and I’ve taken care of a few things.’” So it’s really about, I guess, the mental state that you’re in and your energy and arousal level.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. And what is a power phrase and how do we activate one?

Amy Morin
So a lot of us have negative thoughts before we walk into a situation. So it might be like, “Ugh, here we go again,” or, “Another performance review, it’s not going to go well.” But if you just have some short power phrase that you give yourself and you put it on repeat in your head, not only does it drown out the negative thoughts, but it can remind you, “It’s okay. Like, I’ve got this.”

And making it in the present is important. So let’s say I’m going to walk into a performance review. I don’t feel all that hopeful. I assume my boss is going to point out lots of transgressions and things that I don’t want to hear. Maybe they’re mean during performance reviews, and I’m thinking, “The last five years have gone terrible, this is going to go bad, too.”

But the more I keep dwelling on that, the worse I feel. The worse I feel, the less likely I am to walk into that performance review and objectively point out, “Here’s the value I’ve added.” So I might be better off to have a power phrase that says something like, “I’ve done amazing things for the company. I can continue to do hard things.” Some sort of a phrase that really empowers me. And I just keep repeating it in my head before I walk into the room.

And then if I’m in the room, my boss is like, “Hey, Amy, we need to talk about these 72 things you did wrong last week,” and I’m about to come out swinging in terms of, like, getting defensive or I’m going to start crying or doing something that’s not helpful in the moment, I just go back to that power phrase, repeat it to myself, remind myself like, “Hey, you’ve got this. It’s okay.” Drown out the negativity and give myself a little boost right when I need it.

Pete Mockaitis
So I’m hearing you say you’ve got this. What are some choice power phrases that have come up for a lot of people?

Amy Morin
So for some people, it’ll be like “I can be brave.” So for people who say, “Ugh, I can’t really ask my boss for a raise,” just telling themselves, “I can be brave,” repeating that over and over as you walk in the room can give them the courage to do it.

Or, for people who are on a sales call and their anxiety is going through the roof, just saying to themselves, “I have value. Things I’m going to say are helpful to them.” Maybe you repeat a phrase like that just as a reminder of, “I’m not a bother. I’m not trying to convince them to do something they don’t want to do, but I’m offering a valuable product,” can remind somebody, “Okay, stay in the present and do your best.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I imagine you want to believe the phrase, like it to be true as opposed to, “I’m a money magnet. Wealth flows to me effortlessly,” style affirmations.

Amy Morin
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If I, like, wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and I’m like, “Oh, you’re the greatest human being on the planet,” we know from the research that doing that, like coming up with something that seems really far fetched, actually backfires.

It makes us feel worse because repeating something like that over and over feels like a lie, and then I’m like, “Ugh, I don’t really measure up. I’m not actually the best human on the planet.” So you don’t want to do that. You want to come up with something that feels more believable, something actionable and something doable that you can buy into.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, this phrase is so believable and tame. I don’t even know if I can call it a power phrase, and yet, it has been quite powerful for me. Lately, especially when you sort of have a series of losses, you can start to think or believe, like, “Eh, why bother? What’s the point?” in terms of like, “This will just be another thing that doesn’t work out, you know?” which is not a great place to be. My power phrase was, “Sometimes things work out better than you think.”

Amy Morin
Ooh, I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I actually wrote down a lot of occasions, like, “Hey, remember when you bought this thing, you didn’t know, you thought maybe I’m going to return it, and you’re like, and you used it almost every day?”

Or, “Hey, remember when you emailed this guy totally out of the blue, and then that turned into, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of business over the course of years? So, hey, sometimes things work out better than you think. And it’s just true, and look at all that evidence.” It’s like, “All right. Well, I guess we’ll try this, too. Maybe this will be one of those things.”

And when I’m not fired up. I don’t have high hopes, and yet sometimes things work out better than you think.

Amy Morin
I like that because it’s realistic, right? And then you have the evidence that shows, “Yeah, a lot of times, things I think about aren’t necessarily going to happen or they do work out better.” And I’ve used one for a while, too, which is just like, “I can make it happen.”

And the reason is, like, if I want to complain about something, well, like, “Gee, Amy, do you want to do something about that or do you just want to complain about it?” Or, when I see a problem, like, “Ooh, boy, I don’t think I could do that.” Like, “No, I could make it happen.”

Like, there’s things I could do. Sometimes I choose not to, but just reminds me like, “No, like, there’s action you could take if you wanted to make this better. Maybe it’s not worth it, but if you do want to make it better, make it happen.”

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been trying to run some judo, if you will, mentally, on dread, resistance, not feeling like it, kinds of things. And I was chatting with AI while watching my children’s karate class because they had a long, very long mission statement about building determination, like, “How does one build determination, Gemini?” So we’re pondering this.

We talked about the anterior mid-singular cortex as a portion of the brain. And when this is stimulated, if people tend to have a feeling, like there’s a growing storm that they’re going to rise to it. And so then I think about your David Goggins-type characters of the world who kind of sort of lean in and embrace the adversity, suffering, unpleasantness of a thing, as a benefit unto itself. Like they are being strengthened by the engaging in the very thing they can’t stand.

And so sometimes, I try to hype myself up with the power phrase in that zone, but it’s more of a power paragraph and it’s clunky. Do you have any advice or experience in this kind of a judo move of, “Yes, you hate that, and that’s why it’s great. So let’s go do it”?

Amy Morin
So there’s another play in the book about give yourself a pep talk. So, whereas, a power phrase is just going to be one sentence, sometimes you need the pep talk, right? And we know from the research that a coach’s halftime speech makes a big difference in how players do in the second half of a game.

If their pep talk is motivational and aspirational, they’re going to do much better than if the coach were to point out all of the mistakes that they made in the first half, they tend to come out and they do worse.

And so we can create our own pep talk and it’s kind of like it doesn’t have to be worthy of, say, a TED Talk, but maybe you do have a longer speech that you give yourself. And I’m not a huge fan of the ones that put you down, like, “Hey, loser, you did it again. Quit messing up,” because I don’t think in the long term that the speeches like that tend to help us.

And I think when that happens, when people say no, like, “A lot of the negativity motivates me,” sometimes it’s more of a deeper rooted self-worth issue. But for most of us, I think, “Yeah, if I just asked myself, like, what would my coach say right now? If I had the world’s best coach sitting next to me, they were to give me a motivational speech, what would they remind me of?”

And if you just give to yourself those same words, that same speech of like, “Okay, this is, you have two hours left to get this report done and you’re four pages shy of where you need to be,” are you going to do it? Like, what would this coach say to you?

And if you really do best with a coach that’s going to, like, yell and scream and motivate, like great. But some of us do better with a coach that would be a little more positive. But to know, “What kind of a coach would motivate me the most?” and then you just give yourself that speech. It can do wonders in how you’re going to perform in the next short-term period.

Pete Mockaitis
Have you seen the Chris Hemsworth video “You Need,” which is like a one-minute of him just saying, “Hey, you’re beautiful, you’ve got this, you’re amazing,” just unabashedly bringing it. It’s a treat. We’ll link it in the show notes.

Amy Morin
Okay, because I haven’t seen it, but I’ll have to check it out, too.

Pete Mockaitis
And, yeah, it’s a fun one. But, you’re right, when it’s coming from you to you, like in a reality way with your own words, it’s not silly. It’s not, you know, Disney Sports Movie magic. It’s like, “Hey, you know what, yeah, that kind of, yeah, kind of you’re making some sense here, Pete, yeah.

Amy Morin
And there’s some research, too, if you were to write it down. So let’s say I’m just going to, like, write a kind letter to myself. I could do this exercise today. So for the next time I’m feeling kind of low in life, I just write maybe a paragraph that’s all, “Okay, Amy, chips have been down before, but you’ve been able to rise to the occasion. You’ve been through hard times. It’s okay, you’ll get through this, too.”

And this paragraph, I write it down on a piece of paper, maybe I just tuck it in my purse or I put it in my pocket, put it in my desk drawer. I’m training my brain, “Hey, this way of thinking actually matters and it’s important to me. Like, the self-compassion or the kind words that I’m giving myself, those matter and they’re important to me.”

And then I’m more likely to think in a more self-compassionate and kind way. Because there’s another play in the book that’s the opposite of it, which is ‘take out the mental trash.’ So in a day when I’m like, “Ah, I am such a loser. I can never do anything right. Things are going horribly,” all of those thoughts are going to drag me down. But to tell myself, “Well, just don’t think about that,” actually doesn’t help.

But if you get it out of your head and you write it down on a piece of paper, and then you literally throw the piece of paper away, or if you’re in an open office, maybe you just cross it out with a Sharpie, and instead of crumpling it up, but you throw it away, you’re teaching your brain, “I actually don’t value this way of thinking,” and you’re less likely to continue to have those same negative and unhelpful thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Well, Amy, tell us, is there any tool which is just too good to not mention?

Amy Morin
If I were to bring up one more, I would say, if you are a worrier, one of the most important things you could do to reduce your worrying is to actually schedule time to worry. And it sounds so far-fetched, but there’s research behind it that if you set aside 20 minutes a day to worry, and you actually put it in your calendar, so maybe I worry during my lunch break, 12:00 to 12:20, or maybe I worry from 7:00 to 7:20 in the evening.

And whenever I worry outside of that window, I’m going to tell myself, “It’s not time to worry about that yet. I’ll worry about that later.” And at first, your brain is going to keep pinging you about these things, “No, no, worry, worry, worry.”

But the more that it does that, that’s just more proof that this is a great play for you, “I’m going to worry about that later.” And then when your worry time comes around, you sit down, maybe you write down your worries, maybe you just sit and think. But the goal is to worry as much as you can for 20 minutes. And then you get up and you go do something else. Distract yourself to get your mind off of it.

The therapy clients I do this with will often look like the weight of the world has literally been lifted off of their shoulders within about two weeks. And they’ll say, “You know, gosh, I used to worry like 24/7. Or, even when I was working on a task, I had these worries that were always in the background, kind of nagging at my attention or pinging me all the time.”

“And now my brain trusts me, like, ‘Hey, I’m going to worry about it, I just can’t do it right now.’ And it stopped like trying to get my attention all the time, because before I was trying to push those worries down or I was entertaining them constantly, thinking if I worried enough that I’d make it go away.”

So for anybody that worries a lot, and maybe it’s about something specific, maybe you have something in your life, and maybe it’s a real problem, maybe your spouse has a health issue and you find yourself worrying about it all the time. Or maybe you just worry, in general, about everything, the economy, your kids, the family, whatever else is going on.

Either way, this strategy can work and it can work wonders. It’ll take a little while. The first couple of days you’re going to think, “This doesn’t work” but that probably means it is working. If you stick with it, you can literally contain your worrying to 15 or 20 minutes a day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool, and I’ve heard this advice before, and I’m making a connection here. I’m thinking about David Allen, a guest of the show, awesome dude, of “Getting Things Done.” He mentions that when we’ve got a lot of stuff to do, our brain keeps popping that, pinging us with that in terms of, “Oh, you got to do thing.” It’s like, “Yeah, I can’t do anything about that right now.”

And yet when you have a trusted external system where you’ve listed your projects, your next action that’s out there, it’s up to date, you trust it, and you review it regularly, there’s this tremendous peace that comes like that’s just handled.

And so, in a way, this seems like a similar phenomenon, specifically in the zone of worries. And I guess maybe “How am I going to get all my things done?” isn’t one large category of worries, if you will. So that’s intriguing.

And I’d like to know, during this scheduled worry time, because many of us have never actually proactively worried, it just sort of pops up, it’s like, “Okay, now is my worry time. I’m sitting down. All right.” What do I do when I’m proactively worrying?

Amy Morin
So for some people, they’ll have a journal, and they’ll just jot everything down, “I’m worried about the economy. I’m worried about whether I have enough money. I’m worried about my mother,” and that helps them.

Other people just want to like sit and be like, “Let me just put my head in my hands and just think.” And people that do that, it’s often about one thing. Like, maybe you’ve got an adult child with a substance abuse problem and you want to worry about it, “I can’t fix it, but let’s just worry about it for 20 minutes.”

And they might find that they worry about the same things every single evening. That’s fine. Other people say, “You know, my brain kind of drifts. Maybe I’m worried about that, but then I start to worry about money or my own health or something like that, too.” So I think you can either write it down or just sit and worry.

Occasionally, I have somebody who says that they have somebody in their life that they’ll just speak their worries to out loud, but they’ll make a deal, like, with the other person, “I don’t want you to fix it. I don’t want you to validate it. I don’t even want you to say anything. I just want you to sit there for 15 minutes, and I’m going to basically spill all my worries on you, and then we’re going to move on.” And I’ve had people that will say that works, too.

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

Amy Morin
I would say one of my favorites is probably from my women’s book is, “Be the kind of woman who fixes another woman’s crown without ever telling the world that it was crooked.”

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

Amy Morin
So I really like the research study that shows – it’s probably because I’m becoming middle aged myself – the research that showed that when they took people who were aging, older men, and they put them in a house together and they kind of reset time, like they rewound the clock to make all the decorations and everything to like the ‘50s, and they had them just talking, like, news stories and everything like they were back years ago, all of a sudden, their physical health improved.

People didn’t need canes. They were like tossing a football around and, like, life changed all because they no longer started treating themselves like they were older. And for some reason, I just love that study. That a lot of, I think, our aging and our thoughts about what happens to us as we age has a lot to do with our state of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Amy Morin
I just read the book Platonic and I absolutely loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. She was on the show. She’s great.

Amy Morin
Yeah, I love her.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool? We’ve been through a lot of them.

Amy Morin
Yeah, if I were to pick, say, just one more tool from the book, I’m going to say ‘go for the gold.’ You know, when you walk into a room, you can either think, “Ugh, I hope I don’t embarrass myself,” or you walk in and say, “I hope I crush this.” So if I were to pick a tool, I’d say, ‘go for the gold.’ Walk in the room and say, “I’m going to crush this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a favorite habit?

Amy Morin
So I run almost every day, but I don’t run, like, long distance. I run a timed mile as fast as I can, and then my goal is to do it even faster tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Do you warm up first?

Amy Morin
You know, I don’t. I just go from walking outside to a dead sprint. Probably not recommended, but here we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so fun. Well, when it comes to exercise, I don’t know. I don’t want to, you know, shame or advise anyone on anything because, for me, it’s like, “Oh, I finally found a groove. Don’t touch it. Don’t. This is working. Don’t do a thing different. I’ve been doing exactly this because it’s working. And a lot of things have not worked.” A lot of gym memberships, not made good use of financially, etc. So do the thing.

Amy Morin
The best exercise is the one you will stick with.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And is there a key nugget you share that people really dig, they retweet at conferences and such?

Amy Morin
So there’s, I guess, from my first book, I said that we make our best decisions when our emotions and our logic are in check. And that one seemed to resonate with people that, yeah, you can either reduce your emotional intensity, you can raise your logic, but to make sure that they’re in some kind of balance if you want to make a good choice.

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

Amy Morin
My website, which is called AmyMorinLCSW, as in Licensed Clinical Social Worker, dot com. And on it, you’ll find info on all seven of my books, my TEDx Talk, and my podcast, which is called Mentally Stronger with therapist Amy Morin.

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

Amy Morin
You know, I think, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of things you can’t control about your job, about what your boss did, about the economy, but the one thing you can control is if you grew mentally stronger.

So if we just asked ourselves, at the end of the day, “What did I do today to grow mentally stronger?” you’ll be able to pinpoint something that you did, and it will give you hope for tomorrow and remind you of what you do have control over.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Amy, thank you.

Amy Morin
Ah, thanks for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Alan, welcome back!

Alan Stein, Jr.
So great to be with you, my friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting. You’ve got some goodies for us in your book, Next Play. And I understand that this idea came from a book to you long, long ago. Tell us about that.

Alan Stein, Jr.
Yeah. In the year 2000, I remember it vividly, I had just graduated from college and I read Coach K’s first book, Coach K, the Hall of Fame, legendary, iconic former men’s basketball coach at Duke University. He was the one that actually coined the term “next play.” Although, I think even with his admission, this concept of focusing on the present moment is rooted in stoicism, which has been around for, obviously, thousands of years, but Coach K is the first that I had ever heard coined the actual term “next play.”

And Next Play, if I was going to summarize, it would be a framework for stop worrying about what just happened and learn to focus on what’s right in front of you. Stop worrying about what you wished happened and focus on the reality of what actually happened, and to stop worrying about what was and focus on what is.

And he really designed it as a way for his players to not worry about the missed shot or the turnover or the referee’s missed call, but to dial into the exact next play of the game and let go of the previous one. And what I find interesting is when I read that book in 2000, I, conceptually, understood the concept of next play. I mean, it’s pretty straightforward and logically it made sense to me.

But, truthfully, Pete, I didn’t have the emotional maturity at the time to actually integrate it into my life. At that time in my life, I still allowed myself to get emotionally hijacked by some of the most trivial annoyances and inconveniences that we all experience in life. I would find something to the akin of the Wi-Fi cutting out or a barista messing up my order. And that put me in kind of a downward spiral, in a bad mood, you know, for sometimes hours.

So, it wasn’t until maybe 10 years after reading the book that I was able to actually start adopting it and implementing it in my life and really saw the power of how focusing on the next play is such a game changer.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s pretty juicy, Alan. So, I hear you that, yes, this is an idea that, Alan, makes good sense. Okay. Well, we’ll all nod our heads and say that sounds like a wise, proper prudent thing to do. And yet, actually executing it took some time for you to pull off. So, tell me, were there any groundbreaking insights, distinctions, nuances, breakthroughs that helped you actually put it into practice?

Alan Stein, Jr.
Well, what really put it into practice was, 10 years after reading it for the first time, I started working at a high school here in the Washington, DC area, which is where I live, DeMatha Catholic High School, which is a really renowned school for high school basketball, one of the top programs in the country. And their coach at the time was a gentleman named Mike Jones.

And Coach Jones actually put “next play” into practice with everything we did at DeMatha. I mean, he did it with the players. He did it with the coaches. He talked about it on the court. He talked about it off the court. He talked about it with the small things. He talked about it with the big things. I mean, it was really woven into the fabric of the DeMatha basketball culture that we always focus on the “next play.”

And he even had this hand gesture, almost as if he was flipping a page or flipping the script and say, “All right, we’re on to the next play. That play is over. We’re on to the next one.” And it was, I guess, through pure immersion of watching him implement it every single day with our program that I started to implement it in my life.

And it took a little bit of time. It’s one of these things that it’s really hard to just change the snap of a finger, but as I started to implement it in my life and as I witnessed the DeMatha program utilizing it, again, I could kind of see the power and the reframing tool. And then like anything else, just the pure repetition, the more I started to use it, the better I got at actually implementing it.

And here, you know, 26 years after reading about it for the first time, I’m slowly getting a pretty good grip on my ability to move to the next play. And with most of the things that I preach and teach, both on stage and on page, I’m not coming from a place of mastery. I won’t sit here and look at the camera and tell you that I always immediately move to the next play.

But what I will say is I do so more frequently and more often than I have at any other previous time in my life. And I’m able to do it in both the short term and the micro, and I’m able to zoom out and do it in the macro with the bigger transitions that we experience in life. And as I said, it’s just been so profound for me personally.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. And this reminds me of a recent guest we had, Shirzad Chamine, who used to run CTI, the Coaching Training Institute, and he’s got a great program called Positive Intelligence. And he makes the point a few times, which seems striking, that he says to linger in a negative emotion for more than one second is sort of unnecessary, problematic, kind of undue suffering that limits our effectiveness, which is just striking, one second. Wow, that’s quick.

But that’s a kind of a similar notion, in terms of rather than a barista messes up your order, you go into an emotional spiral of yuckiness for hours to just say, “Okay, that happened and that was a bummer. Maybe, what can I learn from it? What’s my takeaway? What’s my action? What’s my response?” And, it’s sort of, you know, rock and roll, move on.

I’d say it does seem easier said than done at times. And I actually really liked what you had to say about the physical gesture of flipping a page because I’ve felt that in a couple of my emotional state worlds of gestures, like, “Oh, I’m grounding my feet firmly on the floor. I’m feeling my toes. Okay. All right. I’m sort of cleared up.”

Or, let’s say someone says, “Let’s take a step back,” I’ll actually physically move my whole shoulders and neck back, it’s like, “Yeah, you’re right. I was looking way close at this thing, and I’m going to take a bigger picture perspective,” and that gesture actually is sort of associated and attached with that. Or, I think of sometimes, like, literally shaking it off, like a dog shaking water all off of his body is beneficial.

So, I think some of this physical stuff, for me, is a handy tip to actually executing this. I’d love your thoughts on that and more tips and tactics for actually pulling it off.

Alan Stein, Jr.
The physical and the psychological are intertwined. It’s hard to compartmentalize and separate the two. Our thoughts drive our emotions and our emotions drive how we feel, and those feelings actually resonate and show up in our bodies. And I actually use the same one you just mentioned about feeling my toes and keeping my feet grounded on the floor, as well as the one that I just gestured, which is the next play.

So, I think having any type of physical anchor to connect to these mantras and frameworks is a very helpful reinforcement tool, in general. And you said something else there, really the heart of next play is how you process and how you choose to respond to everything that’s going on in the world around you. Really, next play is not only a tool to help you focus on the present moment.

It’s a tool to make sure that instead of reacting emotionally or reacting impulsively with some of our most primal feelings, instead, we decide to respond thoughtfully and respond purposefully. And that’s the whole point of next play, is that you don’t control the event or circumstance that just occurred, but you always control your response to it.

And I want to encourage others and invite them on the same journey I’m on, which is to do less impulsive reacting and do more thoughtful responding. And where this is most helpful is when things in our lives don’t go our way, when our preferences aren’t met, when things don’t happen the way that we wish they’d happen.

Well, how do you respond then? How do you behave then? Because I’m a big believer, not only will you improve your performance and productivity when you learn to bounce back quickly when things don’t go your way, but I know from firsthand experience, you’ll actually improve your enjoyment and fulfillment in life when you don’t let those negative thoughts linger and you quickly move on to the next play.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so can you give us some extra perspectives on how to do less impulsive reacting and more thoughtful responding?

Alan Stein, Jr.
The most important part, and this is the part that I struggled with the most, especially when I told you when I first read about the concept, this is the part that got me stuck, is you have to learn how to slow down. You have to learn how to take a breath, take a beat, take a pause, especially when something doesn’t happen the way that you want.

Because it’s in that space, between the stimulus and now your response, that you get to architect and determine how you are going to respond. When we don’t allow for that space or we don’t take any time, then our primal emotions just take over and we’ll react impulsively.

For me, personally, regardless of what the situation is, I’ve noticed that I still have the same thoughts and visceral feelings and physiological responses to when things don’t go my way. I just don’t allow them to drive the car. I don’t allow them to dictate my behavior.

So, a perfect example, I mean, if I’m sitting in traffic or somebody cuts me off, I still feel the primal urge to get angry, to want to honk my horn, or maybe give someone the finger. I’ve just learned to take a beat between actually doing that, and then thinking, “What would be a more appropriate response? What is a response that is more in alignment with the man that I’m trying to become? What is a response that I would want my kids to see me behave as and be more proud of?”

So, for me, it’s all about taking that split second to gather yourself, compose yourself, have some poise, and then be thoughtful about your next play. I want everyone to be less reactive and more responsive. And if you do so, it will help you in your relationship. It will help you in your output and performance and productivity at work.

And, like I said, it will help you just live a more enjoyable, fulfilling life because now you’re no longer allowing what the world does to dictate your mood and to dictate how you feel and dictate your behavior. We’re much more thoughtful in our responses.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. And so, within that slow down, pause, gap moment, you inserted a question, and I think that was lovely in terms of like, “What would be a response that I would like for my children to do?”

And so, I think that’s huge in terms of reorienting where the pathway your brain is naturally going down, it’s like, “Oh, what an idiot. What’s his problem? Hey, does he not see? Does he not care that there was a danger in lives on the road? This jerk, whatever.” It’s like your brain can just go, one thought leads to the next, to the next, to the next.

But when you can ask that question, you’re really redirecting where that is headed in a powerful way. So, I’d love to hear any of your other favorite questions in that mix there.

Alan Stein, Jr.
Well, just so you know, those things that you just said there, and I know you were saying them a little bit in jest, but those are the exact same things I think when someone cuts me off. But as I said, the most important part about next play, and the most important part about our ability to regulate our emotions is separating how we feel and what we think from how we behave and how we respond.

So, I still think those things and that’s still my primal reaction. I just don’t allow that to overdrive and take over and dictate how I behave. So, that pause is where I can insert that question. And the funny part is, it may feel like you’re pausing for an eternity, but it’s usually only a second or two. It’s a couple of heartbeats. It’s really not that big a deal.

No one is saying that when someone cuts you off in traffic that you have to sit there and meditate for the next 20 minutes to think of a thoughtful response. All I want you to do is to feel your feet on the ground and have the awareness in the moment to say, “Hey, I can’t control that that person cut me off, but I can absolutely control how I respond to it. And I want to start choosing thoughtful responses.”

And I find that when we do that, we also start becoming kinder, more empathetic, compassionate people because, as you also just alluded to in your example, when you take a moment to pause then other questions come to mind, like, “What’s going on in this person’s life? Where are they going where they’re in such a hurry that they’re going to be a danger on the road?”

And then it’s a reminder to me that I don’t know anything going on in anyone else’s life at any given moment, especially a stranger in another vehicle. Maybe they have an emergency they’re trying to get to. Maybe they’ve got a sick child in the back of their car. You don’t know. And once again, reframing that allows more compassion and kindness and empathy to enter my heart, which means I’ll have softer, more appropriate responses.

But back to your original question of some other questions we can ask. I try not to label the questions or thoughts or feelings I have as good or bad, or as right or wrong, because it’s completely subjective and it’s completely contextual. What I try to do is I just ask myself, “Is this helpful? Is this a helpful question to ask?”

And my definition of helpful is whether or not it’s increasing my power or is it giving my power away? So, lots of times when things don’t go my way, my initial visceral reaction is to think, “Well, why is this happening to me? This isn’t fair. This sucks.” And once again, that means now I’m a victim of circumstance and environment.

Instead, since those questions are not very helpful questions, when things don’t go my way, I’ve trained myself to ask more helpful questions, like, “What can I learn from this? What can I gain from this? Even though things didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, what is the next play that can actually help move me forward? How can I use this to actually learn something or make me better?”

Those are much more helpful, empowering questions and they put me back in the hypothetical driver’s seat because now I’m in control. Like I said at the very beginning, I don’t control events and circumstances. I always control my response, and that’s where our power comes from is in the response.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Alan, this is so good in terms of the, me, me, me focus. I mean, you mentioned sick child, and this brings me back to a story. This, literally, happened to me. I was in Chicago, I think it was after a date, just hanging out, chit chatting in the car. And then we see someone “parking” in what was totally not a parking space.

And so, it’s just kind of like in the middle of things, and we’re like, “What are you doing? That’s not a parking space. Can’t you see there’s no lights? What’s up with this guy?” So, we were like running our mouths about this, and then they very quickly hustled, while picking up a child from the back seat, and then went at a quick pace into the nearby building, which was a children’s clinic, and we were just that oblivious.

And so, I mean, you used that as an example, and it’s not just sort of like an extreme thought exercise, but like, “No, literally, that happened.” And we both felt so ashamed, like, “Oh, geez, we’re terrible people. They genuinely have a sick child at the children’s hospital, and we’re just mocking their parking job. Okay. Well, I hope they’re doing okay.”

Alan Stein, Jr.
Absolutely. Well, I sure appreciate you sharing that and that hopefully has stuck with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah!

Alan Stein, Jr.
I’ll give you two rather recent examples for me. Now, one, you’re privy to and your audience isn’t, and I certainly don’t say this to make anyone feel awkward, but as you know, my mom passed away two weeks ago, and my father was married to her for 52 years. I mean, that was his person. So obviously, he’s going through some hard times right now, trying to adjust to his next new play in life, which is, “How do I exist without the person that’s been my sidekick for 52 years?”

And the reason I say that is, for that first week in particular, I mean, my dad was an equal combination of devastated and overwhelmed. I mean, I can’t imagine what was actually going through his mind. And if he was navigating the world and maybe was driving and didn’t put his blinker on, he was driving a little bit slow, or was taking longer to order something when he got up to the front of a restaurant, I can understand why people behind him would be really impatient.

Like, “Hey, this old guy is in my way. Come on, Gramps, let’s go.” And yet, if they knew that a week prior to that, he had lost his person of 52 years, my guess is they’d be a little more patient. They’d have a little more tolerance and a little more understanding. And the reason I bring that up is we should all navigate the world as if those things are happening.

Another example, on a slightly more positive note, I have twin sons that are turning 16 in March, so they’re doing their driver’s ed right now, and I take them practice driving. And when I take them to practice driving, I mean, they’re brand-new drivers. They drive a little slow. They’re a little awkward with the blinker. Sometimes they can’t remember who has the right-of-way.

And we were at an intersection the other day and cars behind us were honking because my son should have taken the left but he was so nervous because there was another car coming. And same thing, I have a feeling, if the car behind us honking knew that there was an almost 16-year-old learning to drive for the first time, they’d be more patient, they’d be more tolerant, and they’d have a little bit more empathy.

And I use both of those as examples because I’m also the person that gets frustrated when there’s an old person in my way or a young person that doesn’t know how to drive. And it’s really helped me soften my responses because I just picture my dad or I picture my sons when I’m in something that is making me feel impatient, and just a reminder that most people are doing the best they can with the tools they have. And as human beings, we should be compassionate to that.

And I have to remind myself that, in that moment, I might be the one that’s being frustrated, but there’s other moments where I’m the one causing someone else’s frustration because we’re all fallible as human beings and sometimes we’re not at our best selves. So, the more patient and tolerant and accepting we can be, I just think we’ll live more fulfilling lives and we’ll create stronger and forge more connected relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that so much in terms of, like, living as though that were the case, which reminds me of, which we’ll link to the show notes, there’s a nine-minute YouTube video, which took audio from a David Foster Wallace commencement speech, “This Is Water,” discussing this very concept that we’re so wrapped up in our stuff that we don’t stop, pause, think about the other context there. And sometimes it really is true. And even if it’s not, living that way is handy.

But while we’re talking about generosity or kindness, your chapter three is entitled, “Tell Yourself How Great You Are.” Why is that useful, Alan?

Alan Stein, Jr.
Well, I think the most important conversations we ever have in our lives are the ones we have with ourselves. It’s the little voice in our head. And if anyone watching or listening right now is thinking, “I don’t have a little voice in my head,” well, who do you think just said that to you? Like, we all have the inner voice and the inner monologue.

And I really want to encourage folks, while we’re on this kick of compassion and tolerance and empathy, to learn how to start talking to ourselves in a more kind and compassionate way. I do a lot of work with really high performers.

And it’s been my first-hand experience, as well as the experience of working with these folks, that many times, high performers can be very critical of themselves, can be very judgmental of themselves.

And when they don’t perform to the level that they believe they’re capable of, they actually start to beat themselves up, figuratively speaking, of course. And I want folks to start learning to talk to themselves with the same compassion and kindness that you would talk to a loved one, or that you would talk to a child, or that you would really talk to anyone else.

You and I are friends, Pete. If you called me up after a really hard day, things didn’t go well, you had a couple of podcast interviews, and you had some tech issues, and one of the guests didn’t show up the way that you had hoped, and it was just kind of a tough day for you, as your friend, the last thing I would do in that moment is to be critical of you, is to make certain assumptions and be judgmental and beat you up and make you feel worse.

As your friend, I would want to create a safe space where I could just say, “Hey, man, I’m sorry that today didn’t go well. I know what that feels like. It doesn’t feel good, but just know, man, I believe in you and I know how good your show is, and how good of an interviewer you are. And maybe today didn’t quite live up to your standard, but I know you’ll be better next time because I believe in you.”

Like, that would be the general sentiment in which I would approach you as a friend. So why wouldn’t I talk to myself with that same type of kindness when I fall short? And just to be clear, I believe in holding myself and those I care about to really, really high standards.

None of this is about letting someone off the hook for low performance or for a casual attitude, but it’s about giving ourselves some grace whenever we fall short of expectation because we have to remember we are human beings, we are fallible, we are flawed, and nobody goes through life making all straight A’s. Like, occasionally, we’re going to mess up.

And when we mess up, how we talk to ourselves will dictate our next play. And that next play will dictate how we bounce back and what future performance will look like.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d also love your thoughts in chapter 28, you’ve got “Anticipate Obstacles.” And I’m thinking it’s an interesting game in terms of, thinking about what can go wrong can be helpful in terms of preparation, but it could also be not so helpful in terms of, “Ahh, let’s forget it, it’s too much. I don’t want to deal with all that, or it’s probably never going to work out.” So how do you think about running your brain with this tension?

Alan Stein, Jr.
I don’t ever want folks to be paranoid, but I always want them to be prepared. And there is a difference between the two, obviously. And where I first started thinking this concept was, when I was in the basketball training space and working with elite-level players, I found it kind of comical how many times a player would drive to the basket and get fouled, and that they would get so upset and been out of shape over the defense fouling them.

And I would remind them, like, “Hey, that’s the defense’s job. You do realize the guys in the other color jerseys are trying to keep you from scoring. And when they do that, occasionally, they’re going to hit your arm or foul you. So instead of being surprised that a defender fouls you, why don’t you just assume they’re going to foul you when you go to the basket?”

“Kind of like, you know, hopefully you never have to hear a pilot say this, but if they would say, ‘Brace for impact,’ it’s the same thing like brace for contact when you’re driving to the basket and expect that somebody’s going to hit you. And if they don’t be very pleasantly surprised that you can get to the basket uninterrupted, but don’t be surprised by the contact.”

And for me, I use it in my life in several different ways. As a professional keynote speaker, I have contingency plans for a whole handful of things that potentially could happen during my talk. It could be something like someone in the front row keeps yelling things out, or one of the waiters drops a glass and it shatters in the middle of my talk, the AV goes out and I can’t use the PowerPoint anymore, the microphone doesn’t work.

Like, things that I’m not saying there’s a high likelihood they’ll happen, but there’s a decent chance they’ll happen, and I don’t want to be caught off guard when those things do occur. So, I try to proactively have contingency plans for if they happen, here’s how I’ll handle it.

And of course, if something tangential happens, so maybe they don’t drop a glass but something else is disturbing, maybe somebody’s phone goes off, then I feel more at ease because I’ve prepared for these different scenarios and I’ve imagined them in my mind before they’ve occurred, so when they actually happen in real life, it’s a more seamless transition to move to that next play.

Now I’m not on stage going, “Oh, gosh, I sure hope no one’s phone rings,” “Oh, man, I sure hope no one drops a glass,” I’m not even registering that, I’m not even thinking about it, but if that happens, I will be ready.

And that’s all that I encourage folks to do is to be proactive and giving some thought to some obstacles that may come your way, personally or professionally, and then just have an idea of what your next play will be if they do occur.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good feeling, just that confidence that comes from that level of preparation. One of my favorite stunts to pull when I was doing more keynote speeches was, if you’d hear a little bit of an extra hiss in terms of the microphone situation, I just loved saying to the client and the AV tech people, it’s like, “I think there’s a mismatch between the impedance of the source and the line here. I have a microphone impedance matching transformer with me in my bag, which will probably fix that hiss.” They’re like, “Oh, my gosh, we’re dealing with a pro.”

Alan Stein, Jr.
Absolutely. Love that. We can never be too proactive in thinking about those things. And the other way that we use this, the proactivity portion is, most people apply the next play in the moment. As I said, it’s the basketball player who turns the ball over and misses the shot, next play. It’s when the Wi-Fi cuts out, or the barista messes up your order, or somebody cuts you off in traffic, next play.

But where I also want folks to use it is when you zoom back out and you think of the big transitions in life that most of us will go through, and you start proactively thinking, “How am I going to handle this next play when circumstances change?” I’ll use the same two examples from before.

So, my mother passed recently, my dad is not in the best of health, and I say that with a heavy heart. I don’t know how much more time I have with him, hopefully, plenty of more years, but we know that that’s not guaranteed.

But, at some point in the near future, I’m going to go through a transition of having spent the majority of my life with two very engaged, active, loving parents, to then stepping into living my life in a next play when both of my parents are deceased. And who am I going to be and what am I going to do when I step into that new version?

On the same other side, I mentioned I’ve got twin boys that are almost 16. I also have a daughter that’s almost 14. In the blink of an eye, my three kids will graduate from high school and move on to whatever they choose to do post high school. And I’ll be affectionately known as an empty nester. Well, what is my next play going to be when I no longer identify with having children at home? Like, who am I going to be and what am I going to be in that next play?

And there are so many next plays that many of us go through, whether it’s marriage or divorce, or when you’re running your business. Well, what if you get sued? What if you go bankrupt? What if you have to make layoffs? Conversely, what if your business starts growing at an exponential rate and you have to hire a whole bunch of more people right away? How do you maintain your culture when you’re trying to scale very quickly?

Like, all of these could be potential next plays, and I don’t want them to monopolize or paralyze us as we think about them, but I do want us to give some thought to proactively deciding, “How am I going to deal with these circumstances changing if and when they do because there’s a very good likelihood they will?” And that’s where the proactivity and the preparedness comes into play.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And whenever we’re chatting, I’d love to hear some tales of you and super pro famous athletes, Kobe Bryant, Kevin Durant, etc. Any memorable stories, moments, experiences from some of the greats that help illustrate some of this stuff?

Alan Stein, Jr.
Sure. Well, I mean, the most memorable one, it’s usually the opening story I give in my keynotes, was meeting Kobe Bryant for the first time in 2007.

And for context, for any of your viewers or listeners that don’t follow basketball as closely as I do, most would agree that in 2007, Kobe was the best player on the planet. And I remember as a young coach at that time watching one of his early morning private workouts and being really surprised at how basic the drills were. He was drilling down on fundamentals that I had done with middle school age players.

Now he was doing them with an unparalleled level of focus and detail and precision and effort, but the actual drills he was doing were very basic. And when I asked him later that day at camp, why a player at his level, the best player in the world would focus on doing such basic drills, he said something that, fundamentally, changed my life forever. He said, “Why do you think I’m the best player in the world? Because I never get bored with the basics.”

That teaching moment, I mean, literally, the hairs on my neck still stand up when I tell that story and it’s been almost 20 years, that the best of the best never get bored with the basics. They have a strong respect and appreciation for the fundamentals, and they try to simplify success, like the sign above my head, that they try to untether from the unnecessarily complex and they just drill down on mastery of the basics.

And that’s really been the foundation to everything I believe and everything I preach and teach on page and on stage is working towards mastery of the basics, and Next Play is a pillar, is an offshoot of that, is a component of, “What is a basic framework we can use to be more thoughtful in our responses and stay dialed into the present moment?” And that’s what it is for me. It’s this whole concept of next play.

And, you know, next play, I mean, I’ve seen, certainly, athletes use it with tremendous results, but I’m now seeing folks in the business world be able to use it as well with equally great success. And I can tell you now, any organization that can develop a next play mentality with their team is going to be at a massive advantage over their competition.

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

Alan Stein, Jr.
No, man, this has been fun. I always love connecting with you. You always spur such great thoughts and ask such great questions, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Alan Stein, Jr.
Funny enough, I was actually watching, like, a reality show on Netflix about real estate. It was called “Owning Manhattan” with Ryan Serhant. And one of the members of his team said, “If you’re not changing it, you’re choosing it.” So that’s a relatively new quote and it just hit me really hard when I heard it.

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

Alan Stein, Jr.
Well, one that I found while doing this book that I thought was really interesting was that the average visceral emotion that we feel only lasts about 90 seconds. If you just let it run through you, and if you just accept it, you’re only going to be frustrated, irritated, angry, upset for about 90 seconds, if you just take that breath and just say, “Hey, I’m feeling frustrated right now.”

The problem most people have is they keep throwing logs on the fire and coal on the fire, and they keep starting that stopwatch over because of the self-narrative and the additional internal dialogue they have when that happens.

So, the barista messes up your order and you feel frustrated, and then you start saying things to yourself like, “Man, this is ridiculous. This guy never pays attention. He’s always messing up my order.” Well, the clock just started over again. “Man, this isn’t fair. I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m late for a meeting, and now I got to wait for another coffee to be made,” clock starts over again.

And that’s why some people can experience someone cutting them off in traffic in the morning, or the Starbucks barista messing up your order, and they stay in that spiral for hours because they keep starting the clock over through the unhelpful self-narrative.

So, to me, it’s so important just to say, “Hey, I’m a little frustrated that they messed up my order at Starbucks. I’m allowed to be frustrated. That’s okay. But I’m not going to allow it to dictate how I behave or how I show up. And I’m certainly not going to be rude to the barista. These things happen.” And by the time I finished that sentence, it’s been about 90 seconds and I just move on with my day.

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

Alan Stein, Jr.
One of the go-to resources, well, I’ll give two. One is the book I mentioned at the very beginning of this called Leading with the Heart, which is Coach K’s first book, where I heard about next play for the first time.

Another book that I recommend very highly is by my good friend, Phil Jones, a fellow speaker. And he wrote a book called Exactly What to Say. And it’s a shorter book, it’s almost more of a handbook and a guide than it is an actual book, but, really, Phil’s whole tagline is, “When you change your words, you change your world.”

And he talks about the power of language and then how certain phrases and statements and questions we can ask, can actually help us get a better response from the people we’re trying to connect with. So, anyone that’s in a leadership position or in a sales position, highly recommend Leading with the Heart by Coach K, and Exactly What to Say by Phil Jones.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Alan Stein, Jr.
I’m a real stickler for my morning routines. My morning routine, how I spend the first 60 minutes after I wake up, really primes me for the rest of the day and has a massive influence on what type of day I’m going to have, so I’m very protective of the first 60 minutes of my day.

And within the first 60 minutes, I do the very best I can to not check email and not check social media. I do check text messages just in case there was an emergency or a fire that needs to be put out. But I try not to check my inbox or check social media.

I try to do something that engages my physical body, whether it’s some light stretching or playing pickup basketball or lifting weights or going for a walk. And then, at the same time, I try to do something that gets me mentally or emotionally engaged as well. So read, watch, or listen to something that’s either educational or inspiring.

And if I can check those three boxes within the first 30 to 40 minutes of waking up, it usually sets a pretty nice foundation for how the rest of the day will go.

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

Alan Stein, Jr.
They can just go to my website, which is just AlanSteinJr.com. That’s kind of the central hub for everything that we have going on. And you can also find me on social media at @alansteinjr. on Instagram and LinkedIn and all of the major platforms. I take a tremendous amount of pride in being both accessible and responsive.

So, if someone enjoyed this conversation that we’ve had, and I hope that they have, and they want to share something or ask something, just shoot me a DM on Instagram or LinkedIn. I’m very good about getting back.

And if you have any interest in bringing me in to speak to your team or school or organization. You can find all the information on my programs at AlanSteinJr.com. And then, of course, you can grab “Next Play” on Amazon or Audible or wherever you get your books and audio books.

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

Alan Stein, Jr.
See if you can adopt this next play mentality. See if you can, at the very start, just put an insert, that pause or that breath or that beat, after you feel the visceral emotion to react, and just take a second so that you can be thoughtful in your response.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alan, thank you.

Alan Stein, Jr.
My pleasure. This was a lot of fun. Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Muriel, welcome back!

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you. I’m delighted to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m delighted as well. Last time we talked executive presence, and that was very fun. And it looks like your executive presence and star has continued to rise and rise. So, congratulations on everything.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
You got a fresh book here, Leadership Unblocked: Break Through the Beliefs That Limit Your Potential. That sounds so important. And I would love to hear, for starters, what’s one of the most common beliefs you’re seeing widespread that is limiting a lot of folks’ potential in their careers?

Muriel Wilkins
I think, probably, the one, they’re all equal opportunity, but the one that I see that really halts people in their career is, “I need to be involved,” because it gets them involved in places that they actually don’t need to be involved in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we need to be involved, as in, “I’m reluctant to delegate, let go.” Or, what are the flavors of “I need to be involved”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, I mean, it’s this unsatiating, almost compulsion to have to be engaged in all the things. So, it looks like, “I have to be at that meeting,” “I have to be cc’d on all the emails,” “I have to be the one that has the conversation,” “I have to weigh in on that document.” And what it does is, it does a couple of things.

Number one is it keeps you from being able to advance in a way that you need to because the more responsibilities you get, the more you would need to be involved in in order to deal with all the complexities of your job.

And, secondly, it actually creates a clog in the system, meaning it keeps others from being able to develop, because they then end up become habituated by the fact that you’re involved in all the things, so then why should they do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, and I’m thinking of yet another downside there is, I recall I was having chat with a fellow Bain colleague. We were talking about, “Oh, what have you been up to? What are you doing?” And he was looking at all kinds of cool opportunities at buzzy startups that had hefty funding and dozens of employees.

And there was one that he got pretty far in the interview process and he was considering it. And he told me he was leaning towards rejecting the offer because of one of several reasons. The CEO of many dozens of employee companies still wanted to review every email that went out to the users.

And I was really struck by that because it’s like, I’ve lived that myself, but then I have a much smaller team. I managed to let it go a long time ago and life has been so much better.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And, look, the thing with a belief like “I need to be involved” is, at some point, it served you, right? That CEO, it probably helped him in some capacity at some point where he was cc’d or maybe he had had an occasion where he was not copied on an email and all hell broke loose as a result of that, or he thinks as a result of that. And, therefore, his mantra then became, “You’ve got to CC me on all the emails.”

You know, I think the point here is that just because it works in one situation doesn’t mean it’s going to work in all situations. And, certainly, from a leadership standpoint, there’s no way you can have the sheer physical capacity to be involved in all the things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us a cool story of someone who had that limiting belief and what they did to evolve beyond it and what, ultimately, happened for them?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I’m thinking, even as you were sharing the story of that CEO, I’m thinking about a client that I had who, and this is something that I often find, particularly if you’re the founder of an organization or a startup, or you were there from the beginning, even if you’re not the founder, you were one of the early employees, where, quite frankly, it is required that all hands are on deck.

And so, this particular person, she had founded this nonprofit on her own, it was just her. And so, she was used to doing all the things. But then as the nonprofit grew, and again, she really needed to be focused on external fundraising and being motivating staff and thinking strategically and dealing with the board.

I remember one of the conversations we had, she’s like, “But I just find I don’t have time to do all these things.” And I said, “Well, what are you spending time doing?” And she said, “Well, for example, like this morning, I was checking the bathrooms to make sure that there was toilet paper in there.” And I said, “Is that the best use of your time as CEO?”

And it made her really think about it from the perspective of, “Why am I the one doing this?” Not to say that it shouldn’t be done, but that wasn’t where she added the most value. And so, it wasn’t that I was telling her it’s not the best use. I just asked her whether it was the best use.

And so, when she started shifting to “I need to be involved where it’s the best use of my time” it gave her an automatic filter for how should she be prioritizing where she spends her time. And I think that’s what we all need to be doing, is really thinking about it through a filter rather than a universal level of engagement that we need to have in all the things in order to keep things from going wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, now for just our human need to have stories completed, how did that toilet paper get handled in the end?

Muriel Wilkins
She delegated it. And what’s funny is there were people in her organization who wanted to help. But she also, it’s interesting because these beliefs never come from a bad place. She was also very concerned because they were doing a lot of work and they were a service-oriented organization.

She was also concerned about putting more burden, as she put it, on her staff. She did not want to burden them with more. So, she took it upon herself. She’s the one who would do all these things, but they were like, “Look, you’re better off going out and raising money for us because if you don’t do that, you’re the only person who can do that. If you don’t do that, we’re not going to survive as an organization.”

So, these little things, and the toilet paper was just one example, but when you add up all those little micro examples of where she was spending the time, and we started calling them breadcrumbs, right? Like, stop focusing on the breadcrumbs and focus on the loaf, the mana. Then she started getting it, and her staff was more than happy to focus on the breadcrumbs.

And you know what? They felt like they were adding value by doing that. And so, kind of it worked out. So, it required not only a shift in belief in her, but she needed to have some conversations, be clear around what she was delegating and ensuring that her staff was also aligned around those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into the rundown of the top seven beliefs that limit us, as well as your approach for addressing them. But before we do it, I’d like to hear, any other surprising, fascinating discoveries you made as you were digging into this research?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, so I think there were a couple of things that really struck me, two, in particular. The first is we just talk about beliefs, and what they are. Because when I say the word beliefs, some people are like, “What are you talking about?”

And so, when we think about what a belief is, it really is just an assumption we’re making or a story that you’re telling yourself. Like, are they true? I mean, you came out of consulting, so you know this. I did as well. We make assumptions when we model something or when we put a budget together. But do we know if it’s actually true? We don’t. It’s a hypothesis around what’s going to happen.

And if you put in one thing I learned in consulting was, you put in garbage assumptions to that model, that spreadsheet model, what’s going to come out on the other side is garbage. And so, one of the things that I really loved digging into was the impact of our thoughts and our beliefs on our outcomes.

And there’s been some interesting studies, everything from Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset to Ellen Langer and Alia Crum’s work around the impact of thoughts and beliefs on health outcomes that undeniably show that it’s not just what you do, but it’s what you think about what you do that has a huge impact on the outcomes you have. So that was number one.

I think number two, when I looked across all of my clients, or I looked at 300 of them, to see if there were some commonalities in terms of the types of beliefs that they had and, lo and behold, I did find that there were some commonalities, the one that surprised me the most is the belief of, “If I can do it, so can you.”

And it surprised me, Pete, because that is a mantra that we use, I have used so many times that I thought was like very motivational, very inspirational. And it can be, but it isn’t always. It can actually be quite debilitating and demoralizing and, quite frankly, get in the way of the thing that you’re supposed to do as a leader, which is to also coach and develop others.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I want to hear, when you mentioned huge impact that you’ve seen from the research, can you share with us any sort of eye-popping discoveries or experiments, pieces of research that made you go, “Whoa”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, my favorite, which I write about or summarize, synthesize in the book is the one by Ellen Langer and Alia Crum. And so, they were looking at, and they were at Harvard. But they basically looked at a group of hotel attendants, so the people that you see when you’re in a hotel cleaning the rooms, doing all the things.

If you’ve seen these folks, they’re on their feet all day or they’re pushing things. They’re doing very much physical labor for eight hours a day. And they ask these folks, “Do you believe that the work that you’re doing is exercise? Like, does it equate working out?” And most of them said, “No, we’re just doing our job. It’s not exercise. Exercise happens after this if I get around to it.”

And so, they introduced to them, “What if you just thought about your work as exercise? What if you just considered your work to be exercise?” which is a belief, right? It’s just a different assumption you’re making about your work. And then they tracked what happened. And what they saw that four weeks after introducing this notion, they saw material enough improvement in a bunch of different health metrics in the folks who they had assigned this new belief.

And so, their conclusion was, and that was the only thing that changed, Pete, nothing else. The work didn’t change, the people didn’t change, their uniform didn’t change. That’s the only thing that changed. So, the conclusion was, again, that it’s not the work that they’re doing, that necessarily just drives the outcomes, but it’s what they think, the thinking about that work, what they believe about that work that then also impacted outcomes.

You know, when I read this study, as well as again, the growth mindset study that Carol Dweck has done, where she did almost the same type of thing as it relates to education, I thought, “Well, my goodness, like, why doesn’t this apply from a leadership standpoint?”

And I have experienced in my own work, part of my frustration as an executive coach for the past 22 years is I would help my clients move to action, move to doing something different but they would always come back to the thing that was frustrating them to begin with or the outcomes that they weren’t getting to.

And what I realized is they were changing what they were doing, but they weren’t changing what was driving the behavior, which is the belief or the thought or the assumption or the mindset. But if we could change that or expand on it, I don’t even like to use the word change, it made it much more sustainable in terms of them being able to have new behaviors, new ways of doing things to then make the out more sustainable.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve heard of this study several times, and whenever it comes up, I just wonder, like, what is the intermediate mechanism by which that is occurring? And so, I can only speculate, and maybe they’ve got better speculations or you know, and you can solve this mystery for me.

But in terms of, if you think about it as exercise, you then do it differently and you actually appreciate, “Oh, my heart rate’s getting up a little bit.” It’s like, “Ooh, I’m going to have a little bit more gusto in the way that I’m moving.” And, thusly, there are physiological impacts of that? Or, what’s that sort of intermediate step?

Muriel Wilkins
Think about it in terms of, you know, if I am watching a scary movie, again, I’m saying scary. If we’re watching the same movie and my belief is, “This is scary,” how does my body respond? My body responds for me, I might sweat, I might go like this and hide my eyes. I might clench my fists and my heart might start pumping fast.

But if you’re looking at the same movie, let’s say Chucky, which was the first movie my husband took me on a date, I would say that was scary for me. He thought it was funny, right? So, what did his body do? His body, his eyes lit up, he was jittery in his seat, he was laughing. Same movie, different response based on what we think about what we’re seeing in front of that screen. So that is my anecdotal way of explaining it.

And I think the same holds true in anything that we do, right? We all might look at a situation and approach a situation, and certainly in the workplace. How we experience any workplace situation, in particular the challenges, is impacted by the way we think about that situation, by what we think about ourselves, about how we think about the other person that’s part of that situation, or what we think about the context.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. I’m thinking about perhaps giving a speech or presentation. Some people say, “I’m so scared. I’m nervous. I’m terrified.” Others say, “I’m so excited. I’m pumped up. This is going to be awesome.” And it just has that whole cascade of downstream effects there.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah. And, look, and, by the way, I’m not a person who sits here and say, “Oh, my gosh, just think it and it will happen.” Like, that’s not what this is all about. I think it’s much more about having alignment, right? If what you want to have happen is to show up as confident in that presentation, or what you want to have happen is the audience leaving feeling like you’re engaging, then you ought to work backwards and say, “If I want to show up as engaging to the audience, how would I need to act in that presentation?”

“How would I need to behave in that presentation? And if that’s the way that I need to behave, then what do I need to think in order to be able to behave that way? Or, how do I need to feel in order to behave that way? And if I need to feel that way, then what do I need to be thinking about the audience, about the presentation, about me, in order to increase the probability that I can actually feel and behave in that way?”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that a lot. So, working backwards there, in terms of my thought or belief leads to my feeling and then my presence, how I’m showing up leads to the impact or transformation. And then as you explore that chain, you could even see, “Well, I need to think or believe that,” I don’t know, “this thing’s really going to work.”

And so then, we’d say, “Well, what are my doubts? Well, why don’t I go investigate those? OH, hey, what do you know? It looks like the odds really are good that this thing is going to work, and that it will naturally flow through.”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah. And, look, and it’s not to lie to yourself. It’s also the point that many beliefs can exist at the same time, right? And so, again, going back to the example of the presentation, yeah, I could still say, “Oh, my gosh, like, I might mess up my words.” That certainly could be true. We don’t know if it’s actually going to happen.

And I have this belief that, “If I mess up my words, people are going to think that I don’t know what I’m talking about.” And I can also believe that what I have to say is really interesting and that others will be interested in it. So, which of those two is best going to serve me if my goal is to be engaging in that presentation? The second one.

So, it’s not to say that the first one doesn’t exist. It’s just that it’s not helping me right now. So why pick it up, right? It’s like if I’m trying to be healthy and in front of me is a carrot or a bag of potato chips, right? Both are good, and I’m making the choice based on the outcome of I want to be healthy, I’m going to pick up the carrot.

If it’s like, “Muriel, you just want to satiate your taste buds right now,” if that’s the goal, then I might pick up the potato chips. Just make sure that the way you’re thinking about something and the way you’re acting is aligned with the outcomes that you want rather than just based on default or habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, could you give us the quick, I don’t know, two- three-minute version of the rundown of the seven beliefs you highlight here?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So, we already spoke about one, which is “I need to be involved,” which is basically, the way you see it is somebody just wants to be involved in all the things. I think the example of wanting to be copied on everything is a great one, and that’s a telltale sign that that might be there for you.

The second is “I need it done now,” which has a sense of not only wanting completion on all the things, but also urgently. So, there’s almost this, what it leads is what’s known as toxic productivity, which is everything needs to be done at any cost.

The third is “I know I’m right.” It typically shows up as the person who, you often hear them called as they always want to be the smartest person in the room. What’s tricky about that one is those folks actually do have an uncanny ability to know the answer and see around the corner. They’re just doing it in a way that doesn’t serve their goal, which is to also get other folks to align with them.

The fourth is “I can’t make a mistake.” And so, that’s pretty self-evident. It’s this belief that no mistakes are acceptable in any type of way. And it really is grounded in this notion of underlying it all, feeling like, “If I make a mistake, I won’t be able to recover.”

The fifth one is, “If I can do it, so can you,” which is, again, one of those that sounds motivating, but can be quite debilitating. We have, “I can’t say no,” as the sixth one. And then the last one is, “I don’t belong here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so what’s interesting is each of these has many particular flavors, variations, facets. For example, “I can’t say no,” I can imagine it’s sort of like there’s a, “Or, what?” And like the, “Or, what?” it could be totally different for people.

Muriel Wilkins
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, they’ll think I’m not a team player,” or, “I’ll get fired,” or, “I will miss out on this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that’ll never come back.” Just for one demonstration, can you give us a feel for the different variants of, say, “I can’t say no”?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, I think that’s a great nuance that you’ve pointed out, Pete. And I think, in order to understand the variance, because, by the way, you can have this belief and it shows up in varying ways depending on the situation or different even times in your career or your life. But what I think is important to understand is where these beliefs come from, right?

You weren’t born with them, they were learned. And they were learned because it is what got you through something, that got you through to the other side. They actually helped make you successful. A lot of times, in your family of origin or maybe in your schooling or maybe in your community or maybe just out in the world, but now in this particular context, it might not be helping.

Even though they are variants, they all have a commonality, which is, “What is the need that they’re trying to fulfill? What are they trying to make sure that you get?” Fundamentally, under each of these beliefs, we are all trying to get three needs met. The first is the need to feel worthy. The second is the need to feel connected. And the third is the need to feel safe, okay?

We all have these fundamental needs in the workplace, outside the workplace, when we were two years old, and when we are 55 years old, right? So, many of these beliefs come from a place of trying to get these needs met. So, the, “I can’t say no,” for example, well, when you dig down, when I work with my clients and we dig down and say, “Well, why can’t you say no?” They might say like, “Well, I don’t want to disappoint them, right?

Well, what would disappointing them mean? Ultimately, when you feel, you know, I remember my daughter told me once when she was younger, she said, “The worst thing that you could ever tell me.” She was like eight. She said, “The worst thing you could ever tell me is that you’re disappointed in me.” I said, “Really?” I said, “It’s not that I don’t love you.”

She said, “No, no, no. It’s that you’re disappointed in me.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “Because I would feel like you’re literally just, like, turning your back on me,” which basically told her those words meant that she would no longer be, in her eight-year-old mind, would no longer be connected to me, right? And so that was her articulation.

But at the root of “I can’t say no” is a sense that, “If I say no, I will be disconnected from the people who I am trying to do something for, or from the work. So, yes, on the other hand, means that I am connected, right?” And so where might that come from? Maybe at some point in your career, in your life, or whatnot, you learned that saying yes kept the relationship going, kept the connection going.

But does it still serve you? And is it necessarily true, now, universally, that if you say no, it will destroy the connection? And vice versa, as many people find out later in their career, “Even though I’m saying yes to everything and taking all the things on, I still am not maintaining the connection. I’m still not getting the promotion. I’m still getting fired. I’m still the last one here and abandoning myself rather than being able to care for myself and care for the work at the same time.”

So, it’s not that, all of a sudden, I want people to say no, no, no, no, no, no, no all the time. It’s just understanding that that rule that you have in your head that may have served you at some point is not a universal rule. You have to be able to adapt and recognize “When is it helping you, and when is it not?” So, there are times with my clients where I’m like, “Yeah, you can’t say no. This is one you can’t say no to. You got to do it.”

But then there are others who’s like, “Really? What are your other options?” Well, you’ve got yes, you’ve got maybe, you’ve got a stream of other options that you can choose as a response. It doesn’t always have to say yes, be yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that. And it sounds like we’re starting to get into it a little bit, the process, your framework, when you are addressing these pieces. Can you walk us through these steps?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the first step is that you have to uncover that there’s actually some place where there’s misalignment. And so, what I tell people and try to short-circuit it and I talk about it in the book is the minute you feel something is off, that’s the only way I can describe it. And that can come from an external cue.

Somebody’s not getting what they want or you didn’t get the promotion or you’re not getting the feedback you want or you’re not, something is off. There’s a gap between what you want, the outcome you want, and what’s actually happening. The audience seems bored. But there are also internal cues, and I would much rather people face the internal cues, because they usually suggest it before the external ones come up.

And the internal cues, you know, I’m pointing at my chest, my heart space here, is my chest tightens. Something feels off. I get like a little tingly. Something feels off. I’m worrying about something, but I don’t even know what I’m worrying about. Something feels off. So, the first question is, or awareness is, “Something doesn’t feel like it’s happening the way I believe it should be happening.”

And then the second question is you have to name what is the belief that might be driving that dissonance, right? So, “What is it that I’m believing?” And this is a simple question, “What is it I’m believing about myself? What is it that I’m believing about the situation? Or, what is it that I’m believing about the people involved or the stakeholders or whatnot that is contributing to me behaving or feeling in this way?” Okay? And so, that’s where the naming happens.

And what I found is that when we got down to it, it typically, at least for my clients, ended up being one of these seven. Those were the top seven. There are certainly others. And so, I’m not suggesting that these are the only seven. It’s that at least it gives you a jump start as to what they might be. Once you can name the belief, then you want to move to, before you move to action, which is, “Okay, well, Muriel, what do I do about it?”

You want to actually unpack it a little bit, and that’s step number two, unpack it. The unpacking is becoming friendly, getting to know that belief, because it’s been around a long time. You better believe it. So, you’ve got to look at it and say, “In what way has it helped me? And in what way is it not helping me? Why do you want to do that?”

Because this is not about getting rid of the belief. Again, it’s just putting it to the side so that when it is helpful to you again, you can pick it up. And the only way you’ll know when to do one or the other is if you become familiar with it. And just asking yourself, “In what moments has it helped me? And in what moments does it not help me?” you are then having more agency and taking control more about what your beliefs are and your thoughts and assumptions are, rather than just, again, looking at them universally.

Once you do that, then you can move to the third step, which is the unblocking. The unblocking has two pieces and it’s very important. The first step is reframing the belief. So, you’ll say, “Okay, well, if that belief’s not helping me, which one would?” And it’s just as a reframing. So, instead of, “I need it done now,” what if it’s, “I need certain things done now,” or, “I need the things strategic, that have strategic value done now,” or, “I need the things that are most important done now”?

Or, we even drop the now, “I need to focus on the things that are important for us to do.” And that little reframing, you can then channel into the last step, which is the actions. If that is my new belief, then how will I approach this situation or this work in front of me or my team or myself, right?

The issue is most people try, because we are so action-biased, most people try to short-circuit the whole process and go straight to, “Oh, there’s a problem? What do I do? What do I do?” And that works, but that’s the fake-it-till-you-make-it approach and it’s not sustainable. We see this happen all the time with people outside of the workplace, with people who try to lose weight, for example.

It’s, “I’m just going to start exercising January 1st.” Well, we all know what happens by Feb. 14, right? Valentine hits and it all goes out the window. Why? Because the action change, but the mindset around relating to exercise, relating to working out, relating to all those things are not sustainable. And so, you go right back to the actions you were doing before because your actions will realign with the way that you think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, sticking with that example for a moment, let’s say that we’re faking it till we’re making it in the world of exercise, your diet, health stuff, what are some ways some of these particular beliefs show up? Maybe just walk us through that whole process in which someone is engaged in that but it’s not going to end well, tell us, how might the execution of the three-step framework unfold to land in a happier place?

Muriel Wilkins
I’ll use me as an example. So, I have wanted to build my strength for a while. I’m a cardio person. I have been a long-time runner. Did distance-running for a long time, until my hip gave out on me.

And I thought to myself, I’d been told for years, “Muriel, you need to balance out your cardio with strength.” Okay, I tried. I would say, “Okay, yep, I’m going to start this program.” Went to action, but never, mindset-wise, it was, “No, cardio is where the real value is at. Running is where the value is at.” So, guess what I did most of the time? I ran, and within a couple weeks I would give up my strength training regimen, okay?

Until I recognized that, because of my hip injury, a couple ortho doctors told me, “If you don’t strengthen your hip more and your muscles around it, you’re going to have some serious issues down the line.” Okay, so how do I need to rethink about this? I need to rethink about this not in terms of training for a race, I need to rethink about this in terms of longevity, right?

What do I believe about longevity? Oh, what I believe about longevity is both my cardio and my strength is equally important to contribute to the type of healthy longevity that I want. Reframe, okay? That mindset of training for a race, “Cardio is where it’s at,” was not helping me. Okay, that I realized.

Once I understood where that original mindset came from, which was past the uncover, I could move to unpack. Why was I thinking, why was it helping me all this time? I knew that my success had come from racing, so I wasn’t letting go of that being the belief. I became very clear. I’m not racing anymore. That got me past the second phase.

Third phase, reframe, I now have new ways of thinking about my exercise routine. Okay, now I’m thinking about it differently, I can move to action. And every time I slip up on the strength training, which I still do, I go back and I say, “Okay, how am I thinking about this? Why am I slipping up on the strength training? I’ve got to rethink how I’m framing it.” And I go back to the longevity piece, which helps me continue with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, perhaps we have an eighth major belief there in terms of this isn’t valid. Maybe that’s related to “I don’t belong here.” It’s like, “You know, doing the strength training thing, that’s not really me. I’m more of a cardio person, a racing person, not down with the gym bros grunting and doing huge plates and all that. So, I don’t see the value here.”

But then, when there’s a new belief, indeed, it is transformational. I think I felt similarly, in that having a bodybuilder-like physique, I think, once appealed to me as maybe a 16-year-old. Never really happened. But now that’s just, it doesn’t matter at all in terms of my interest. But when you talk about longevity, I think about Peter Attia, and Outlive, and some of his things.

It really is, “Oh, well, would you like to be able to play with your grandchildren in your seventies and eighties?”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, different outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to being sort of stuck in a chair the whole time, and I’m like, “Well, I would. I would like that.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. And, I mean, you mentioned him, but that is what changed my framing of thinking about this was actually reading his book.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s a good one, Outlive.

Muriel Wilkins
And so, it was like, “Yeah, I want a different outcome. So, what do I have to do? I can’t keep thinking about it the same way. I’ve got to change the way I think about it or else I can’t get with this program.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think about beliefs about value can be interesting, in that you may come to the opposite conclusion in terms of, “Hey, you know what? This thing really isn’t worth doing. I could just stop beating myself up and trying to get back on the wagon and just let it go.”

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, here’s the thing, and what really drives me, Pete, like we ought to work every single day or we have work, but work is part of our life, whether we like it or not. And it can be truly challenging. A big part of my career is built on the fact that work is challenging for people. I would be out of a job if they didn’t consider it challenging. And I want to be out of a job. I truly do.

And what I find, though, is that people do not give themselves credit for how much control they actually have about how they experience work. And this might sound very controversial, right. because we tend to say organizations have a responsibility to make us feel like we belong, organizations have a responsibility to make us feel like this, this, and that. And I actually absolutely agree.

I am not absolving any organization or system for making you feel a certain way. They have a responsibility. And you also have a responsibility for yourself when you go into that job or into that workplace. And so, your part of your responsibility is saying, “How am I approaching this? And how am I thinking about it?”

Because, again, what the research has shown is how you think about something does have an impact on how you experience it. And I don’t know about you, but if I know that I actually have half the currency to influence how I experience anything, why in the heck am I going to wait for somebody else to change my experience?

I’m going to at least try to make it 50% better, my part of it. If they don’t want to clean up, and I don’t want to rely on the other person cleaning up their side of the room, let me clean up my side of the room and at least know that I’ve shifted the energy a little bit by cleaning up my side of the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Muriel, could you give us another fun example of someone who worked through this kind of process of examining the belief, starting from sensation, and, in fact, saw just this outcome, a transformation of the experience of work into something much more lovely?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, absolutely. So, I think one that comes up also a lot is the belief of “I know I’m right,” you know? And these are the folks who, quite frankly, they tend to be high achievers. They have been known as being very smart, particularly as they were growing up. They get things very quickly. I suffered from this one, quite frankly, and still have to manage it.

And so, I had a client where he received some feedback. The feedback didn’t say, “Oh, he knows he’s right all the time.” It didn’t say that. What it said is, “He talks over people. He interrupts in meetings. He makes people feel like they’re not smart.” I mean, so the feedback said, “You talk to him and you feel stupid afterwards because of the way that he responds.”

“He did not give a chance for people to come up with their own responses. He would question them in a way that, quite frankly, they didn’t even want to share what they thought out of fear that he was going to sort of come down on them.” And we’ve all experienced those individuals at some point in our life. I will raise my hand and say, unfortunately, I have at times been that individual.

And with my client, even when he got the feedback, he was very like, “It’s wrong. It’s not right. It’s not right.” And it wasn’t till, and I talk about this in the book, like he not only got it from people on his team, he got it from his peers, and that became an issue. And because they didn’t want to work with him, quite frankly, at that point, which was hard to then get the work done, because he needed his peers to get the work done.

And it wasn’t until he saw himself on a Zoom, we had recorded a Zoom meeting that he had been in, and he saw not how he was behaving, he saw how others were responding to how he was behaving, which was again, the interruptions, the constant “Got it, got it, got it, got it.” And, particularly, he saw the look of frustration from his boss, and he valued what his boss thought a lot.

And that’s when he said, “Okay, that’s not the way I want my boss reacting to me.” So that was the beginning, for him the large part was even getting the, like, “Yes, there is dissonance and I want to do something about it.” So, then we were able to name like, “Why do you think she responds that way? When you speak in this way in a meeting, what is going through your head…” that’s the question I ask him, “…when you interrupt, when you talk over people?”

And I remember, he just with exasperation, he’s like, “Because I know what we need to do.” He’s like, “I know what we need to do. I know what the answer is. Why are we spending time talking about this? We’re wasting time.” That was the belief. And he was applying it for everything. And so, for him, the unpacking piece, which is the second stage, came from this place of his whole life he had been valued for being right.

He was a top tier scholar. I’m not going to go into specifics because then he might be identifiable, but like, he was top of the top of the top. But anybody who has done well, particularly at school, and gotten rewarded for it, may suffer from this one. So, he understood that, while it may have served him well at school, or it might have annoyed other students, but he didn’t really care, it wasn’t serving him well in this role that he was in now.

And so then, we reframed it, right? And the reframe was based on, “What’s the outcome that you need to achieve?” And the outcome he needed to achieve was, “It’s not just about getting the task done. I’m now in a position where I also need to get buy-in from my peers, and certainly buy-in from my boss. And so, what would I need to believe? What would need to be my operating assumption and principle in order to show up in a way where I was more collaborative in order to get to that outcome?”

And it was, “My job is not to always give the answer. My job is to help guide people to the answer,” which then led to him being able to listen a little bit more, ask the questions, wait till at least people finish talking. Now, will he ever be known as the warm and fuzzy guy? No.

But was there a marked improvement in terms of how others experienced him? Absolutely. And he was able to then move through some of these projects that he needed to get done with others a little bit more seamlessly than he was in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
What I like a lot about that story with uncover the blocker is there are perhaps many ways to illuminate this above and beyond simply introspection. It’s like here we’ve got some technology and work, a recorded Zoom meeting, “Oh, okay.” And that shows some things that you may not get with looking into the sky with a journal in hand.

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that’s why I think it’s both sort of a mechanism of there are external cues and then there are internal cues. For me, personally, I don’t really care where your cues come from, know. As long as you are aware that, again, the math isn’t math-ing, what you want to have happen is not actually what’s happening, or something’s getting in your way.

And sometimes, again, you know, it’s nice to know about the internals because you can short-circuit that a little bit faster than waiting till you get, you know, so for him, what would have been an internal cue, an internal cue would have been able to read the room, not necessarily waiting for the Zoom. Now what’s interesting in this particular example is that, with practice, he became better at reading the room, right?

And that’s what I’m looking for. It’s not necessarily that you get it right every time. It’s that he got to a point, and that’s what I look for with each one of my clients and I look for, for myself, is the course-correction time taking less time. So, “Am I able to notice?” It’s, was he able to notice in the moment that, “Okay, yeah, I just interrupted for the third time, and that person looks a little exacerbated. Maybe I should switch course right now.”

“Yep, I’m totally anchoring in the ‘I know I’m right.’ I can hear it. Let me reframe so that I can be more collaborative in this meeting if, indeed, that’s my goal.” Because if that’s not your goal, if your goal is to come off as the smartest kid in the room, as the 360 said, then keep doing what you’re doing. We don’t need to do anything differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I’m thinking, when it comes to these reframes, so we move from “I know I’m right” to “My role is to help others find solutions, not to always give them the answers,” I think that, in my experience when making that shift, in the moment it can feel revelatory like an epiphany I’m kind of excited about.

And then, yet over time, it doesn’t really feel as though that is, in fact, the dominant operating model inside of my feelings, nervous system at work. Do you have any pro tips on reinforcing the enlightened reframed such that it’s really sticking and taking root?

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, look, I think that what’s very cool about beliefs is that they’re so malleable, right? And so, I actually think that this model works if you are curious. And so, I encourage people to continue to be curious about it because that may not be it. The reframe might not be what’s going to last forever and ever and ever. You may need to reframe that even more.

And so, you want to constantly be asking yourself. The real rule of thumb is really keep being curious about, “What am I thinking in this moment?” And the more that you can keep thinking, or, “What am I thinking as I walk into that meeting? What am I thinking as I go into that conversation? What am I thinking as I’m about to do this presentation?”

And the more you can make that curiosity starting point, the beginning of your planning for anything, the more you will let those beliefs evolve even more so that you can discover, “Oh, that’s not it. Maybe it’s something else,” and that’s okay, right?

The issue is when you just are so attached to that one fundamental belief, one of the seven or whichever other one you’re tied to, that you end up not doing anything differently. You just keep doing the same thing over and over again, which as we know is the definition of insanity if you’re expecting different outcomes.

And so, the whole notion is, if you want to do something different, just being curious about what’s driving that doing. And continue to mold it, continue to, I personally practice this a lot and it comes a little bit more naturally, but it’s taken me years to master. I don’t even think I’ve mastered it, but years to kind of habitually be curious about what I’m thinking in the moment.

And I will be like, “Yep, I got it.” And then three months later, I’ll be like, “Oh, there’s another level to it. It’s not only this, it’s also that. Okay, that’s cool, let me try that one now.” And so, you have fun with it a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Muriel, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Muriel Wilkins
I mean, look, I think the main thing is, that I would love for folks to take away is, again, this notion of you have so much more in control than you might give yourself credit for. And true agency is an ability to have a choice.

And one of the areas, and probably the primary area that I believe we all have a choice with is how we think about anything. And so, if you want to have a choice in how you experience anything, start with what’s most in your control, which is your thoughts, your assumptions, and your beliefs.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Well, one of the quotes that inspired this work, and is a favorite quote of mine, that comes from the world of Buddhism is, “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” And that’s the quote, right? Pain is always going to happen. Challenges are here and they will cause us pain. The goal is not for the challenges to go away. But how we respond to those challenges can either make us feel like we’re suffering or we can have a different experience with them.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Right now, my favorite tool is breathing. It’s, literally, recognizing and applying the fact that I can change how I experience anything by just changing the way I breathe as I’m going through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Muriel Wilkins
My favorite habit is every night texting my kids because they are now off to college, and I text them “Good night” and “Love you” every single night.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with the clients, they retweet you and you’re known for?

Muriel Wilkins
Every now and then we get we go there, and I said, “Listen, I’m not religious, but I’m going to drop some Buddhist knowledge on you, right?” And, yeah, I tell them like, you know, pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. And you can just see in their face that they get it.

Again, this whole notion is they have more control around how they experience something. And, particularly, from a leadership position, if you’re in a leadership role, the way that you respond to something has so much impact on everyone else. And so, the ripple effect is real and be a good steward over that.

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

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, so if you want to learn more about all the things that I’m involved in, MurielWilkins.com is the best place to take a look. And I’m on LinkedIn at Muriel Wilkins, and on Instagram @coachmurielwilkins.

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

Muriel Wilkins
My final call to action is be curious about your mindset. Don’t go straight to doing. Take a pause and just be curious about how you’re thinking or what you’re thinking about what you’re about to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, thank you.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you, Pete. Always a pleasure.