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Jul 15
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978: Crafting Your Personal Resilience Plan for Beating Burnout with Marie-Hélène Pelletier

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Marie-Hélène Pelletier argues that resilience isn’t a trait and provides a customizable path to develop yours.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why no one should assume they’re resilient
  2. How to design your Resilience Plan
  3. The tiny actions that build big resilience

About Marie-Hélène

Throughout her career in business management and psychology, Dr. Pelletier has spearheaded the dialogue on the crucial issues of leadership resilience and work performance. Drawing on her extensive background in corporate, insurance, governance and public sectors, she brings an international perspective and unique expertise on leadership. She is a practicing leadership psychologist and executive coach with over 20 years of experience and holds a Ph.D. and an MBA from the University of British Columbia. 

Marie-Hélène is a Member of the Global Clinical Practice Network of the World Health Organization, and past Director on the boards of the Canadian Psychological Association and the International Association of Applied Psychology. She has presented and authored and co-authored a number of industry and academic publications and has won numerous academic and industry awards. In 2024, Dr. Pelletier published her award-winning book, The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health.

Resources Mentioned

Marie-Hélène Pelletier Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marie-Hélène, welcome.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Pete, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about your wisdom. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly striking, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and our resilience and mental health while putting together your book The Resilience Plan here.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
You know, something I’ve loved in my studies, in general, and in my work was always interdisciplinary. I always found the creativity of bringing ideas together was great. So, I’m going to say the immense benefits of bringing psychology and strategy together, just amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example or elaborate on that?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I can, absolutely. I came to this because I work a lot with professionals, leaders, business owners, high achievers of any kind, and they came to me, and they would say things like, “MH, I don’t know what my problem is. I’ve dealt with much harder things before. What’s wrong with me?” And if I had only spoken to them as a psychologist on the resilience side of things, they probably would have dismissed it. But because I brought analogies from the strategy side of things, because we took their context into account to better understand the actual reality that they’re in, that’s what changed everything. And when we do this, small shift, big change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you give us a story or example there?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yes. When I was writing the book, one of the things that sometimes people do is they do a focus group. So, it’s my first and only book, so I’m learning as I go. I do a focus group. In the group, there’s this woman, senior leader, who proceeds and does her strategic plan with us and the book. And then, shortly after, she sends me an email and says, “Okay, I need this for my entire team of leaders. Can you travel, do this as a workshop?” Yes.

So, I travel. She comes and says, “Hello.” She says, “I’m going to sit at the back because, you know, I’ve done this before.” Great. So, I proceed with the workshop with her team, and at the end she comes back and says, “Okay, I started sitting here thinking I’ve done my plan already, there’s nothing for me to gain in addition. I’m doing this for my team.” And she said, “But I realized I had implemented successfully for the first time all the actions I wanted to implement as it relates to my resilience, and I’m now ready for the next iteration of the plan.”

And so, that’s an example of how, given these particular tools, you can actually get to a plan that you can implement, that makes a difference, and just like in business, can evolve after a period of time. So, we can dive into the details of how do you get there but that’s an example of how practical this can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe let’s return to that notion of people say, “I don’t know what my problem is. I’ve dealt with stuff that’s way harder than this before and yet I’m wiped out. I’m burnt out. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I’m overwhelmed.” And so, they are puzzled, and then you say when you bring the strategic elements in there, it becomes demystified. Can you elaborate or give us an example of what that might look like?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yes. Well, the analogy that sometimes I would give, and that’s in part what led to writing it in the book, was how, if we were in a business situation and we had a great idea for a new service or a new product, would we just have the great idea and launch? Or, would we have the great idea, and then look at who else is offering this? How much or something like this, how much are they charging for it? Who is willing to pay for it? Which forces might impact the launch? We would do all this, right? We would look at the context around this idea and then design a launch strategy that would be successful.

So, same thing here. Yes, we want to be more resilient, and initially we don’t understand it, but if we, actually, use the same tools we would use in business strategy to understand with more clarity the context, then we can actually create a plan that works. And that’s what changes everything. It’s as if initially we disregard many elements of the context. We are not realistic about the amount of demands we’re facing, the quantity, the importance of the demands we’re facing, that’s one example, and other aspects of the context, which makes any intention not that easy to implement and, frankly, not successful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in other words, we don’t want to simply do a one-size-fits-all resilience plan in terms of what you got to do is you got to do your deep breathing, you got to do your exercising, and you got to sleep well, and you’re done! But rather, you’re going to go into the depths of the particular context in order to customize it to be just right.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. And it may include any of the things you just mentioned, or it may include other things. It depends on your current context, as well as other things, like your values, the type of demands you’re facing, the type of supply of energy that you have right now. And so, when we take all this into account, then we can design something that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then maybe, as we’re deconstructing myths or misconceptions about resilience, like it’s not one-size-fits-all, any other top things you want to clarify for us in that domain?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It’s not a one-size-fits-all, absolutely, which means the plan you designed for yourself, Pete, in this moment in time will be different from mine, and even yours will be different from yours maybe six months from now. So, there’s that. I think even before this, one of the misconceptions we need to clarify is that often people will tend to think that they are resilient as an individual. That’s who they are as a person. They own it. That’s like a personality trait.

And people get to thinking this for logical reason. They’ve gone through very demanding things before successfully. Sometimes people around them have said, “Pete, you are the rock of the team. You’re the rock of the family. You’re so resilient.” And you get to a point where you believe that it’s who you are. And the challenge with this, number one, it is not a personality trait. It’s our ability to go through adversity and come out even stronger, which will fluctuate over time, therefore we can influence it.

So, it’s not a personality trait, and so it is something you want to invest in because there will be more demands coming forward. We can be proactive about this, and I will argue we really want to so that we can prepare for those demands moving forward. So, this notion that it’s who we are, “And, therefore, it will always be there for me. I don’t need to do anything about it, and I will respond in however way I do,” that sort of very, in a way, passive response is not helpful. So that’s one of the key things we need to change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if it’s not a personality trait, I mean what is it? What would we liken it to? Is it an asset?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
A state.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s a state, like an emotion?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yeah, an experience. So, including, yeah, your emotions, the way you’re thinking, the way you’re responding to the situation. So, it’s all of these. And so, therefore, the more you’ve prepared, invested, planned, the more you can, in some ways, increase that baseline, if you will, such that when additional unexpected larger demands come, many of which we actually want because they’re interesting challenges, things we are happy to solve for, then you’ll be able to bring your best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you maybe give us an example of a professional who was encountering a state of low resilience repeatedly, and then figured out a plan, did some things, and saw a transformation?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It’s something that I can say, you know, I’ve gone through similar situations, you may have as well, but one person I worked with came to me and really felt like their schedule was completely out of control. They were running after the most screaming demands at all times. It just felt like they were not leading this ship. It’s as if they were on a downhill bike and the bike was going faster than what they could control in some ways, and they happened to be working with me at that moment.

And so, what we did, and that’s what I’ve done in the book, I’ve extracted some of the tools we use in business strategy but using them for our resilience. So, first, we looked at this person’s values, what’s most important for them in this moment in life. And that includes both personal and professional. For this person, some of their values, just from memory, included things like health, family, relationship. They valued physical activity. That’s something that had been important for them before, and they had some others.

Then we did this exercise where I get the person to draft on one piece of paper, two columns, their sources of demands and their sources of supply. And for this individual, they realized how they had an immense amount of demand, both from work and personal life, which they initially did not really account for in some ways. So, yes, they knew they were busy at work, for example, but then they realized, as we were looking at their personal life, that they also had a friend who was leaving a key relationship.

One of their parents was dealing with health issues. Of course, people we want to support in our professional lives, and personal in this case, but the reality is that they do represent demands and we want to be realistic about that. Now, this person realized they had not invested much in anything that gives them energy, so the supply list was very short. And we did all the work looking at the equivalent of their SWOT analysis, looking at their context.

And so, for them, it led to creating their strategic plan, which usually I’ll go with three main pillars, and one of them for her was to invest in managing her time better. She realized that she was not good at estimating the amount of time it takes to do things. She tended to underestimate how long anything took, most things, and so for her one of the pillars was “Better managing my time.”

And under this strategic pillar one of her concrete actions, a tactic, if you will, was, and we always focus on tactics that are very simple, for her it was to challenge herself once a week to guess how long something’s going to take, and then actually measure how long it takes her to do that particular task, just to help shift how she was assessing her time. And there were other pillars on her on her strategy, but that’s an example.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. Let’s hear it. So, what are some other pillars there and tactics that go with them?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It will depend, of course, on each individual. Sometimes I work with people who will realize that in their values, the value particular relationships that they have, whether it’s family, friendships, people they live with, people in their lives, one way or the other. And I’m thinking of one individual in particular who at times worked from home, and sometimes when he was working from home, if he was not in a meeting, he would open the door of his office, and he had a young child, who at times would come in the office, the door was open.

And he realized how, more often than not, of course he was doing something when the child would come in, so he would say “Oh, wait a second” or would just finish typing whatever he was doing. His next action in his plan, one pillar was relationships, and his action was, “Whenever someone from my family, who I love and value, because now I have even more clarity on that value, whenever an individual comes in, I will actually stand from my desk, stop what I’m doing entirely, mid-word, mid-email, not finishing the thing, turn around, step out of the office, and be with them.”

So, it was just connecting. And you see how one of the things that is so important in this type of work, and just the same way in a business type of strategic plan, you want actions that are implementable, that you can do. And here, in this particular strategic resilience plan, we very much need these actions to be so small that we are highly likely to do them. So, they cannot take an immense amount of time, which no one has, because then you’re building self-efficacy.

You’re building that sense that you can do this, and from there, you can grow it if you want, but we have to start really small. Otherwise, most people’s schedules are full, overflowing even, and therefore no change is going to happen.

Pete Mockaitis
MH, I really love that notion of it’s super small. And I’m reminded of a conversation we had with BJ Fogg about tiny habits and how those really can be quite transformational. And so, we talked about the demands and supplies, so an economist thinks of supply and demand in terms of price versus quantity and what is the price point at which I’m willing to supply so many units of yada, yada. And you’re suggesting the units here, it sounds like, is not so much price, but energy. Is that accurate?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. Yes, I’m using the term because we are used to using these terms in a different context, and it just seems to resonate with people I’ve worked with. So, I’ve used them in different ways before, and it seems to resonate. So, yes, here I’m looking at, “Where is your energy going? That’s your sources of demands. And sources of supply, is what is bringing energy to you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, in a way, this can be tricky in terms of distinguishing the finer points here. Like, my precious children, of course, I love them, being with them is delightful. And other times, they’re driving me nuts. They are feeling like a demand. They’re sucking me dry. So how do you think about any acid tests or key indicators or guidelines you use when you’re categorizing stuff?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
No, go with the flow. Go with what’s easiest because, very much for any of the worksheets that I’ve developed and the ideas in the book, it very much is going with the done is better than perfect, Pete. And, yes, others have said golf also tends to fit on both the demand and the supply. So, yes, I would say keep going.

Put it in both columns if it fits there. For right now, the most important thing is we’re getting this done, and any of the exercises I’ve suggested there can usually be done in 5-10 minutes so that, I sometimes say if you’ve got a flight that makes you cross the continent, you can get out of your flight if you started at the beginning with your plan. So very doable, we’re not getting bogged down by details. I hear you. Some things will fit on both but most things will actually find their way in one, more clearly than the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think, with some careful reflection, discernment, you can, I think, distinguish some of the nuances. Like, working out or golf could be the same way as like, “Oh, golf is energizing when I’m connecting with really great people. And it’s not energizing when I’m stressing, trying to beat my best score ever,” for instance.

Or I can say that with weightlifting, “It’s energizing when I do a modest number of sets and I’m trying to beat my previous record. And it’s debilitating when I’m just doing tons of volume, and then it feels like more of a demand.” And I love that notion, specifically of the personalization with that example of the working from home, “I’m going to stop what I’m doing. I’m going to attend to the person.”

Because someone else may very well really love the flow states, and that’s more of a supply, like, “Man, when I get into an uninterrupted groove of 90 minutes of just creating something, that’s really a big supply,” and it would maybe, for that individual, be the opposite, “Oh, let me stop mid-word and address somebody.” That could be the opposite of a resilience-boosting approach for them.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It could. But you see, I love where you’re going with this, because it does. It’s a great way to demonstrate how it will depend from one person to the other. Because, let’s say, I mean, it could actually, in fact, be in the same person, that you value your wonderful relationships, you want to honor them. If someone comes in, you want to really acknowledge them, and you also value when you’re in the flow of something and you want to maintain that creative path that you’re on.

So maybe what we’re saying is right now there’s a bit of a disconnect, because you do realize you want to keep going but someone interrupts you who you love and you want to honor. Maybe one of the pillars is called boundaries, and in those boundaries, when action will be to be a bit more deliberate about when you need to not be interrupted and make sure the door stays closed, not just for the Zoom meeting or the podcast recording, but also for the moments where you need that uninterrupted time.

So that way, you can still have the other action related to family members that you will interrupt yourself. If the door is open, that means you’re willing to interrupt whatever you’re doing, and you do. But if you’re in the flow, maybe you create the structures to protect that too.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, M.H., maybe, I know, in a way, this is an impossible request, but I’m going for it. Could we perhaps do a 10-minute rapid accelerated, like fast motion demo of, let’s say, you and I were creating a resilience plan, what would be step one? And I’ll give you just like a quick answer example.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I love it. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we’ll charge through.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
So, you’re willing to, you’re the person, you’re doing this. We’re doing this on you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. And I know we won’t get all the way done, but if we could just get a sense for, “Oh, I see what step one is and some of the outputs that might emerge from step one. And I see what step two is and some of the outputs,” you know, we’ll just get a sense.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Let’s do it. First, Pete, tell us some of the most important things for you in life. That’s your values. Don’t get bogged down on, “Is this a value or not?” Just tell me what comes to mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. God, integrity, service, growth, optimization, family.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. I’m making some notes so that I can help and remember. Okay, keep going. Next, tell us about, if we were to do a supply and demand table right now, we’re not doing a full table, but give us maybe top few, two or three demands you have on the work front these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, producing podcasts regularly; working with the production company and getting that squared away nicely; integrating two of those companies to serve people well; and not having anybody abandon us, either employees or customers in the shakeup.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Retention?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, give us some things on the personal side, things you’re willing to share with the entire planet?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, I mean, just kids, and they’re young, and their associated needs, just kind whatever we’re working through, like learning, and just making sure they’re healthy and safe and loved, and responding to their needs as they emerge.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Fantastic. Okay, let’s jump. If we were doing this fully, we would go in more details, but let’s keep going. On the supply side, what kinds of things on the work front give you energy?

Pete Mockaitis
On the work front? Well, I mean, I’m discovering really cool stuff from guests who say something that blow my mind, like, “Whoa, I’ve never heard that. That’s really interesting.” Maybe discovering new tools or approaches for getting things done and making things happen. Entering new domains, we’re getting some YouTube and some video stuff happening. So, I guess discovery exploration as a general theme, yeah.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
And give us maybe one on the personal side, sources of supply.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say exercise.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. Let’s go with this one for right now. Now, we’re probably going to skip doing the full SWOT analysis because that would be a bit longer than the 10-minute that we’re trying to reach here, unless you’re willing to give a shot at one thing in each quadrant. How do you feel, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
In general, like a strength, a weakness, an opportunity, and a threat in the domain of resilience?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I’ll guide you. Okay, let’s do it. You look like you’re going to do this. All right. On the individual side, so just looking at you as a person, what is one thing that makes building resilience naturally easy for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m reminded of BJ Fogg who told me, “Pete, you are a natural celebrator.” And it’s true.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, perfect. Okay, love it. It’s perfect. Now tell us something about you, same thing, you personally, that actually makes resilience building a bit challenging?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, probably like self-criticism or like the need to perform, like, “Oh, I’m so bad,” you know, if I screw something up.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Perfect. Yeah, you’re good. Great example. Okay. External, so in your context, around you, personal or work, something that makes resilience a bit easier for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Just like a general contextual, environmental, external thing that makes it easier?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
I would say, well, when family’s happy, that’s easier. Like, if they’re in a playful, “Ah, da-da, let’s do this fun thing!” mood, that’s easier as opposed to like, “Wah!” you know, they’re like bickering and arguing amongst themselves, like, “Oh, come on, man.”

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, okay, perfect. Great example. And last quadrant, you’re doing this, still on the external side, tell us an example of something that, in your overall context, makes resilience challenging?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe sleep interruptions, someone crawl into bed, waking me up too early.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, good. So now that we have this, we would design a strategic plan, and I often start with, say, three strategic pillars. Now, by strategic pillars, we’re talking about three directions that you would want to invest in. And within each of them, we’re going to find one action or a tactic that potentially you will consider.

So now that you’re looking at the values we’ve talked about, sources of supply and demand, and your overall context, I’m going to ask you first, otherwise I’ll provide ideas, but if something emerged for you, that’s usually a good place to start. Is there something that you’re already thinking, “Yeah, this looks like I could invest a bit more here,” and that may be a good idea?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m thinking about on the work front, it’s like, at times, there are new cool fun interesting things I like to explore and try. And other times, I just sort of forget about that, sort of crank it out, like, “All right, next episode, let’s do that.” Like, “Oh, email process, go.” So, I mean, I have a giant list in OmniFocus of all these potential ideas or initiatives, and it would probably be really swell if I just had a short list I could refer to make sure that there’s usually something fun, cool, interesting, novel to explore and grow into there.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. So, pillar number one could be exploration focus, let’s say, and potentially one of your tactics there could be, I mean, one option is what you just described, creating a short list. Sometimes a short list can take a longer amount of time. If we wanted to scale this down even more, you could say pick one, one a month, just pick one.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Pick. It’s a good list. You’ve liked all these ideas anyway at some point. If you spend the time to rank and create the shortlist, that may take you too long and you may not do it. So, yeah, it could be either a shortlist or pick one a month and explore, for example. Okay, so we’ve got one pillar. Another pillar, do you have another one that came to mind or you want me to throw in one?

Pete Mockaitis
What you got?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. Another one could be to be proactive on the family front. Now this is, I have little information, so I’m not saying you are or are not right now, but family is a value. It’s something that occupies an important part of your life. Potentially, there’s a part, there’s an opportunity to do one more thing even more proactive. Either you’re talking about the sleeping, kids are coming in, or sometimes, you also said it’s a strength when the family is happy, when everyone is in good moods and that kind of thing.

Do we have an opportunity to, I don’t know, once a week do a family check-in? Again, you may already be doing this. Or is this an opportunity to look at, “Who of the kids is now transitioning to an older age where we could look at helping shape their sleep patterns, for example, so something works a bit better?” So, I don’t want to dive too far, it’s personal life and all this. But that could be an example of another pillar that would combine some of the things you’ve observed and how things are going, as well as your values.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And what’s funny, what’s coming to mind is I’m just thinking about food.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, tell me about this one.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like young kids get cranky when they don’t eat. And yet they might not eat because they don’t want whatever foods. And so, if I could get laser-focused on, “Okay, what are healthy foods you like to make sure they’re always in supply, that we could cut down on some of the crankiness because they don’t want to eat whatever we got, even though it’s perfectly good, and maybe they need to learn, whatever, in the short term, make sure? Okay, blueberries are the thing,” for example. “Let’s just make sure we always got ample blueberries in the refrigerator.”

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. So, you could literally have a pillar called food for kids with actions, like you said, it’s in supply. And maybe number two, you’re prompting the eating because sometimes it’s there, but no one’s touching it or whatever. And then they realize too far, or you realize far further on the road, that it’s impacting how they’re reacting. So, there you go. You can have your three pillars just like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, thank you. That’s fun. So, I know we just spent a lot of time talking about how it’s all custom, and context-specific, and everybody’s different. But now, M.H., I’m going to put you on the spot and tell us, what are some top pillars and tactics that you’ve just noticed seem to come up again and again and again, and be super helpful when people embark upon, knowing they may well not be applicable for all persons?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. Well, I mean, there are areas that we know from research if we, all of us, it’s just the implementation needs to be very personalized. But the reality is that humans, in general, and we know this from body of research, decades of research, we will be more resilient if we are doing more on the exercise front three types of things: cardio, strength training, and meditative type activity. So, that’s one.

We will be more resilient if our nutrition is better, so it connects with the pillar, your food pillar here. And we have solid research, literally showing a difference if we’re having this meal healthier, it will have an impact. It’s not just long term, 20 years from now. It’s having an impact. Our sleep will have an impact on our resilience.

Spending time with people we enjoy spending time with, and then there are additional ones, like time in nature, doing pleasurable activities, things you enjoy doing, which is critical for recovery from work so that we can then bring our best to what we do. Other themes that fairly often will emerge for individuals I work with, there usually is some version of better boundaries, however it gets defined, that’s often there.

Fairly often, there is this element of managing my time differently, connects a bit with boundaries, but sometimes it’s also very time-specific, again with that tendency to underestimate how long something is going to take. Yeah, so some of these are examples.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And then perhaps within a couple of these, could you share some top do’s and don’ts, like some things that people might get wrong? For example, with exercise, perhaps folks overdo it and it’s counterproductive. I’ve been there. Or they neglect one side of things, like maybe, “Strength is not my thing. I don’t want to get too big, bulky muscles.” That’s a whole another conversation. But tell us, are there any top do’s or don’ts that you find within these domains?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yes. On the exercise front, more people, if they do anything in this area, they’ll be on the sort of active recovery, and will see meditation as something that is not for them, either because they’re like, “Ah, I’m not that person,” or they’ll say, “I’ve tried it, MH, and I can’t calm my brain down. It’s just not for me.” Well, hello, the reality is that research is crystal clear. It is critical for all of us. It makes a huge difference. So that’s probably one of the next frontiers. If you’re wondering what to do next, that probably would be the one.

Now, here’s the key thing. If you’ve tried it and you’re in that camp saying, “My brain just doesn’t slow down. It’s not for me,” all that, change your success criterion. It’s not about, “Did I calm my brain down and leave these feelings out?” No, success criterion, “Did you press play on the thing? And did you sit down trying to do it, and doing your best to bring your focus back on your breathing?” for example, whatever the guideline was. And that’s it.

If you’ve pressed play, you’ve done it, two minutes, four minutes, whatever the duration is, start small, full points for this, even if your brain was going the whole time. So that’s an example. Meditation would be one. Another area to really consider is the sleep. People will tend to bring their electronics in the bedroom, which then becomes tricky, because if we don’t sleep in the middle of the night, it’s very easy to reach for the electronic, which then is engaging the brain as opposed to giving the brain the message that, “No, no, no, it’s time to sleep.”

So, the “don’t” would be don’t bring the electronics in the bedroom. If your phone is your alarm, buy a small travel alarm, and that will be smaller than your phone probably and will ensure that you actually create the boundary there as well. So, these are some examples. Sometimes people are skipping meals on the nutrition front, so making sure there are easy things. You were talking about kids earlier, but it’s true for us too. Sometimes the day will go so fast, we’ll just reach for what’s easy, and that may not be what’s going to help the brain best sustain for all the next hours. So proactively planning for this, that is another example.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And with the research on meditation, you mentioned two minutes, four minutes, does the research suggest that such small doses are actually effective and useful for us?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Anything’s better than nothing, but in eventually, yes, longer will have more benefits. But again, here we are about starting small. Even smaller than this. You could start with just committing to doing five deep breaths while you’re washing your hands. We wash our hands many times a day. It does not require more time for you because you’re still doing this. Might as well use the moment to slow the breath down completely, all the air out, and slowly breathe in. It’s there and it’s a start. And what happens when we start in these smaller ways, we build that sense of self-efficacy, that we can influence this and that builds. Once we start building this, we will be able to extend over time.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I would say stay curious for the small actions. And I know how everybody, how so busy, so full everyone’s schedule is. If it feels like you can actually step away and create, invest in creating that plan for yourself, fantastic. If it feels like even that is too much for right now, then start with something very, very small.

But the reality is you will need to invest in yourself so you can bring your best to what you do in your personal and your professional life. It will serve as a protective factor from burnout. It will serve as a model for others, whether it’s your kids or people you work with. And so, staying curious about your next action and implementing is key.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I’m going to go, and that’s very much the spirit of this book, with, “Done is better than perfect.”

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Recent research on priming, so the non-conscious ways in which we can support our brain in attaining our goals. And there’s been fascinating research there, I could give you an example, but the short point of this is, if we expose our brain in advance to an image or words that represent our goal, and we know images are actually even more powerful, we’re increasing our chances of reaching this goal. Still need all the conscious planning, the smart goals, the planning for it, the small initially, the whole thing, we need all this, and priming can help. Fascinating research there.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you say priming, just like, if I want to be in shape, I could get a picture of an underwear model and post that somewhere that I’ll see you regularly, and that in and of itself will increase the odds of me achieving the goal?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. And it could be that, it could be weights, it could be whatever for you represents that goal, yes. And it just needs to be at a place where your eyes see it so you don’t need to think about it, meditate, visualize. These are other processes that are also positive, but priming, it truly is just about your eyes seeing it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular researcher or journal article we should link to there?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
There are. Two key researchers would be Latham and Locke. So, if you search Latham and Locke and you look for priming, you’re going to get to their research and then many others.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I’m going to go with Mind Over Mood written by Greenberger and Padesky, over a million copies sold, 20 plus languages translated. It’s a very practical workbook, so it has theories that come from psychology, as well as exercises, always, to implement. And it’s a book that I think everyone should have in their homes, at work. It just provides great tools to deal with normal parts of life, some that are easier to manage, some that may be more challenging, but just research-based, very practical.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Well, I want to say, I’m going to say, actually, doing a strategic resilience plan, because I’ve used it. I’ve used it in various phases of various demands I’ve gone through personally. I’ve seen others, obviously, but I’m using this tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Walk outside.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
“Anything’s better than nothing.”

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
TheResiliencePlan.com will get you to everything I do. Always happy to connect on LinkedIn as well, and love to see what others are thinking and doing and all that. So that’s another great way.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Step back and be strategic about your resilience the same way you’re strategic in what you do at work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. MH, this has been fun. I wish you much resilience and adventure.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Thank you. Love that, resilience and adventure. And same to you, Pete, and to your audience.

Jun 03
0

967: How to Overcome the Fixed Mindset and Create Cultures of Growth with Dr. Mary C. Murphy

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

 

Dr. Mary C. Murphy explains the downsides to the culture of genius—and shares an alternative path for transforming individuals, teams, and organizations.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The biggest misconceptions about the growth mindset 
  2. The optimal number of mistakes to make 
  3. How to deal with the four situations that trigger a fixed mindset 

About Mary

Mary C. Murphy is the Herman B Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Founding Director of the Summer Institute on Diversity at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Founder and CEO of the Equity Accelerator, a research and consulting organization that works with schools and companies to create more equitable learning and working environments through social and behavioral science.  

Murphy is the author of more than 100 publications and in 2019, was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. government. She is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research has been profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and NPR, among other outlets.  

Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she earned her BA from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University in 2007, mentored by Claude Steele and Carol Dweck. She splits her time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Palo Alto, California.  

Mary’s new book on organizational mindset, Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations is available now. 

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Mary C. Murphy Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mary, welcome.

Mary Murphy

Thank you, Pete. It’s so good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m excited to dig into your wisdom when it comes to talking cultures of growth and mindset, transforming individuals, teams, and organizations. Could you kick us off with a fun story that really shows what’s possible or what’s at stake with this kind of stuff?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, I can tell you the mindset culture origin story, where it came from.

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s do it.

Mary Murphy

And I think it will help share for your listeners, their experiences of the cultures of growth and cultures of genius. So, at Stanford, where I was getting my PhD, it is tradition that all graduate students present to their faculty. So, I was in one of these seminars, we’ve all been in one of these seminars, where a friend was presenting his work from the year. And, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, didn’t raise their hand, just blurted out, this professor blurts out, “Well, it’s clear the fatal flaw in this work is XYZ.”

And then another professor on the other side blurts out, “No, the fatal flaw isn’t XYZ. It’s ABC.” And they start fighting amongst each other to show who’s smarter than whom, right? Who’s the smartest in the room? How can they take down this idea, the most devastating comment, right? How quickly they could do it. And it was very much this culture of genius idea, relying primarily on star performers. Can you cut it, or can’t you? Do you have it or don’t you? Who’s the smartest in the room?

Two weeks later, I’m in a different seminar, and the faculty there have a totally different way of engaging with the students as they’re presenting their research. And, yes, they are identifying what are the challenges, what are the problems with the work, but what they’re competing on is not how smart you are. They’re competing on who can find the solution, the most elegant solution to the problem. Maybe this student needs to include a different survey, work with a different population, do their work slightly differently.

And what I saw in those moments was both of these are characterized by mindset, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And what they did to people in those seminar series was very different as well. In the first one, the student didn’t want to touch his work for weeks later because it was so painful the way that it had been treated in this fixed mindset culture of genius. In the other seminar series, we saw students so ready to hit the ground running, and they had ideas and strategies to actually engage their work differently because that was the focus of the culture of growth there, the growth mindset sort of embedded in that environment.

And so, this is the beginning of mindset culture where I saw mindset doesn’t just exist in our minds. What’s your mindset? How does it affect you? What my mindset is and how does it affect me? It’s really in our interactions, in our teams, in these groups, what we say and do, how we interact with each other. That’s where mindsets are made. And that mindset culture shapes almost everything, our thoughts, our feelings, our behavior, and our performance.

Pete Mockaitis

Ooh, I love it. So, we’ve got cultures of growth, cultures of genius. And it’s funny, genius sounds like a good thing that we want to do.

Mary Murphy

It does, doesn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis

But here, it is not the preferable option of the two.

Mary Murphy

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you unpack a little bit these terms and the cultures, what they look, sound, feel like in some depth?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, absolutely. So, the culture of genius really has at its core this fixed mindset belief. You either have it or you don’t. You’re smart or you’re not. And it’s really focused on identifying who those star performers are with the belief that these are going to be the team members and the performers that we are going to elevate and put all the resources around. These are people who are inherently more capable due to maybe some kind of superior intelligence or talent or ability.

And they really focused in these cultures of genius on those standout individuals to carry the rest of the team. And the whole organization and teams are set up around it to do that. It’s, find the genius and give them the ball. And that’s a very fixed-minded way. It’s like there are only a few people who have these kinds of skills, only a few people who have this kind of ability.

The culture of growth has, at its core, the growth mindset belief that talent, ability, and intelligence is a potential, that, sure, we all differ based on it, but the commitment of the team and the organization, if it has a culture of growth, is that we are going to take everyone, hopefully everyone with very high intelligence, talent, and ability, and we’re going to challenge and grow them and give them strategies and resources to take that talent, intelligence, and ability and grow it even further to the benefit of the individual and to the benefit of the organization.

And so, this culture of growth, you can tell it from a culture of genius because supports are given to people to develop and to contribute. The reality, though, just as we’ve gotten fixed and growth mindset wrong by saying, “Do you have a fixed mindset? Or do you have a growth mindset?” this false dichotomy, we’re not going there when it goes to mindset culture. Mindset culture exists on a continuum, and the truth is that many teams and organizations are usually a mixture of the two.

And so, you can have a bit of a culture of growth or a bit of a culture of genius, especially if you have a very large organization. We find almost always pockets of cultures of genius and pockets of cultures of growth. And then it becomes, “How do we actually move the whole organization to be more growth minded more of the time?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, the continuum is present both for individuals and for organizations, teams.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. The individual mindset continuum and then the mindset culture continuum. And we move between at the individual level. We move between our fixed and growth mindset. That’s like the last third of my book. It really talks about the mindset triggers that we know from 30 years of research on the fixed and growth mindset. What are those situational triggers that move us between our fixed and growth mindset sort of on a daily basis in the workplace, in our relationships, in our families? What are those triggers?

So, we identify four of those that have really strong empirical evidence to back them up. And then we help people identify which are their triggers, and then how to move more towards growth when I identify that I’m in a triggering context that’s going to move me towards my fixed mindset sort of automatically.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so helpful. And I find that is dead on with my own experience. Like, “Yes, indeed, I believe not just because I’m supposed to, but because the science and data tells me it’s better and superior, that growth mindset is true. Like, yes, human beings can, in fact, learn, grow, develop, improve in things.”

Mary Murphy

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, neuroplasticity, etc.

Mary Murphy

And I’m in my fixed mindset all the time, too. I mean, talk to me in the evening when we are loading the dishwasher. And I’m like, “Man, there is a right and the wrong way to do this. This is the right way to do it.” And you talk to my husband, he does it a completely different way. I got a very fixed mindset about the way to do that.

We can’t be thinking about it that we can’t talk about when we find ourselves in our fixed mindset, what are the triggers that move us to our fixed mindset. Because then it becomes more of a religion. The growth mindset becomes more of a religion. Like, you have to have it. You have to bow down to it. You can’t admit to ever having a fixed mindset thought or behavior. And then we never get better. It just becomes something that we kind of give words to rather than actual behavior on the ground.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mary, when you say on the ground, I think loading the dishwasher is about on the ground as it gets. And I think, I don’t want to spend too much time here, but I think we must spend a minute or two. So, is it, in fact, not the case that there is an optimal way to load the dishwasher?

Mary Murphy

I actually think there is a scientific way, and I think YouTube will probably give you about 400 videos about the scientific A versus B testing of the better way to load the dishwasher.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess what I think about there is, like, I’ve got my own opinions on dishwasher loading, but I think in, some ways, it all depends on what do we mean by better in the terms of the speed in which you can load it.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. That’s right. How do we define better? It’s a good question for mindset culture, actually, more generally. How do we define better? How do we define high performers or top performers? Are we talking about efficiency? Are we talking about outcomes only? Are we talking about process? Being able to make those definitions transparent and clear is the first step to actually figuring out then what we are trying to drive towards.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I did want to hear about these triggers, but first, let’s hear a little about the genius notion. So, is it not true that there are stars that we do need to disproportionately lavish with coaching and resources and attention to maximize shareholder value, etc.?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, so I think that this is one of those things that we haven’t really thought all the way through. I do think a big question is, “Wouldn’t an organization just want to hire geniuses? Aren’t they all high performers? Or don’t we want a whole organization with just these geniuses there?”

And what we see is that high performers actually prefer, because we’ve done the research with thousands of people at hundreds of companies, that high performers actually prefer the culture of growth because, to your point, most organizations, if they’re hiring for genius, they are not investing in the growth and the development of those geniuses. They are hiring geniuses and say, “Now you take us to where we need to go. Now you take us,” and they don’t give people resources or strategies and supports to actually help them continue to grow their skills and abilities. They expect them to get there and to do the work.

The problem with having a whole organization where you do nothing but hire these geniuses is that it creates a hugely interpersonally competitive environment within the organization, because, again, if you have that fixed mindset view, there’s only some who are smart, “Look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year when we do our stack ranking evaluations.” It creates this environment where everyone is only as good as their last performance.

People start to hoard information. They start to leave people off calendar invites in order to show that they’re the smartest ones in the room. They’re the ones with the best ideas. They know a new star is being born every day, and so they really want to hold on to not only their reputation, but also their status within the organization. And so, you have people concerned about that instead of concerned about doing the work that’s going to move them and the organization forward. And you also see big ethical problems in these organizations due to this internal competition.

And so, ultimately, high performers know that the culture of growth is the place where they can take risks, they can be supported in that risk taking, they’re going to be continually resourced and invested in across time, and that the process is going to matter just as much as the outcomes. The outcomes are very much going to matter in a culture of growth. But there’s also the whole thing about process and development and the work of, “Will the company allow me to take some risks to actually do something innovative and creative?” That’s where the culture of growth really out-beats the culture of genius and the bottom line, because we’ve studied that too.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And I think I’ve seen in my own experience, having hired folks who were amazing, it’s not true that you just hire someone who’s brilliant and then everything they do is brilliant always and forever.

Mary Murphy

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

Like, I actually scratched my head a few times. It’s like, “Well, what happened here? We had someone who was just amazing and then they stopped being amazing. Like, what’s the deal?” And sometimes you might never know the answer as to what happened, but it really is, I think, almost like, folks are realizing, “Oh, this isn’t quite right. This isn’t quite my thing. I’m actually getting progressively exhausted and burnt out by being so amazing day after day, and I’m just tired of it now.”

Mary Murphy

That’s right. That’s right. I mean, that’s what our research shows, too, that as it turns out, even geniuses don’t fare well in the culture of genius. In these environments, high performers are usually put on a pedestal and that creates almost like a straightjacket where they’re not allowed to take risks, they’re not allowed to make mistakes, and it puts them in a very fragile place where they’re afraid to fail, and so they become very risk averse, and they kind of do the thing that we kind of thought we’ve seen in the past, “Well, that worked in the past, so I’ll just keep redoing that cause that’s the safe thing. We know that will be a success.”

So, you see people not putting forward their best ideas, not innovating, not being creative in their work. And we see this too in school settings where we label kids as gifted, and then it becomes that they’re often terrified of underperforming. So, they play it safe, they hide their mistakes. They don’t take on any kind of intellectual challenges because they have been labeled gifted and they can’t lose that reputation or that status. So, that’s what we do when we put people in those roles and when we surround them with that culture of genius.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s true. I’ve known some folks who, they were on a valedictorian track, and they weren’t going to mess it up by taking the hard AP classes.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. Exactly right, yeah. That’s a good example.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you make reference to a prove and perform mode. Sounds like we’re talking about that right here. And so, you say that when we escape from that, we actually improve our cognitive abilities. Can you tell us about some of this underlying research and just how much of a lift do we see there?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, this really goes to some of the cognitive and neuroscience work that’s been done when we look at mindset and mindset culture. And so, what this shows is that when we are really only focused on performance goals, rather than performance goals and learning goals together, which is the alternative in a culture of growth.

When we’re only focused on performance, you’re only as good as your last performance, you have to prove your worth with every example that you are engaged in, every piece of work you’re engaged in, a new client presentation, a report that you’re writing, “Show me how smart you are. Show me what you did for me lately or how smart you are,” and that any mistake can be taken as a sign that you don’t have it.

When we are focused on those performance goals, a lot of our cognitive resources and executive function actually is focused on the self, “It’s focused on me and how I’m coming across and my reputation and how other people are seeing me.” And so, by dividing, literally dividing our attention in this way, our executive functions in this way, self-focus and then the work that you’re actually trying to do, it takes longer to do that work. We do it, ironically, with more mistakes, and it actually undermines, therefore, the quality of the work that comes out.

Whereas, if we can focus on the performance, and we want to do the best possible work we can, but we want to also learn the most while we’re doing this, it takes the self-focus off and it puts the focus on the work itself and how to improve the work, “How can I write the best client pitch that’s really going to help the client see that we’re going to be the best for them? What can we learn with the client together? What are they going to want to learn from us by working with us? How do I build that into the pitch?”

You take that learning lens onto the work, in addition to the performance, takes the attention off of you, puts the full executive function onto the project itself, and that ultimately produces the best outcomes at the individual level, and then when you aggregate that at the team and the organizational level.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And you’ve got a good turn-of-a-phrase, succeed by failing at 15% of your efforts. How so? And why 15%?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, so this is basically from a set of studies, kind of a meta-analysis of many studies, that looked across many different modes of being. So, it looked at human performance. It looked at animal performance in animal studies. It looked at AI algorithms and the performance of those algorithms. And in each case, the question was, “What is the optimal amount of mistakes that actually support learning?”

If you think about it, if you have flawless performance, what are you learning? You’re not learning anything. You’re not learning what worked. You’re not really learning about what might work or what could work or how to get innovative about it, and so mistakes are integral. And we actually have parts of our brain that are tuned to mistake-making that really help us then concretize, “Okay, that didn’t work. Here’s the lesson. Here’s a new way to solve or strategize for this problem, so that we can actually update in our minds, and then solve the problem going forward.”

Those systems are not activated without the mistakes. So, the question becomes, “What’s the optimal amount of mistakes?” And these studies over time, in many of these different modes shows that 15% is the optimum amount of mistakes to enhance learning and performance.

And so, if you’re not making about 15% of mistakes, if 15% of what you’re doing isn’t failing, you’re not pushing yourself. You’re not actually learning and performing at what could be your best. You’re playing it a bit safe. And so, that’s where that 15% comes from. And it’s a really nice study of studies that sort of shows what’s optimal.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, what I find intriguing here, as we talk about teams and cultures and such, is Gottman and others have talked about the five-to-one ratio associated with praise to critique, and, mathematically, 15% critique…

Mary Murphy

Pretty close, right?

Pete Mockaitis

…and 5X praise, yeah, that is rather close.

Mary Murphy

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m not surprised, too, that, like, in many of these contexts, making mistakes, yes, it’s a negative experience in the same way that being critiqued by a partner is a negative experience. And so, you need to have a lot of that positive reserve. But if you have no complaints or critiques of your partner, are you actually learning and growing together?

Are you different people? You probably are, if you’re human, you are going to be different people on some dimension. And if there isn’t enough space for that in the context of the larger success of the couple or of the organization or team, you’re probably not optimally growing together either.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, as I think about a team, could you give us a story of someone, or an organization rather, who was able to turn it around, they noticed, “Hey, we’ve got a culture of genius here. It’s not serving us,” they took some steps and they transformed and saw cool things happen? Could you share something about this?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, I have a lot of these examples. I think that the one that I worked with closely was Shell. The oil and gas company, Shell. And they were really challenged by a goal that they had set back in 2007, called Goal Zero. They wanted zero leaks in their pipeline, and they wanted zero fatalities with any of the production or consumption of their oil and gas throughout their whole process.

And they were not able to meet Goal Zero for years and years and years. And they started working with me and several inside the organization together to start to think about how a growth mindset culture, how a learner mindset might actually be able to help identify, “What’s the missing piece that has not allowed us to reach that Goal Zero?” and started to do this with talking to the frontline workers.

They looked at their evaluation and promotion processes. Are they learning the most that they possibly can about their employees and their work, and how to improve it? They changed those things. They started talking to frontline workers who may not even be Shell employees. They might be contractors, but they’re out on the deepwater platforms and they’re in the fields of Afghanistan doing this work. And, “How can we help support them?”

And so, the conversations basically started to permeate the whole organization. They started to change some of their policies and practices on the ground. And, ultimately, they had a couple of individuals on the frontlines that said, “Hey, I have an idea. Like, we go through this process with regards to this work that we’re doing, but we think that there’s a hole here. We could, actually, if we’re doing this learner mindset thing, we can actually try this other way of this process. And we think that will allow us to not have any risk for leaks or fatalities that might happen.”

And so, they started to shift that. They found mechanisms to lift that information up to decision-makers. That was a new strategy they did as part of a culture of growth culture change. They changed some of these practices and then they reached Goal Zero. The only company within this industry to do so after sort of working on this culture change for a couple of years.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. And so, it’s funny how… I mean, I’m sure you worked hard, and I don’t mean to diminish this fabulous accomplishment. At the same time, it sort of seems like, “Yeah, we probably should have been doing this forever.” But I guess that’s the way of like most improvements. It’s like, “Oh, I probably always should have been exercising,” or, like, all the things like, “Oh, yeah, people know stuff, so we got to make sure we have mechanisms by which we can get that surfaced and implemented.” And yet, often we just don’t get the wisdom inside people’s heads. Jeff Wetzler, we just had on, discussed this matter. We don’t get that wisdom in people’s heads up and out and going.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. And I think that the reason, one of the reasons for that, is because sometimes some of these changes, they can seem sort of piecemeal, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good practice. We should put that practice into place,” But without a framework, a unifying framework that says, “Here’s growth mindset culture. What does a growth mindset culture look like? What does it do? What is its focus? It’s on learning and development.”

“Now we take every one of our processes and our practices and we put them through the lens of learning. Are we learning what we need to learn? If not, let’s change it through that, and to figure out the best practices to advance that across the organization.” Otherwise, it’s just popcorn. Like, different practices that we should always have been doing, but without understanding why or what the larger goal is, what we’re trying to create more constructively for the whole organization.

And that’s, I think the benefit of that growth mindset culture idea, and then the particular norms and practices that we know and have studied that actually create that growth mindset culture and make it real on the ground.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, when you said culture, it’s almost like the process is an organism that learns as well, not just an individual human.

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. That’s right. You might fire these individuals, or they might retire, or leave the organization, and the new people that come in, the process and the practices are so embedded in the work that they then can enact that and come back into that learning organism that exists, and be plugged into that and be able to take that on almost immediately because that is the benefit of culture, not just working at the individual level, it’s the benefit of the cultural level.

Pete Mockaitis

And can you share a couple of these norms and practices that are just transformational in terms of they might seem small and yet they make all the difference?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, we find that fixed and growth mindset cultures differ on the basis of five different norms kind of consistently across all of the studies and the research that my team has done and that others in the scholarship area and academia have done. And those are collaboration versus competition, the extent to which those are everyday practices, and how that collaboration versus competition is structured.

Those practices also exist when it comes to evaluation and promotion of individuals. So, you might think about, “Are people only getting benefit in their performance evaluations based on the outcome instead of the process, or how they galvanized an entire team, or how they collaborated to make this work, either with external or internal individuals?” So, collaboration versus competition, all the practices related to that.

Innovation and creativity, that’s the second norm that is really shaped by cultures of genius or cultures of growth. In cultures of genius, we see people playing it safe. They are afraid of bringing different ideas to the table because if they don’t work, they’re going to be taken as a sign that, “Me, personally, I don’t have it. I don’t belong here.” It makes people’s imposter syndrome kind of go through the roof because, “If I make a mistake, it’ll be seen and it’ll be known that maybe I’m an imposter in this environment.”

Whereas, in the culture of growth, people are really so focused on learning that they’re willing to try new things. And in fact, they’re motivated to do that. But they set up very safe experiments that actually help them take innovation and creativity piece by piece, and gathering the data along the way to really see whether that innovation or that creativity problem-solving is actually moving them in the right direction. It’s what I call effective effort.

This is a big difference between cultures of genius and cultures of growth. Cultures of genius rely on the guts of their geniuses, what do they care about today. Elon Musk is a great example, where he says, “Today, I feel like Twitter/X should be like this. And that’s what the whole organization is going to do. Tomorrow, it might be like that.” And you see these huge swings in these cultures of genius based on what the genius feels or wants in that given moment.

In a culture of growth, it is so much more rigorous. It’s based on data and experimentation. And we’re going to see whether or not the changes that we are actually making at the organizational and team level is having the impact that we expect it to have. And so, a culture of growth ultimately ends up being much more successful because they are learning so much baked in.

And the last three quickly is just risk taking and resilience, integrity and ethical behavior, and then diversity, equity and inclusion. We see much more diversity naturally in cultures of growth than in cultures of genius, because the culture of growth is not tied to the genius prototype that exists in our society. Pete, if you’re going and you Google genius, and you put the Google image, you click Google images, who do you think you’re going to see in the Google image?

Pete Mockaitis

Albert Einstein.

Mary Murphy

Albert Einstein, a million, bazillion. Who else?

Pete Mockaitis

Nikola Tesla. Ben Franklin.

Mary Murphy

Yeah, good.

Pete Mockaitis

Edison.

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. Right. Or present day, you might think Steve Jobs, or you might think Elon Musk even. But you think about, “Who are these people? What do they have in common?” They all tend to be mostly men. They all tend to be white. Or they all tend to be of a certain economic or social background. And so, the culture of genius uses that prototype, even implicitly, not even in an explicit, conscious way. Implicitly, we want to hire the geniuses. We want to bring those in.

So, when we’re thinking about who matches that or internally who we should promote who’s a genius within the culture of genius, it will benefit these individuals that fit that cultural prototype and leave aside women, people of color, people with disabilities, really anyone who doesn’t match that cultural prototype that we also know in our bones what that prototype is. The culture of growth, on the other hand, they’re focused on who can learn, grow, and develop the most.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. Well, I definitely want to make sure we can touch on the mindset triggers. Can you unpack a few of these and kind of raise our attention to, “Aha, this is the specific kind of a situation that nudges me over into fixed land” and what to do about it?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, there’s four mindset triggers. The first one is evaluative situations where we anticipate, before we’re even getting the work done, we anticipate and we know that we are going to be evaluated on the basis of what we’re working on. So, that might be, again, a client pitch, a presentation, a report that I’m writing. For a lot of people, being evaluated is their fixed mindset trigger. And they then create work and set up their outcomes very differently.

For example, if I’m giving a presentation, I might decide I’m only going to hit the high points and the successes, not the challenges and things that we actually struggled around because I don’t want to admit any weakness. And I might not leave any time for Q&A at the end of my presentation because I don’t want anyone to question whether or not my ideas or the recommendations that I’m putting forward are appropriate or are optimal. So, evaluative situations, we know that that’s a big trigger for people.

The second is high effort situations. That is where we believe in the negative correlation between ability and effort, “If I have to try hard, it means that maybe I don’t have it. Maybe I’m not a natural.” And in the culture of genius, this is really, really threatening because you should have it. You should absolutely know exactly what you’re going to do and be successful every single time.

And so, what we see in the culture of genius, with the high effort situation trigger, is that people only want to do the easy parts. They don’t want to take on stretch assignments. They don’t want to take on mastering a whole new domain. Even if they get promoted and get more money from it, we see that a lot of times people are held back by this fixed mindset trigger of high effort situations. It puts them right into their fixed mindset rather than their growth mindset.

The third one is critical feedback. Now, instead of anticipating that I’m going to be evaluated by others, now that evaluation has come and the feedback is not good. This is a lot of people’s fixed mindset trigger, where people feel like the negative feedback that they’re receiving or the critical feedback says something about them as a person rather than the work. They take it personally. We call this also the backpack kid. When they get a negative performance grade on a test, they crumple up the test, they put it at the very bottom of their backpack, crumpled up at the bottom, never to be seen again.

We see the same thing happening in workplaces where people get their evaluation, they look at the top to see where on the scale they lie, and then they put it away, rather than actually read through and remember the ways in which they’re being offered support, or what they could do to improve. That’s how critical feedback can operate as a fixed mindset trigger.

And the last one is the success of others. And here we can really think about the ways in which we praise people individually and on teams. What do you usually say when someone performs well? What would you say to them?

Pete Mockaitis

Good job.

Mary Murphy

“Good job!” Right, exactly. Now, good job makes us feel great, and it’s kind of the most common way we praise, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what we did well. Like, what would we actually improve or what would we actually want to replicate because we did it so well in this context? And so, when we think both about praising individuals and praising teams, how can we take this from, “Someone else got praised on my team. Now that means that there’s less for me”?

Putting people in that zero-sum mindset, that scarcity mindset around praise or success, which is really showing that this is one of our fixed mindset triggers, and actually help people see, even in the good stuff that people are creating, how they can learn, grow, and develop from that, and make it not an individual thing, but also so the whole team is learning what was really great about this presentation, how can the team replicate that or take it to the next level the next time that they’re working on it.

Pete Mockaitis

And if we catch ourselves, let’s say something triggers us and then we have a thought like, “I guess I’m just an idiot,” and so then it’s like, “Oh, that’s fixed mindset. Uh-oh.” So, you mentioned, like, religion, it was like, “No, no, no, I have sinned by thinking this into our thought,” what is the ideal response? And how do we, ideally, I don’t know if recover is the right word, but kind of get back into an optimal groove?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, I do think people think of it sort of counter intuitively, but truly the best way to learn and to lean into our growth mindset more of the time is to acknowledge and learn to work with the fixed mindset, to not sort of be shocked or dismayed when it shows up, to just be like, “Oh, yeah, old friend, I remember you. Here you are again.”

Remembering that this is where my fixed mindset is likely to show up. If I know I’m going to give a presentation and I know I’m expecting some critical feedback from the people in the room, preparing myself for that and trying to tell myself, “Okay, when this happens, I’m going to make a plan to go into learning mode rather than going into prove and perform mode where I get defensive, where I have to show how smart I am.”

Asking questions of the questioners, trying to learn where they’re coming from, trying to learn and think about the ways and the experiences that we’ve had that might be able to answer their question in a way that everyone can learn from. So, I think identifying those triggers for ourselves, and then making a plan to know that these are predictable context, predictable situations, when I know I’m going to go into it, making a plan to prepare for that and not, you know, you’re going to be in your fixed mindset occasionally. That’s normal, right? Normalizing that, not beating yourself up about it, and just saying, “Next time, I’m going to focus on moving towards growth.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

Well, I would say if anybody’s interested in identifying their own mindset triggers, on my website, we have a Mindset Triggers Assessment that people can take. And you can take that for yourself. Or if you are a leader or you have some direct reports, you can also take it as a group and understand each other’s mindset triggers so you can work together better.

The other thing I would say is that we have a culture cues audit. So, if you are looking at, “What are the triggers and the situations in our own teams or family or clubs that you might be a part of? What is the mindset culture of these?” you can sort of look at the cues and the environment that sort of helps show you where you are on the mindset culture continuum and give you strategies to help you move towards growth, even no matter what your role is, even if you don’t have direct reports or others that you’re responsible for.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

I am really inspired by the African proverb, I think it goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” That idea, I think, is really interesting. And I probably would amend it a little. That if you want to go fast, go alone. You’re not going to go optimally.

I think that we tend to think, in American society, that we’re all independent agents and that we can sort of operate completely alone if we choose to do so. And we know that that’s just not a fact. We know that when we operate alone, we’re not going most efficiently. We’re not taking all the best ideas. We can’t possibly as an individual. And so, I’m really inspired by that idea that to go far, we go together.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mary Murphy

We had a study with over 600 entrepreneurs, and we looked at the mindset of founders in early-stage companies. These are like series A, series B, very early-stage organizations and companies. And we saw that the founders’ mindset influenced so much in these early-stage companies as to the clients they would bring in, the hires they would make, and also the culture that they started to, even if they weren’t attending to culture, it really impacted the culture that they started to create with the organization.

And we saw that these companies started by founders with more of a fixed mindset, they were more risk averse, they were less creative, they didn’t want to hire anyone that was smarter than them, which actually really stymied the innovation and the market share that these companies actually created. And we also found it influenced their fundraising. And so, the ones with more growth-minded founders who created more cultures of growth in their companies, they actually were able to meet and exceed their fundraising goals much more than those with a fixed minded culture of genius.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Mary Murphy

Most recently, I read Amy’s book, Amy Edmondson, Right Kind of Wrong. I really loved the examples she provided and the stories she told. So, I would recommend that to people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

I started to work with a coach around storytelling, and I feel like examples and resources and tools to help make better stories and to help create storytelling has really helped me be better at my job.

It’s also showed me new research questions and new ideas for studies when I listen to other people’s stories through the lens of really understanding what makes them work and what are the mechanisms underlying people’s success or people’s failures.

Pete Mockaitis

And can we hear who this amazing storytelling coach is?

Mary Murphy

Her name is Kymberlee Weil, and she has an organization called the Storytelling School, and you can also listen to her podcast, but she is incredible.

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

Mary Murphy

Mindset is not just in our minds. For years and years, we have thought about it that way and we have seen it actually be used to label people and kids in classrooms, “So, that kid just has a fixed mindset. There’s nothing I can do about it,” says some teachers. And we see that in the workplace too or in families.

And so, seeing that mindset is not just in the mind, it’s co-created in relationships and teams and organizations. And then how do we help each other create these mindset cultures? I think that really resonates with people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

I’d point them to my website, MaryCMurphy.com. That’s where those quizzes are located. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter and all the other places. I also have a Substack, if people are interested in that, and that is recorded as an audio too if people are into the audio formats rather than the reading format. So, yeah, they can find me there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

Oh, yes. So, this would be a homage to my mentor, Carol Dweck, who came up with the idea of the fixed and growth mindset, who wrote the book Mindset. She challenges her first-year seminar students, her first-year college seminar students to this, and I would challenge your audience in the same way, in Carol’s name, that think about over the weekend or in the next few days, whenever you’re listening to this, what is one outrageously, outrageously growth minded thing you can do in the next few days?

Imagine what that could be, commit to doing it, and then tell me about it. Find me on social or anywhere. I would love to hear what your outrageously growth-minded thing is that you’re going to take on today.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, Mary, could we hear just a couple examples of…?

Mary Murphy

Well, Pete, what do you think? What is one example that would come to your mind?

Pete Mockaitis

Outrageously growth-minded, I don’t know.

Mary Murphy

Yeah, outrageously.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m meeting my podcast mastermind group shortly, and we’re going to do stand-up paddle boarding, and I’ve never done that before.

Mary Murphy

Hey, that’s good.

Pete Mockaitis

I feel like I’m going to fall over many, many times. So, that’s the first thing that came to mind.

Mary Murphy

I love that. That is a fantastic example. I started to pursue a couple of things. One, I mean, you can’t sort of take this on in just a day. But I started to pursue cello recently because I got really into it, I don’t know where it came from. A lot of family members are musicians. But I got really into this idea so I just signed up for a cello lesson. And then I got really into it. Now I’ve been sort of doing it for several months. But I think follow one of those passions that you might have or some inkling that you have, that’s a way to, and then commit to doing one step towards it. That’s outrageously growth minded.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, thank you, Mary. This has been much fun, and I wish you many fun growth environments.

Mary Murphy

You as well, Pete. Thank you so much for having me. This has been fantastic. I hope your listeners enjoyed.

May 30
0

966: Guy Kawasaki on How to Increase Your Impact and Become Remarkable

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Guy Kawasaki discusses the key to making your life and career remarkable.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three keys to becoming remarkable 
  2. How to effectively sell your dreams 
  3. Why there’s no such thing as “perfect” timing 

About Guy

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and host of the Remarkable People podcast. He was the chief evangelist of Apple, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, Mercedes-Benz brand ambassador, and special assistant to the Motorola Division of Google. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University, an MBA from UCLA, and an honorary doctorate from Babson College. He lives in Watsonville, California. 

Resources Mentioned

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Guy Kawasaki Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Guy, welcome. I’m excited to chat. Now you’re an experienced interviewer yourself. You’ve interviewed some remarkable people. Tell me, any particularly super memorable moments that you’d like to share with regard to that adventure?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, certainly, interviewing Jane Goodall, actually twice. Those are very memorable moments. I mean, if you had to pick someone that you wanted to interview, Jane Goodall would be right up there, right? And so, that’s the two Jane Goodall recordings. And then one of the funniest things that happened is that, believe it or not, of all people in the world, Margaret Atwood is the first person to drop an F-bomb on my podcast. Now, I thought for sure, I was like waiting for the Gary Vee episode. I figure he’s going to drop a few for sure, you know, just saying hello, but Margaret beat him to the punch. What can I say?

Pete Mockaitis

That’s fun. Well, I’m curious, what is it about Jane Goodall’s message, life, work, vibe that really resonate with you?

Guy Kawasaki

I mean, how can you not love Jane Goodall? She’s 90 years old. She travels 300 days a year, and her kind of travel is very difficult because she’s on deck from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to sleep. I know when I travel, I’m making a keynote speech. I really have to be on for about one hour. The rest of the time I can be like not so on, but Jane Goodall is on the whole time. And just the love and passion and empathy and concern she has for the welfare of people and the world is just so obvious. I mean, she’s truly a remarkable person.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, I’m excited to hear about the wisdom you’ve got for us in your book, Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. And you are a remarkable person yourself, Guy, with a remarkable title. And if you could actually indulge me for a couple of minutes, I’ve wondered about this for years, and now is my chance. All right.

Guy Kawasaki

Well, let’s end this problem for you.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. All right. So, you are the Chief Evangelist of Canva and formerly the Chief Evangelist of Apple.

Guy Kawasaki

Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Tell me, in some detail, I’ve got follow-ups, what does the role of Chief Evangelist truly mean?

Guy Kawasaki

The role of the Chief Evangelist, well, first of all, going back to Greece, the word evangelism comes from Greek roots, and it means bringing the good news. So, I bring the good news of Canva today, how it has democratized design and enables people to be better communicators.

Way back when I was the Chief Evangelist and software evangelist for Apple, so I was bringing the good news of Macintosh. So, what a chief evangelist does is he or she is kind of the person that’s the most visible as this is the person who truly believes it’s going to get you to believe in our dream as much as we do. And he’s bringing good news and it’s kind of a cheerleader marketing sales position. It’s the purest form of sales. And it’s the purest form of sales because an evangelist has not just his or her own interests at heart, but also the other person’s interests at heart.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it sounds beautiful. And it’s, like, I think I want to be one. And I think maybe some of our listeners would like that as well. So, just very fundamentally, what is the nature of your relationship between, say, you and Canva or you and Apple? Are you, like, an investor advisor, a full-time employee, a contractor, a marketing affiliate, a customer and super fan? Like, what is that?

Guy Kawasaki

So, when I was software evangelists for the Macintosh division, you know, round one, I was an employee. When I was chief evangelist round two, I was also an employee, but also an Apple fellow. And that is not a line position. It’s more kind of an honorary kind of title fellow, but I was a working fellow. I had a real task to do, not just sit around thinking about the future. Most Apple fellows are engineering and tech visionaries. And I was just a marketing schlepper. So, that was unusual there.

Now for Canva, when I met Canva 10 years ago, they offered me this position, and I made a very wise decision. I said, “I don’t want a salary. I want everything in stock.” So, I took everything in stock and I was really the first person in the United States, so they really didn’t have like, you know, I guess there’s a bunch of legal things you have to do to legally employ a person.

So, I was not employed. I’ve been a contractor technically for all these years. And now they have hundreds of employees in America, but we just never did anything. And Canva is doing so well. I couldn’t hurt it if I tried. They don’t need to make me sign any piece of paper at this point.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And so, then when you interface with Apple or Canva, are you “reporting” to or working with, say, the VP of marketing or the CEO or the board or whoever wants to say, “Hey, Guy, spread some good news over here”?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, when I was the Apple Chief Evangelist, I reported to a vice president of R&D, I think his title was. This was Don Norman. And then later on, I moved over to the marketing department. So, they shoved me into the functional area. Now, when I started with Canva, there were only, I don’t know, 10 people, so it was kind of dealing directly with the co-founders.

Now in the 10th year, I’m just kind of hanging out there and I’m just doing very high-level stuff and I speak for them and I continue to carry the flag, but it’s not like I’m punching a clock, and it’s not like I’m issuing monthly progress reports or anything like that.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Now, Guy, if I or a listener aspire to become a chief evangelist, what does that path look like?

Guy Kawasaki

Okay, so I think the path for an evangelist is that you truly, truly love the product. And that’s the start. And for you to love the product, the product has to be really great. So, the key to evangelism is you evangelize or you create or you affiliate with something great because it is really hard to evangelize shit. Trust me, I have tried a few times in my life. So, that’s the key.

Now, many companies have not yet understood or embraced the concept of hiring an evangelist. It seems like focus mostly in tech because they kind of copied what Apple did. But the function of bringing the good news and getting people to believe in your dream as much as possible, that’s what it does. I wouldn’t worry about the title so much.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. So, this is clear. I’ve wondered about this for more than a decade, “What does it mean when Guy Kawasaki says he’s a chief evangelist?” That is settled.

Guy Kawasaki

Well, you should have contacted me earlier. You didn’t have to think about this for 10 years.

Pete Mockaitis

I can rest easy. Well, I mean, I just sort of heard, it’s, “Oh, yeah, Guy Kawasaki…” Okay, sure. Well, now, so there’s that. Let’s talk about your book, Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. What’s the main thesis, core idea here?

Guy Kawasaki

I think the main core or the thesis here is that if you make a difference, if you make the world a better place, people will have no choice but to think you are remarkable. So, basically, the book, I would not characterize this book as a self-help book that, it’s like, “Okay, you’ve decided to be remarkable. Day one, when you wake up, this is what you do.” You’re like, I don’t know, you change your LinkedIn profile. You write a white paper. You start talking at TEDx or something like that. That’s not it at all.

The assumption is that if you make a difference, people will have no choice but to think you are remarkable. And I want people to be empowered to make a difference. That’s the key to me.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you kick us off with a cool story of someone who followed a path that looks a lot like what you’ve laid out in the book and what unfolded for them?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, I would not say that there is no single path, right? I mean, Jane Goodall from the time she was a kid till today, she loves animals and she loves nature, so she’s stuck with that the whole life. Julia Child is another example. Until her mid-30s, she was a spook, and then she got married and she moved to France, fell in love with French cooking, and she became the French chef. So, you can make big changes in your life too.

But what I noticed after interviewing 250 of these people is that they all go through this phase of growth where, Julia Child acquires new skills in French cooking, Jane Goodall started in secretarial school, went to Africa, and she studied the chimps, and then she went back and got a PhD after she did all that. And, yeah, that’s a completely different path but that also showed growth. And the flip side of growth is grit. Because if you’re growing, if you’re learning new things, you’re not going to be instantly successful. You have to have perseverance and passion.

And then the third phase, I think, and the phase that not everybody makes it to, is that you have to become gracious, which is you realize that you’re lucky, you’re fortunate, people have helped you. It’s not just your own growth and grit, but good fortune, good people have helped you, so you owe it back to the universe to help others succeed too. And Jane Goodall is a great example of that.

I’ll give you a negative example. So, until three or four years ago, I would have told you that Elon Musk is the closest person there is to Steve Jobs in terms of world-changing ideas in technology. But I think that he has totally flunked the third chapter, which is grace and graciousness, right? So, I mean, you would not say that Elon Musk is gracious. Well, not the new Elon Musk, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I hear you, growth, grit, grace, three components. And it sounds like super achievers may not always exhibit all three of the stages, but they probably have growth and grit, and whether they choose to use their progress and stature for good or evil can go either way. Is that fair to say as a summary?

Guy Kawasaki

Yes, that is fair. And, listen, I’m a very optimistic guy despite my criticisms of various systems and things. But I think with a life of growth and grit, where you’re making a difference and you’re making the world a better place for people, you’re probably going to end up being graceful and gracious. Maybe Elon is an outlier there because, I mean, you cannot debate that Elon Musk, more or less, single-handedly made the automotive industry go electric, and you cannot debate that the automotive industry going electric is not a good thing for the world. It is a good thing for the world, right? So, he has made a difference. He’s made the world a better place. I just wish he would embrace some grace and graciousness.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Well, then can you walk us through a little bit? So, within the growth, grit, and grace, each has three subcomponents. Could you give us a quick overview of these nine chapters?

Guy Kawasaki

The quick overview of the nine chapters is growth, grit, and grace. So, growth is, I’m a big fan of Carol Dweck, the Stanford University psychology professor. And she basically makes this dichotomy that if you have a growth mindset, you believe you can acquire new skills, you can do new things. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe you cannot. And you, also, if you are successful and you have a fixed mindset, you believe you don’t have to grow, which is arguably even worse.

The grit mindset is Angela Duckworth’s. She’s the mother of grit. And it’s about persevering when things don’t go right and learning from failure. And the grace mindset, I think it’s mostly this understanding that when you are successful, you have an obligation to society. And there’s 188 tactics in this book. This book is extremely, extremely tactical and practical.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool. Well, let’s dig into some of them then. So, under stage one, growth, talk about the growth mindset. We’ve had a few guests discuss that concept. Tell us, are there any misconceptions about the growth mindset? Or are there times where you yourself find you’re drifting into some fixed mindset type thinking? And what do you do when you find yourself there?

Guy Kawasaki

Yeah. So, one of the things that I learned after the book was done, there’s a protege of Carol Dweck, her name is Mary Murphy, and she made the brilliant observation that the growth mindset is primarily in your head, right? So, in your head, you believe you can grow or you believe you cannot. But she says that, as important is the environment that you’re in, because if you have a growth mindset, but you’re in a fixed mindset organization, you’re going to be very unhappy. And if you have a fixed mindset, and you are in a growth mindset organization, where this organization wants you to learn new things and you cannot rest on your laurels, you are also going to be very unhappy. So, that’s something that, if I could do it all over again, I would include that. And I pride myself on having a growth mindset, and it’s because of Carol Dweck’s book. And, like, at 44, I took up ice hockey, having never skated before. At 60, I took up surfing, having never surfed before. And let’s just say that when you take up hockey or surfing that late in life, you pretty much have a growth mindset. You cannot not have a growth mindset and do those things.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, then chapter three, under growth, you say plant many seeds. Can you unpack this idea for us and some of your favorite tactics?

Guy Kawasaki

Yes, yes, yes. So, planting many seeds means that in order to grow, you have to collect a lot of data. You have to do a lot of sampling. You have to take a lot of shots. And I bring in this example of I cut down these eucalyptus trees in my backyard, and I wanted to replant the hill. And so, I wanted to put it in native oaks. And I learned that with native oaks, you got to put in a lot of acorns, and you have no idea which acorn is going to be a seedling, then a sapling, then a tree. And it actually takes 20 years to get from acorn to tree.

So, I mean, that’s a metaphor for life. You gather a lot of acorns, you put them in water. The ones that float are dead. You throw those out. Then you put them in this preparation stage where you cover them with a cloth and moisture, and you put them in your refrigerator and you simulate winter for the acorn. Then come spring, you stick it in the ground and you put a lot of them out because not everyone is going to take root, and then you wait 20 years. You need to collect a lot of samples, and you need to plant a lot of acorns to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, what I’m noticing about the metaphor, which is rather beautiful and practical, is that along the way, with each of the steps or phases, you’re getting some information and you’re saying, “Oh, okay, don’t pursue these, the floaters versus the sinkers. All right.” And then you get the refrigerator situation like, “Oh, okay, don’t pursue these.” And so, you’re already sort of whittling it down to “This is the most promising thing that looks like it might really take off.”

Guy Kawasaki

Yeah. And then, so you plant a lot of acorns after those first couple processes and then some of them take root, so you’ve got to protect those from the deer. And then you got to be patient. It’s a very good metaphor for life.

Pete Mockaitis

I hear you. All right. Well, I guess with all the tactics, any particular tactics you recommend in the planting seeds department?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, I think the most important tactic is it’s a numbers game. You’ve got to plant a lot of seeds. And going back to my Macintosh history, we evangelize hundreds of companies to create Macintosh software, and we thought, initially, and we thought we had it all figured out, right? You need spreadsheet, you need database, and you need word processor. But lucky for us, there was this acorn called Aldus PageMaker.

And Aldus PageMaker became a mighty oak called desktop publishing. But I got to tell you, we did not plan desktop publishing. It’s not like we said, “We’re so insightful. This computer is great for desktop publishing.” Nobody knew what desktop publishing was. People were still setting hot type, melting lead. And that is a great example of, “Thank you, God, that we’re planting many seeds.” And one of them was Aldus PageMaker.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then in stage two, grit, your chapter, “Sell your dream,” I mean, you’ve been evangelizing for a long time. Any favorite tactics in the realm of selling dreams?

Guy Kawasaki

Yeah, my favorite tactic in the realm of selling dreams is a demo. I believe that a demo is worth a thousand slides. Well, actually it’s not completely geared towards tech. Now, in tech, obviously, you can have alpha software, you can have a rough website, you can have a hardware prototype. So, it’s easy to see how you can create this demo.

But to take an extreme example, if you were trying to create a new restaurant and you want it to evangelize your restaurant, maybe you start with a food truck serving that kind of food, or you start out with a pop-up restaurant, or something like that. There are people who serve meals at their houses. So, there’s always a way to figure out like, “How do you prove the concept? How do you test the concept?” Not just cogitate it, not just talk about it, but actually let people touch and feel and eat your concept. I love the demo.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then any clever ways you recommend we go about doing the demonstrations? So, we got a food truck, we got a pop-up and software. It’s like, “Hey, look at it, and see how it does the thing you like.” So, any other clever ways you recommend we do the demo to sell the dream?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, in software, where probably this may be the most obvious to people, in software, I think the key to demo is not to show what it can do, but to show how you can do it. And let me use Canva as an example. So, yes, I could have all these finished graphics in Canva, and just go from page to page and show beautiful PowerPoint, beautiful Instagram, beautiful Etsy, beautiful infographic, beautiful resume, beautiful, you know, etc. but I don’t think that’s that effective a demo.

I think the effective demo is, “Okay, so let’s start with your photo, and let’s make this into a book cover. So, here’s the collection of Canva book cover templates. Now let’s scroll down here. Oh, we like this template. Let’s click on this template. Now let’s upload our cover photo and let’s change the text from the generic text on the template to your book’s title.” And in five minutes you would have a very nice book cover design in Canva. So, you showed how not what, and I think that’s the best demo.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense because, in that context, that really delivers the, “Oh, wow,” kind of a moment, like, “That was five minutes, and this looks just about ready to go. That’s amazing. Holy crap, I got to buy this.”

Guy Kawasaki

Let me tell you something, in five minutes, in Photoshop, you may just barely be finished installing it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, when it comes to grace, what do you mean by turn and burn?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, turn and burn is actually at the conclusion of the book. It’s not grace per se, but turn and burn is a surfing metaphor. So, I can explain a lot of life in surfing. So, most of surfing is spent waiting in the water, hoping you’re in the right place for the wave to come to you and to break at the right time, etc. But, as a lesson in life, if you are always looking for the perfect wave, the perfect product, the perfect service, the perfect book, the perfect photo, the perfect movie, the perfect project, the perfect, you know, whatever, you’re never going to accomplish anything.

At some point, you just have to turn and burn and start paddling. And that’s a very important lesson. There are many entrepreneurs, they spend just years and years thinking about, “Yeah, this is what I’d like to do, and I’m doing research.” At some point, as Steve Jobs once said, real entrepreneurship, I mean, and there’s no truer words than that.

Now, after turn and burn, my last recommendation in the book is that, rather than focusing on, “Did I make the right decision or not?” Instead, you focus on making your decision right, because making the perfect decision is very difficult, if not impossible. You just cannot know everything and predict the future. So, at some point you take your best shot, and you paddle and then you make that wave work.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

No, that’s good. I just want people to know that, man, I think I’ve created the best book ever for how to make a difference and how to be remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

Okay, my favorite quote is a Chinese proverb. And the Chinese proverb is, “You have to stand by the side of a river a very long time before the Peking duck will fly in your mouth.” In other words, Peking ducks don’t fly in your mouth. You got to go out and kill the duck and cook it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

Ah, my favorite study or a bit of research is probably the video by Dan Simon. And he did this research where he showed, it’s called the invisible gorilla. So, in invisible gorilla, they have these college students wearing black and white T-shirts, and you’re instructed to count how many times the kids in the black T-shirts are tossing the beach ball.

And in the middle of that, this guy comes out dressed as a gorilla goes, “Hoo, hoo, hoo,” and only half of the people noticed the gorilla because they’re so focused on counting the beach balls. I think that’s a very important thing about making things noticeable and what could be on, how can something be so obvious and people not see it. Half the people didn’t see the gorilla, which is, to me, just amazing. And I hope I always see the gorilla.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Guy Kawasaki

My favorite book is a book called If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. Now, obviously it’s for writers. But if you substitute any creative endeavor for the word “write,” it’ll work for you. If you want to paint, if you want to play music, if you want to make movies, if you want to be an entrepreneur, this book is about empowerment.

And the gist of the book is if you want to write, don’t wait for permission. That permission could come externally like, “Oh, you passed the creative writing course,” or, “You have a Master’s in English,” or, it could be internal, “I took the creative course. I have a Master’s in English. Now I can be a writer.” Brenda Ueland is saying, “If you want to write, write. If you want to program, program. If you want to be an entrepreneur, start a company. You don’t need permission. You don’t need certification. You don’t need to do anything. Just do it.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

By far, the center of my universe is a Macintosh. I could not function without a Macintosh. And then I have a second favorite tool, which is, I don’t know if you know this, but I am deaf. And I am deaf so I can hear because of a cochlear implant. And I became deaf about three years ago. And I’ll tell you that cochlear implant has made a huge difference in the quality of my life because it enables me to go from being deaf to just having really lousy hearing. So, that’s a big deal. And, oh, you wanted a digital tool, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, well, I guess you said Macintosh, but if you got another one, I’ll take it.

Guy Kawasaki

Well, okay. I mean, I guess you could say Macintosh is a digital tool, but also you may find this astounding, but I am a hardcore Microsoft Word user. I use Microsoft Word to write my books. I use style sheets for every paragraph of my manuscript. And I constantly flip between the outline view and the print view. And I’m a hardcore user of Microsoft Word.

Pete Mockaitis

Microsoft Word on Mac and not a PC?

Guy Kawasaki

Yes. No, I never touch a PC. There are two things I will not use, a PC and a Tesla.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Guy Kawasaki

I always clean the filter in our dryer from lint after drying clothes. Every time I always clean the lint filter.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wise words. Wise words. And is there a particular nugget you share that people tend to quote back to you often and you’re known for?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, I tell the Peking ducks quote a lot, so I get fed back that. I also tell people that you should never ask people to do something that you yourself would not do. Now, this assumes that you’re not some kind of psychopath, but assuming that, that’s a very good way to go through life. Just don’t ask people to do something you yourself would not do.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

Ah, it’s hard to avoid me. I mean, if you use Google, you just type Guy Kawasaki and you’ll get more responses than you possibly want, but there is GuyKawasaki.com. That’s my website. That’s primarily brochure where, if you really wanted it to interact with me, the best way is email. So, I’m GuyKawasaki@gmail. That’s hard to remember, right? My name at Gmail. And, yeah, that’s it. I’m like an open book.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

I may lose a lot of readers when I tell you this, but this is the truth. I think that one of the most important things you can realize to be awesome at your job is to understand that you should try to make your boss look good. I think many people think, “Oh, my job, I want to get ahead. I’m going to make my boss look bad. I want to show that I’m better than my boss, and they’re going to fire my boss and give me the promotion.” I have never seen that happen.

I think the much more mature, productive, and remarkable perspective is, “My job is to make my boss look good. And if my boss looks good, he or she is going to get promoted, and I’m going to be drafting along. And then, finally, that my boss is going to be so good that I’m going to have such a halo effect on me that it’s going to enable me to branch out and take a new job, get funding, whatever.” But it’s all based on make your boss look good. Don’t try to make your boss look bad. There’s very little upside in that.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Guy, this has been fun. I wish you many more remarkable conversations and adventures.

Guy Kawasaki

Thank you very much. Thank you. All the best to you.

Mar 18
0

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

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

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

You’ll Learn:

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

About Mawi

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

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank you Sponsors!

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

Mawi Asgedom Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mawi, welcome back.

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right, 940-ish. Totally.

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

Not yet.

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, please. All right.

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And then the fourth area?

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

Ah, I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

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

Pete Mockaitis

That’s a good one.

Mawi Asgedom

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

Feb 08
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934: Building Confidence by Facing Fears with Michelle Poler

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Michelle Poler shares her epic story and strategies for facing fears head-on.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to instantly flip your fear perspective
  2. Why to dare being disliked
  3. The distinction between being brave versus fearless

About Michelle

As the Founder of Hello Fears, Michelle Poler has created a social movement empowering millions to step outside of their comfort zone and tap into their full potential. She has inspired some of the world’s most influential organizations including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many more. Poler is also the creator of the project 100 Days Without Fear and her work has been featured on CBS, CNN and Buzzfeed, among many others. 

Resources Mentioned

Michelle Poler Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Michelle, welcome.

Michelle Poler

Hello. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear so much of your story and your pro tips. Could you kick us off by giving us the whole scoop on the 100 Days Without Fear project?

Michelle Poler

Yeah, where should I start? This is 2015, I moved to New York to do a Master’s in Branding at the School of Visual Arts, and I realized that I was not living life to the fullest, that I was living inside of my comfort zone. And, suddenly, at the Master’s that I was doing, they asked us to do a 100-day project of our choice. And while a lot of the students kind of picked a project that could fit their lifestyle, I adopted my lifestyle to the project when I decided that I was going to go outside of my comfort zone for 100 days in a row. Basically, I faced one fear a day.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, lay it on us, so what was the first fear you tackled? And what was the most dramatic? Can we hear a few tales on the frontlines?

Michelle Poler

So, the first fear was to actually accept this project, to say yes to facing my fears. I spent my entire life living inside of my comfort zone, so it was like 26 years saying no to things that made me uncomfortable, and, suddenly, saying yes to all of them at the same time, so that was really scary, just saying yes to this project, committing to changing my life from one day to the other. So, that was the first fear.

And then I started slowly taking risks, doing things that are outside of my comfort zone, but that are not too risky or dangerous. For example, fear number two was, I think, eating an oyster, something I avoided for a really long time. Fear number three was getting a piercing in my ear. Like, those small things that I avoided for 26 years, and, suddenly, I’m like, “Let’s do this. I’ve been thinking about this for so long, but I didn’t have the courage. Now, I’m going to try it out.”

And then, little by little, I started, like, escalating on the level of, I guess, I don’t know, the fears that I was facing, until the project went viral around day 40. And then, even though I got a lot of love and new followers, and people being very inspired to go after their own fears, I also got criticism, as you could imagine, and people saying things like, “You’re doing things that I do on my day-to-day life.”

I was doing things like getting a Brazilian wax, or driving at night, or flying by myself, eating by myself in a restaurant, doing all these things that I just avoided for a long time. And I was like, “This is my time to step it up,” and that’s when I started facing bigger fears, doing things like skydiving, posing nude for an art class, holding a tarantula or a snake, doing standup comedy, things that people don’t do on their day-to-day.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, there’s so much in there right there, and it’s unfortunate when you hear the haters, or the critiques, because that’s sort of the whole idea, like, “Yeah, they were my fears, not yours.”

Michelle Poler
Yeah, it’s very personal.

Pete Mockaitis

And I think, if we’re honest with ourselves, all us probably have some fears that it seems like “normal people,” or everybody else is just fine with. I’m thinking about maybe there’s some, like, home improvement projects, like, “I don’t know if I really want to get down and dirty with, like, the saw, and the drywall.” And it’s like, “Oh, it’s no problem.”

And so, I think that’s dead-on. It’s sort of unique for each individual, and so maybe there’s an implication right there. It’s like who are you going to share this with? Some folks will support you, and some folks will just do the opposite.

Michelle Poler

That’s why people hide their fears because they’re afraid to be judged, I guess, and say, “Am I the only one afraid of this?” And then that’s why I think the project went viral because I was, I guess, brave enough to be very vocal about my own fears, even though they’re like super simple, some of them, but still scary to me.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, could you paint a picture for us for one particular that was pretty hard, and what the scene was like, and what you were feeling, and how it unfolded?

Michelle Poler

Well, so many come to my mind, it’s so hard to choose one. But let’s talk about posing nude in front of an art class…

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, let’s.

Michelle Poler

…which was really scary.

Pete Mockaitis

Lay it on us.

Michelle Poler

First of all, I didn’t come up with that fear. A friend of mine suggested that fear. Actually, I only came up with 20 fears. The rest, like all the other 80 fears, people suggested to me, and those that I can relate to, and I was like, “Yes, that is definitely outside of my comfort zone I would tackle.”

So, a friend suggested this, and she’s like, “Why don’t you pose nude for an art class?” And I’m like, “Why did you put that idea in my mind? Now I can’t say no because I’m in this process of facing my fears but I definitely don’t want to do that, but how can I say no to that now?” And so, okay, so I signed up for a class as a model, I talked to, I think it was, like, a school of art in New York, and I thought, I was so self-aware, so self-conscious that I went waxing.

So, I was like, “I don’t want any hair in my body,” and I starved like the entire day because I was like, “I want to look good,” which was a huge mistake, both decisions were big mistakes because when I got to the place, before it was my turn to model, the models that were there, they had, like, curves and a lot of hair.

And that’s when I realized, “What am I doing?” I was only thinking about myself. I was not thinking about the students. And the students need something to draw, they need more hair and curves and all these things, and I was so self-aware that I was removing all of that. And so, at the beginning when I undressed, I went to the room, immediately I turned around, I gave my back to the students because I was so afraid to look at their faces. And then the professor was like, “Okay, Michelle, can you turn around now?” It was like quick 5-minute poses.

So, after five minutes, she was like, “Please turn around,” and I was dying. I was like so embarrassed but, at the same time, I had this really interesting change of thought where I went from thinking about me, and how I look, and how I’m being perceived, to thinking about them and what they need in their class to succeed. And then, at that moment, I started bending myself and finding interesting shapes to give them something to draw. And it was really interesting having that transformative, I guess, thoughts in that moment.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And then how did it wrap up?

Michelle Poler

So, they all knew that I was facing a fear, that I don’t normally do this, and they were like really supportive at that point, and then they were clapping and cheering, and they showed me their drawings.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, so there you have it. And so, you have one sort of master key right there, was shifting the focus away from yourself onto others and being of service. That’s pretty cool.

Michelle Poler

I realized no one is judging us in the same way that we judge ourselves. I was judging myself so much, I was the only one judging myself, and that thought, that, I guess, aha moment stays with me every single time that I’m afraid to put myself out there.

Pete Mockaitis

That is powerful. And so, you share that and many other such insights in your book Hello, Fears: Crush Your Comfort Zone and Become Who You’re Meant to Be. Can you lay it on us, what are some of the master principles that you’ve unearthed here?

Michelle Poler

Well, I divided the book into 10 chapters, and they’re all the 10 different fears that stops us from becoming who we’re meant to be from fulfilling our potential. And some of the main aha moments that I share in the book are related to the fear of rejection and failure. Those, at the end of the day, are the biggest fears that hold us back from pursuing what we actually want to go after, and fulfilling our own definition of success.

At the end of the day, it’s not about skydiving or holding tarantulas. It’s about what we tell ourselves in that moment where we’re about to take a risk, a risk that is aligned to our dreams. That’s the most important thing because it’s not about facing any fears, it’s not about facing a hundred fears. I’m not here to tell you to do that. It’s about facing the right fears, the ones that are holding you back from the life that you actually want to live.

And so, one of the things that I share in there is one of the most powerful tools that I have, and that have changed the lives of so many people is that, you know, the typical question that, I don’t know, why on earth we are used to asking ourselves or other people around us when we’re about to face a fear, and it’s, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Have you ever asked yourself that question or somebody else?

Pete Mockaitis

Certainly.

Michelle Poler

That’s a really terrible question. Because when you think about what’s the worst that could happen, immediately your mind goes to the risk, and that’s not helpful when you’re trying to face a fear. And even though I know the intention of the question is to help us understand that we’re not going to die, but we might get rejected, we might get fired, we might be embarrassed. There are other things that might happen if we take certain risks.

So, instead of asking ourselves, “What’s the worst that can happen?” I started asking myself, “What’s the best that can happen?” That question brings your mind to focus on the reward instead of the risks. And that is the main reason why we, in the first place, decide to face a fear because we want something, we desire something, so let’s focus on that instead of the risk that that may bring.

And it’s not that I’m telling you do not consider the risk. We’re human and that is the first thing that we’ll consider anyways, but we forget to consider the reward. And that is why, so often, we stay in our comfort zones. So, next time you’re about to do something scary, something that is worth it but that’s outside of your comfort zone, ask yourself, “What’s the best that can happen?” Try to put yourself, your mind, in that scenario, and that is the one thing that will encourage you to take action.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s handy. Thank you.

And, Michelle, you’ve also got a strategy for, specifically, dealing with impostor syndrome. What’s that?

Michelle Poler

Well, impostor syndrome is the one thing that keeps us from really going after the things that we want to do because we tell ourselves that we don’t deserve that, that we’re not worthy of, and we ask ourselves, “Why me? Why would people listen to me, my message? Who am I to be someone to be heard?”

And I ask people to ask themselves, “Why not me?” That is a question I ask myself before doing this project, and putting it out there, because I was like, “Why would people follow me? Like, why would I talk about fear? Who am I?” And then I’m like, “Why not me? Am I not passionate enough? Am I not creative enough? Am I not intelligent enough? Do I don’t want this enough? I do.” So, it’s about betting on yourself.

And one question, like a different question I always ask myself, and this really also helps with impostor syndrome, is, “What is everybody else doing? And how can I be more me?” I don’t have anything against Google, but people Google too many things, and they Google how to dress up for conferences, how to speak in public, how to do all these things.

And I never Google anything, unless it’s an address or something like that, or a recipe, but before going to Google, I always ask myself, “How would I do this? How would I speak in public? How would I dress for a conference? How would I do an icebreaker?” Like, anything, I always ask myself, “How would I do it?” before I research other people. I actually avoid researching other people because I want to make sure that anything I do comes from me.

If I’m going to do research, I’m going to do it myself, I’m going to do my own research. When we own who we are, and our authentic selves, we are not going to have to deal with the impostor syndrome. The impostor syndrome is when we’re trying to be somebody else to fit in, to be accepted, to be liked. But if you’re just really trying to be yourself because you like who you are, you accept who you are, you give yourself permission to just be you, there will not be any impostor syndrome that can stop you.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s really a fun perspective in terms of if I am not trying to fit into a mold or a role, then the impostor syndrome goes away because the comparison goes away. It’s like, “Oh, I’m not a big shot like these people who are doing these things in this way,” because you didn’t even bring that up in the first place. It’s like, “I’m just going to do how I do…I’m just going to do this thing the way I imagine it ought to be done,” as opposed to trying to fit another set of expectations, which I may very well fail to meet because they’re not mine.

Michelle Poler

That’s why I encourage people, instead of comparing yourself, contrast. I’ve been practicing that for so many years already. Like, since I was little, I didn’t want to be like anybody else. I think this was, I have to thank my mom for this, in that she, in the first place, she called me Michelle because she was like, “I don’t know any Michelle in the world, so then I won’t have any expectations. I just want you to be who you are,” since the beginning, and she was always very curious about who I am, and always listening to me.

And I always felt like I had a voice, and I’m really grateful for that. And that is what I want to encourage people now to see that they have a voice, that it matters, that that’s their own, and that’s all we want. We don’t want a copycat. We don’t want more of what we already know and have. We want real people with real problems, real solutions, real ideas.

Pete Mockaitis

And then, to that end, I suppose as you’re doing you and living your life and approaching things the way you want to, you’re going to get some criticisms, you’re going to have of those haters. What are your favorite approaches for dealing with this kind of stuff that comes your way?

Michelle Poler

The first thing is that it’s so important to understand that we are not here to be liked by everybody, and that is okay. I’d rather be loved by a few than liked by everybody. And the more you want to be liked by everybody, the more generic you will sound, and the less you will connect with people. The more you are daring to be disliked by others, the more true to yourself you’ll be, and the more you’ll connect with the right audience. And, for me, that’s priceless.

And I’ve heard a lot of people that they don’t like me, and they say, “Michelle, I can’t stand you. I can’t stand your voice or how self-confident you are,” because I am very self-confident, and people don’t like that. But then there’s another group of people that really admire that, and that they want to be like this, and they want to learn from me so they buy my programs, and they buy my books, and they listen to my talks. And they actually get really inspired to change their own lives. And, to me, that’s enough.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. Well, so that’s a great perspective, that we’re not trying to be liked by everybody. We’re just loved by a few, and that’s enough. And so, help us, if we’re there intellectually, and we’re like, “Yeah, that makes sense. I agree. That checks out,” and yet emotionally we’re not there, how do you recommend we get there?

Michelle Poler

So, I want to ask you something. Do you like everybody? If you have a party at your house, would you like everybody to be there? Or, can you think of a few people that you’re like, “I’d rather not have him in my house. I’d rather not hang out with that person”? And every time, for example, on social media, if I lose followers, I don’t think, “Oh, they don’t like me.” I’m like, “Maybe I don’t even like them either. Like, we’re just not a match, and that’s okay.”

Like I was saying, we’re not here to be liked by everybody, just like you don’t like everybody. It’s okay if people don’t like you. But those people you don’t like, they’re loved by other people, and that’s fine too. I think we’re not supposed to be a match for everybody in anything in life, in love, in jobs, as influencers, as anything, and I’m okay with that.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And then when you’re in the midst of doing something you’re afraid of, do you have any specific mantras, self-talk, pump-up rituals, any tactical things you do when you are about to enter into the fearful place, and you want to make sure that you go forward instead of running away?

Michelle Poler

Yeah, sure. So, like I told you at the beginning of this conversation, I spent my entire life avoiding fear, avoiding discomfort because every single time that I experience that feeling in my body, when you’re about to do something scary and your stomach starts telling you, “Stop it! I don’t want to go that route. Like, it’s not safe.”

I used to interpret that feeling as a sign of my body telling me, “Don’t go that way. It’s dangerous and it’s a sign that you shouldn’t do that.” It’s my intuition trying to protect me. And I realized that that feeling is also growth. That, for me, was a huge realization because I thought, “Oh, my body is protecting me,” and I realized now that my body was protecting me from growth, from opportunity. And growth feels like that. It feels uncomfortable.

So, every time now that I experience that feeling in my body of, “I am uncomfortable. My stomach is telling me not to go that way,” I understand that there’s an opportunity there. And now, instead of avoiding it, I choose that.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, through practice, repetitions, you’ve just made the connection that, “Oh, doing this thing that I’m afraid of is what makes for growth. So, this fear feeling is really just the pre-growth feeling, and that’s that.”

Michelle Poler

Yes, it was over and over again, as I was doing the project, every single day, if you ask me, you haven’t asked me this, but everybody asks me the same question, “What’s the biggest fear that you faced?” And the biggest fear is the one you haven’t faced. It’s so hard for me to tell you and answer for that question now because I already faced them.

Every single day of the project, I thought, “Okay, this was not that bad. Tomorrow I’m going to die. I can’t.” It’s going to be the worst one because I haven’t done it, because the fear is the unknown, but after I did it, every single day would be like, “Okay, that wasn’t that bad. Tomorrow is the worst one.” So, I can’t even think which one was the worst one because after I did all of them, none of them was as bad as what I thought they were going to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a huge lesson right there in terms of, “Hey, take it from Michelle. She’s done this a hundred times, plus a hundred document of times and then more that each time it wasn’t as bad as you feared it would be.” And I’m curious, so that was the experience over and over and over again, “Oh, I’m really scared of this thing. Oh, that wasn’t so bad. I’m really scared of the next thing. Oh, that wasn’t so bad.” So, I’m curious, somewhere along the line after 50 days or 70 days, did you come to think that the next day wasn’t going to be so bad?

Michelle Poler

No.

Pete Mockaitis

No? Okay.

Michelle Poler

And I’m still a fearful person. People think that I’m fearless now, they’re like, “Oh, my fearless friend, you faced so many fears. I want to be fearless like you.” I’m quite the opposite. And, actually, being called fearless is like a disservice to what I actually am. It’s actually the opposite of brave. Fearless is doing the things that don’t scare you.

So, what’s the courage in there? Why would I be proud of being fearless? I’m more proud of being brave. That means that I was definitely afraid every single time that I faced a fear and still I conquered that fear, like I still showed up. And I think that is more powerful, more valuable, more inspiring than being fearless.

Pete Mockaitis

So, now you have the perception, “Oh, this fear feeling equals that I’m about to grow.” So, you know and understand that at a deep level but you still feel the full fear and think it’s going to be terrible before you embark on the thing?

Michelle Poler

Yes, and I try to avoid it at the beginning, I go through the entire process just like the first time because we’re human, and new fears come up every single day, and a fear means that it’s something that you haven’t done before, but, also, it’s really interesting to understand that if you do something and you don’t like it, it’s very fair that you don’t want to do it again, not because you’re afraid but because you don’t like it, generally, because you tried it.

My entire life, I just said, “I don’t like this,” or, “I’m afraid of this,” but I never tried those things. Like, I would say, “I don’t like oysters.” “Have you ever tried an oyster?” “No.” “So, how can you know?” So, it was so important for me to just expose myself to all these fears, try all these things, and now I can tell you with all certainty that I do not rollercoasters. I tried them and I don’t like them, and I don’t want to try them again. But I could if I need to, but I don’t want to, but I tried them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good distinction right there. Okay. So, maybe, Michelle, if we could zoom right into now, today, is there something that you are experiencing fear and avoidance of right now? And how are you talking to yourself or planning to approach it?

Michelle Poler

Well, for the first time in my life, I am experiencing fear of success. When I heard about fear of success years ago, I was like, “That makes no sense. Why would somebody be afraid of reaching their goals? It makes no sense.” But now, as a mom, and understanding how limited time is, I am afraid of success. So, I’m at that point where I’m, like, “Should I grow more? Should I stay where I am?” Like, that is one of the fears I am right now dealing with, and also the fear of having another baby. Like, we are thinking about it but, at the same time, brings a lot of fear because now we know what it is to be parents.

Pete Mockaitis

So, with the fear of success, what are you doing with that?

Michelle Poler
I guess the most important thing is to understand what is your definition of success first. And understanding also that it can change over the years, because my definition of success was to be New York Times’ bestseller, speak as much as possible, like be on the road as much as possible, be on all these shows and surround myself with these people.

And, suddenly, what if my definition of success changed to also have more free time, be more at home, have more quality time with my family? So, it’s understanding that and being at peace with what your definition of success is today, and stop pursuing an old definition of success that you had in the past, or worse yet, pursuing other people’s definition of success.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I guess what I’m thinking here is, with this fear of success, it doesn’t so much seem as much as the others as something that you’re just going to just go do it, but rather maybe it seems like there’s some thinking, some distinguishing, some sorting out, that prioritizing, soul-searching, values to finding clarifying action that’s happening with this fear.

Michelle Poler

I think what’s important here is to identify if you’re not pursuing something because it is no longer part of your definition of success, or is it because of fear? If the answer is fear, then my recommendation is to never make decisions based on fear. If only fear is what’s holding you back, then you definitely have to go for it. Find the best way to do it. If you need therapy, whatever you need, but go for it. Do not allow fear to hold you back.

But if it’s just that your definition of success changed, then that’s something that you have to adapt. So, in this point, that’s what I’m trying to figure out, “Am I not growing because of fear? Or is it because my definition changed in this moment?” And it can always change back in the future but that’s what I’m trying to understand right now. So, it’s a lot about just looking inside and being really honest with yourself, and do not ask other people what the answer is. We love asking other people, “What do you think I should do?” And people don’t know. Only you know. The answer is always inside of you.

Pete Mockaitis

And as you do this self-inquiry, having these conversations with yourself, and you land at…and sometimes it’s really trick to reach that point of clarity, that, “Oh, it’s only fear that’s holding me back,” because a lot of times, fear can masquerade as, or rationalize some things, like, “No, really, there’s a strong chance something terrible will happen if you do that thing.” So, I guess we can call that risk. Do you have some perspective on how you distinguish between this emotion of fear versus valid risks that need to be prudently considered?

Michelle Poler

That’s a really good question. I think it’s like having that honest conversation with yourself. Like, if I’m thinking about it, what I told you about the fear of success, I think it’s more aligned to I actually want to spend more time with my family, I actually want to feel more at peace and less rushed and less things to do, and all of that.

But when I talked about having another baby, that is actually fear, that’s not my definition of success. That is, I know what it takes now to have another baby, and fear is the one thing that’s holding me back but it’s something I want. So, if I determined that fear is the only thing in my way then I’m not going to let it come in the way of something I want.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, now zooming into the workplace in particular, what are some of the top fears you’ve observed people have at work, and how you recommend we tackle them?

Michelle Poler

One of the main fears people have at work is they don’t want to be themselves. They want to be who they’re expected to be. So, I’m at work, I’m expected to behave like this, to talk like this, to send emails like this. And I want to encourage people to be their true selves at all times with whoever, with your boss, with your team, with your in-laws, with anybody. I think that that is the definition of living an authentic life, and people say, “Well, at my work, they wouldn’t like my real self.” Then maybe you’re not at the right job, that’s what I would say.

I think that we only have one life. I’m very mindful about that. And one of my purposes in life is to live life to the fullest, is to really enjoy my life, is to feel that every day counts, and I want to be happy. And there is a huge difference between being comfortable and being happy. And people, without realizing it, they’re pursuing comfort, not happiness. And I feel like it’s one of my missions to make people see this and understand that comfort will not lead to happiness.

And we’re told this since we’re little. Since we’re little, it’s like, “You need to find the right job. You need to have stability. You need to find a partner. You need to have all these things.” And when you check all the boxes, and you ask yourself, “Is this what happiness is about?” If you’re not truly happy, it means that you’re checking other people’s boxes, and you should check your own boxes. That’s what will lead you to your own happiness and not comfort.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And now let’s hear about, at work, folks have a fear of speaking up in a meeting or asking for what they really want and need. Any tips on how we can tackle those in particular?

Michelle Poler

For me, the best strategy is if you really believe that you deserve something, you’re certain about that, you’re not just being entitled, or you want it because somebody else got it, you feel like, “I deserve this. They’re not recognizing me and I have to speak up for myself,” first, you have to do it. If not, you’re betraying yourself and you are rejecting yourself. Because of the fear of rejection that you’re getting, you have that fear, “I don’t want to be rejected. I don’t want to get a no,” you are rejecting yourself. And I think that’s the worst thing that we could do.

So, first of all, encouraging people here to speak up and ask for what they know they deserve. And the strategy I would use, again, is asking myself, “What’s the best that can happen if I do this, if I ask for it?” What if you get a yes? We’re so afraid of getting a no and being judged that we stay where we are. Every time that we choose comfort over growth, we feel like we’re staying where we are but we’re actually moving backwards.

Every single time we’re choosing comfort, we’re moving backwards because the rest of the world is moving forward. And I think it’s also, like, our duty to speak up for ourselves. And if you know you deserve this, you ask for it and you don’t get it, maybe you’re at a place that they don’t appreciate you enough.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michelle Poler

This quote is by Steven Pressfield, and this is the quote that inspired me to put my 100 Day project out there.

So, it says, “Are you born a writer? Were you put on earth to be a painter, a scientist, an apostle of peace? In the end, the question can only be answered by action. Do it or don’t do it. If you were meant to cure cancer, or write a symphony, or crack cold fusion, and you don’t do it, you not only hurt yourself. You hurt your children. You hurt me. You hurt the planet. Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, beautiful. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Michelle Poler

Well, I’m a big fan of Brene Brown. All of her research that she’s done about empathy, about language, about vulnerability, anything that is in her books, I’m a huge fan of those. I learned so much from her.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Michelle Poler

I would say The War of Art by Steven Pressfield from the quote that I read. That book is very simple and very life-changing. Well, also, a kids’ book.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure.

Michelle Poler

Can I say a kids’ book that I feel every adult should read. It’s called Maybe by Kobi Yamada.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

Favorite tool, Videoleap. That’s where I edit all my reels. So easy to create a reel and find the perfect music and everything through Videoleap. So, I’m a big fan.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Michelle Poler

Dancing before any phone call, any important phone call, like with clients, or doing a podcast interview. Before coming to this podcast, I danced by myself in my office. It just gets me in the right mood.

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

Michelle Poler

The question, “What’s the best that can happen?” It’s the one that I get the most quoted on. And if I can share another one, is when you believe in yourself so much, you make others believe in you as well.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

You can go to my website, MichellePoler.com, or if you want to watch me embarrass myself facing all 100 fears, you can go to 100DaysWithoutFear.com, or follow me on Instagram @hellofears.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Michelle Poler

I would say the final challenge would be find the right place for you. Don’t settle. Don’t settle for anything in life, not for a job, not for a partner, not for a city, not for a home, not for a dog. Find what feels right for you.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Michelle, thank you. This was a ton of fun. And I wish you many adventures and fun times crushing more fears.

Michelle Poler

Thank you. Thank you for having me.