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2024 GREATS: 983: Making the Most of Your Limited Time Before Death with Jodi Wellman

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Jodi Wellman shares how reflecting on our scarce remaining time of life helps us live free from regret.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you need to befriend the Grim Reaper
  2. How to feel “astonishingly alive
  3. How to break out of a rut

About Jodi

Jodi Wellman is a former corporate executive turned executive coach. She has a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is an instructor in the Master’s program and a trainer in the world-renowned Penn Resilience Program. She is a Professional Certified Coach with the ICF and a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach from CTI. 

She has coached and spoken with clients like American Express, Fidelity, pwc, Royal Bank of Canada, BMW, and more, and runs her own business, Four Thousand Mondays. She’s also known for her inspirational TEDx Talk on how death can bring you back to life. She lives between Palm Springs and Chicago with her husband and cat, Andy.

Resources Mentioned

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Jodi Wellman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jodi, welcome.

Jodi Wellman
Thank you for having me here. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited, too. I understand you say you’ll have about 1,822-ish Mondays left of your plans here.

Jodi Wellman
Well, I got to tell you, that number’s down by two weeks since you read that. So, I’m down to 1,820, but this clock is ticking down, and, yeah, big plans. I mean, that’s the point, right? It’s like, when we get a little bit granular with that math, that fabulous mortality math, it does make me and many others go, “Wait a sec, how am I going to spend that diminishing time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, what are some of these big plans?

Jodi Wellman
Well, they’re usually bucketed. It’s funny you ask that because, in terms of research and then the way that I look at my life, they’re in categories. So, there are different domains of life. There’s the fun and recreation side of things, which can further categorize into travel. So going to the south of France in the fall, that’ll be exciting. And so, there’s a whole category around recreation. What are we doing with our leisure time?

And so, looking at starting new hobbies, I’m going to be getting more into trying to learn a new language. And so, really, I’m looking to either refine French or Italian. So that’s just one category, and so that’s a good start, I think, lest I bore you with the gory details.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I appreciate that, that’s fun. That’s fun. Well, lay it on us, you’ve been researching our mortality. Your book, You Only Die Once, a compelling title. Any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and our lives, our mortality, that professionals need to know?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely think so. So, we all know in the work we do, for example, that, oh, there’s nothing better than the power of a deadline. It’s like we will tend to procrastinate until we know that the strategy session is coming up on the 17th or we’ve got a big project due at the end of the quarter, etc. And it’s so true with our lives.

So having this distinct and, okay, fine, maybe a little bit morbid sense that we are finite is precisely the thing, by having that deadline that does kick us into gear to get on with, I say, the business of living. So, it could be the things we do at work, all of the initiatives we might just keep postponing, but also the things we do outside of work, all the joys and things we might do, again, for recreation, socially, etc., that make us more well-rounded when we come back into work.

So, the research is called Temporal Scarcity, and it’s this idea that whenever we have an asset, okay, like life, that we become heightened, frightenedly aware that it is temporary or rare. Our perception of its value goes through the roof. So that is why I get us to count our Mondays, and that is the heft in terms of empirical evidence behind how we do need to have, unfortunately, that rankling feeling of, “Ugh, scarcity” in order to take action and have that deadline, or else we’ll just float along the lazy river of life and have good intentions, maybe, but not really take as much action on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, a deadline is quite literally here, there will be a day in which we die, a deadline.

Jodi Wellman
You caught it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, morbid, yeah, I mean, that’s how some people could react to it, but you seem to have a very different emotional energy vibe association to this. Tell us about it.

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, I’ve never been super scared of it. I recognize, and in doing research, of course, and working with groups and individuals that some people would much rather not talk about death than anything. Many people would rather public speak. We’re very afraid of dying in the discussion.

So, my openness to it and my mission in life, really, is to de-fang it, make it something that’s like, “Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to think about the fact that we’re not going to be around much longer,” relatively speaking. And so, how do we use that and take a more amusing approach to accepting, “Yeah, it sucks to be us,” and yet let’s use it pretty darn quickly to move over to the life side?

So, I talk about the Grim Reaper. I love it. I love the whole topic of mortality because I know it’s a tool. It catapults us not to keep talking about death but to talk about life. So, I make the switch pretty darn quickly. It helps that I doodle, you know, the Grim Reaper and tombstones. It helps to lighten it a little bit, and I tend to give out the most ridiculous, hilarious prizes in my workshops, again, to create levity.

But it’s like a fact of life that we do a fabulous job of denying and deferring and avoiding, and I just say, “Guys, let’s just accept it. Let’s talk about it for a minute. Let’s do the math, let’s do the thinking, and then use a table. I’m curious, like, how does that motivate you to maybe spend your time differently because there’s so much power there?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe could you give us an example of how a person walked through the math, they took a look at it, and then that transformed the way they approached their work, and their life, what they’re up to?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I give so many examples in the book, and I do that because we do like to hear and learn vicariously through other people, right? So, there’s one leader I worked with who used to do, in the nature of his business, he acquired companies. And when he stopped and counted, not just his Mondays left in life, but his. Mondays left in his career, he didn’t really have formal retirement plans, but he had a sense about, “By this age, I want to be able to say no and say no a lot, unless it’s a really cool project.”

So, he did the math and he looked and said, “Okay, I do however many acquisitions, mergers per year.” And he did that and worked backwards and said, “Wait a sec. Like, I’ve been thinking, deluding myself,” because that’s what we do. I mean, this is what psychology is. We just try to fool ourselves into happiness. You know, we got to cope somehow.

And so, he was thinking, he knew he wasn’t going to live forever or work forever, but when he did the math and he realized, he really had five good deals ahead of him, like really good juicy ones that he loved to live for, it put everything else in perspective. And it helped him focus in on the kind of work he wanted to do, the kind of deals he wanted to negotiate, the kind of team he wanted along the way, because he was just dilly-dallying and having people around him that weren’t necessarily the lifers, as he now called them.

And so, it helped him prioritize, “What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of work do I not want to do?” because we all know sometimes that’s where the meat on the bone is. So, it can really help sharpen what our priorities are just by way of one example.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then for our math, can you walk us through it? How might we compute that? Do I need to whip out an actuarial table? Or, what’s the sequence by which I arrive at my Mondays left?

Jodi Wellman
Right. It’s a lot easier than you think. Now, the good news is I have a page on my website called Resources that does the math for you, if you don’t want to waste your precious time in life doing math, but it’s pretty easy. So, if you identify as male, start with 78 years, that’s the average life expectancy, and then you minus your age, and then you multiply by 52 just to keep it easy.

Now, if you are a little more fortunate to have been born a female and you identify as such, then your average age is 83, and then you minus your current age and you multiply it by 52 weeks a year. And then if you don’t identify with either, just average it at 80 and minus your age, and again multiply it by 52. And I think you could probably add in a few Mondays just because you listen to How to Be Awesome at Your Job. I mean, I do think that that should buy you…

Pete Mockaitis
Life extender.

Jodi Wellman
It is. It is, at least a couple weeks, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Life giving. Okay. And so, then when you see that number, it’s like, “Well, shucks, here we are, we’re maybe 1,000-ish, 2,000-ish,” and then it’s even more real when we get precise like 1,822, like you had there. And so, you see that. And then what’s most people’s reaction to beholding this figure?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it is usually a bit eye-opening, like, literally, eyes-widening, like, “Oh,” because we are used to the language of years. We’ve already rationalized, “Yeah, I’m going to live to about 80. My grandma lived to 90. Oh, shoot, but my Uncle Reg died at 71,” and you average it out somewhere. But when we talk about the weeks, and I’m super nerdy because that’s why I call my company 4,000 Mondays.

When you even think of it in terms of Mondays, which have a very different feeling than a Friday, you know, Fridays are slam dunks, like, life is easy. But when you think about it with a Monday, and you quantify and say, “Am I really doing the stuff that lights me up if I’m going to be waking up for just that many more Mondays?” that’s where it creates the eye-opening and wakeup call that I’m looking for people.

So, it does tend to create enough discomfort. I’m not afraid of a discomfort. I want people to feel just enough of the poke in the ribs to feel like, “Oh, I got to get on with this.” And this is the thing, Pete, and you know this from all the work you do and the research you do, and with me with my positive psychology background, I would love the idea that we could all just be motivated enough by the pursuit of something awesome. You know, the, “Oh, I want to live this kind of life and I’m going to go for it.”

And some people are intrinsically motivated enough to do that, but the rest of us, we need a prod, we need a nudge, we need something that is, unfortunately, just a tad negative, which is why I talk about scarcity rather than abundance in this context. And so, that is the eye-opener for people that we think, “Oh, I didn’t want to see it that way, but now that I see it and I hopefully can’t unsee it. What does it motivate me to do?”

And that’s where the conversation gets good. It’s like, “So now what? This precious life. This dwindling, diminishing existence you have. What do you want to…?” Throw that in. I mean, you’ve got to heighten the drama, “But what do you want to stuff it with?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jodi, it’s funny. This might be the most intense episode of “How to Be Awesome at Your Job” ever. It’s like, quite literally, life and death is all we’re talking about. But what you say really does connect. A friend of mine shared with me he had some family members with some health challenges. One was a child of his, which was very scary. And another was his mother, and he said, “Boy, just experiencing that really kind of made me think about what I want to be doing with my career, instead of like postponing my dreams.”

And so, he just like went for it, he’s like, “I’ve always had this cool business idea, and so I’ve got some people together. We made a pitch deck and we approached an investor. And then he’s in for a couple hundred thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars for a few points of equity.” So, he’s got like a multi-million-dollar evaluation. It was like, “I just talked to you like a month ago. What is going on here? It’s amazing.”

And so, I’m proud and impressed and, just like that, I mean, he had the idea bouncing around his head for a long time, and then a few scary situations with family members’ health, the guy was, “You know what, let’s just see what happens. Let’s just go for it.” And then, wow, he’s off to the races.

Jodi Wellman
Oh, this story is profound, and I love it. This is the research that I do that just lights me up beyond belief that I hope to also shine that light on others. This is the wakeup call with this gentleman. And it takes a really unfortunate situation to see that light. Especially, because I talk a lot about the wakeup calls we receive personally. Like, if you get a health diagnosis that ain’t so hot, that usually tends to snap us to attention, and we want to live differently, and research is so clear.

I always love this phrase that psychologists, existential psychologists use, that when people have had a brush with death, they experience what’s called a roar of awakening. It feels so visceral, right? And so, whether it’s our own precipice moment with the great beyond, or whether it is because a family member or a dear friend, or we’ve had some very salient moment to realize, “Oh, gosh, like, we are mortal,” that can be the thing that catapults us.

And, ultimately, what it comes down to, and I think you even embedded the words in your anecdote, it’s like, “What are we waiting for?” We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re going to have time later, and I am getting to get all hot and bothered here, but we need to talk about it because I think we believe we’re going to have time to do the new initiative, or open up the New York office, or do the cool thing, or open up the spinoff business, or go to Prague, “We’re just going to get to do it later.”

It’s either in this category of when work dies down, we’ll, like, let’s all get laughed together at that notion, because we’re working hard at making work more productive and busier often, which is not about dying things down, another metaphor about dying things down. And so, we’re either waiting for that, lull, “Well, it ain’t going to happen,” or we’re waiting for retirement, which to me is like, “Don’t you dare.”

Yeah, plan a cool retirement, do that, too. But if you are deferring your existence for a later that just may not arrive, oh, honey buddy, I just want to take you, in somewhere between a hug and a throttle, it’s just like, “What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for your kid to get sick. Don’t wait for you to get thankfully in remission from a cancer that you just were trying not to think about. Don’t wait to get to retirement when, all of a sudden, your gout is so bad that you can’t even climb the Spanish steps that you’ve been longing to climb since you were in your early thirties that you just put off.” See, I’m getting all worked up, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I hear you. Well, it’s heavy and it’s intense. And, in some ways, you’ve got something novel on your hands, like the math and the number of Mondays and whatnot. In another way, this is a very ancient wisdom concept, you know, memento mori. I think that’s Latin. I was a Latin student. That just means remember your death. Is that correct?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, remember you’re going to die. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Remember your death. And so, I know Ryan Holiday has done a fine job of, I think, he’s got a cool coin as well that says that on it. I think there’s a skull or something. Cool stuff from Ryan Holiday. So, tell us, what’s sort of like the ancient wisdom on meditating upon this? And what’s your new fresh stuff that you’re bringing to the table?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it’s all rooted in the ideology that some call it stoicism as a philosophical endeavor. Philosophers, depending on their camps, for centuries have been extolling the virtues of remembering that you’re going to die, and in some cases, it was so that they could control the population for ways of being virtuous or for religious means. But being in tune with the end is not a new idea.

Just like with most of us, we all rationally know we have an expiry day. We don’t know when it is, but we all understand it. But it’s the reminder that we need to keep in mind and keep fresh. So, in more modern times, I referred a moment ago to some existential psychologists, and there’s a whole new branch of psychology called existential psychology, and it really is the study of our experience of not just the positive psychology side, which is a lot of my background around like what it takes to live the good life, but it’s also the nuances of how we will defer and avoid and deny, and what the cost is of that.

So, the more modern take on it is let’s just try to be open and honest with ourselves about it, and have conversations with our families, and our friends, and just like, for me, it’s like that’s the best happy hour ever. It’s just talking about a bucket list and holding each other accountable about, “What are you going to do?” “Did you book the trip?” “Did you book the online course?” “Did you set up the LLC like you said you wanted to do?” Because again, what are we waiting for?

So, it’s all rooted in the ancient times. And in the modern times, I think there’s not really a lot more we can do other than create a habit around talking about it and thinking about it and remembering it. So, this doesn’t just become a, “Huh, interesting conversation I listened to on your podcast that floats away.” We have to embed it into our routines, if you will, and that’s the stuff that helps make it stickier.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us another example? So, we’ve heard about a couple folks in the deal-making or entrepreneurial zone. Any other dramatic wakeups that you’ve witnessed?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, there was a woman I worked with three years ago, she was in her early 40s, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she ran her own company and it was an eye-opener for her. She beat it, and that was fantastic, and that had inspired her to come alive and start a foundation as part of her organization.

So, a lot of what this does is it instills this idea about like legacy thinking, which is really important I think for leaders, but not even just for leaders but people thinking about, “How am I showing up at work? And how am I showing up at life? Like, how do I want to be remembered?” So, for this woman, Christia, she felt really compelled as a result of having her life threatened in front of her, to say, “I want to start raising money for women with breast cancer who didn’t have access to some of the means that I had.”

Because she knew coming from the south side of Chicago, that she had a history where she knew other people were suffering in ways that her financial means were allowed her better access to some care and convenience. So, now the truth is, if I was just to fast-forward to take this to a different direction, but on purpose, is that she was re-diagnosed and, unfortunately, a couple of years ago she did pass away, and she was 42 when she died.

And I still work with the company, the fabulous team there that inherited the business from her. Her sister and her niece are running that company. They’re called Thank God It’s Natural, and they are phenomenal. But for Christia, it opened her eyes up to “What kind of business do I want to run? Where do I want to prioritize our operations? And where do I want to not focus?”

So, another woman, here in Palm Springs, where I’m currently based, also had a breast cancer experience for herself. She started a nonprofit that helps survivors. And the way she worded it is that, “I was given a second chance at life.” And she said that in her experience of sitting and doing something like 24 rounds of chemotherapy, I wrote about this as an example in the book and drew a doodle about it, I called it Shay’s Circle because she said, “I took a fresh journal page and I drew a big circle.”

“And I said to myself, ‘I’m making it through this cancer situation, but I’m going to be very thoughtful about the life I’m going to live moving forward, this second chance I’ve been given. What do I want and who do I want in my life?’” And she was very deliberate and wrote names of people, some of the priorities with her work, activities she wanted to focus on, things with her kids in the circle, and she was very thoughtful about, “And I will no longer…” and she had a couple names, and she had a couple of tendencies, like pleasing tendencies, saying yes to being on committees and all the things that we just do because we’re not conscious that our life is finite.

So those are extremes, people having had scares that did, unfortunately, take them, but also scares that did, I think, we learned from that. Like, my goal is for us to have wakeup calls without having to go through any of that drama of having a near-death experience because there’s so much gold from people who have been there or have been close. So, we can refine our priorities. I think that’s one of the biggest opportunities, in addition to being grateful for life. But we’re refining our priorities and the big businesses we work in and things we do, sometimes that’s key.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m fascinated as I just imagine the listeners hearing this, like, some people have already turned off this podcast and have asked out their dream guy, their dream partner or send an email to be like, “Let’s talk about this business that we’ve been picking around.” They’ve already taken the action. They’re so fired up. They’re inspired, like, you’re transforming them. Boom. Already done.

I think there’s others, and I’m finding myself in this boat a little bit right now. It’s like, well, you know, Jodi, I mean, I guess I’ve been quite blessed. I mean, in many ways, I’ve had a lot of dreams, and then I have realized them. It’s like, I’ve got a family, and they’re amazing. I’ve got a dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that, better than that dream job. It’s like, I’m talking to fascinating people whose books I would just read, and this is turning into income, and then other entrepreneurial things are turning into income, and I’m working with cool people I like.

In a way, it’s like I don’t feel like I’ve postponed anything major, and yet I have a feeling there’s more for me here because I don’t, frankly, spend much time thinking, “Oh, I’m going to die soon.” I don’t do that. And as you’re saying it, it feels heavy and intense, like, “Yeah, whoa, for real, a limited number of Mondays. Okay.” But I’m not yet electrified to charge in any given direction. I was like, “Huh, these are pretty good. I guess I should just keep doing that.” What about this segment?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I love what you’re saying. So, I have quadrants like any good empirically based situation has quadrants, and so you are in…

Pete Mockaitis
As a former consultant, absolutely, they do.

Jodi Wellman
I know, exactly. You got the Bain in you, right? So, you’ve got widening your life with vitality is one dimension, and that’s literally the idea about, “How can I add more fun and interest and experience and cool stuff and pleasure and happiness?” Okay, so for many people who have really busy profound jobs, this is the dimension and, in fact, this actually is where most people in my research will identify as.

They’ll say, “I’ve got enough meaning in my life but I need more of this widening vitality. I need more fun. I feel like I’m not going out as much as I used to do the fun things in the restaurants, or going to a concert, or trying that new printmaking class, or the things that might feel kind of cool and make me feel more alive in a different way, rather than maybe the more one-dimensional existence I’ve been living, which is like rocking my business.” So that’s just one axis is widening your life with vitality.

The other one is deepening your life with meaning, and that is that sense of having a purpose, being connected to people, maybe something bigger than you, like in the spiritual realm. It’s defined as kind of doing good, as opposed to just feeling good. And so, when you mash these together, you’ve got four quadrants.

Pete, you are in what I call the astonishingly alive category, which I know, it’s a big word. I know, but here’s the deal, because why this is, is that you are, you seem to be, you’re living a good life where you’re plus, anywhere positive, even if it’s 0.10 on meaning, and plus on vitality, and so you’re in a good place. There are a lot of people out there, a majority, because, by the way, my research is clear, like 11% of people identify in the astonishingly alive category currently.

And so, most people are in that zone of like, “My job’s meaningful,” or, “Rearing my kids is meaningful, but I’m so freaking bored.” Or, it could be the reverse, which is, “I am having fun. Like, I’m out there. I am traveling. I’m on the yacht, but I go home and I feel like I’m an empty hollow shell. Like, what am I doing this for?” So, there are variations on those themes, but I don’t want to say now that there’s no fun for you, that you can’t do more with this.

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re done.”

Jodi Wellman
No, exactly. Cash in your chips. No, because here’s why. This is why you do this podcast. You’re in a good situation, you’re living life, and yet you are yearning to learn more. You want more. So, nobody I know who’s in the astonishingly alive category is just content to put your feet up and be like, “We are done here.” You want more, and so that is where I do think some of these exercises can be useful.

So, for you, counting your Mondays may not be resonant in a way that you’re like, “No, but I’ve done cool things.” That’s what we’re looking to get to, is that feeling like, “I killed it.” Like, if you got to the end, you’d be able to say…

Pete Mockaitis
So much depth, Jodi. Like, “You’re just going to die.”

Jodi Wellman
That’s where you’re at, like, “Okay, fine. I nailed it. Like, I lived this life. I extracted it. I did it.” You might be able to say that now, and yet, there are also things where if you did play the game with me about the deathbed regrets, or if you knew you had 18 months to live, what would be things that you would, all of a sudden, think, “Oh, I want to do that”?

Those are all just cues and clues to either yearnings or inklings that you might want to get moving on now, and I call them pre-grets. I know it’s super cheesy, but, like, if you identify a regret, you might be like, “Oh, man, I always wish that I had volunteered at that library,” or “I always wish that I had gotten back to playing the violin,” or fill in the blanks. There’s no shortage of examples.

That’s an example of like, “Hey, the good news is, last I checked, you still have a pulse, and if you really want to pick up the violin again, like, dude, it’s yours to pick up!” And then you just get to be the one to decide, like, “Eh, it was a passing fancy, no big deal. My life is great without doing that,” or, “Yeah, you know, I would feel proud of myself if I actually did pick that up,” or go and read to kids from 4: 00 till 5:00, Tuesday evenings, whatever it is. Those are opportunities, I think, to just add even more astonishment to your astonishingly alive life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I like that notion a lot in terms of with the two axes. I’m thinking of a buddy he’s doing a lot of cool things. Like, yeah, he’s into drumming in a band. He’s brewing beer, and going to beer-tasting events, and like golfing and improving his golf. And then his mom said, this is like a very mother thing to say, she’s like, “Oh, you know, all those hobbies aren’t really a vocation.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s heavy, vocation.”

But, yeah, that sort of speaks to meaning, and there’s some truth to that, like all the fun and games with these activities can leave you feeling hollow and/or you might say, “No, I’ve got the dream family, but, oh, my gosh, when do I get to get out of this home and just be wacky”?

Yeah, so two dimensions, you can widen, have more fun widening your vitality, but you might feel hollow, or you can be super fulfilled, but, “Ooh, where’s the fun?” And that does remind me, yeah, I guess the things that are sort of left undone, I mean, some of them I’m just sort of pursuing, like, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to be lighter and stronger at 41 than I was at 21? Well, I’m on my path. I think we’re getting there and it’s sort of exciting to feel the progress from like a fitness perspective.

But then there’s also things that just sort of got left by the wayside, like, you know I always thought it would be cool to learn how to sing, and I’ve never really done that very well. Or, I’ve always been mystified by when I go bowling, which is rare, like one throw of the ball is a strike, the next is a gutter ball, and I don’t think I did anything different. Like, what’s behind that?

Like, I thought it would be fun to spend a day with a bowling coach for no reason, just to solve this plaguing mystery, but, like, though I may only go bowling three times a year for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t matter if I win or lose to me in the least.

Jodi Wellman
Right. This is the cool thing. You are giving examples that I think we, in our rational brains think, “But this isn’t really a thing, is it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it doesn’t really matter.

Jodi Wellman
And we can call it corny. And that’s one of the things I notice actually in the workshops and work I do, is that people will feel the need to kind of explain away or say, “I don’t even know why I want to do this, but I do,” and it’s like we just have judgments about things. And I’m here to say there’s nothing that is too small or silly.

Because when you look at the span of your life, and remember, I’m the one that gets fanatical about calculating time, usually calculating it backwards, but every single moment of our lives is a little tiny fragment, whether it’s a five-minute or 10-minute, or a bowling excursion, or going out for Thai food, or spending time in a meaningful conversation with a colleague, they’re all just 30 minutes attached to each other.

And so, in our lives, we underestimate that if I was to take, “Hey, what if I did book a bowling guru session?” First of all, that sounds to me like it would be hilarious, and I’m always a big fan of having a good story to tell later. But that could be a thing. It’s a fun thing. Now, this is an example you could probably whip up, and this is what I do in workshops with people.

It’s like, “Get your list going. The things you might come up with first may not make your cut, or you may find it interesting today, and then tomorrow, when you’re seeing the light of day, or you’ve ranked ordered other things, you think all that, “Meh, you know what? I don’t really need to go to the Florida Keys, whatever.”

But at some point, when you have a working list, it gives you the actual solid chance to make choices about your life. Because right now, in the absence of having something that’s concrete, like your list of things that bring you joy, your list of things that would be cool to do, that again I like to organize them on those axes, about fun stuff, deep stuff, vitality, meaning. But now at least you have a menu to choose from about how to design your life.

And life will pass us by. We know this full well. We get to the weekend and, well, first of all, we’re always glad it’s the weekend. But we get through our weeks and they feel like blurs. It’s a very strong signal that we aren’t doing anything that’s unique or different with our time. And in order to even just create the perception of time slowing down so that your 1,822, or however many Mondays you have left, are well spent, it’s about being super conscious and saying, “You know what? I’m going to book that bowling lesson.”

Or, “You know what? I am going to go and plan that road trip that I’ve been talking about for ages.” Or, “I am going to finally schedule that team retreat that I’ve been dreaming about but I just like, am I an all talk no action kind of person? No, I’m going to just book it because it’s on my list, and I’ve said like this is something that I would feel really cool if I did. Would I regret it gravely on my deathbed? Maybe, maybe not.”

But the point is we need to start capturing some of these desires because, otherwise, they will float away and we’ll get focused on the things that are sometimes important, but mostly urgent, Covey style, and the next thing you know, it’s three years later and we’re not any younger. So, this is just really about getting deliberate with what it might take to make a life worth living.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah And, Jodi, I think as folks go through this exercise, they could have moments of inspiration, like, “Yeah, these are all the cool things I’d love to do.” And then disillusionment in terms of, “Oh, but you know, I got to pay the bills, and we got the mortgage, and the kids need these things. And I can’t just abandon my duties and responsibilities.” So, we get excited and then there’s a dose of reality and practicality that’s like, “Wah, wah.” So, how do you deal with those?

Jodi Wellman
How do we deal with that? I am fanatical about making sure that at least, like, do a list of 30 things, 25 at least have to be things that are very doable in a day or a week. So, it needs to be within your resource plan. Like, it can’t be, “Oh, you know what makes me really happy is when I am sailing around the Mediterranean.” Yeah, you and everybody, but that’s not going to be likely. Like, I’m looking for things that are actually very bite-sized on your list. Like, for many people, it’s that they go for a walk on a Saturday morning in the forest preserve.

Like, last I checked that was free. Okay, maybe you have to pay for parking. I don’t know what we’re talking, like five bucks. And sometimes I know busy parents are like, “Dude, when was the last time you had a Saturday morning free?” But I would still challenge you, and say, “Do you have 35 minutes to go and sneak that into your day?”

Identifying things that give you, again, small little bouts of joy. Like, for some people, it’s as simple as, I’m looking right now, of course, at a book. And this comes up a lot when I work with professionals. We read a lot of business books, as we should. They’re amazing. Lots of cool ones. Lots of great self-development books.

And yet, it is a real source of almost guilt but joy about people saying, “I would just love to read a fiction book for a change,” or, “I would love to read a biography, just something kind of mind-expanding.” And that is an example where, what if you read a chapter in the morning over coffee and your piece of peanut butter toast, and you just shook up your routine a little bit?Because we haven’t even talked about novelty, but like having variety in our life is one of the lowest-hanging fruit options out there to shake up our lives, and add just a little bit more, again, of that vitality because we just get into routines. And we’ve been trained by lots of really smart thought leaders that habits and routines are the way. And I’m going to challenge that because I think that it is because we get into the rut, and one of my favorite quotes is by Ellen Glasgow, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Like, we will routinize our lives to the point where they’ve lost sort of the flavor. It just becomes, “I know what I do on Tuesday mornings. I go into the office. I nod at Marcy. I get my coffee. I do the report. I have a status update meeting at 2:00 p.m. and then I go home.” Like, the shaking things up even in ways that we will, again, underestimate the value of, like, going outside.

I just heard from somebody that was at a workshop. They decided to go and spend part of their lunch break walking to a little food stall because they were in a bit of a funk, like, “Let me go walk to a food stall, shake it up a little bit.” They got a taco. Again, we’re not talking about big bucks to live a life that feels really cool, and, like, “Oh, interesting. This is like a new area. I’ve never been here. There was a little bit of sunshine. And I got out, and I came back, and I have a new lease on life to attack my afternoon.”

And those are small things where, again, we’re not talking about doing the bucket list about you have to move to Paris, and you have to divorce your deadbeat spouse, and you have to make these massive plans, like change your career and go back to school. If you feel the urge to do those things, don’t not do them. But for most of us, it’s not about the grand sweeping gestures. For most of us, it’s about deliberate little tiny things that we can pepper our days with that will add up to a life that feels more lived than one that just, again, was like a glossed-over, zombie-version of the life that I think we all deep down really want to be living more alive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, this is powerful stuff. Tell me, any other do’s and don’ts or things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jodi Wellman
Well, definitely, the biggest do of all is do befriend the Grim Reaper. He will take your last breath away in the end, and so I understand the need to keep a distance, but he is absolutely the portal to living like we mean it. So do keep him close by, being aware, count the Mondays. And I’m going to reiterate what I just said. Like, don’t underestimate that small things matter and pick one small thing to take action on. We know this through every business adage we’ve ever found, every to-do, every self-help to-do. It’s like, don’t try and take on the world.

If you can blow your life up and start something. I know a client who said, “I’m leaving my job.” She’s in New Jersey. She’s like, “I quit. I moved down south and I’m opening up an Etsy shop.” That was a lot of life change in an instant, but for her, she needed to make a big signal to herself. But was it like that for most of us?

No. It’s like, what is one thing you can do by the end of this week that is going to make you feel just a little more alive? Is it making a new playlist? You know, is it pulling out the spice drawer and being like, “Oh, my gosh, when was the last time I used garam masala?” Or is it calling your old friend from college and being like, “Dude, we keep talking about getting together. When are we going to…? Okay, October the 9th? Booked.” Like, do a thing that makes you feel like you voted to live. One small thing.

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

Jodi Wellman
Oh, my gosh. Hunter S. Thompson, “Life should not be a journey to the grave in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow, what a ride!’”

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

Jodi Wellman
I’m always a fan of the research that reinforces death reflection helps us be more grateful. So not death awareness, which is just seeing a funeral procession go by. That does freak us out. But, actually, stopping and thinking, “Huh, I have this many Mondays left,” being thoughtful. And then what that does is it does make you more grateful for not just the experience of being alive but for the good things in your life. So, death reflection pays off in multitudes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jodi Wellman
I would say anything by Irv Yalom. Y-A-L-O-M. He’s a psychologist that does really cool work. So, Staring at the Sun is a really good example. And it’s this idea about being willing to contemplate mortality.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite tool?

Jodi Wellman
I’m going to come back to count your Mondays and keep some sort of talisman nearby, they will be your reminder about your fabulous temporariness.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jodi Wellman
No habit. Remember, habits dull the edges of our existence.

Pete Mockaitis
I love the multiple perspectives here. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Jodi Wellman
This idea that sometimes the fear of death is rivaled only by the fear of living.

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

Jodi Wellman
Thanks for asking. I’m over at FourThousandMondays.com.

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

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, think about your legacy. How do you want to be described when you’re long gone? Not just because you died. Maybe you got promoted. Maybe you got moved to the fancy office in the Southwest. Go do that. How do you want people to think of you when you’re gone? Oh, and, yes, at your funeral. And that is the reverse way to engineer a life that you love and that you are proud to be living.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, thank you. This has been very, very fun. Jodi, this has been aliveness-boosting. I wish you 1,800 plus joyful Mondays.

Jodi Wellman
I super appreciate it. Thanks for this time well spent.

1019: Achieving More with One Bold Move per Day with Shanna Hocking

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Shanna Hocking shares transformative mindsets to help you advance your career and achieve your goals.

You’ll Learn

  1. How daily bold moves increase confidence
  2. Powerful mantras to keep self-doubt at bay
  3. How to stop dreading difficult conversations

About Shanna 

Shanna A. Hocking is a leadership consultant and coach, fundraising strategist, speaker, and writer. Shanna spent 20 years in fundraising leadership at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, University of Alabama, and Duke University.

She is the author of One Bold Move a Day: Meaningful Actions Women Can Take to Fulfill Their Leadership and Career Potential. Shanna’s expertise has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, The Muse, and Harper’s Bazaar UK. Shanna was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in 2024.

Resources Mentioned

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Shanna Hocking Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Shanna, welcome.

Shanna Hocking
Pete, I’m so glad to be here together with you.

Pete Mockaitis
I am so glad to be here as well. I think you’ve got so much really cool wisdom associated with career advancement and strategy and wise goodness, and I’m excited to dig in.

Shanna Hocking
Great. Let’s do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or counterintuitive insight you’ve come to about us professionals trying to advance? What’s something you know that most of us don’t?

Shanna Hocking
Well, I’d like to believe that my job is to bring out things that people already know about themselves and maybe just need that encouragement. So, I think people need a reminder that they belong exactly where they are. We get to the table, the role, the seat, whatever it is, and then we start to think that maybe we didn’t belong there in the first place because it’s new and it’s challenging us. So, I think the reminder I want to give is that you belong exactly where you are and you’re meant to be there right now and your voice is important.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very encouraging and hopeful. And I’m curious to hear, what happens if we don’t have that message in our hearts and minds, and we think something’s amiss? What are the implications for us in terms of how we show up and advance or fail to advance in career?

Shanna Hocking
Well, I think, first, it’s very important to say that most everyone feels this feeling when they’re in that role. It’s very normal. And so, if that’s something that you’re experiencing, you’re okay, you’re still in the right place. I think what happens if we don’t hear that voice of encouragement or that peer mentor or mentor to support us, we start to let that voice become much bigger than our expertise and our initiative. And we miss a chance to shine, to share ideas, to add value, and then, really, we are missing out, but so is our workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you share us, you’ve got a book called One Bold Move a Day, which is fun. I like bold moves.

Shanna Hocking
One Bold Move a Day is a message to you that you can achieve all of your personal and professional goals through a single intentional and meaningful action that you choose for yourself each day.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. You’ve done this before, Shanna.

Shanna Hocking
I have done this before, and I really love telling this story about bold moves because people hear those words, bold and move, and they make a decision about what that means. And a bold move, as I define it, is a meaningful action that helps you move forward, learn, and grow. And with that mindset, you can see how this is attainable for you and worth trying.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. And it also feels manageable and yet also meaningful and potentially transformative when strung together over many days in consecutive sequence. Could you share with us a cool story so we can get a taste for what exactly is the transformation that might be in store for us if we do one bold move a day?

Shanna Hocking
Sure. Well, I was delivering a workshop at a university this week, and I had been on campus with this team before, and at the break someone came over to me and she said, “Shanna, I had been waiting to tell you that I made my bold move.” And for her, there had been something she had been reluctant to do. I mean, every one of us has that thing on our to-do list that we need to do or want to do, but we feel hesitant for whatever reason.

Maybe we’re anticipating a negative outcome, or maybe we’re unsure if we have the capacity to do it, or we just really put it aside because it’s not our favorite thing to do. And so, she used this framework as the motivation to do the thing that had been on her to-do list for a very long time. And after she learned it, she felt compelled to make that bold move the next day.

And it was really meaningful for me to hear that story in real time from her because I think it’s important for us to realize that a bold move can be the big billboard moment in our career and in our life, or it could be just that thing on your to-do list that you need to move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you tell us what was that thing and what happened as a result of doing it?

Shanna Hocking
Sure. So, for her, she needed to reach out to someone to have a conversation, and I think we often think about these as difficult conversations, and so when we put that kind of language on the anticipatory feelings about the conversation, we create these self-doubts and worry in our mind that it might not go well.

And the bold move framework reminds us that it’s an opportunity to grow and learn from it, and so I like to redefine this as an important conversation to have. And when she was able to do that, she was able to move forward a project that had been stuck because she put herself out there and followed through. And even if it hadn’t gone the way that she wanted, she would have learned something from that experience.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that example so much in terms of reaching out to someone to have a conversation that you’ve put off. And I’m thinking there have been times in my life I could think of, there were two key emails, and I thought, “Oh, you know what? If I could set up a partnership with this person, that could just be so huge.” And I thought, “Oh, but he’s such a big deal. I don’t know. Like, why would he pay attention to little me?” and, “Well, hey, it can’t hurt.”

And so, I put it off. I put it off, and then I did. And that led to, literally, a partnership with thousands of hours of coaching and then hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

And I almost didn’t do it because I got scared, or thinking to myself, “Oh, no, it’s not going to go anywhere. Why bother?” or, getting too perfectionistic with it. It’s like, “Okay, this could be huge, so I really got to make sure this message is the most amazing thing ever,” but then, “Oh, but now it’s too long. No one wants to look at that wall of text.” And so, so back and forth, and yet, that was massive.

And then another time, I read an article about someone who had a cool business in the Wall Street Journal, and I was like, “Huh, you know, we could help you guys with that.” And so, I thought, “Oh, I don’t know, this guy is, you know, a founder/CEO of a billion-dollar company. He’s probably going to ignore his messages.” The same thing! You think I would have learned my lesson, but over a decade later, I guess I forgot. It’s like, “You know what, let’s just go ahead and do this thing.” And then, like, 14 minutes later, he’s like, “Yeah, we should talk to our VP of whatever.”

And so, we got the meeting and, hopefully, that works out. But, yeah, I like what you’re saying there. It’s, like, one bold move a day, that is attainable, writing a tricky email or reaching out to someone that you kind of been a little skittish about or procrastinating, can really be transformative in terms of the doors that it opens up.

Shanna Hocking
Yes, and I love both of those examples. Do you happen to remember, Pete, what motivated you to do that most recent bold move that you told us about?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny. It’s really silly and idiosyncratic, but I’ll share it with you anyway. I was fascinated by Kalshi.com, in which they gained regulatory approval to enable people to, essentially, bet on the election. And I was like, “Wow, this website is so fascinating. There’s all these things that you can bet on. Everyone, be very careful. Don’t get carried away.”

And so, I was getting carried away in terms of, like, you could bet on the weather, and I was like, “Oh, well, how could I get an informational edge about the weather? Where are some personal weather stations I could access that other people don’t know about?” And so, I was kind of getting obsessive about this, and I came to realize, “You know, Pete, even if you, like, clean up on betting on the weather, you’ll be so much better off just spending that time obsessing about and figuring out stuff to make your businesses work better.”

So, I was having a conversation with one of the executives, and I said, “Hey, so you knowing me and my strengths, like what should I be obsessing on that can improve our business and that’s not the weather because this is not really healthy or valuable?” And he’s like, “Well, how about partnerships?” And I was like, “You know, I read something about partnerships, and I had this idea. Let’s go ahead and do that.” So, it was sort of sharing that with someone else.

And I guess maybe there’s a little bit of vulnerability there too, it’s like, “I realize I’ve been wasting my time and life. You tell me how I might spend it better,” and then that kind of brought the idea right back up to the surface.

Shanna Hocking
Well, I think what’s so interesting about the way that you did this is that sometimes we go down a path, we don’t even know we’re going down this path maybe too far or wherever we are, and the power of having someone in community with us to offer reflection or insight about either a different path we need to go down or a different way to look at that path. And I think that that’s really true of bold moves. People may never know the bold moves that we make unless we share them, and there’s a lot of power in doing this together with others that you care about and care about you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so could you help us think a little bit more about these bold moves? It seems like one category might be reach out to somebody or do the thing you’ve been procrastinating. Can you share with us any other guiding lights or shortcuts which might suggest, “Here’s a likely valuable bold move for you”?

Shanna Hocking
I would say that it could be sharing your idea in a meeting, or giving difficult feedback to your boss or another senior leader when you have a different perspective that’s important to share. Connecting and meeting with your mentor is a bold move, whether that’s a peer mentor or an aspirational leader that you’d like to be more about.

Learning is a bold move. Saying, “I have something that I can contribute to the world, but I have greater capacity to learn about it,” that’s a bold move too. And so, this reframe is, “Oh, not only am I able to do this today, but I’m going to give myself credit and celebrate the progress that I’ve made once I’ve done it.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And so then, how do you think about the time? If one bold move a day, is there a place on your calendar where it’s like, “Okay, 10:30 a.m. It’s bold move time,” or how does that go down?

Shanna Hocking
Well, I’m not quite as formal as that because I really think that once you adopt this practice, there is the idea that you have to open up those doors to make them happen, and if that works for you to say, “At 10:30 a.m. I’m going to do this,” that’s great. Over time, you’re going to see doors open, and the question is, “Are you going to walk through it?”

And so, what I mean by this is you’re in a networking conversation with somebody at a conference or a work gathering, and they say something that you think, “Should I add this comment? Should I ask more about this?” And that momentary decision that you are considering and the choice that you make accompanied with it is potentially your bold move of the day.

So, you can’t plan that that’s going to happen at 10:30, but you can say, “When I walk into this networking gathering at this conference, I’m going to walk up to someone and talk to them,” first bold move, “and maybe I’m going to ask them a question about something that interests me that they might want to share more about,” and there’s the second bold move of the day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And one of the top things our listeners say they want to improve on is confidence, and confidence is tricky, because that could mean one of several very specific things. But if we were to generalize a bit, it would seem that continually doing these bold moves is probably one of the top practices for growing a general sense of confidence, self-belief, self-efficacy, “Hey, I can do some things here.”

Shanna Hocking
So well said. People often say to me, “Shanna, I don’t feel confident enough to make this bold move.” And just like you’ve said, I remind them that confidence comes from taking action to move you closer to your potential. And so, in making that bold move, no matter what the outcome is, you’re building your confidence.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And share with us, in the moment when we have those fear or impostor-types of feelings and emotions, how do you recommend we power through?

Shanna Hocking
I find it really helpful to have a mantra to power through, particularly if you’re going to walk into a situation or be faced with a situation that you anticipate will either cause you to shrink back or not speak up, and there’s a whole host of mantras that might work for you. “One bold move a day” is a great one. I really like to say, “I will achieve more than I ever thought possible.” And that kind of reminder in the moment of, “Can I possibly do this?” helps me to move forward and make my bold move too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Can I hear some other mantras that are really helpful and resonant for folks?

Shanna Hocking
Sure. Well, I’ll tell you a story about a mantra that could be applicable, depending on where you are in your career. If you’ve just stepped into a new role and you’re feeling those feelings we’ve talked about already, Pete, about, “Do I belong here? Can I do this?” you were hired for a reason. And so, there have been points in time in my career where I made this level-up moment. I’m into my first managerial role, for example, and I thought, “I can’t possibly do what is being asked of me in this moment right now.”

And so, I looked in the mirror and I reminded myself of my title and my role, and that alone gave me the confidence to say, “Oh, yeah, no, I am a big deal and I can do this.” So, that’s another potential mantra that might work for you in the moment to remind yourself someone chose you for the role that you’re in.

I really like to think about mantras that motivate you. So, if you’re motivated by gratitude, if you’re motivated by celebrating progress, then you can say, “I will learn something from this and I will celebrate afterward no matter the outcome.” Or you can say, “I’m so grateful for all I’ve been able to accomplish, and I know that I can achieve more.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. I imagine this could take so many fun flavors in terms of as many unique people and messages that we find resonant, you know, there could be plenty. And I’m wondering if you have a system or process by which you recommend people go about unearthing an effective mantra for themselves?

Shanna Hocking
I find that mantras are often things that come to us. There are things that we hear from other people or we read in a book and it’s the kind of thing you write into the margin or you write down on a Post-it note or in your phone, and you’re like, “That works for me.” What version of that worked for you? What motivated you? What did it make you want to do? And then, can you apply that directly or adapt it to create the mantra that will be the one that you can most rely on?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. You could catch it from any number of unlikely sources. I’m thinking, once I was watching this goofy reality TV program, and some guy was trying to psych himself up to ask for a date, and he said something like, “You’re alive for 14,000 more days, and this will not be the one that you look back on and are disappointed,” or something like that. Like, it was intense, like, “Whoa, this is life or death, there’s a limited number of days,” and that’s true, we do have a limited number of days.

And so, he brought that, and, sure enough, he asked for the date, and it worked out, so great job, reality TV guy. So, yeah, just sort of maybe keeping our antennas up for where those bits of inspiration can come from, or maybe where they’ve come from in years past, but maybe we’ve forgotten, from a favorite book or movie or whatever.

Shanna Hocking
Love that. I think that there’s lots of inspiration that we can take in everything around us if we’re looking and listening.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you recommend folks adopt a few key mindsets. Can you expand upon these?

Shanna Hocking
Yes. So, the bold move mindset is the foundation for making your bold moves each day, and the bold move mindset is made up of four individual and complementary components. The gratitude mindset, being grateful for all you have and all you are. The happiness mindset, reminding yourself that happiness does not come when you reach success. Every day, you are working towards something that’s important to you, and that’s what’s defining your happiness.

The progress mindset, celebrating every step of this journey and honoring what you’ve learned along the way. And the “and” mindset, the recognition that you can experience two different things at the same time, such as joy and challenge, and embracing that you are more than one thing at any given time.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, those are powerful and grand. Do you have any pro tips on how we might cultivate these effectively?

Shanna Hocking
I think the gratitude mindset is a very approachable way to start. Lots of people talk about gratitude, Pete, and the very first time that I read about this and heard about this, I was reluctant to try it. I’m way too practical and way too actionable to think that a gratitude journal was going to change my life. And the idea of writing down three things each day that I was grateful for gave me the pause to think about what I’d already been through and what I’d already learned, and accept that and accept myself.

And I have found that that is a great place to start, and starting to figure out how the bold move framework can apply to you, and whether you do this in the morning or the evening, it doesn’t matter. It is the idea of saying, “I’m grateful for what I have in this day,” not the biggest things that we’re grateful for every day, but, “Today, what am I grateful for?” And that comes with accepting yourself and giving yourself credit too.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Shanna, I’d love to get your perspective when it comes to gratitude journals. I’ve done this exercise off and on at times, and what’s interesting is sometimes it feels very perfunctory, like I’m checking the box, “I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful for this. I’m grateful for this. And so, yep, those, in fact, I objectively, logically understand, these are blessings, and it is good to have them. That is special and rare, and, thusly, gratitude is an appropriate response.” It’s almost sort of like robotic.

And other times when I’m doing the gratefulness practice, boy, I’m really feeling it, in terms of like, “Wow, this is just, wow, a tremendous blessing.” And my heart is open and expanded and I could see how this leads to all sorts of benefits and sort of health outcomes and goodness that they say happens when you do a gratitude journal.

So, do you have any perspective on that? When doing the gratitude thing, sometimes I’m really feeling it, and sometimes I’m not, I prefer to be feeling it more. How do you think about that?

Shanna Hocking
Well, I think it’s a really good point because, again, I was the reluctant person when I started this too. And what I’ll say is, at the very beginning, it might feel like a to-do list item that you have to check off, and there was a transformation for me that happened when I realized that it was okay to be grateful for getting to visit my favorite coffee shop. There was nothing silly or mundane about that. It was a recognition of something special that happened during the day.

And like any practice, if we only do it when we’re feeling like the top of our game, then it’s not going to become a habit that will outlast the difficult moments and the difficult days. If we only write when we’re in flow, then we’re not going to be able to be a great writer. We have to be able to do it even when it’s not coming as easily because it’s the practice of the work that we’re putting in.

So, with gratitude, if it’s feeling like, “Today’s not my day for me to recognize these three things for myself,” then practice sending it to someone else, “Pete, I really value that you invited me to be on your podcast. And I especially value your vulnerability in our conversation today. I just wanted to tell you that I thought it was great.” Then I’m expressing gratitude to someone else and I’m still getting the power of that feeling for myself, and I’m sharing the joy with someone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s nice. And how about the progress mindset?

Shanna Hocking
So, the progress mindset for me formed because I was so busy going on to the next thing, the next goal, the next close, the next outcome, the next job title. And every time I got to that milestone, I would high-five myself, but then I’d be like, “Okay, what’s next?” And when you’re constantly waiting to get to this next thing, you’re not being present in the moment, and that’s what I experienced for myself. And I was really hard on myself, and I still am, I have to work through this.

So, what can I do to celebrate the progress that I’ve made? I haven’t finished the project. We don’t have to wait till the end for a celebration. You need to celebrate the progress along the way in order to be motivated to keep going. This is particularly true if you’re a people leader. How are you celebrating progress for your team members so that they can navigate the challenges and keep working through them, and see what the outcomes will be even if it’s not the way that they hoped or planned?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s nice. And tell us, when it comes to team leading, one bold move I’ve discovered is the bold move of letting go of some things, and asking another colleague to take it on. And delegation can be challenging in terms of, “Oh, no one can do it as well as I can do it,” or you have some fears, concerns. Can you share with us any of your top tips when it comes to delegating, letting go, empowering others?

Shanna Hocking
Well, I will say that no matter where you are in your career, whether you are working together with an intern or a colleague, or you are a chief executive, delegating is a learned skill and it requires practice. I think that the very first tip in understanding how to approach delegating is changing the mindset from, “I can’t do it all,” or, “I’m not good enough, and therefore I have to do this,” to, “What opportunities can I create for other people around me to learn and maybe get to the place where I am? And how can doing this allow me to focus on my best and highest use of time, which allows me to contribute more to the world?”

That mindset shift is so important. I often hear people trying to hang on to doing it all because they think they’re supposed to. And then from there, it’s really understanding what is important to other people to achieve, and, “How can I help them do this? And how can I help create opportunities for learning? And then how can I communicate clearly about what is expected so I can set someone up for success in this process?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, these things make great sense in terms of a great mindset to have going into it as well as some principles to follow, to have that be more likely to be successful. Can you share with us any nitty-gritty do’s and don’ts within this?

Shanna Hocking
Absolutely. The first thing to know is that if you’re going to delegate something to someone, you cannot micromanage them throughout the whole process if you want this to be successful for you or for them. So, in the beginning, it might take an extra 10 minutes or 15 minutes to say, “Here’s where the outcome is that we’re working toward. Here’s how frequently we’re going to talk about progress. Here’s how you can reach me when you have questions. And we’ll look forward to seeing how this goes along the way.”

But if you say, “Here’s the project. I want you to work on it,” and then every couple of days you’re like, “How’s it going with this? What’s happening with this? Where are we with this?” What you’re saying to someone is, unintentionally, “I don’t trust you. I don’t believe that you have the capacity to do this on your own.” So, having that conversation up front gives clarity to all roles of people who are involved.

The other thing is, it doesn’t mean you’re letting go of everything entirely. Especially if you’re a people leader or if you’re delegating a project to an intern, you are responsible for that outcome, too. And so, that clear communication just creates more clarity for everybody who’s involved in the process, and then you can experience a different kind of pride, too, in seeing someone that you’re working with being able to achieve something and feel good about it for themselves. I think that’s really where growth comes as a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, zooming out, tell me, Shanna, any other key things that make all the difference when it comes to career advancement and wisely navigating things?

Shanna Hocking
Something I often encourage people to consider is how to lead from where you are. I, fundamentally, believe that everyone is a leader. Your leadership is not about your title or your authority, it’s the energy and purpose by which you lead yourself and serve others each day. So, no matter where you are on the org chart, you have both an opportunity and a responsibility to lead in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, any final things you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Shanna Hocking
As you are starting on this bold move journey, as I call it, a bold move can be quiet. When you’re talking to two people like us, Pete, right? You and I make a living by being out in public and doing a lot of things to encourage others, and it might seem like, “Well, that’s great for Shanna and Pete.” So, a bold move is defined by you, and it might be quiet, right? You do not have to be extroverted in order to achieve this. You have to be committed to your own success. And I hope that that’s the encouragement to get started on this journey.

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

Shanna Hocking
“Luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”

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

Shanna Hocking
So, I will share with you that the research study I’m talking about most frequently recently is about your team’s collective strengths. So, the study came out last year, and what it’s showing is that when you identify individual strengths and talk about how to leverage those strengths collectively and trust each other’s strengths in the workplace, you can create a high-performing team.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do we know how to do that or how to not do that?

Shanna Hocking
Well, I lead a workshop on how to do that, so we definitely know how to do it. It is a self-discovery conversation and also a team collective about, “What do we do well? And how do we do it well together? And then how do we apply that?” You can think about this in terms of a project. There’s probably something that you can contribute to a project right now that is going unnoticed in your workplace because maybe it’s not something you talk about frequently or it’s not related to your job title.

But if you can say to your manager, like, “Here’s a strength, a way I would like to add value to this project,” you might be able to unlock some piece of this project that’s been stuck and also your own potential.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Shanna Hocking
My very favorite book to recommend is, What Works for Women at Work by Professor Joan C. Williams. That book changed my life, and I have given it as a gift to many women that I mentor.

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

Shanna Hocking
I just got trained in the Hogan Assessment in order to be able to help leaders understand themselves and their teams better. So, I’m looking forward to using that tool in order to do my work.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Shanna Hocking
I’d say probably gratitude, right? I think it is the most approachable way for any of us to be able to celebrate who we are and where we are.

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

Shanna Hocking
When it comes to one bold move a day, people often feel inspired by the idea that you get to choose what your bold move is every day and nobody else gets to judge it.

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

Shanna Hocking
I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn where I share a lot of leadership insights and, also, I send out a weekly newsletter, which you can find on my website, ShannaAHocking.com.

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

Shanna Hocking
Well, Pete, I think we’re going to challenge people to make their one bold move a day because it will make the world a better place, and it will help them to be the best version of themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Shanna, thank you for this. And I wish you many lovely bold moves.

Shanna Hocking
Thank you, and back to you.

1015: The Science Behind Setting, and Achieving Your Biggest Goals with Caroline Miller

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Caroline Miller shares the overlooked science that helps you pursue your most ambitious goals.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top goal-setting myths to abandon immediately 
  2. The two types of goals and how to set them 
  3. The BRIDGE methodology for effective goal-setting 

About Caroline 

For over three decades, Caroline Adams Miller has been a pioneer with her groundbreaking work in the areas of the science of goal setting, grit, happiness, and success. She is recognized as one of the world’s leading positive psychology experts on this research and how it can be applied to one’s life and work for maximum transformation.

She is the author of nine books, including My Name is Caroline, Getting Grit, Positively Caroline and Creating Your Best Life, which the “father of Positive Psychology,” Dr. Martin Seligman, lauded in Flourish as “adding a major missing piece” to the world of goal setting. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and attained one of the first 32 degrees in the world in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Caroline Miller Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, welcome back.

Caroline Miller
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Goals. And I’m curious, you’ve been around the block, doing a lot of research, positive psychology, and more, what would you say is your most fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and goal-setting, goal-achieving?

Caroline Miller
I think my biggest awareness aha moment is that, 20 years after I learned goal-setting theory, the number one ranked management theory of all time of 73 theories, also known as the 800-pound gorilla, everyone sets goals and no one knows this number one theory, and it floors me to this day that it remains one of the most unknown, but most validated theories ever to come out of psychology.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m intrigued. So, if there’s 73 theories, how does a theory get to win number one? I’m imagining a reality TV show which the theories are competing against each other with judges and audience input. How does that work?

Caroline Miller
Well, I only report the news, but I do know I have research showing that academics, management theorists, people in the field who actually know what the science is about when you look at self-efficacy theory or different kinds of bias, etc., goal-setting theory is universally ranked number one because of its importance and because everyone does it.

And if we knew the science, which is so amazing that people don’t, if we knew the science, I do believe we’d be more productive, more engaged and more successful. And as a mother, I also feel strongly that our children would grow up with dreams that they have the tools to accomplish, which I don’t think they have. And I think that’s a huge error we’ve made as a society and as parents to not have this science and teach it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued. Like, what kind of lift might we see in terms of our goal attainment rates, peddling around as we do, ignorant of the science versus utilizing all these best practices?

Caroline Miller
I can’t give you a percentage, but what I can tell you is that most people disengage and become overwhelmed by the size of their goals, the fact that they have a big dream and they don’t know where to start. And so, as the mother of three adult children who grew up being told to tell them they were winners and that, if we did this, they would all grow up confident and happy, and they’d be very hard workers.

What instead we found out, now that this era of self-esteem parenting is over, is that for the most part, they’re fragile and they can’t always take feedback or performance reviews. Now, I’m not being universal, not all are like this, but the findings are pretty robust that this is a generation that doesn’t know how to do hard things and break goals down into small component parts and have mastery experiences. But I also speak for the parents.

I mean, I’ve known this thing for 20 years. I’ve been all over the world. I work with CEOs and leaders and companies big and small, countries big and small, and they all set goals and no one has this science. So, I think, universally, we are underperforming and underachieving. And one of the things in Big Goals that I’m really proud of is I dug into the research that shows that it’s mostly white men who have benefited from these productivity systems that started in the 1880s and do not benefit women and people of other cultures, partly because we weren’t around.

We weren’t in the workplace. This is not how we thought the workplace would be, but it hasn’t evolved, and it’s something that isn’t discussed. It’s time to have this bridge between the 20th century and the 21st, and my book addresses that gap that I’m happy to share more about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I guess I’d like to understand, if you don’t have a precise percentage, perhaps could you tell a story in terms of a transformation unfolding by utilizing the science?

Caroline Miller
I could tell you a million stories. I worked with one executive, a lot of executives, but I’m thinking of one in particular, a CEO of a major, let’s call it, outdoor remodeling company, who through COVID just kept setting the same performance goals for the salespeople and his senior leadership team, but the entire society turned upside down. We were in, what Locke and Latham would call, a mass learning goal condition where everything you did five, ten years ago can’t be done the same way anymore.

We’ve got a distributed workplace. We’ve got artificial intelligence. We’ve got all kinds of supply chain issues. And so, what he did was he hit pause on all of the goals that he had for himself and for his senior leadership team, and he said, “Caroline Miller’s going to come in and teach us about goal-setting theory, and we’re going to now slow down, and we’re going to take all of these goals and turn them into learning goals because we’re learning new ways to do things.”

The world is different. This is a period not unlike after the Black Death, which gave birth to the Renaissance, which became more evidence-based approaches to medicine and art and science and so on and so forth. So, what he did was he changed the entire goal-setting dashboard within the company. People were able to take the time to learn how to do their jobs in new ways because they had to. They couldn’t meet with customers in person anymore. There were different ways of working with computer systems that people had to learn, let alone artificial intelligence. That’s a whole different conversation.

And as people slowed down, they became more curious and engaged in what they were being asked to do, how the onboarding was done. And as a result, the company hit record profitability in the last few years, and he’s a very satisfied customer. But that’s just very typical of what happens when people learn about Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory and realize that there are two kinds of goals: performance goals and learning goals, and you can’t mix them up.

And when you do, when you take something that the world has never done before, you’ve never done before, a learning goal, and you skip the time that it takes to gather the skills and the education, the knowledge to do this job, and the time to kind of try out “How do I personalize my approach to this?” what you end up is something called goals gone wild, which is embodied by Boeing’s 737 MAX disasters. The Titan Submersible was stocked in rush.

You can’t skip the learning component when you’re doing something for the first time. When you do, people lose their reputations, companies lose their reputations, and in the case of the Titan Submersible, Boeing, other companies, Ford, the Ford Pinto, people lose their lives. So, it’s a serious issue. It’s a simple theory, but the importance of getting it right cannot be overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, what’s sort of our fundamental misconception? Is it the performance learning stuff?

Caroline Miller

I think the fundamental misconception is that people think SMART goals is science, and it’s not. It was this dude, this manager in 1982, who was going to give a presentation. It was this sticky acronym, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, whatever. I mean, the part of the problem that we’ve discovered with SMART goals, because it’s been studied, is not only does it undermine goal achievement, because if you use the word “realistic” for “R,”what you find is that people undershoot their ability to go after hard goals. And Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome for all goals is challenging and specific.

So, imagine my arm reached out in front of me, or yours, and the goals that we should be shooting for that always get the best outcomes are past our fingertips. So, when you use “R-realistic,” what you find is that people undermine their ability to find out what they’re made of, and they usually shoot and get very mediocre results. But it’s called “jargon mishmash syndrome,” because “smart” means different things to different people. So, it’s not science. It’s just not science.

So, that’s one of the first things that I would say is that people labor under the conception or the misconception that they know the science of goal-setting, and I think we take it for granted that we have accomplished things in our lives, “And if I did this, I can do that,” when, in fact, the science came out in 1990, and it’s still the most unknown, undelivered piece of research from academia into the mass market, and it stuns me every day.

No matter where I’m talking, no matter who I’m working with, their productivity dashboard in their company or in their lives is based on an urban legend, or vision boards, or law of attraction, or some version of that. And we are not supporting ourselves and the people around us, and our children in particular, in the best possible way if we don’t go out and learn this science.

So, I think it is a crisis of unimaginable proportions because we have a generation that is anxious and depressed and disengaged from the workplace and quite often comes right down, as Gallup said in their State of the Workplace in early 2024, “The number one problem facing all workplaces is a lack of productivity based on faulty goal systems.” We don’t have good goal hygiene. And if we don’t know the science, it’s like trying to put a cornerstone down for a building that’s rocky or isn’t going to hold the weight of the building and everything’s going to crumble.

We have to know the science of goal-setting. This to me is an urgent plea for everyone to stop and say, “It’s time to go in an evidence-based direction,” just like we did during the Renaissance after the Black Death. Everything has to come up a notch and I’ve worked on that. Plus, in the book Big Goals, I introduced something called a BRIDGE methodology that then is the gap between “Here’s goal-setting, theory, here’s the right goal, but how are you going to accomplish it?”

And what I’ve brought to bear is all of this science that no one has heard of from academia, from psychology, from motivation, from mindset research, from grit, to help us understand how to accomplish those goals. And as I said earlier, there’s a gender component that people haven’t paid attention to. Not all approaches to productivity and goal setting fit everyone. You have to personalize it based on who you are and where you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, are you telling me that if I put my dreams on a vision board and secrete them to the universe, the universe is not going to bring them into my reality?

Caroline Miller
Hmm, let me think about that. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then lay it on us, let’s get these principles associated with the goals theory.

Caroline Miller
Well, what I will say about vision boards is the reason why they hang around so much, I call them these zombie theories, they’re just not dying like SMART goals. They’re dying. They’re hanging around but they won’t go away. There’s some little kernel of something important in vision boards, and that is the science of priming.

When we remind ourselves with pictures or words or aromas, things that enter our conscious and subconscious minds that prime us to act and think in goal-directed ways, we are more likely to accomplish our goals, but that’s a small subset of what must be done. It’s never enough to just have a vision board or to just chant or to write something in lipstick on your mirror.

I think that we’re not taking ourselves seriously if we’re going to just have this one-dimensional approach or magical approach to getting what we want. We can’t skip the hard work piece, that’s just not possible. And you know what, even little kids know that if you give them something that they haven’t worked hard for, they don’t tend to value it. None of us do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s hear the principles fundamentally. How do we set goals?

Caroline Miller
How do we set goals? So, we start with goal-setting theory, basically, “Do I have a performance goal or a learning goal?” In the book, I call it performance goal with checklist goal. So, this is something you’ve done before that’ll fit on a checklist, and you can actually give that checklist to someone else and they’ll have a shot at accomplishing that goal.

So, what it is, it’s like a hotel maid, it’s like a surgeon going into the operating theater and checking “Do I have all the right instruments or the right people around me?” or a pilot in a pre-flight checklist. Checklists are for things you’ve done before and you don’t want to skip a step. And for that reason, you know that you can set a specific outcome by a specific date. And again, Locke and Latham say challenging and specific. That’s a performance goal/checklist goal.

The other kind of goal is a learning goal. So, you start with that, and you can call it a moonshot goal, meaning you haven’t done it before, and the world hasn’t done it before. And then you have to say, “What is it I need to learn in order to accomplish this goal? Who has that knowledge? Is it on Wikipedia? Is there a YouTube? Is there a book? Is there a podcast? Where am I going to flatten my learning curve?”

So, then you go into this BRIDGE methodology I came up with, the brainstorming. But the brainstorming really ought to start with this one prompt that I keep coming back to, “What’s new? What’s new? What do I not know yet? What’s new in the world that would help me become more efficient and effective in this goal?”

And I’ll just tell you one little story that I’m just transfixed by, and that’s this Herculaneum papyri, how they’ve solved this library of charred scrolls. Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in Herculaneum, when Vesuvius dubious erupted, the biggest, most wonderful library in ancient history was charred and these scrolls became like little pieces of firewood. And for years, hundreds of years, I want to say 400 years, we’ve been trying to unroll them.

Guess what happened? During COVID, the former CEO of GitHub got fascinated and bored by the fact that he’s sitting at home every day and he goes on Wikipedia, and he starts looking up ancient tragedies and catastrophes, and he stumbles on this unsolved thing like, “Oh, my God, what do we know now from Silicon Valley, from high particle accelerators, from artificial intelligence that could help us unroll these scrolls?”

Long story short, they now have unrolled, by using artificial intelligence and beaming lights into these scrolls and virtually unwrapping them, they have started to read these ancient scrolls and it’s going to remake everything we know about religion and art and philosophy. It is just stunning. So, you always start with what’s new.

So, in the book, I talk about why traditional brainstorming approaches don’t work, but I have a long set of prompts I have in the book to help people through brainstorming. Relationships. Relationships mean not just “Who do I need to know and have in my life to accomplish this goal? But who do I need to put a container around and keep them out of my life while I’m accomplishing this goal?” People don’t look at that and that’s critical.

And we know research from Shelly Gable at the University of California Santa Barbara, she found that when you share a big goal, a dream with somebody else, their response has to be curious and enthusiastic. That’s the one signal that says to you, “This person has my back, they’re in my corner, and I can tell them more, and they are going to help me accomplish that goal.” So, “Who should be in my life? And who shouldn’t?” Relationships.

Investments, “How am I going to invest my character strengths in the pursuit of this?” We know from positive psychology that knowing your top five-character strengths and using them, deploying them in new and interesting ways to accomplish your goals, or to interact with people throughout the day, makes you more successful. It also makes you happier and it makes you more authentic.

So, the investments can be time, energy, money, character strengths, but you have to think through, “What am I going to sink into this process that I have to build a budget for, build a time budget for, etc.?” So, BRID decision-making. Oh, my gosh, I love this topic. So, when Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for sunk cost theory and all of his work on how do we value the things that we spend time with, he also did a lot of work on bias.

But at the end of his life, he wrote this brilliant book with two other economists called Noise, and he was saying that the biggest mistakes we make in decision-making is when we don’t do a noise audit of how we’ve made previous decisions, identical decisions, “What are we being impacted by? Did our football team win or lose yesterday? And are we making the same decisions as judges in identical cases? Are we paroling these people and keeping these other people in jail?”

Noise is a huge part of how we make decisions. It’s rare for me to find someone who has sat down and made a list of their best decisions and the components of those decisions, and done a noise audit. And I think this is why there’s a big move to teach game theory and Poker, especially to women who don’t always learn how to take risks. Poker, and Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, is how we’re beginning to teach people how to take risks in decision-making situations that they must take, even if they have imperfect information.

Pete Mockaitis
With noise, we’re defining that as our historical track record of decisions? How are we defining noise here?

Caroline Miller
Noise is when we have the exact same decision to make about, let’s say, a referee on a football field, right? And it’s the same player going off sides, and it’s a Sunday or a Thursday night game, and you didn’t get a lot of sleep before the Thursday night game, and you see the same player or the same play unfolding in front of you but you make a different decision. You throw a flag or you don’t throw a flag.

Noise is when you have the same kind of decision to make but you make it differently on different days because of things that are going on in your life, and that’s different from bias. Bias is when you’re biased against a certain gender or a certain class of people, or you’re biased against people who didn’t go to your school and you’re a hiring manager. That’s bias. Noise is when you’re allowing the variables—usually you don’t know this is happening—to interfere with decision-making so that your decisions are uneven.

And what’s interesting is artificial intelligence is proving to be one of the greatest ways to spot and fix noise problems in decision-making because it’s just taking data and making a decision on an algorithm, and that’s really what we need to strive to do. Does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. So, could you just give me eight examples of noise variables?

Caroline Miller
Another example of a noise variable, I said about a hiring manager, would be, let me think, I’m going to go back to a judge, a judge who is making parole decisions. And during the course of a day, at 8 o’clock in the morning, they make a parole decision and a complicated decision where they give somebody parole instead of sending them back to jail because they had a good night’s sleep, their football team won, but maybe their willpower is a little bit higher in the morning. But they’re making a decision that they won’t always make at the end of the day from decision fatigue. That’s noise.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, the variables would have to do with the rest, their rested-ness is noise because it’s not actually a valid consideration in terms of what is optimal for a decision regarding that person’s fate. And so, if they’re tired, they’re hungry, they just got in a fight with somebody, it’s sort of like they’ve got an emotional thing going on.

Caroline Miller
They’re distracted, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve also heard that we can estimate the steepness of a hill differently if there’s a friend with us or not. And so, in a way that’s noise. Friendship is noise. It’s somewhat ambiguous, but we’re assessing our prospects based on things that are not intrinsic to the situation on the ground.

Caroline Miller
I know the research you’re speaking of, that’s a little bit different than a decision. That’s a thought. That’s a thought you’re having, and you’re saying this is a more effortful climb or it’s not, based on whether you’re looking up, down, do you have a heavy backpack. I’ll give you another example of noise that I think most people can relate to is a radiologist reading mammogram screens and they look identical.

There’s very little difference between the two mammograms, but depending on the time of day, again, “Did you sleep? Did you have a good lunch? Are you distracted because you got a call from school and your child needs to be picked up?” What you might do is send somebody to come back in for a second mammogram, or say to the other person “You’re clear.” And again, I’ll just say, artificial intelligence is reading scans and removing noise from decision-making. It’s fascinating.

So that’s just another example of noise. Same screen, same X-ray, different decision, based on the noise that’s going on in your life. And what’s interesting is Kahneman said, at the end of his life, and he died in March of this year, he said, “This is a bigger problem that’s so not discussed, bigger than bias.” And we get all this bias training. Noise is a bigger problem and it potentially cost companies and countries billions of dollars.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And you said there’s a final component.

Caroline Miller
So, grit. So, I’ve worked closely with Angela Duckworth. I wrote a book called Getting Grit and I’m fascinated by the fact that we can break grit down into components like humility, and patience, and the ability to take risks, and persistence, and perseverance, the ability to stick with a task just a little bit longer.

When you have big goals, it’s baked into that idea, that fact, that you’re going to have to be more than just resilient. You’re going to have to do hard things for a long period of time. So, you have to essentially do a grit assessment on yourself, “Do I have what it takes to actually hang in there through the dark night of the soul? Do I have the people around me who will reflect back to me that I have what it takes to finish what I’m starting right now?”

Grit is a quality that can be cultivated and it can also be contagious. So, Angela Duckworth found at West Point that if you had a low grit score, because she does the grit scale on incoming cadets at West Point, because what they found is your grit score predicts whether or not you drop out that first summer, Beast Barracks, because they couldn’t figure it out.

For a hundred years, they couldn’t figure it out. Leadership scores, grades, whatever, nothing, nothing spoke to the dropout rate during Beast Barracks until the grit scale. And she found that when you room a lower grit score cadet with a higher grit score cadet, it’s contagious because you do a few things differently for longer periods of time. You might even be a mindset. I call it changing the channel. You can learn to change the channel in your brain to go to a place where you hang in there a little bit longer. So, you have to have what’s good grit, and you can build it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is the higher contagious to the low-grit person or vice versa?

Caroline Miller
Yes, high grit. Well, the lower grit person becomes grittier, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
The higher grit person does not become less gritty? They’re not infected by the lazy person there?

Caroline Miller
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Because the culture of West Point rewards grit. And that’s something that Locke and Latham also found is they found that people are less happy while they’re pursuing hard goals over a long period of time. They set, again, these challenging and specific goals and they were puzzled, “Why are you a little less happy while you’re pursuing these long-term goals but then happier at the very end?” It’s because society prizes and rewards that kind of behavior.

You want to have good grit. And I’ll quickly say, there are three kinds of bad grit that we all have to look out for. One is stupid grit. I call it stupid grit. It’s like summit fever in mountaineering where you see the top of the mountain and you’re so drunk on getting to the top, or you’re so arrogant that you don’t listen to the Sherpas and you’re not caring about the people you’re roped into. You see a lot of arrogance with stupid grit, and it’s people who think they know better and they won’t change direction. Good grit does not have that component because it has humility baked into it.

And then there’s faux grit. We have so much faux grit, you know, people pretending to do hard things, faking their PhD research, pretending they won the Medal of Honor when, in fact, they bought it on eBay. I mean, so much faux grit; performance-enhancing drugs. And then there’s selfie-grit, which is also bad, and that’s when you do hard things, but you are so obnoxious about it, because you tell everybody that you suck all the oxygen out of the room and that repels people.

So, good grit is important when you have big goals, because you will have to dig a little bit deeper and work harder to achieve them. And then excellence, people need to start at the beginning of their goal-setting strategy with “What am I attempting to hit here? What is my definition of excellence with my behavior, or with this particular outcome?” Because in goal setting, we say that which cannot be measured cannot be achieved.

You must have a measurement in place of the excellence you’re shooting for. And I’ll just remind you, Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome was always past your fingertips, challenging and specific. Low goals and no goals got mediocre to no results whatsoever. And at the end of every day, believe it or not, we do scan our day subconsciously for what we’re proud of that we did that day. And the things that build what’s called authentic self-esteem are the things we did outside of our comfort zone in pursuit of meaningful goals.

We never build our confidence and pride on doing easy things. And this is why I believe we have really done a tremendous disservice to the generation of young adults now when we took away valedictorians and gave them comfort animals, and we dumbed down the playgrounds, and we just did a lot of things that ended up stripping elite out of their vocabularies, and they didn’t know “What does excellence look like? And how am I going to get there?”

And the minute you introduce that back in, people take more pride in what they’re doing and they change their perception of themselves, “What am I capable of doing? How did I do it? And I’m proud of myself and I also know who has my back. I know who was there for me when it was hard, and when I fell down, and when I needed to get back up.” That’s why we all need to do hard things, because it changes our lives, and I believe it changes the world. And knowing goal-setting theory makes it more possible that we can do these things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps give us an example of a worst practice and a best practice approach to, let’s say, we’re tackling a goal to launch some new and improved marketing initiatives to reach record-breaking levels of revenue?

Caroline Miller
So, let’s say you’re at a company and you’re launching sweatshirts, and you’re trying to decide whether or not you’re going to have this font or that font, or this color or that color, and you just want to do a brainstorming session. So, you pull everyone in, 30 people into a conference room, and you start throwing around ideas. And at the end of the day, you’ve come up with maybe one or two good ideas, but, hey, that’s it.

And then you don’t set a target for, “Well, how quickly can we do it?” or, “Is there a better way to do this?” Remember, brainstorming, you also want to know what’s new, “Is there a better, more efficient way? How do we find out where to do that?” You don’t find out any of those things. It’s what we’ve always done before. This is the approach we’ve always used before for brainstorming.

You don’t even stop and think about relationships, “Who in this company also has to know that this is our timeline for achieving this goal? Whose support do we need?” You don’t figure out investments. You don’t even realize that the cost of the kind of material for these sweatshirts has gone up, “Oh, my gosh, your budget is blown.” Your decision-making, you’ve never figured out “What if I have to pivot? What if COVID hits? What if the whole world shuts down? Do I have a playbook for pivoting?” Probably not.

Good grit, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve never faced a situation where I didn’t succeed in this job.” So, then you maybe blame it on somebody else, and excellence is you probably never started with a target. What’s different, what to know what’s good, is when you have this goal, “Okay, I’m going to make the best possible sweatshirts with this font and this color and the rest of it.”

And then you go, “Okay, who around me, who in this world is doing it better than us? Who has set some kind of dimension of excellence that we can look to? Are they using the kind of fabric that doesn’t kind of go into the trash dumps? Is it biodegradable?” So, you study what excellence looks like. And instead of putting all the people who look like each other in the same room where you get, what I call the Habsburg-Jaw effect, where it’s sterile, there are no ideas that actually live past being in that room because they’re not interesting and they’re not diverse.

You do a very different approach where you maybe have people submit their ideas. Instead of being in a room, you want a diverse set of people brainstorming, and you figure out, “Is this a learning goal or a performance goal?” It’s probably a performance goal because you’re making – I hope this isn’t going on too long – because you’re making sweatshirts. So, you’ve done it before and you know you’ve sold 100,000 in six months at this price.

So, you say, “Hey, we’re going to do it with this new fabric, and it’s within our budget, and it’s a performance goal for us so we’re going to sell 200,000 more. And here’s how we’re going to do it because we’ve got this new factory process, we’ve got this new sweatshirt, we’ve got these people who are giving us better prices on fonts, etc.” You go into the decision-making, “What do we do if…?”

Let me give you an example on this, if you don’t mind. Abercrombie & Fitch was about to introduce what they called their best dressed guest line, and they had, just as COVID hit, they had taken pictures of all the models, they had all the clothes made, best dressed guests. It was designed to appeal to millennials who needed five outfits to go to weekend destination weddings, which was the big thing. So, suddenly COVID hits, and they’ve got this marketing line all paid for, they’ve got the budget, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the pictures, and it’s not usable because no one’s getting on a plane, no one’s going to a wedding, and no one’s buying clothes.

They pivoted quickly. They sent cameras to all their employees. They said, “Wear our lounge clothes. Take pictures of yourselves. Those are our ads for the next year and a half.” That kind of agility and that ability to pivot and do that kind of decision-making was such a plus for Abercrombie & Fitch. So, then they reintroduced best dressed guests when COVID passed, and, anyway, that ended up being a big hit too.

So, you have to know, “What’s going to happen if we have a black swan event like COVID?” And then grit, I already explained. And then excellence, you start with “This is a performance goal for us. This is what we’ve done before. What’s challenging and specific?” You name that number and then you measure along the way to make sure that you’re hitting those targets.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, let’s say it’s a learning goal that it’s new and never before done, how do we approach that differently?

Caroline Miller
Okay. So, let’s just take the Apollo spacesuits. So, there was that horrible implosion where three astronauts died in, I think, the Mercury capsule, Gus Grissom and his two colleagues, but Apollo was still going to put a man on the moon. That was their goal. So, they had to make these spacesuits that were going to withstand the kinds of pressures and fires and gases that could leak into the suit. So, what did they do?

They didn’t set an exact date and time by which they would have the suit, but they went and they found people who knew how to deal with stretchy fabric and who could sew with great precision. And what did they do? These engineers went and found these seamstresses at Playtex, the girdle company, and they met with them. And in a room of brainstorming, they honored the knowledge and the wisdom of these teenage and young 20-year-old seamstresses quite often who could sew with precision to 1/32 of an inch.

And instead of saying, “This spacesuit will be ready by September,” they said, “We’re going to get this right and we’re going to incentivize everybody here to have the standard of excellence, that this is going to keep people alive, and it’s going to allow the United States to come back with what we need to learn about the moon.”

So, all the seamstresses had pictures of the astronauts hung over their sewing machines to remind them of the importance of what they were doing. So, they baked in the motivation, and so only the definition of what excellence looked like was “Could this spacesuit allow Neil Armstrong to move and twist and maneuver and reach down and pick up lunar rocks?” It wasn’t, “We’re going to have it done by a certain date.” Excellence is, “It’s got to work and it’s got to pass these tests. And that’s when we’re going to say we have a spacesuit that’s going to go to the moon.” That’s a learning goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, tell me, Caroline, any final do’s and don’ts that we should know about setting and achieving big goals?

Caroline Miller
I think the most important one is to assume that you know nothing. And I hate to say that, but 20 years ago when I was handed goal-setting theory at the University of Pennsylvania as one of my first assignments in this Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program, I own Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, every single person, I had their books and I got goal-setting theory and I went home and I looked at all of them. They were all urban legends.

And yet, this is how we have built companies. This is what we’ve instilled in productivity systems. If you don’t know goal-setting theory, you don’t know how to really set goals effectively. Just start with that one assumption, dip into Big Goals, and just learn goal-setting theory in the first three chapters of the book.

Get that and then move on to the BRIDGE methodology, because if you do that, there isn’t any dream that you have that you can’t have a really good shot at achieving because you’ll be able to create a strategy that’s going to get you as close as you can possibly get to that dream or get you there. Because I really do believe that the science changes our lives and it makes us more hopeful and optimistic.

I also want to say that one of the most important things in this book is that women do not typically do as well with all the motivational kind of programs and advice that’s been doled out for 50 years. I’ll just give you an example. When women perform jobs on time and tasks on time and get things done on time, they do not get credit for it. Instead, men often, who work longer hours and who don’t get it done on time, the men get rewarded for being seen as harder working and more committed to the company.

So, it’s really important that when you pursue a goal, you have to know what’s the culture you’re working in and how is that culture going to support you in the process of pursuing and achieving your goals, and that’s just one of many examples in the book. You have to know, “Does my company and does the culture I come from and my gender support using this advice to achieve my goal? Or is it going to backfire?”

Because men tend to approach goals as winning and domination and power and success and often money, and women are more communal. They’re not as agentic. That’s not what women get acculturated and rewarded for. So, you can’t just take the goal-setting advice that’s out there on lots and lots of podcasts.

Because, quite often, we don’t hear voices other than men talking to men about men, like Special Forces and presidents and examples that are unrelatable to a lot of us who are taking in really, really interesting stories and advice, but pause and say “Does this story relate to me and my life and what I do and what I look like?” Because if it doesn’t, make sure you do the research to find somebody who does fit that. That’s going to be the advice that’s going to help you the most.

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

Caroline Miller
My favorite quote is, “You can’t keep what you don’t give away.”

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

Caroline Miller
My favorite study is the “Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener. And they found, at the same time, 2005, as I went back to school, that all success in life is preceded by being happy first. So, any goal strategy plan has to start with how you boot up your well-being through positive interventions, like using your strengths, exercise, gratitude, meditation. So, all success in life is preceded by being happy first, so you got to start there.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Caroline Miller
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chessler.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Caroline Miller
I love Perplexity.

Pete Mockaitis
I just started using that. Why do you love it?

Caroline Miller
Because it gives you the sources and citations where it’s getting information from, instead of just kind of being a wild scrape of the internet. And I’ll just say this, I just spent last weekend at Penn with the co-creator of the Google Notebook, which just got rave reviews everywhere. Google Notebook, Steven Johnson is the man I was with at Penn last weekend. He has come up with something extraordinary where you can drag all your sources and websites and links and podcasts and whatever into this one notebook and, oh, my God, you have your own brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Caroline Miller
Favorite habit is swimming. I get up at five o’clock and I go to swim practice with other master swimmers.

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

Caroline Miller
“You can’t keep what you don’t give away.” And can I give you the backstory on that, because it’s very meaningful to me?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Real quickly. When I was overcoming bulimia almost 40 years ago, at a time when nobody got better, it was really a death sentence. I started to get better one day at a time in a 12-step group in Baltimore, Maryland, and it was just a miracle. I didn’t think I was going to. I’m surprised I’m alive some days. And I was so thrilled and proud and happy that I was eating and healthy and just not doing all the destructive things I’ve been doing for seven or eight years before.

And someone said to me, “Caroline, it’s great that you’re in recovery, but you can’t keep what you don’t give away.” That taught me what gratitude and love and giving is all about. If you have something worth sharing that’s good, that will help somebody else, you can’t keep it unless you turn around and pull someone with you. So, people quote that back to me all the time.

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

Caroline Miller
My website, CarolineMiller.com, or the book Big Goals has its own website. We just loaded lots of case studies on success and failure using the BRIDGE methodology and goal-setting theory and that’s BigGoalsBook.com.

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

Caroline Miller
I would say choose to do hard things and choose to learn about yourself and your character strengths in the process of doing hard things. And if I have a bonus asterisk point, go to something I have no vested interest in, I don’t get anything for this, the VIA’s Character Strengths Survey. It’s free, 15 minutes, at ViaStrengths.org. And, boy, it ranks your character strengths from 1 to 24. Lock onto your top 5, and use them every day in new and creative ways to show up and succeed. It’s proven and it makes you happier to just find out what your top five are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Caroline, thank you. This is fun. I wish you much luck with all your big goals.

Caroline Miller
Oh, you, too. Thank you so much.

1002: How to Inspire Great Performance and Increase Team Satisfaction with Anne Chow

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Anne Chow demonstrates how embracing inclusion enhances performance and transforms workplaces.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why busyness destroys opportunities
  2. How inclusion boosts success 
  3. Why consensus is over-rated

About Mitch

As the former CEO of AT&T Business, Anne Chow was the first woman and first woman of color to hold the position of CEO at AT&T in 2019, overseeing more than 35,000 employees who collectively served 3 million business customers worldwide during her time there. She is currently the Lead Director on the board of Franklin Covey, serves on the board of 3M and CSX, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Resources Mentioned

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Anne Chow Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, welcome.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. You are as senior a leader as they come. So, no pressure, we’re going to expect senior-sized insights from you, Anne?

Anne Chow
I don’t know. I used to be, perhaps, Pete, so I think it’s all relative. I’m currently employed by myself, which I think is something that lots of us can relate to, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so we’re talking about your book and more, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion. Could you kick us off with a really phenomenal, dramatic story that illustrates, indeed, just how transformative this inclusion power stuff is?

Anne Chow
So, this is actually how I opened the book. So, many of us can sort of reflect on what was the very first job we had where we realized that leadership was a thing. Many of us entered the workforce, whatever that may be, in a small business, medium-sized business, or a big company, and we’re going to work and we have a job. But leadership is sort of this abstract thing. It’s the people above us, people making the decisions, that are not like us doing the work in any way, shape, or form.

For me, I realized that leadership was actually a thing when I first had this job in customer service. And it was the first time that I had a large team that was sort of a seminal experience if you were in telecom, if you were an up-and-coming leader, that they wanted you to lead an actual big group of people that was geographically dispersed, demographically very different than yourself. Many of them were union workers as well. And so, that was the first time that, for me, I realized that leadership was a thing.

I kind of came in with a lot of, I would say, dare I say, Pete, cockiness, that I was coming in as a new, fresh leader, and I knew where I was going to take the group, and credibility wasn’t instant, let’s put it that way. Most of these people had so much more tenure than me, they were over twice my age, and much more seasoned and much more wise. And what I realized that there was a difference between leading and managing.

I had previously managed lots of things. I was responsible for projects and tasks. But in this case, I wasn’t just responsible for the job of the customer service function of my multi hundred-person organization. I was responsible for the people who were doing the work. And, ultimately, that’s what leading bigger is all about. It is really taking a very human-centric approach to your work, to your tasks, to everything that you do, not just about your workforce, but also as it relates to all of your stakeholders, whether it be your customers, your investors, your partners, your suppliers, or even internal partners and other organizations that you might work with.

And so, for me, that was a huge realization because I realized that I could not get the job done all by myself but I had to figure out how to lead bigger through widening my perspectives, by including more people in my purview. And that was all towards the objective of, one, being awesome at my job, but, importantly, having greater performance and a much greater impact on the business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you have the aha moment, leadership is for real. It’s a thing that you’re living and experiencing, and you can’t do the job by yourself. You needed to work through the folks and make it happen and take a human-focused approach. So, understood. So, then, did you see some transformative power with inclusion? Or what went down when you found yourself in this situation for the first time?

Anne Chow
So, first, I was hit and met with I wouldn’t call it quite a brick wall, but it almost felt that way in the sense that I didn’t have instant credibility with my team. I thought, naively so when I was, this is when I was in my 20s, that, “Hey, my title, my role would instantly gain me some respect and credibility,” and it didn’t. My people gave me kind of a wake-up call, they said, “Hey, what makes you think that you know what’s happening here? We’ve had leaders like you before. You’re just a young whippersnapper. You’re going to come in here and just kind of do your check mark and then move on.”

So, what I found myself having to do was truly listen, truly empathize, truly try to put myself in their shoes to understand, one, “Why were they so non-trusting in management?” Two, “What were the issues that they were facing in terms of not being able to do their job well?” There were many barriers. Most of them were outside of their control, which is where I would come in, whether it was relationships with other work groups like sales. And I think in many organizations, there’s friction between sales and service.

Sales are the people who get the commission for making the sale. They don’t have to make the service actually work or put it in. The service people are left holding the bag, trying to deliver what the salespeople committed on. Service people are there when something breaks. You don’t call a salesperson to fix something. You call a service person. And so, I had to get underneath those issues, actually represent them in front of other stakeholders, sort of transform how we were working with other teams, both internally and externally, because we had external suppliers and partners as well. And that completely changed the amount of agency we had.

It completely changed how they viewed me, quite frankly. They put a lot more trust into me. They realized that I was there to help them, to support them, not to micromanage them, but to empower them and remove barriers and enable them to be more successful, both as individuals but also collectively as a team. So those are just some of the examples of when you lead with inclusion, when you lead bigger from the front and with people in mind, it absolutely works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you had a change of heart in terms of, “They’ll respect me because of my title,” to, “No, they’ll respect me when they see that I’m for them, I’m serving them, I’m making their lives easier and understanding them.” I’m curious, was there a particular turning point or issue, and we can zoom way in, in which you really keyed in on a pain point or a frustration or a something, and then delivered something for them, and they said, “All right, here we go”?

Anne Chow
Yeah, there was. I’ll just riff on the example that I just gave between sales and service. So, sales was a constant pain point for us, and we would have chronic sales teams that would constantly bring in something that was overcommitted, we were not involved in any of the upfront planning process, and it was that kind of that old adage, Pete, that you’ve probably heard as many of your listeners have heard in terms of “Poor planning on your part does not a crisis on my part make.”

This was our life in customer service. We actually had, over time, we developed this wall of fame and wall of shame. The difference between the sales teams that were on the wall of fame, they had learned to work with us in a strategic way, in a proactive way. We actually felt like we had a partnership. The sales teams that were on part of the wall of shame were last minute, everything was always a crisis, we never had enough information, and we were always put in a bad position as it related to serving the customer and delivering what we need to do.

And so, in that front, what I did very specifically was target those sales leaders, my peers and my colleagues over there, to attempt to compel them to change their behaviors, to attempt to compel them to work inclusively together to realize that we are on the same team, this customer is our joint customer, and we will both be better off, and our teams will be better off if we actually work together.

So, I worked tirelessly to try to get as many of these sales teams, because this is where we would get our orders from, was from sales, from a delivery standpoint, and that was really a big part of the effort, very specifically, that I worked on as their leader, as their supporter to help my team get their role done.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say wall of fame and wall of shame, I’m literally imagining a wall with portraits of individuals. Was this physically present in the facility?

Anne Chow
Yeah, it was. It was the day before digital signage, so it was very much paper-driven and marker-driven, and could be easily removed, let’s say, if your leaders or customers might walk through the site. You wouldn’t want to see something like that. You’d want to see leaderboards and much more sort of cheerleading type of stuff. But no, it was in fact visible.

And what I think one of the most powerful things it did for my people, as it relates to how they perceived me, was that I was actually authentic and recognize what they were going through as opposed to giving them some corporate party line of, “Oh, well, yeah, we got to deal with it somehow. You know, it’s not their fault,” but to really be there for them as part of the team and really being part of a solution to help us all deliver better and lead bigger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m thinking it’s fairly common to hear dismissive corporate talk, and it has so many flavors, but it all serves the same end, to be like, to convey, “I don’t really care what you’re whining about. Go ahead and make it all better.” And so, Anne, could you give me some choice phrases, like what a blow-off sounds like from that leadership?

Anne Chow
Well, Pete, I’ve strived my whole career to not lead this way, so I’m going to dig deep here. I’m going to dig deep here, although I will confess to you and our listeners and viewers that I have been accused from time to time of using corporate jargon. So, some corporate jargon that, these are some of the phrases that I, quite frankly, can’t stand, although I am guilty of saying them in a time or two. How about, “It is what it is”?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Anne Chow
That’s just not helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s basically saying “I will do…” Like, in response to they’re raising an issue, a complaint, a concern to you, and you’re saying, “It is what it is,” it’s basically like, “Nothing can be done. Next.”

Anne Chow
Right. And how actually ridiculous is that, right, which is nothing can be done. Something can always be done. And I think that when I think about that phrase or even catch myself wanting to say that phrase, I have to reframe myself and say, “You know what? There is stuff that we can control. We need to focus there. There are things that we can influence.”

“That is my job as the leader is to help drive influence where we may not have control. I know there’s also a ton of stuff we care about, but we can neither control nor influence it. Worry is a very unproductive emotion, and we all kind of go through this as humans. So, worrying about the stuff that we can neither control nor influence just hurts us all.”

So, part of I always felt, instead of saying “It is what it is,” is to get your team focused on “What can you control? What can we influence? And how can we influence it? And, yes, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff we care about, but it falls outside of our responsibility and our influence, and so we do no good expending calories and energy in lamenting about it.” So, I always found those situations as an opportunity to refocus my team, and also refocus myself, quite honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And I also like that there’s three categories and not just two. There’s control, there’s influence, and there’s out of control, as opposed to just control and no control.

Anne Chow
And, Pete, the engineer in me would say maybe there’s probably four categories. There’s control, there’s influence, there’s stuff you care about, and there’s stuff you just totally don’t care about, all of the other stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anne Chow
But our care-abouts are usually much, much greater than that which we can control, and sometimes we confuse the two. And in a workday or in any day in your life when you think about this, your time and energy are finite resources. So how are you going to spend that time and your energy? And do you align that time and energy against that which gives you the most powerful outcomes and impact? Or are you just busy?

I never really like this word “busy,” because activity is different than productivity. And so, that’s sort of another area is that, “Oh, you know, gosh, we’re so busy,” or, “I’m too busy for that,” that’s another one, or, “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We can’t look at that.” Busy doesn’t mean that this other thing that’s coming in might not need to take a greater priority.

Busy just implies, “All right, you’re just doing stuff. Is this stuff productive? Are you even open-minded enough to listen to other perspectives, to understand what this other opportunity or crisis or challenge might be, that it should, in fact, rise to the top of what you need to focus on, what you and your team need to focus on?”

So, I think that’s sort of another one, is to not fall in that trap of just “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We’re too busy to consider that new dataset. We’re too busy to go and read that additional research report. We’re too busy to go and take that field visit and join you in that customer meeting that might actually tell us something about whether or not our products and services are working in the minds of customers.”

So, I think that’s also another sort of corporate trap that we fall into, is that the craze of the day, the busyness takes us away from really thinking about having impact. And whether or not that busyness, what is it that we’re working on, the time and energy and effort that we’re placing, is it really aligned with the greatest performance and the greatest impact that you, as an individual, can have, but also you, as an organization, a team, or even a company, depending on what your role is?

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. So, busy doesn’t tell us much at all other than you have a lot of activity occurring currently.

Anne Chow
Right. And maybe you’re actually not that good at prioritizing. I am guilty of this. I think we are all guilty of this when we have days, weeks where we just feel like we’re, you know, what’s the analogy, the hamster or the gerbil in that wheel, that that’s like we’re going, we’re going, we’re going, but we’re actually going nowhere. And I think we’ve got to catch ourselves when we find that to be the case.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re talking about inclusion, can you share with us, what do we mean by the word inclusion in terms of how you define it, and how it’s often defined just generally in corporate speak? How are we thinking about this word?

Anne Chow
So, first, let me say that this book that I just recently wrote, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion is a leadership book. It is not a DEI book. One of the intents of me writing this book was to approach inclusion with a much more strategic perspective, aperture, than it is currently perceived by some. A quote actually from the book is, “Inclusion itself has been made too small, stuck at the end of the DEI acronym.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what inclusion is to me. Inclusion, and I use leading bigger pretty synonymously with inclusive leadership. All that is, is widening your perspectives to have greater performance and greater impact. And the ergo, the therefore from that is, one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to widen your perspectives is to widen your perspectives by including as many different kinds of people as you can in the work that you’re doing, whether it’s your employees, your team members, your partners, your customers, or otherwise.

Every business is a people business. And so, to take this very people-human-centric approach to your leadership and to your business. And who doesn’t? I mean, think about it. Who doesn’t want to widen your perspective so that your performance is better and that your impact is greater, however you might measure it in the scope of your job, or your career, or your life?

Why do I say inclusion has been made too small? There are different groups of people who view that DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, means certain things. And I think that it is often misconstrued by certain groups of people to mean issues of gender and race representation at the cost of everything else.

One, in actuality, this is Anne’s view. This is Anne’s view of DEI. One is the acronym does us a disservice because it oversimplifies three different important strategic leadership imperatives. While they may be interrelated, they’re not one thing. Diversity is just simply the reality of the modern world. Every generation that comes forward becomes more and more diverse. Our elements of diversity go far beyond our gender and race, our gender identity, and our racial and our ethnic identity.

Who would have ever thought that an element of diversity in the workforce would be, whether or not you wear a mask, or whether or not you have a vaccine, but these were new and emergent, during the pandemic, aspects of diversity in terms of how you had to think about your team, dynamics, how you would run your workforce, how you handle your workplaces. And this is just ever-changing, and my book explores many of the different dimensions that shape us as individuals.

But of course, Pete, no two of us are the same, and that’s the beauty of diversity. Diversity just is. You can choose to embrace it and lean into it because the diversity, the evolution of the diversity of the world will impact your workforce. It will impact your customer base and your evolving customer base. It will impact your investor base. It will impact everything about the work that you’re doing today, will be impacted by it.

The question is, “Do you lift your head up out of the sand and sort of run toward that to try to understand it so you can get ahead and grow? Or do you just kind of let it happen to you, and consciously or unconsciously ignore or exclude certain parts of the world because of your frame of thinking?

Equity is just simply fairness. So, for each of us as leaders, we have to decide what fairness we want. Do we want making it up? Do we want equitable access to health care for all of the members of our team? So, equity to me is just an outcome, and it means a fairness of some kind of outcome, and each leader has to decide what that is.

Inclusion, which is where the magic is, requires action. When you think about it, if you want to lead, act, behave in an inclusive way, it requires that you open your mind, that you open your perspective, that you open, in some cases, your heart, and that you do something differently, and it is about widening your perspective. Ultimately, what we want is more diverse, more innovative perspectives to help us come out with better outcomes, making better decisions. I mean, that’s what we want.

That’s how you become awesome at your job is that you make better and better decisions. You do that by surrounding yourself with the best people possible. You do that by delving into as many data sources, valid data sources as possible, and you collaborate. You collaborate. And if you’re responsible for an organization or a team, you build cultures that are agile, that are resilience, because the only thing that is constant is change.

So that is my view of inclusion, is quite simply widening your perspective, and inclusive leadership is about, and leading bigger is about widening those perspectives so you can have greater performance and greater impact. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, there’s a lot of really good stuff to think about there. So, can you bring that all the more real and practical in terms of our mindset and our way of thinking and interacting with the world? What are some habits or approaches that are working against us, maybe don’t even realize we’re doing, that fail to widen, but rather constrict our perspective to our detriment?

Anne Chow
Yes, very much so. So, I actually had an opportunity a couple years ago to co-author a book called The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias, and the way that we opened that book is with this sentence, and that is, “To be human is to have bias. If you were saying that you don’t have bias, you would be saying that your brain is not working.” So, bias basically sits in the functioning of our brains and neuroscience because we experience so much.

We’re taking in so much data in every moment but our brain can only process a very, very small fraction of it. And so, how we handle that is we form biases. Biases are predispositions for preferences. It may be even prejudices against certain things, groups, people. It could be associated with food. I mean, think about if you had a bad experience eating a certain kind of food, you will have a bias and not eat it ever again.

Why is it that if you happen to be exploring, let’s say, a different kind of cuisine than you’re used to, and you’re going with somebody who is very, very experienced in it, you want to ask them, “Well, what is that?” They’re not going to tell you, because if they tell you that it is, this is a true story that I experienced, if they tell you that it’s goat brain, you’re not going to eat it, because you have a bias as to what it is.

But if you try it, you may find that you actually like it. I mean, this is kind of how it works, right? On the flip side of that, in terms of the positive, think about the feelings that all of us have. If we meet a total stranger who’s from the same hometown we are, or how we might react when we bump into somebody or meet somebody who’s from the same alma mater, we have a natural affinity to those people because we always like to seek common ground.

Where we can fall into traps with this is imagine if you’re recruiting for a position that people have equal skillsets, maybe one of them even has better skillsets, but they didn’t go to the same school that you did in the same program. Might you inadvertently say to yourself, “I know exactly what program that was because I went through it, and it was super hard, and I’m going to pick that person over the other person who maybe has some of these other skills but I weigh those, the fact they went to my alma mater and went to the same program I did, higher because I have inside knowledge, and it’s something that relates to me,” right?

That would be almost a very natural reaction for many of us, but you may not actually be picking the best talent for the role if you let that bias rule. So, we have many situations like that, that we go through our regular workday, where we have to catch ourselves on, “Are we thinking with a narrow perspective? Are we leaning towards what’s comfortable? Or are we seeking wider perspectives? Are we making ourselves and the team sufficiently uncomfortable that we know we’re challenging each other enough, that we’re doing the due diligence around the debate of any particular issue so that we come out with the best decision and the best outcome?”

It doesn’t mean that we’re ever going to get consensus. In fact, one of the things I touch on in the book is the difference between collaboration and consensus. We always want collaboration. If, in fact, you have a truly diverse team and you’re really getting in the weeds of a difficult issue, you may never get consensus.

Some of you may be out there thinking, “Well, then what do you do?” You can get alignment. You can develop alignment if you’ve built an environment and you’ve cultivated an environment of constructive discourse, healthy debate, smart risk-taking. But consensus should actually never be the objective if you’re dealing with something really, really, really difficult and complex.

You’re going to have many different perspectives about it, but you want to vet all the different scenarios that you possibly can, the various risks, the intended consequences, think through the unintended consequences. And so, these are just a couple of examples of how we might, in our everyday lives, at work, or even out in our community, find ourselves falling into the trap of comfort.

Pete, this is a very interesting stat that may not surprise people, but over 70% of leaders pick protégés that are of the same race and gender. That’s pretty significant, that number. And when you consider it, think about yourself, who are you most comfortable with a lot of the times? Who might you not be comfortable with and why, even if you don’t know the people at all?

This is the power of really thinking more inclusively, acting more inclusively, behaving more inclusively, because if you don’t, you are, I absolutely believe that you’re going to ultimately lose to a leader who is leading that way. You will be out-competed, absolutely, in my view.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, as you say this, I’m thinking about the podcast and like what I’m comfortable with, and it’s like, “I am not comfortable with TikTok,” for example. It’s, like, I don’t like being there. Like, it’s weird to me. It goes fast. I feel like my brain is getting dumber, and so I don’t want to deal with it. And, at the moment, there are no How to be Awesome at Your Job shorts on TikTok.

And yet I can see in my own data that my listeners, generally, are not big into social media. They kind of are, you know, they’re like me. And, as I do the surveys, it’s like, “Oh, the average age of my audience is growing faster than time is passing.” And TikTok does skew to younger folks and, I guess I’m 41 now and time is flying.

And so then, I see what you’re saying with regard to our comfort. It’s just like, “Eh, I don’t like TikTok.” And so, it’s like, “Oh, so that’s it? So, I guess I’m not going to mess with TikTok, we’re not going to get into TikTok, and we’re not going to draw in young folks who like using TikTok who have no idea that this show exists, and it is to our detriment just because of my preferences and comfort levels.”

Anne Chow
That’s right. And when you think about it, Pete, not to scare you, but I’m sure you’ve looked at all the demographic information because you’re now mulling it over. You as a Millennial, because you’re a Millennial, this is the first year in the workforce that Gen Z is either equal to or outnumbers Boomers. So, Gen Z-ers who are all over the TikTok, and if you talk about Alpha, who is coming behind them, coming after them, it’s all about the TikTok, do they not want to be awesome at their job? Of course they do.

But what are the vehicles and platforms that serve them to get what I think are timeless conversations that you have lifted up through your podcast, entirely relevant to them? But they will not ever know, nor will they ever move backwards in terms of using their mother or fathers, the elders. I have two Gen Z children, so one is already in the workforce, one is, knock on wood, going to enter after she graduates in December, and they actually call us the geriatrics. And I’m a Gen X-er.

So, I mean, I’m an old Gen X-er, mind you, but I’m a Gen X-er but my children actually call us the geriatrics. And I fancy myself to be pretty technology savvy but I’ll confess to you, since you confessed to me and everybody else, I don’t do the TikTok either. No, I don’t. And I’m specifically calling it “The TikTok” because it makes me sound even more geriatric but I’m kind of playing it to…

Pete Mockaitis
“All these youngsters and their TikToks!” So, that notion about being uncomfortable and widening the perspective, I think is very helpful because it’s possible for it to just blow right past us in terms, like, “Yeah, I don’t really like TikTok, so I’m just moving on.” It’s like, “Oh, well, we’ll timeout, like ideally, you’re having a wider perspective and including people who will challenge you a little bit along those lines, and say, “Okay. Well, TikTok may or may not be an optimal channel for you to invest in, but it’s worth a fair shake given just the vast quantity of hours that people are spending on TikTok, even though you’re not one of them.”

Anne Chow
Right. And, in your line of work, How to be Awesome at Your Job, more and more workers that are entering the workforce are on there, so you’re actually missing a big part of your target audience because of just this shift. And I think that really underscores a point I made earlier, which is you could do that, I could do that, but, ultimately, we will lose to somebody who is the next-gen Pete or next-gen Anne, and who is already on there, who’s going to disrupt us. Our audience will dissipate and we will become irrelevant, even if our content is better because, simply, we’re not there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Miss Excel is crushing it on TikTok, for example. So, they’re out there.

Anne Chow
Yeah, they are. They are. They are, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we talked a lot about TikTok, but I’d love to hear about other examples in which we can kind of, oopsies, forget to widen the perspective, and not get the inclusive goodness that leads to our peril.

Anne Chow
So, this is actually the last chapter in the book, and it’s about flexibility. So, some of us in today’s world will think, “Okay. Well, flexibility is important. Yeah, we want to work in a place that’s flexible and in a work environment that’s flexible.” Some people may say, “Well, you know what that means? That means that you get to work at home, I get to work in my car on the road. It means a flexible, hybrid work environment.”

I actually think that flexibility in a work environment. Flexibility and leading bigger means the following, and you’re going to be able to tell I’m an engineer because I’m going to give you three other concentric circles. The first circle is your job, the second circle around that is your career, the third circle around that is your life.

To me, flexibility means leading in a way that acknowledges and respects the fact that every member of your team has a job in the context of their career, in the context of their life. I’m going to sound like a geriatric now. Back in the day, when I first entered the workforce, you had your professional life and your personal life, and they were very much bifurcated. Workforce was a place that you went to. It wasn’t something that you did. We didn’t have this incredible technology that enabled you to be connected at all times, to be able to get stuff done, and check in, and do whatever it is you need to do. That world is gone. It’s over.

We now live in a world, and the pandemic really accelerated this, as we all know, where we all know that we have one life. It has some personal dimensions and professional dimensions. We can do work wherever it is that we live. We have to recognize, if you’re choosing to be a leader that your interactions with other people are specifically about their job and your job, but they have bigger aspirations. Their job sits in the context of their career, which sits in the context of their life.

And I think that the data says that we work, we spend about a third of our lives working, another third sleeping, so work plays a very significant role. So, unless you, as a leader, respect and seek to understand and have this broader perspective of, it’s not just about “Get the job done. Get the job done. Get the job done.” There has to be empathy involved, there has to be authenticity involved, there has to be grace involved.

These are words that, ten years ago, were never, ever thought of entering the workforce or in the context of leadership. These are now much more important skills in leaders today, and our next-gen workforce actually expects these traits in their leaders. So, to think much more broadly, to widen your perspective of what flexibility actually means, and that, ultimately, no two people are the same, you might not have a working agreement with somebody who is not a high-performer, is not going to be the same as you are with a high-performer who’s more experienced, who’s demonstrated, that they can have a much more fluid approach to work.

And so, I think this is a level of, if you will, sophistication in our thinking about what flexibility actually means. An example of that is safety. When we think about safety first, in my generation, that meant physical safety. That workplaces had to be safe, that if there was a spill, it had to be cleaned up, that there were rails on the stairs, handrails on the stairs, and you had to hold the handrail on the stairs, these kinds of things.

But today, equally as important is psychological safety, and psychological safety in the workforce. So, we all play a role, if you’re choosing to be a leader, to create environments where people feel safe to express themselves, to take smart risk, to have constructive debate. Because, how are you going to widen your perspectives if you don’t create an environment where people actually feel comfortable and safe to do so?

So, you cannot have an environment that is toxic or one that punishes “failures.” You have to have freedom within some kind of framework and some type of expectation, and this is just a very different way of leading. It’s a very different way of thinking about how you do your job and how your job relates to other people’s. I actually tend to think it’s really, really exciting and even more meaningful. But those are also some of the things I think for people to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, I’d love it if you could share any specific actions or tactics or do’s and don’ts associated with some of this goodness.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what I would say, I’ll address this from two different perspectives. If you happen to be a manager of a person today, so you have a responsibility for a team, people, whatnot, when you do your performance reviews with them and you give them performance feedback, you’re giving them feedback very specifically on their job. But part of your responsibility is to ensure that you have some line of sight to what their career aspiration is.

So, part of your role as their manager, as their coach, as their supervisor, if you will, to use some old-school language, is not just to focus on their performance development and performance management. You also have a responsibility to focus on their career management and their career development. I’m still shocked by the number of times that I worked with people, and they say, “Oh, I just got blindsided. That employee just up and left because he, she, or they thought that it was going to be better. They got a job that they thought they could have more upside. They just never brought it to me that they actually aspired to get promoted or they wanted to move from this function to that function.”

So, you as the manager, you as the supervisor, you as the leader have a responsibility to not just focus on the job but to help prompt and understand career aspirations, because I can tell you that individual, I mean think about yourself, you’re not just doing your job to do your job. You’re doing it because it’s going to lead to something.

And even if it’s you’re doing your job today to put food on the table, to get healthcare, for your family and yourself, you are doing that so that you can serve some other passion, whether it’s in the same line of work, whether it’s some, what is maybe today a side hustle compared to your day job, but you’re doing it for a purpose, and that purpose, your career is whatever that life’s purpose is, whatever your calling is, and that may or may not be directly related to your job.

And I think that we, as leaders, have to respect that, but we actually have to embrace it if we want to cultivate talent and have the best workforce out there. So, Pete, that’s one example of what you can do very differently. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to continue to give performance feedback and performance-develop your people, but it also says you also have to think about their career development and their career management as a separate but parallel thing, because they are, whether you like it or not, and they’re going to.

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

Anne Chow
So, one of my favorite quotes is, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” It’s a quote from Gandhi, and I think it’s a quote that, for me, embodies the fact that we are all adults, and we take ownership of the choices that we make. And if we see something that we believe needs to be changed, you’ve got to become part of that positive change. You’ve got to be part of the catalyst to make it happen. And so, that is one of my favorite quotes.

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

Anne Chow
One of the ones that I have used constantly since it came out, and they just celebrated the 10-year anniversary, the 10th one just came out, actually, I think just very, very recently, and that is the McKinsey Lean In, Women in the Workplace study that started a decade ago.

One of the reasons why I find this set of research so groundbreaking is that it very specifically goes into multiple facets of women in the workplace, slices and dices the different demographics, talks about the different stage of the evolution of women in the workforce at various different levels, and peels the issues and the opportunities back, not just by identifying the problems, but it also offers solutions for companies and organizations to consider, to continue to cultivate women in the workplace. So, I think it’s been one of the most groundbreaking, consistent set of research done over multiple, multiple years.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Anne Chow
A favorite book of mine is How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. I think this book is so revolutionary in the way of, you know, there’s been a lot of study shown that we, as people, are not truly happy unless we’re helping others. You know, this whole idea of happiness at work and joy at work, I mean, it tends to be sort of so simple. When you think about jobs and careers, it’s so quantitatively-focused, so ambition-focused, but ultimately what brings you joy in your life?

It really is extremely, extremely provocative in terms of helping you, maybe even catalyzing you to think through this question of “How will you measure your life?” We each have one life to live. We do not have a professional life. We do not have a personal life. We have one life. It has professional and personal dimensions, and we’ve been given a gift of this life. So, what is it that you want to accomplish in this very, very short time that we have in this world? And my hope, of course, is that you choose to lead bigger, not just at work but in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks?

Anne Chow
I’m going to reinforce something that I just said because I think it’s such an important one. We each have one life to live. We don’t have a professional life. We don’t have a personal life. We have one life that has personal and professional aspects. And so, the challenge, the opportunity, the gift we have each is to figure out what we want to do with that one life, and there is no time like the present.

Time is that most precious resource that we all tend to waste and squander. Once time has passed, we can never get it back. And so, if there’s something that you aspire to do, be, help with, become, the time is now. There’s no time like now.

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

Anne Chow
I would point them to my LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, or my website, which is TheAnneChow.com, The-A-N-N-E-C-H-O-W.com.

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

Anne Chow
Yeah, I would challenge every single person here to think about how you can lead bigger. What is the one area in your job that you would like to learn more about, where you know that widening your perspectives will help you, you just haven’t taken the time or made the effort or even thought about how to go about doing it? Is it with your team? Is it with a platform, a tool, a part of the market that you want to pursue, a set of investors that you know are out there, but you haven’t figured out how to connect with them yet? So, find one area first with respect to how you might widen your perspective and start there. So that’s the one challenge, a homework assignment that I give everybody out there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anne, this is fun. I wish you much great big leading.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much. You too, Pete. Cheers to leading bigger.

1001: Transforming Relationships by Overcoming Self-Deception with The Arbinger Institute’s Mitch Warner

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Mitch Warner reveals how we end up sabotaging ourselves and how you can overcome these obstacles to strengthen relationships and your leadership as a whole.

You’ll Learn

  1. How “the box” limits your perspective and opportunities 
  2. The tell-tale signs self-deception 
  3. How to make people feel safe to share their perspectives 

About Mitch

Mitch Warner is a bestselling author and Arbinger managing partner with a background in healthcare and organizational turnaround. Mitch is the co-author of Arbinger’s latest bestseller, The Outward Mindset. He writes frequently on the practical effects of mindset at the individual and organizational levels as well as the role of leadership in transforming organizational culture and results. He is an expert on mindset and culture change, leadership, strategy, performance management, organizational turnaround, and conflict resolution.

Mitch is a sought-after speaker to organizations across a range of industries, bringing his practical experience to bear for leaders of corporations, governments, and organizations across the globe. Specific clients include NASA, Citrix, Aflac, the U.S. Army and Air Force, the Treasury Executive Institute, and Intermountain Healthcare. Mitch carries his first-hand perspective as a proven leader into his speeches and facilitation, dynamically bringing Arbinger’s concepts and tools to life through his powerful stories and hands-on experience. His audiences leave inspired to improve and equipped with a practical roadmap to effect immediate change.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Mitch Warner Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mitch, welcome.

Mitch Warner
Thanks so much, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to be chatting with you today because Leadership and Self-Deception is one of my favorite books of all time, and I didn’t know who I could talk to on the show about it because the author is just The Arbinger Institute. And so, I was like, “Who? I don’t know, I guess.” And then you show up in my inbox, that it’s like, “This is the coolest thing ever.” So, thank you and welcome.

Mitch Warner
Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited for our conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Super. Well, maybe just to back it up a smidge, what is The Arbinger Institute? And how does a whole organization write a book?

Mitch Warner
Oh, great question. The Arbinger Institute is an organization that helps other organizations transform their culture. And the way we help people transform their culture is by helping people transform their people, specifically, at the level of mindset. A lot of people think about transforming a culture or transforming people in terms of behavior, “Okay, well, here’s what people are doing. Let’s fix that. Let’s get people doing something different than they’re doing today, and then we’ll get a better result.”

And our work illuminates the fact that every behavior that people are engaging in is driven by how they see. It’s driven by their mindset. And so, our work is to help organizations transform at the level of mindset. And then when that happens, people start behaving differently and they get better results. And so, the books that we write, including Leadership and Self-Deception, as well as the other books, are all deeply informed by the work that we’re doing with clients.

And that’s not one person. That’s a whole team of people that are going in to help organizations do the work of transforming their results. So those stories are coming through our team from our clients, and they inform everything that we do. And so, while we have teams of people that actually write those books to share those ideas more broadly in the world, we write them as an institute because we are an institute, and it’s really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And the book doesn’t read as though a piece of writing by committee. It is riveting and lovely, and transformation. That’s something we’re all about here. So, could you kick us off perhaps with a really phenomenal story of folks being transformed by some of these principles? Could you walk us through a person and what went down with regard to what they were thinking and doing and the new ideas that got in their head, and the new things they did, and what happened?

Mitch Warner
One that comes to mind is a leader named Louise Francesconi. She ran a 17,000-person division of a very large organization, and she decided that she was going to own the cultural transformation that she knew had to happen inside of the organization. And it was actually an organization that, when we started working with them, had been newly acquired, and she was put in charge of this division.

So, you got these two different groups of people, and these two groups of people are trying to come together, and they realize that they have to cut a significant amount of money. In fact, $100 million was the task of this newly combined leadership team. We’ve got to cut a $100 million dollars from the business, and we’ve got to grow the business at the same time.

Well, they’ve been involved in the work of cultural transformation that Louise wanted to own inside of this division, and so they just called and they said, “Hey, how would we leverage these ideas that we’ve been working with to tackle a really complex problem like that?” And we said, “Well, we’ll come and we’ll be on site as you do that.” And they came together in the typical way, “All right, let’s cut $100 million,” and Louise set it up in what she thought was the right way to set it up, “All right, everybody come, you’ll all present what you’re going to do to contribute to this big goal.”

And we all know how people show up like that. People are territorial, they don’t want anything to be cut from their area of the business, they kind of present something that’s perfunctory, but you just know you’re never going to get there in this way. Everybody is really just thinking about themselves. They’re coming to that with what we call an inward mindset, “I’m not malicious, but I’m definitely not focused on my impact on other people. I’m focused, really, on how this is going to impact me.”

And they got to a point about halfway through the day where they just realized, “You’re not going to make this happen.” And so, my colleague at Arbinger’s took Louise aside, and said, “Hey, would you mind if I just help shape this meeting?” And she said, “Sure, be my guest.” And he said, “Okay, we’re going to take two hours.”

Now, out of an eight-hour day, that’s a lot of time. But he said, “We’re going to take two hours. And I just want you to pair up with someone else in this room, and you’re going to spend the first hour just explaining to your counterpart all the things that you’re working on, all the things that you’re wrestling with, the things that you’re struggling with. And we’re going to do that for an hour, and then you’re going to spend the next hour just coming up with any way that you could help the other person that you’ve been learning about save their money, not cut their money, just save their money.”

And it was like magic. You had people who were now alive to the people around them for the very first time, really, and going, “Oh, my word. I didn’t realize that what you were trying to do in this organization was so important and how hard that is, but how critical it is, too. Here’s ways I think I could help you save that, that critical piece of the business.”

And it got everybody so far outside of themselves that they started to come up with, on their own, ways that they could help the other people in the business save their money. And as a result, they found redundancies and ways that they were costing themselves, the business, more than they needed to so that they got to cutting a $100 million dollars by the end of the day, and not one person had to lose their job in the process. It was stunning.

And I think about that experience often because it just illustrates what happens when people get outside of themselves, when they just start thinking about, “Hey, who are the people around me? What are they trying to accomplish? What could I do, given the resources that I have, in order to help people be more successful?” And you don’t have to be a leader to work that way. You can be anyone in an organization.

And I’d say that the people in organizations that are most valuable to the organization, doesn’t matter what role you sit in, whether you supervise people or not, are the people that think that way. They just figure out how to get outside of themselves and go, “How do I help other people accomplish their objectives given what I can do?” They’re the magic in an organization.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds cool. And I’m not going to try to lean into my Bain strategy consulting background, but I’m so curious about these initiatives that saved a hundred million without losing any heads and people feel good about. So, could you give us just one example of an initiative that someone came up with, like, “Hey, this would help you save money,” and someone receives that and says, “Why, thank you,” as opposed to, “Back off, pal”?

Mitch Warner
Well, the first thing that happened in that room is one of the people stood up and said, “Based on what I’m learning from the person that I’ve just been meeting with,” in a serendipitous way. It wasn’t, you know, “Okay, you meet with you, you meet with you.” It wasn’t like that. “It was just the things that I’m learning about this person, I actually think that I should be reporting to that person.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Mitch Warner
That was the first move that happened in that room. And, look, that doesn’t happen in organizations. It doesn’t happen in meetings like this. No one raises their hand and says, “You know what? I think I should go down a rung in the ladder in our org chart.” That doesn’t happen, but it does when a person says, “You know what? We could succeed if all of the things that I’m doing, which in, a Venn diagram, really overlap with this other organization, if all those things were consolidated.”

And what they saw is that there were facilities, there was equipment, there were processes that had significant redundancy to this other department. And so, from the perspective of this person, they couldn’t say, “Well, I think you should report to me.” They just said, “You know what, for the good of this organization, I could report to you. And if we did that, if we consolidated into one unit instead of two different departments, we could get rid of all of those redundancies, work our teams in the same facilities, on the same equipment, with the same process.” That got them to their first seven million.

But, more importantly than that, it put in motion a domino effect in that room where people realized, “Hey, being part of this company means I don’t have to protect myself. In fact, I can figure out things that I could do that are so innovative because they’re no longer filtered through the lens of self-protection or self-advancement.” When it gets to that point, oh, my word, you can accomplish anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it really is beautiful. You said that doesn’t happen, it does sound almost like miraculous or spiritual, and they’re like wisdom traditions that are speaking of these matters associated with putting others, being in service of others, and kind of losing your ego and these kinds of things. So, I want to talk about the particulars of the individual mindset at length. But, first, I want to hear, in an organizational setting, how do we start to get the memo that, “It is, in fact, safe to do this, and I am not going to get my head chopped off if I lower the defenses”?

Mitch Warner
That’s a really good question, and that’s a question that is easier, I think, if you’re a leader to say, “How do I send that message?” If you’re not though, then it will feel risky. Let’s just be honest, it will feel risky to say, “You know what? I’m going to step out and I’m going to do the kinds of things that I feel would have the highest and best impact on the people around me. And it might mean that I forget some things about the past that I’ve used as justifications for why I haven’t done that to date. It might feel risky. because of where we’ve been.”

But the funny thing is, what I’ve experienced is, that people that take what feels risky, that step, discover that that’s the thing that actually propels their own success. You can’t do it. Here’s the irony about it. You can’t do it to improve your chances of succeeding as an individual. It’s just that I’ve seen that that is the natural outcome. It’s the byproduct.

When people step out and say, “You know what? Let me take a risk and just let me see this person as a person. What are they trying to accomplish? Let me adjust something.” Everybody is going, “That’s what we need in the organization. Those are the kind of leaders we need.” It’s just what I see.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think that is really beautiful. And I’m thinking about it even, I’ve witnessed this, even in, like, super transactional situations, like there’s a sales meeting that’s occurring, there’s a person that wants to sell something and a person that might want to buy that something. And I’ve seen this a few times when on, as the seller and the prospective buyer, when the seller says, “You know what? Given what you’re describing, or what I’m seeing here, what I have to offer isn’t right for you right now.

Like for a roof, “First, you’ve got to handle that masonry situation, or the roof I’m going to put on there isn’t actually going to keep the water from leaking. So, I don’t do masonry, so you’ve got to handle that first, and then maybe I could help you out afterwards.” Or, it was a digital marketing agency that said, “Hmm, you know, what we’re really good at is promoting this other kind of a result, and we don’t actually have the experience to get a bunch of email addresses associated with this consumer base, and so we’d really be just rolling the dice. And I don’t feel really comfortable putting your money at risk that way.”

And then that same person said, “Pete, I think you should absolutely hire this company.” And we did. Because that builds such tremendous trust that, putting your own self-interest aside, your short-term, immediate self-interest aside, built such trust and good recommendations and vibes, and I think they got more out of it as opposed to trying to grab the deal in front of them.

Mitch Warner
You see that all the time. I mean, is there any role in your life where you’re not more successful if you’re trusted as an advisor by the people that you’re trying to help or serve? I mean, whether you’re a leader, and the people that you need to be seen as a trusted advisor by are the people you lead, or you’re a salesperson and you’re trying to get people to buy, or you’re a parent and you’re trying to help younger people develop into better people. I mean, it doesn’t matter what your role is. And you see that all the time.

And sometimes it looks exactly like you’re saying, “You know, I don’t have the solution for you but I think I know who does. Let me help you get connected with that person.” I remember a dear friend of mine was a leader in a sales organization, but said, “You know, I was in the middle of this transaction. It was the end of the year.”

“I had my quota, and I knew that I had to get this deal over the line in order to meet my quota, and so I pressured this client that I had to get this deal over the line and it wasn’t in their best interest because I was trying to get them to buy in bulk something that they should really have amortized over multiple years when they actually would use this product.”

And the client actually called him on it, and said, “Hey, just so I’m clear, are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for me?” And it was so convicting that, all of a sudden, he realized, “Yeah.” And in that moment, he had this choice, and the choice was, “Am I going to be honest and be just human with this other human being, or am I not?” And he made the choice to just do what he felt was risky, and he said, “To be honest, I’m doing this for me, and I’m so sorry.”

And the interesting thing is that, while he adjusted the deal and he missed his quota, that client was a client for years, far longer than that contract would have been, whatever he was trying to sell. I mean, we got to be honest, sometimes we do take short-term hits by doing the right thing, but ultimately that’s where our success really lies. Those clients, they stay with you forever. There are so many examples of that.

And it can even be as small as, you know, a friend of mine, a colleague, was delivering an Arbinger workshop. And in the middle of this workshop with a client realized that they were bugged with some of the people in the room that were kind of resistant.

Mitch Warner
They were frustrated, they were annoyed with these people in the room, and they realized, “Oh, my word, I have got to make a decision. Do I keep going knowing that I’ve been irritated or do I own that fact, given that it’s a reality?” And they came into the room, they took a break, came back to the room, and they said, “I have to take ownership. I’ve gotten annoyed with some of you that are resistant, and it’s kept me from getting curious about what are you so resistant to. Can I just…?”

And, all of a sudden, the room changed and people said, “Well, this is what we’re resistant about.” And for the first time, that person could facilitate the workshop that they were there to facilitate because now they’re working with actual people. It felt risky, but the truth is it unlocked the very thing that they were there to do. And I think that’s the irony that you and I are talking about. Whatever feels risky, turns out will unlock the very thing that gets us the result that we’re there to accomplish in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
Mitch, I love this stuff because it grabs the heart in terms of what is being a human about and, like, we got jobs, and we do them, but sometimes it could feel like they are just, like, “Follow the processes. I am a robot executing value-creation activities,” right? But when you speak about this stuff, and I read Leadership and Self-Deception, it comes alive in terms of we are human beings who have values and feelings about stuff.

And, sure enough, it does work out often, not always, that when you step up and are courageous, you take a risk and call a spade a spade, say what’s really going on, and compassionately listen to another person’s point of view, cool stuff happens. I remember, this is the weirdest example, but I was in high school and there was a girl, and we were kind of dating, kind of not, we need to DTR to find the relationship better, I guess.

Anyway, and so it was the weirdest situation, a fun bunch of friends, and we got in this weird little argument and it’s like we were litigating, like, who did who wrong in the course of this semi-romantic relationship. And so, we were sort of arguing in front of the jury. And we weren’t really getting anywhere, and then they left. It was just the two of us, I said, “Hey, yeah, I actually didn’t know you felt that way about this thing. I’m really sorry. And I wasn’t trying to do this. Tell me more about that.”

And it was amazing how it just totally shifted the view, it’s like, “Are we litigating or are we trying to understand, like, the other person and where we come from?” And it’s a totally different energy, and it might be, “soft” or “touchy feely,” but it is effective in terms of, “Okay, this relationship is restored, there’s trust, and we’re off to the races, moving and making things happen.”

Mitch Warner
Somebody once, who experienced this work, said, “Oh, this is soft like a brick.” It hits you and it’s at the core of our relationship. So, to the degree that we believe that relationships actually are what’s driving results, whether it’s in a personal relationship with a partner or it’s in an organization. If you believe that relationships drive results, then what unlocks those relationships is critically important.

And what you said, I think, is so interesting, this litigating who’s right and who’s wrong. In the book, in Leadership and Self-Deception, this whole idea of self-deception that gets in the way, we say sometimes there’s a risk of calling a spade a spade. Usually, the risk is calling myself a spade, when I am a spade, when I’m not seeing clearly. It usually never helps to call someone else a spade. Let them find out the truth about them. But, for me, in a situation where I feel a need to litigate, to justify, it means that something is off. It means that something is wrong and I know it.

I know it at such a deep and professional level that I’m really good at hiding it from myself. I mean, imagine that you and I work together, and I come across a piece of information and I think, “Oh, my word, this would be super helpful for Pete.” The straightforward thing to do would be to just share it with you. But if I betray my own sense of what would be helpful to you as a person, who has needs and challenges and objectives, who’s real to me, just a person that I’m working with, if I go against that sense, if I betray my own sense, then all of a sudden, I need to feel justified for that betrayal.

And how do I do that? I create a world where it’s okay for me to have treated you as less than a person. And so, I might see you as competition, I see you as a threat. Only one of us could get the promotion after all. Or I see you as lazy because, if you didn’t come across this information on your own, that means that you’re probably not doing your job. Or I see you as incompetent, or I see you as stupid, or whatever the case might be, and I see myself as all the opposite of those things.

And now, there’s this whole narrative in my head. You’re not even aware of this Pete, but I’ve got this narrative in my head of why it’s okay for me to be the way I am with you. And why do I need that? It’s because I’m actually not okay with the way I’ve chosen to see you. And I’ll invite you to be exactly what I say I don’t like. I’ll invite you to be all of those things, because if you are, then I’m justified in how I chose to see you. You’ve got this whole human dynamic that came about and I’m litigating that in my own head, but it all stemmed from me.

And I think the hopeful thing about that is, given the fact that I’ve deceived myself, I can also reclaim the truth, just like you did with that girl you were dating in high school. In the moment, at any time, we can go, “Wait a minute. That’s been my impact? I’m seeing you now again? I’m so sorry.” If I can let go of all of those falsehoods, then we can just be truthful together again. We can be human together again. That’s, I think, the hope of it. It’s both how scary it is, the way this snow-balls, but how easy it is to reclaim the relationship that we can have at any moment if we choose to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Mitch, you’re saying so much good, wise stuff. And in the book, there’s an expression they use a lot, and I hear it in my own voice, in the voice of the Audible narrator, when I’m doing it, it’s like, “You’re in the box!” So, Mitch, tell us, what does it mean to be in the box versus out of the box, metaphorically?

Mitch Warner
The box is this metaphor for that distorted way that I’ve come to see the world that gives me justification for my own self-betrayals, the way I’ve chosen to see other people falsely. So now, I’ve got this distorted view of you and me. It’s two-sided. I can’t see you in a less-than way without seeing myself as superior, or vice versa if I get justification that way.

You can imagine a version like that, right, “Oh, my word, I don’t have any privileges here, and I’m new to the team, and Pete is so connected, and he’s so much smarter than I am, he’s so much more gifted than I am. He probably came across this information years ago. If I could go to him now and share this.” So, now I’m worse than, you’re better than. It doesn’t matter which form that takes, it’ll look different depending on how I get justification in any relationship.

But that distorted view, it’s like living in a box. I no longer see reality. I’ll only see the things about you or me that reinforce that false self-image and that false image of you that gets me justification. Because more than I want you to change, more than I want the relationship to be healed, more than I want to work productively to save our family, or our company, or our community, I want justification. And I won’t just carry that distorted, I won’t just live in that distortion of a box with you. I’ll carry that around in a new situation.

I’ll walk into a meeting, and you’re not even there now, but I’m so invested in this view of myself that, “I’m so smart and capable and noble, because the worst thing that you can do when you work with someone like Pete is spoon-feed them information. So, I’m doing the very best that I can, that I’m smart, I’m capable, I’m more capable.” I walk into a meeting and people are presenting ideas. I’m carrying this box, this distorted view of myself into that meeting.

If you were to ask me, walking in then, “Hey, Mitch, what kind of leader are you? What kind of contributor are you? What kind of team member are you? Are you the person that needs to have all the best ideas?” I say, “No way. I’m the kind of person that likes ideas no matter where they come from.” But if I’ve got a view of myself that I’m really smart and capable or whatever that case might be, and then I share an idea and it gets shut down, somebody says, “Oh, you know what, Mitch? I’ve tried that in some other organization. It didn’t work very well. I think we could do this though.”

If I didn’t have this box, if I wasn’t living in this distorted reality, I’d go, “Oh, awesome! I’m glad you’ve tried that. All right, how do we do what you’re suggesting we do? Let’s mobilize around that.” But if I’m living in this box, if I’m carrying this distorted view of myself and others around, all of a sudden, that idea that might save our team, that’s a threat. It’s a threat to my self-image. I experience this all the time at work, but also at home.

You know, I’ve got this image that I deserve to be listened to or whatever. All of a sudden, I walk into situations with my kids. I’m not seeing them. I’m not even seeing myself. I’m just in this distortion field because I need to feel justified for that distorted way that I’ve chosen to see them and me, and now I’m not interacting with what they say. I’m interacting with threats to this self-view that I’ve got that’s so important to me, because at least if that distorted view of myself and others is correct, I’m justified in not seeing the people around me. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely, it does. And this idea is so big and powerful and transformative when you get your arms around it. And so, I mean, I’ve read the book, and if folks haven’t, I just want to make sure they’re not like, “What are they smoking? This is some trippy stuff.” Could you give us some super common examples, like we see all the time in terms of how folks find themselves, deceiving themselves, and then getting into trouble, like the top one or two or three things that occur perhaps nearly universally to humans interacting with other humans?

Mitch Warner
Well, look, there’s a thousand examples of how self-deception shows up in my life, but I won’t see them because self-deception, by definition, is a lie I’m telling to myself. So, what’s odd about that is I can’t see the lie even though I’m the liar because I’m so invested in believing that it’s the truth. In fact, my own emotions will tell me that this is the truth.

So, one of the easiest ways to see it, where self-deception is showing up, and self-deception, let’s just be clear, it’s just the problem of people having problems and not knowing that they have that problem, which would be easy to fix if we’re like, “Hey, Mitch, by the way, the way you’re talking to your kids right there, that’s going to alienate your kids. Is that what you want?”

Or, “Hey, Mitch, the way that you’re showing up in this meeting is actually going to have people resisting your idea instead of embracing it.” Or, “Hey, Mitch, the way that you’re avoiding this conversation with this employee over there, you’re talking to everybody about them instead of talking to them, your team member, that actually will exacerbate the problem. It’s going to keep going rather than get better.”

I mean, it’s like the most basic things that we can see if we’re not the person in the middle of it. And this would be easy to fix if you could tell me, “Hey, Mitch, by the way, the way that you’re talking to your kid is probably going to alienate them.” It’s not just that in self-deception I can’t see it. It’s that I resist that possibility, “Well, do you see how they’re talking to me? How else am I going to get through?” or, “Do you see what this employee is doing? They never listen to other people.” Whatever the case might be, but we don’t see it.

And you can look anywhere in your life where people are creating problems for themselves and they don’t notice it. They can’t tell. So how do I discern it? How do I know where this is happening in my own life? I have to look for the red flags of this box. And the red flags are, “Are there people that I’m blaming for my situation, for my experience? Am I horrible-lizing any people in my life? Am I seeking allies? Am I talking to people about other people? What might that signal?”

You said I litigate. I do that in my own head, Pete. I lawyer up. I find myself driving home from work and I tell myself this story. It’s like I’m playing out this courtroom scene, and I’m creating this case for why I’m right. Even the feeling that I’m right might be an indication that I could be telling myself a story here and it may not be the full truth. I could be self-deceived.

Those telltale signs, it might be that I exaggerate values, “Well, you know what? This is fair.” I wasn’t thinking about fairness when I was just working with someone else. It’s when I betray my own sense of what other people need, and now I’m in this distorted box where I’m looking for justification. Actually, that word itself, wherever I feel justified or I’m looking for justification by talking to others and gathering allies for me, that’s a pretty big red flag that there’s a reason I’m trying to feel justified, and it’s because things aren’t right as they are.

So, I just say look for those instances. Look for those instances where I’m experiencing any of those red flags, and then ask myself, “Is it possible that this isn’t fully the truth?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Mitch, if I could put you on the spot, hardcore, could you share with us one recent instance in which you caught yourself caught up in this?

Mitch Warner
Oh, absolutely. I found myself with a team member here at Arbinger, one of the senior leaders, and I realized that I had had conversations with this person repeatedly, where I saw problems around what was happening inside of their team. And when they would ask me, “How are things going?” I would kind of dance around it, and I was talking to other people pretty straightforwardly about the problems that this person was creating for me and what I thought was for the company.

And then, finally, one person said to me, “Hey, what do you think it’s like for that person when you have conversations that aren’t really straightforward?” And in the moment, I realized I’m actually sabotaging this person’s success because I think I might want them to fail. Otherwise, why would I not tell them what I’m seeing if this could cost them their success?

And the reality is, I wanted to be justified. As long as they were behaving in these ways, then I was okay talking about them as a problem, seeing them as a problem. What you do with that, that’s where it can feel risky, but I always finish those conversations where I then step forward and say, “Hey, you know what, I haven’t been telling you the truth about what I’m seeing that’s problematic on your team or in you.” And it was an incredibly healing experience.

And what I saw in that conversation was all the ways that I had been creating problems for this person. So, yeah, it happens. I’ll be honest, Pete, those discoveries happen at least weekly, sometimes daily, where I realize I’m not real with other people, and I need to be in order to do my job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Mitch, I appreciate that vulnerability and sharing a lot, and I think that’s powerful context right there in terms of if you catch yourself doing this, that doesn’t mean you’re very bad and very wrong and “Shame! Shame!” It means, “Hooray, you’re engaging the stuff correctly.” And in so doing, you’ve illuminated a pathway to improving your relationships and your results, and even, I’d say, your very character and the rewarding-ness of life itself, if I may be so bold. And that’s awesome. And so, it’s encouraging to hear you, the almighty managing director of The Arbinger Institute.

Mitch Warner
Oh, no, no, no.

Pete Mockaitis
That you, you too, realize you have these discoveries frequently, and I think that’s just a good message for anyone who starts going down this road, and is like, “Geez, I am a real jerk.” It’s like, “Well, we all kind of are. And it’s nice that you’re identifying specific opportunities for improvement, and you’re going to be on a nice little upward character trajectory with better relationships and results to go with it.”

Mitch Warner
Look, the only thing that qualifies any of us at Arbinger to do the work that we’re engaging is that we see it all the time in our life. It’s just constant. I’ll just say one thing about this process. There’s two ways to go about trying to improve myself. One is a project that’s really about me improving, “I want to be free of the box. I want to be a person who’s not self-deceived.” That’s great, but I just find in my own life that that never actually gets me where I want to be in the relationships that matter to me.

The other way I get there is I just go, “Man, what’s life like for this other person having to live and work with me when I’m like this? What are they trying to accomplish? What are they trying to achieve? What are their needs and challenges and objectives? What’s life like for them?” And then when I focus on that, all of a sudden, I can see clearly, more clearly than I can when it’s just a self-improvement project, the ways that I’ve been getting in other people’s way, and then I just respond. When I do that, things get better, faster than when it’s a self-improvement kind of project. You know what I mean?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, that sense of conviction and what’s life like. And I think that’s a superpower question right there because, to even face that question soberly and honestly, it takes courage. Like, just the thoughts you’re willing to entertain in your own head, it takes some courage, like, “You might not want to do this when driving because the temptation is immediate.”

Like, “Well, they’re wrong!” It’s like, “They deserve it!” It’s almost like there’s a little monster that’s just, like, trying to run. Like, “No, no, no! Don’t look here, don’t look here!” when that is exactly the place that needs to be looked. It’s like, “What’s life like? Oh, it probably kind of sucks. It probably feels very unsettling to be on the receiving end of this day after day after day.”

And then to just internalize what you hath wrought, the pain and destruction that you have brought on to others hurts. But I think that’s a great sign that you’re growing in self-awareness and compassion, and it’s kind of like the immediate precursor to breakthrough.

Mitch Warner
Absolutely. And if you get there, if you find yourself able to begin to see, “Oh, my word, this is what I’ve wrought. This is what life, I think, is like, having to live or work with me.” Go share that with the person. Go tell them. We call this at Arbinger, “Meet to give.” So often we meet to get, “What would it look like if I just met to give?” And I say, not, “Hey, here’s some changes I think I can make.” You should share that. But, first, tell the person what you’re seeing that you weren’t seeing before when you started to think about what life has been like for.

And I’d just be that clear, I’d say, “Hey, you know what? I wonder if we could have a conversation, because I’ve been thinking about what life has probably been like for you having to live or work with me. And, look, I don’t know if this encapsulates all of it. I’m actually curious about what exactly it’s been like from your perspective. But just sitting there, trying to think about what it likely it’s like, I think it’s like this.”

“And as I think about your objectives, I think your objectives are this. I think this is what you’re trying to accomplish. And here’s how I think I’ve been making that harder, and I just got to own that. I am so sorry. But I’m actually curious. Is that right? Are those the challenges? Are those your objectives? Or what would you add?”

Going to someone, and saying, “Hey, tell me how I’ve been a problem for you,” don’t expect anything from that conversation. Don’t expect someone who you’ve had friction with to be like, “Oh, well, great. Actually, this…” They won’t tell you. You haven’t created a safe enough space. You haven’t demonstrated enough interest in figuring out that, and being willing to own it. But when you do that, even if you don’t have it completely right, all of a sudden, they say, “Oh, actually, yeah,” or, “Well, kind of, but it’s actually a little bit more like this.”

And all of a sudden, you start learning and you get curious, and you say, “Okay, tell me more about that.” That process of just owning it, showing that you’ve been doing some thinking, showing that you’re curious about what your impact has been, that does more to change a relationship than probably anything else you can do. I would say that nothing changes in an organization, nothing, until the relationships between the people that have to work together, transform.

And nothing moves the needle more in transforming those relationships than people doing the work to think about their impact, and then going and honestly sharing that and owning it, and then getting curious about how they might have been wrong around that, and finding ways to help. You offer, “Hey, so, well, given all that, I think I could do this. Would that be helpful?” And they’ll say, “Oh, actually, yeah,” or, “Well, it’s a little bit different.”

It’s no different than the conversation you should be having with family members, with siblings, or a partner, or your kids if you’ve got kids. It’s exactly the same. Just try it. Go meet to give with the people in your life and do the work in advance, and then own it honestly. You’ll be amazed at the transformation that that will begin to put in motion.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Being on the receiving end of that is, like, it could be like startling. It’s like the end of “A Christmas Carol,” like, “What happened to Scrooge? This is amazing! A Christmas miracle!” Beautiful stuff. Mitch, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Mitch Warner
No, I just say don’t think that this is some theoretical thing. This isn’t. This is the way that we work when we’re at our very best selves. We’re just honest. We see each other as people. We’re outward. We take responsibility. And to the degree that you can uncover the places where you haven’t been telling the truth about how you’ve been creating challenges you haven’t seen, that move will do more to set you free to do the kinds of things that you want to see in your life that will propel your success in any relationship than, in my experience, any other work that you could do. So, just jump in, take the next step.

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

Mitch Warner
There’s many, but one of the ones that I personally love comes from Abraham Lincoln, when he said, “I don’t like that man. I should probably get to know him better.” I mean, it’s not terribly profound, except it is. If there’s people in my life that I’m resisting or struggling with, what would it mean if I just got to know them better? What would it mean if I just went and met to learn with that person?

I keep that in mind every time I think, “Man, I don’t like that person. I’m bugged,” or, sorry, irritated. “I’m experiencing friction. Maybe I really need to get to know this person better.” And the truth is every time, that’s unlocked something new for me.

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

Mitch Warner
Oh, great question. There was a study that was done by McKinsey a couple years ago. It was this longitudinal study over many organizations that found something that I have found in our work with organizations. What they found is that organizations that identify and address mindset at the outset are four times more likely to succeed at changing whatever they’re trying to change in the organization than are organizations that just bypass mindset change and go directly to behavior change.

When I saw that study, I thought, “Oh, my word, here is independent research that just validates the work that we’re doing every day.” You’ve got to begin with mindset. Going to behavior won’t work because every behavior is an outgrowth of mindset. So, if you can master that, you can change anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mitch Warner
Two that I keep coming back to, one is Insanely Simple. It’s a really powerful view into the work at Apple to get to simplicity, and what that can mean in your organization or in your own work as an individual. What would it look like to get to real simplicity? And the other one is called Creativity, Inc. It’s the Pixar story, and how that team of people was able to unleash creativity by really overcoming ego and seeing each other and their customers as people. We use the Adobe suite constantly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you or The Arbinger Institute shares that really seems to connect and resonate with folks that gets quoted back to you often?

Mitch Warner
When you think about a job, whatever your job is, with an outward mindset, there’s a particular pattern. Sometimes when we think about a job, we think, “Well, here’s all of my tasks, here’s my objectives,” the kind of things you could put on a job description. But when you’re really outward, you don’t start with what you do. You start with what other people need to do, who depend on you in the way you go about your work.

My manager, my customers, my co-workers, my direct reports if I’m a leader, if you start there and just see people, what are they trying to accomplish, then you will find the most innovative, powerful ways to adjust what you’re doing every day to be more helpful to them. And the truth is, there’s nothing that anyone does in an organization that’s not intended or designed to help someone else.

So, when you unlock that, that, “My job is to help other people accomplish their job better, so it’s in my power to figure out the innovative ways to change what I do moment-to-moment to be more helpful,” and then measure that impact. Go check in and say, “Hey, I changed this? Was that helpful? I’m thinking of adjusting this. Would that be helpful?”

You can remember that with the acronym SAM, see others, adjust efforts, measure impact. Employees that do that are the most valuable employees in the company. And so, I’d say that’s the thing people walk away, remembering day to day. The way to stay outward, the way to not get bogged down in self-deception or lies I’m telling myself, is to just orient my work every day, what I’m doing moment-to-moment in an outward way. See others first, then adjust my efforts and measure impact.

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

Mitch Warner
Just come to our website, Arbinger.com. We’d love to have a conversation with you, figure out what are your challenges, what are you trying to accomplish. There are tons of resources there that can help you get started on this journey to living and working with an outward mindset. Or, go online and buy our books. You can go to Amazon. You can go to any other retailer. Pick up Leadership and Self-Deception and see what that unlocks for you in your own work. Wherever you are, whatever you’re trying to accomplish, pick up the book, we’d love to hear from you about it.

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

Mitch Warner
I’d say, going back to what we were talking about, Pete, go and meet to give with the people that you have friction with. Just do that work. If there are people in your life that you’d actually just like to improve the relationship but there hasn’t been friction, I’d say go meet to learn. Just get curious. No other agenda. You could do this today.

Pick someone in your life. It could be someone in your family, it could be someone that you work with every day, and just say, “Hey, I’d love to just learn more about what your needs and your challenges and your objectives are. Would you be willing to just let me get curious about those for a minute? I’d love to learn more.” You’d be amazed at what that would unlock. Meet to give, if there’s been friction. If there are people in your life you just love to have a different relationship with, go and meet to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Mitch, this is powerful stuff. Thank you. I wish you many, many happy days and minimal self-deception.

Mitch Warner
Thanks so much, Pete. It’s been great to be with you.