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1066: How to Thrive When Your Resilience Runs Out with Dr. Tasha Eurich

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Tasha Eurich shares why pushing through sometimes isn’t enough–and how to bounce back stronger than ever.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hidden costs of “grit gaslighting”
  2. How to know when you’ve hit your “resilience ceiling”
  3. The three needs that unlocks the best version of yourself

About Tasha

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and New York Times best-selling author (Shatterproof, Insight, Bankable Leadership).

She helps people thrive in a changing world by becoming the best of who they are and what they do. With a PhD in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Tasha is the principal of The Eurich Group, a boutique consultancy that helps successful executives succeed when the stakes are high.

As an author and sought-after speaker in the self-improvement space, Tasha is a candid yet compassionate voice. Pairing her scientific grounding with 20+ years of experience on the corporate front lines, she reveals the often-surprising secrets to success and fulfillment in the 21st century.

Resources Mentioned

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Tasha Eurich Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Tasha, welcome back.

Tasha Eurich

It’s so great to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, it is great to be chatting with you. I am excited to talk about the insights of your book, Shatterproof. I listened to it in its entirety and then had to get the text as well. And there’s so much good stuff to get into. Maybe, could you orient us a little bit? You’ve mentioned that this is the book that you needed as well, and that’s the first time this has happened for you in your author journey. Can you expand a little bit about the health backstory and how that plays into this?

Tasha Eurich

Yeah, I mean, I think my last book I needed. I needed to become more self-aware, even though I didn’t know it when I first started out. But when I say I needed this book, in the context of becoming shatterproof, it was literally, it felt like a matter of life and death. And I look back and I know that it was.

And basically, the very, very short story is I’ve had a lifetime of mysterious health ailments that nobody could diagnose, that nobody really thought was real, like all the tests would come back normal. And I did my best to manage, resiliently, to push through, to power through, to be the fifth-generation entrepreneur that I am, and suck it up and keep going.

And starting in early 2021, when the world was starting to recover from COVID, I started getting very, very sick. And within a couple of months, I was bed bound. I had 10 out of 10 pain every day. My resting heart rate was 150 beats per minute. I was fainting all the time. I couldn’t remember what I had done 10 minutes ago or even the names of my family or my longtime friends.

And the way I started to cope with this was what I’ve always done, right? Which is, you and I were joking about our resilience spreadsheets. I had my list of practices: gratitude, yoga as much as I could, social support, reaching out, telling my husband at the time what I felt and what I thought, trying to reframe challenges as opportunities, and active coping.

I went to every single specialist under the sun, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was having more anxiety than I’d ever had before. I was more depressed than I ever was before. And, eventually, I had the experience that I eventually uncovered, as a researcher, kind of along right around the same time, where I hit my resilience ceiling, which means I sort of lost all ability to cope, and the tools that I’ve been using my entire life stopped working.

And so, I was in a position where I knew there was an alternative because we had this in our data. Some people are able to take the hardest things that happen to them and become better, stronger, wiser. And finding that answer was so personal to me that, you know, I probably spent longer on it than I would have.

I think I was able to dig into, like, the complexity of the solution and tried to make it simple. So, simplicity on the other side of complexity. But the point there was, I think no matter what all of us are facing, we all need this book. We all need an alternative to resiliently powering through, being mentally tough. There’s a point at which that doesn’t help us anymore. And if we keep trying to do it, it hurts us.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Very well said. You had a lovely quote. It’s ascribed as a Chinese proverb. Can you give it to us about when the wind blows?

Tasha Eurich
“When the winds of change rage, some people build shelters and others build windmills.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that just viscerally paints a picture of what’s unique and fresh and lovely about your work here. Because we just recently had Dr. Aditi Nerurkar on sharing about the five resets, and that’s all very good. Yes, indeed, exercise is great. Breathing is good.

Tasha Eurich
And if it helps, yeah, keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Gratitude journaling and such. Like, these are all great, great uses of things to do to feel better, to overcome some stuff. But that shift from shelter to windmill, I think really, really captures it. Because that’s how it can feel sometimes, like, “Oh, man, I’m getting battered. Well, I got to exercise more. I got to breathe more. I got to do some more yoga.” Yeah.

And as you identify, sometimes that just runs out, it’s like, “Oh,” and that’s a spooky feeling, just like, “Uh-oh.”

Tasha Eurich
It is. It is. And what I’ve found, in talking to high achieving-people, you know, of kind of all walks of life, is it is the most distressing for the strongest people because we look back, and we say, “Gosh, maybe this isn’t even the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” which was the case for me. I’m like, “Why can’t I just show up with my gratitude journal and do my meditation and find some relief?”

And then you start to do something that I called grit gaslighting, right, which is where we blame ourselves for struggling under the weight of the very real difficulty of living in this world in the year 2025.

And so, yeah, I think, especially for high-achieving people like your listeners, part of what I want to do with this conversation is normalize that you are not failing at resilience. You are hitting your resilient ceiling, and everyone has one.

Pete Mockaitis
And, boy, the grit gaslighting is something sometimes I even do to myself, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete. Like, I mean, your business is like stellar. Compare this to, like, seven years ago, man. Like, this is great. You’ve got three wonderful children, a wonderful wife, a nice house.”

It’s like things seem like they’re rocking here, and I have been through some tough stuff, and then, throughout history, it seems like folks had it way tougher. You read about the folks fighting the Revolutionary Wars, like, “Oh, jeez.”

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, “What am I whining about, for God’s sake?”

Pete Mockaitis

And yet, and I don’t want to linger too much here because it’s kind of like the nonfiction, the obligatory nonfiction book intro, “Today is, like, so difficult and unprecedented, and that’s why this book is exactly what you must buy.” So, I mean, in a way, that’s quite obvious.

Tasha Eurich
And yet it is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we could maybe briefly hit us with, “Okay, why could we be okay with being not okay in the current climate? And why are we not just weenie babies who can’t tough it out? Like, the folks fighting the Revolutionary War or dealing with ‘real hardship’”?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, like Marvel characters and business casual, right? So, there is a thing, so I’m a scientist. I am a quantitative scientist at heart. And when I first started this research program five years ago, I wanted to answer that question. Because what I was seeing all around me, and I’ve been coaching CEOs for 20 years, was a completely new level of exhaustion, chaos, stress, demands, and not just professionally, personally, in all of their lives, and in my life, too.

And so, what I wanted to see was, like, empirically, was that true or did it just feel that way? And I stumbled upon this excellent, very, very sort of scientific metric called the World Uncertainty Index. And it uses a variety of factors to come up with every year, basically, and it plots the level of uncertainty.

And what I thought I would find was kind of crazy, like, after 9/11, it went down; went kind of crazy during the Great Recession, maybe went down; COVID, it spiked, went down. But what I found was, like, a pretty consistent high level of uncertainty until 2023, 2024, and it went like this, “Boop!” exponentially higher.

And when I show it, when I get to speak about this book, and I show it to audiences, people’s eyes get wide, and they go, “Oh, it’s not just me.” And so, I think you’re right. There is always the sort of drama of the beginning of a nonfiction book. But, for me, as a scientist, like, it’s real. You’re not imagining it. It’s real.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Uncertainty Index, and it’s intriguing. So, 2023, 2024, it doesn’t seem like anything happened. Or, am I overlooking something that happened?

Tasha Eurich
Well, it’s worth going to their website to look. It really gets crazy this year, which is interesting, right?

Pete Mockaitis
With AI, that’s kind of wild.

Tasha Eurich
AI is pretty wild. In the business world or organizations, a lot of sectors are being disrupted that people never thought would be disrupted because of a lot of external factors, and the effects of COVID are still being felt. I think all of that together, along with just the pace of life. Like, think about right now, at this moment, the number of people that need something from you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, geez, I don’t want to.

Tasha Eurich
Right? Like, if I think about that too hard, I start to flip out because it’s like, “Oh, well, this thing I was supposed to have to them a month ago, and this other thing.” And so, even something as “simple” as the cumulative demands, they don’t stop. Like, nobody’s saying, “Well, I’m going to just really need all this stuff from you, and then I’ll go away, and you can go on vacation for three weeks.” So, that’s the piece of it, is the chronic compounding stress across multiple areas of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That really gets me. And I’m thinking about the email inbox, which I struggle with. My buddy, Brent, shout out, listener, sent me one of those Someecards, it said, “Congratulations on hitting inbox zero. Oh, sorry about that.”

Tasha Eurich
Brent for the win. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s how it is, like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, at this very moment, I am caught up. Oh!” And it lasted about nine   seconds.

Tasha Eurich
That is such a great example of this, right? It’s, like, this is Sisyphean, for anybody who’s into philosophy. We’re pushing that boulder up and the boulder rolls right down, and we’re back to zero.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess we got that in terms of modern humans. The folks who had their own challenges of poverty, starvation, war, extreme challenges, no doubt that is brutal. We, however, have our own flavor of brutality being waged upon us that they did not. And it’s so unprecedentedly high levels of uncertainty. And you mentioned in your book that we humans have a real hard time with a lot of uncertainty. What’s that about?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, human beings were not designed for the world that we live in right now. If you think about it, our ancestors were, you know, their lives were difficult. They’re sort of hunting and gathering. They don’t have the comforts that we have now. But they were punctuated by danger, but things would sort of go back to normal.

So, you imagine you’re out hunting, and you see a tiger, and your stress system goes crazy, your cortisol goes up, all of your stress hormones, your fight or flight, and you’re able to escape the tiger. And then you go on with your day, and you go back home, and you have a nice night by the campfire. But the way that we are living now is our bodies actually are built to perceive a passive-aggressive email from our boss, for example, as that tiger running towards us.

And then if you multiply that email with all of the other emails just in your inbox, we have stress hormones coursing through our bodies all the time. So, we were sort of designed to have that danger, go back to normal, and our bodies can restore themselves. But what I say in the book is living in perpetual fight or flight mode isn’t just stressful, it drains the very resources we need to cope with stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s brutal. So, the traditional resilience practices are useful. They have their place and they do some things, and yet they can run out. And you reveal there is another path for us. What’s the path?

Tasha Eurich
So, the best way to think about it is to contrast it with resilience, okay? So, resilience is about putting our heads down, powering through so that we can bounce back. And that’s really important. So, resilience is the capacity to bounce back after hard things. That’s kind of the agreed upon consensus in, at least, for researchers.

What becoming shatterproof means is proactively channeling adversity to grow forward. And we don’t do that by powering through our pain. We do it actually by harnessing the broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And there’s a great analogy, like conceptually, and we’ll talk about what that looks like practically, but, conceptually, have you ever heard of the Japanese art of Kintsugi?

Pete Mockaitis
I have a couple of times. Why don’t you paint the picture?

Tasha Eurich

Yeah, so it’s this beautiful art form where the artist repairs a broken piece of, usually, it’s like pottery or ceramic, with lacquer and precious metal. It’s usually gold. And, basically, like, mending broken objects with precious metal. What that does is it creates a whole new object that is stronger at its broken places.

And the question I always ask is, like, “Instead of powering through our pain and our cracks and our breaking points, what if those became fodder for us to identify what in our environment is tripping us up?” to understand, “What are the needs that we have that are going unmet? What are the self-limiting patterns that we’re showing up with that are making things worse for ourselves? And then how can we actually use that opportunity to pivot?”

And not change everything about who we are, but to try to find new ways of getting our needs met? That’s the idea, is kind of leaning into those cracks, not in a way where we’re pain shopping or anything of that nature, but to lean into those cracks as an opportunity for, you know, I say it’s self-awareness walking.

It’s finding those moments in our worst times where we can find unique insight about ourselves, how we interact with our environment, how we make our choices, how we live our life, so that we can access that best version of ourselves. And I think that’s what we all do, right?

All we want is to be happy and to enjoy our lives, and to find that version of us that we know is there, but that feels like it’s being, you know, it’s handcuffed to a furnace somewhere, and, like, locked up because of all the chaos that can’t come out.

So, that’s kind of the contrast between resilience and shatterproof is don’t just grit your teeth and push through to gain back a status quo that probably wasn’t that good anyway. Use this as fodder for self-examination and self-improvement. And that’s the contrast I make is it’s bouncing back for resilience. When you’re shatterproof, you grow forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say needs, you’ve identified the three to thrive. Can you share what are these needs? And how, of all the needs we might have, Tasha, do we know these are the three to thrive?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. Well, the good news is it is not I who has uncovered these needs. It is hundreds of researchers over more than a half century that have been researching this theory, that it’s actually my favorite theory in psychology. It always has been, and I’ve worked with it, gosh, 20 more years ago in grad school. It’s dating me. It’s called self-determination theory.

And the theory itself asks a really simple question that I think is so unbelievably practical, it’s, “What brings out the best in humans? And what brings out the beast in humans?” And what they’ve identified, and the main researchers are Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, is that there are three biologically programmed psychological needs that every single human existing on earth is programmed to seek.

I’ll tell you what they are, and then I’ll tell you what happens when we get them and when we don’t get them. So, the needs are, number one is confidence, and that’s the need to feel like we’re doing well and we’re getting better. We’re kind of showing up. We’re meeting challenges.

The second is choice. And what that’s about is feeling a sense of agency in our lives, as well as authenticity, “I can be who I am. I can be centered around my values. I don’t have to pretend or fake.” The third need is connection. And that’s a sense that we belong, and that we have close and mutually supportive relationships.

And what they found, these researchers in self-determination theory, is when these three needs are met, we are the best version of ourselves. No matter what is happening in our lives, no matter what fresh chaos is erupting around us, we can rise to the occasion.

But when any one of these needs are, especially, actively frustrated, not just unmet, but being frustrated by the situation we’re in, that’s what brings out the worst version of ourselves, the reactive version, the person that falls back into comfortable but self-limiting habits in the face of these sorts of triggers all around us.

And so, it’s so interesting because, when I was doing this research, it took me a couple of years. It took our research team of 12 people a couple of years to finally figure out that that was what separated shatterproof people from everyone else, was this idea that, “If I’m not getting my needs met in my environment, I need to find new ways of crafting them myself.”

And it sounds so simple. But if you think about the world we live in, that’s sometimes cast as selfish, right? Like, “Well, why are you meeting your own needs when everybody needs something from you?” And it’s the opposite, right? When our biologically programmed psychological needs are met, we become better for ourselves and better for everyone. We can be a better spouse, a better parent, a better employee, a better leader.

So, I think we sort of get it wrong. It’s like the idea that, “I’ll finally be happy when…” It’s like, “I can finally focus on my needs when…” But you have to reverse the equation. That’s where you have to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so powerful, and I find it reassuring. It took y’all a couple of years to get into it. It’s because I think that many of us have probably dealt with that question, like, “Man, what’s my deal? Like, why can’t I just be awesome like I was last year or whenever?”

Tasha Eurich

Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it’s sort of like mysterious. And yet, when you just look very clearly, it’s like, “All right. Well, let’s see. Well, how well are my needs, these needs being met – my needs for confidence, my needs for choice, my needs for connection.” It’s, like, “Oh, well, that’s my deal. That is my deal. There it is, right there.”

Okay. And so then, I would love to hear, within the research, because I’ve heard different typologies for needs. So, we got Forrest Hanson and his resilience book, talking about safety, satisfaction, and connection. So, I see some overlap. And I remember my teenage idol, Tony Robbins, had a rundown of, like, six. Like, certainty, uncertainty, significance.

So, could you maybe expand a bit about, so self-determination theory, what’s some of the most compelling evidence that, “Yup, these are the three as opposed to not nine, not maybe this other thing over here. But, no, no, focus on these three”?

Tasha Eurich

So, I want to differentiate between self-determination theory and every other theory of human needs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tasha Eurich
Self-determination theory. The first paper was published the year I was born, 1980. And if you go to Google Scholar, and you type in self-determination theory, it is article after article after article where, and it’s, actually, it’s not even a theory. They call it a meta theory.

There are so many facets to it that have been rigorously empirically supported that it sort of rises above any theory of needs as a meta theory. So, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Everybody sees that as like the end all, be all, of human needs. There is almost no empirical research to back that up. So, it’s one thing to have a model. It’s another thing to have 50-plus years of rigorous empirical research being done by hundreds and hundreds of well-respected academicians.

And from my standpoint, there’s just no comparison. And, again, it doesn’t mean that we can’t pull from multiple theories. But I think about, you know, I talk about this in the book, a CEO I was coaching as I was writing the book, was leading his company through this massive organizational transformation. He and his wife were caring for aging parents. There was so much going on, and he didn’t have a sense of confidence.

His board was at his throat all the time. His employees were unhappy. Everyone was just saying, like, “Why can’t you be doing this better?” He had very little choice, which is strange as a CEO, but he was constrained by so many things. He was constrained by the health challenges that he was helping to manage.

And then connection, you know, it’s lonely at the top. It’s shockingly lonely. And he would always say, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” and I knew he wasn’t fine. And one day, he called me and, he was like, “Guess what happened? I just got on a call with my team and, like, through the most minor thing that just happened, I started screaming at them. So, I guess I’m not fine, right? I guess I’m not fine.”

And he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” And my response is the response that I would give all of your listeners and that I try to remember myself, which is, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You are a human being whose biologically programmed needs are under threat. And what that’s telling your body is you’re being chased by a tiger.”

So, the good news is there are ways to move through that. But the way, one way to not move through that is to resiliently power through.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. You mentioned Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” And you mentioned in Nietzsche’s, in fact, very own life, he disproved that shortly after writing it. Can you tell us that tale? And then unpack, well, what does determine whether or not an injury makes us stronger or weaker?

Tasha Eurich
I love that question. It really gets to the heart of it. So, this is probably my favorite story in the book. Nietzsche, what I tried to do is trace that expression, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” as early as I possibly could. And I found in one of his books that was published in the late 1800s

And so, he published “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” A month later, he was strolling through a square in Turin, and he came across a horrible scene, a man beating a horse. And for some reason, something snapped in Nietzsche at that moment. Something just snapped. He started hysterically crying. He rushed over.

He threw his arms around the horse. People started gathering. The crowd started gathering. The police were called. Someone was sent to, like, escort him home. And the next day, he was taken to what they called, at the time, an asylum and basically went mad, and he never emerged again. So, what I think is so powerful about that story is saying things, saying things that sound right or that sound good, doesn’t always make them true.

And I think we have to start pressure testing some of this commonly held wisdom about navigating adversity, “Does it sound good or is it actually the right advice?” And I think that, to answer the second part of your question, if I boil it down, the difference between resilient people and shatterproof people, the most fundamental difference is instead of powering through, they use that opportunity to proactively reinvent themselves.

In other words, pausing, observing, looking at some of the things within themselves that might not be the best things, and then intentionally pivoting to find, as we were talking about, new ways of meeting our needs. But I think it’s this orientation of, you know, “There’s got to be a better way. And even if I don’t know what it is, I’m going to set out on this path.”

And, by the way, I give four steps of the shatterproof roadmap in the book, “I’m going to set out on this path to build a better me and what might be one of my worst moments.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love bettering here at How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Tasha Eurich
Better is great.

Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned that personal growth, self-betterment, is just about the tops, a way that we can find positive psychological outcomes. Can you expand on that?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, I talk about, I call it the shatterproof six. And there, in the book, is a list of empirically supported goals that if we start however small, like whatever small step we take, but if we start to pursue them, we’ll meet our deepest psychological needs. Those three to thrive needs that we talked about.

And self-development is one of them. Especially, if our need for confidence is being frustrated, if we commit to personal growth, to expanding our horizons, what the research in self-determination theory shows us is, just by pursuing that goal and by asking, “What’s one step I can take today to get a little bit closer to feeling confident and, like, the best version of myself?” that feeds our needs no matter what’s happening in the situation around us.

And I don’t say that lightly. There’s been research showing that three to thrive need satisfaction works for people who are living in extreme poverty or who are refugees. There’s one really compelling study that was done with Syrian refugees, that showed that a really simple intervention where they pursue these sorts of need-based goals, their entire lives get better. And not in a sort of toxic positivity way, but you start to feel real fulfillment that feeds you during these tough times.

Pete Mockaitis

So, let’s walk us through this four-part process.

Tasha Eurich
So, the first step is to probe your pain. And what that means, in a nutshell, is to pause and say, “Pushing through my pain or avoiding it is going to give me temporary relief, but there’s two problems.”

Number one is this thing researchers have called negativity rebounds, which means that when we sort of deny the emotional reality that we’re experiencing, especially when it’s really negative, we’re okay for a minute, and then it comes back in full force. So, that’s the first problem.

The second problem with not paying attention to our pain is we’re missing really valuable data, right? So, the question to ask is, well, there’s two. The first is, “In the last week, what are the negative emotions that I’ve been experiencing that are kind of higher than my baseline? So, maybe I’ve been feeling a lot more shame recently, or I’ve felt anger, or I felt sadness.”

And then the second question is, “What is that pain trying to tell me?” So, for me in my health journey, I sort of, I hit my resilience ceiling, I gave up for a couple months, it was not pretty. But one day, I kind of woke up and I started asking myself this question, like, “What am I feeling? I’m feeling helpless. I’m feeling powerless.”

And what I realized was my pain is trying to tell me that I have totally lost control over my life, right? There’s no cavalry that’s going to come save me. I have to save myself. So, that leads us to the second step, which there’s so much richness to this, but again, I’m going to try to boil it down, which is trace our triggers.

So, we look internally first at our pain. Then the next thing we have to do is say, “Okay, what is happening in the world around me that is sort of creating this internal state?” And sometimes we don’t help, but almost always there’s going to be some kind of external trigger. So, it might be, and there’s different triggers for different need frustration.

Someone might have criticized us, hurts our confidence. We might have a micromanaging boss, which hurts our choice. We might have recently ended a relationship, which kills our connection. And so, once we have that trigger, we’re not done. We don’t just get to blame it on everything external. We have to go back inside and say, “Okay, what need is that trigger getting in the way of?”

So, for me, what I realized was the trigger was sort of just being pushed through this healthcare system that is designed for patient volume and not patient helping, right, and being told over and over that what I was experiencing wasn’t real. And that was triggering my choice need. I was massively undernourished in the choice department, and I wasn’t helping myself.

So, that’s actually what leads us to step three, which is to spot your shadows. What happens in the face of triggers, what happens in the face of need frustration, is we have these instinctive responses that feel helpful, but that are actually pushing us further and further away from our need. So, in my example, I was, and I talk about different ways these shadows can show up in the book, but just as an example, I was giving up.

So, there’s some of them that are really counterintuitive. Like, “Why would I, when I’m totally powerless, when by the way, I make a living bossing around CEOs, why would I give up? It makes no sense.” But what I’m doing there is sort of, like, assuming that I’m not going to be able to fix it, and conserving energy, and saying, “I’m not a doctor, I can’t diagnose my rare disease, so I’m just going to sort of go along to get along.”

But what that shadow was doing was leading me further away from a solution. So, the question I always tell people to ask if you’re trying to spot your shadows is, “How is my behavior right now different from when I’m at my best?” And the example that I just gave is a good one, of like, “Normally I do this, but right now I’m doing this.”

So, that brings us to step four, which is pick your pivot. Pivoting means proactively moving away from these familiar shadows that make us feel better, and towards new paths to need fulfillment. And we do that through something called need crafting. And the good news, for step four, is we sort of already talked about this, right? These shatterproof six or the goals, where if we say, for me, like as an example, instead of letting myself give up, my number one goal in life is maximizing my physical health.

And that’s one of the goals that’s been shown that if we pursue, we will have greater need fulfillment, specifically in this case with choice. So, what did I start to do? I changed the way I was showing up. I changed the way I was engaging with doctors. I spent 30 minutes, this is pre-ChatGPT, I spent 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases.

And, eventually, it took me a minute, a couple months, but then I had a list of these are the diseases that I might have. And then I finally had like the one that I knew I had, and I started changing the way I engaged in doctor’s appointments. I would show up with a summary, with a list of objectives. And they would open their mouth and I would say, “Thank you so much for being a participant in my care. Here’s what I would like to accomplish in this appointment.”

And some of them didn’t like it and I had to find new doctors, but I had to become the CEO of my medical journey. And the beauty of this process, just to kind of put a period on the end of a sentence, is, it wasn’t right away, because I had to find the right specialist, but within a few months, I finally had the diagnosis that I knew that I had through my research, which is something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disease where your body can’t produce the two proteins that are in every system of your body.

And so, it leads to these really kind of unrelated, confusing symptoms that usually show up as normal in diagnostics. And I can say with 100% certainty, that if I had not discovered this in our research, I certainly wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I’d be here at all. And if I was here, I would be a shadow of my former self.

And so, when I tell people this works, there is no better way for me to share that than to say, “You know, I didn’t sort of find this as a dispassionate researcher. I found it as a human being whose life felt like it depended on these solutions.” So, that, my friend, is the shatterproof roadmap.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful.

Tasha Eurich
So, there are six kinds of overall objectives. And then, for each of them, there’s a couple of options. So, the first is to rise. And that is making myself better. We already talked about self-development. That’s a perfect example of a shatterproof goal. And those, again, are largely geared towards building confidence.

The second kind of category is to flourish. And that’s making my life better. The health goal that I mentioned is in that category. Something as simple as joy, like rediscovering the love of the game by immersing myself in something I like to do. The third is to activate. Oh, and by the way, sorry, flourish mainly focuses on rebuilding choice, as does the third, which is activate, and that’s kind of making things happen around us.

And I’ll give a couple of examples, because this kind of has different flavors. One of them is advocacy, right, speaking up for myself, making my needs known. Another one is agency, making my own choices, being my own person.

Then we’ve got another choice-based aim, which is to align. And that’s kind of making authentic choices. The best example of a goal under this is authenticity. It’s not going along to get along. It’s not sort of pretending to be something that I’m not. It’s expressing my values and showing up as who I really am.

And then the last two shift over to connection. So, if your connection is thwarted, you might decide to relate, which means that you’re making meaningful connections. I’ll give you a couple examples under this because I think it’s so rich.

One is closeness. So, that’s kind of deepening close relationships by giving and getting support. It might be reactivating a connection that you’ve kind of let slide because of your busy, stressed out, striver lifestyle. Or you might choose forgiveness. Letting go of old grudges, not for them, but for my own wellbeing.

And then another one I really like under this is spirituality. Whatever that looks like to you, religious or not religious, connecting to something greater than ourselves is kind of a powerful but underutilized way of maximizing connection.

The sixth, and final shatterproof kind of category, is contribute, making the world better. And when we engage in service, we’re actually powerfully meeting all three needs. So, you think about Adam Grant’s work when he wrote Give and Take, his first kind of big mega hit book.

There is so much behind that, where when we give, when we contribute to the greater good, when we try to make positive change, it’s satisfying our deepest fundamental human needs. So, when we give, we get. And I think that’s why it’s the one objective that meets all three needs.

Pete Mockaitis
And is it your recommendation that we pick a single goal?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. My goodness, yes. Sometimes people are shocked when I tell them that, in my job of coaching CEOs, we pick one behavior to work on, one high-impact behavior for an entire year. And everyone’s like, “Well, I mean, could that possibly be helpful? Why don’t you do more?” And the reason is, in my experience, if we have any more than one thing we’re trying to focus on developmentally, we’re not going to do it.

I’m coaching a CFO right now who brought me his development plan that we were going to kind of blow up and rethink, and he’s like, “It has five components.” And I covered up the paper, and I said, “Name them.” He couldn’t name a single one. And we both laughed. We said, “Uh-oh.” So, that’s why making your growth and development easy isn’t a crime. It’s a present to your future self.

So, one shatterproof goal, even break it down to one shatterproof habit. Like, for me, it was those 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases. Start there. Keep it something that you can regularly focus on. And that’s something that you go crazy on for a week and then get so overwhelmed that it becomes the last thing on your list.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some more examples of a single behavior of a senior executive for a whole year, just so I get a sense for the scope of a “behavior”?

Tasha Eurich
So, I’ll give you one from someone I just got off the phone with who is doing an amazing job. He’s killing it. His CEO is thrilled, which is improve collaboration with open-mindedness and empathy.

And sometimes it’s even simpler than that. Sometimes it’s, “Listen better.” But if you think about it, if you’re a CEO and you’re not very good at listening and, all of a sudden, you start listening to people, the ripple effects are endless, right? So, I think it’s counterintuitive, but as long as you’re picking something that, in this case, like, your stakeholders are saying is limiting you, it can have a bigger impact than we think.

And I think we just try to overcomplicate development because we’re all type A overachievers, but that’s not how breakthroughs happen, in my experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just to follow this through a little bit more, if we did pick listen better or whatever, what might that mean in terms of, is it a daily behavior that we settle in on next or what’s the very next step?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, so this is kind of getting away from the shatterproof framework, but I think this is a great way of operationalizing it. Usually, what we’ll do is we’ll come up with that development goal, and then we’ll have an action plan that is 10 to 12 specific behavioral elements that they’re going to try to do every day.

So, it might be specific to a certain relationship. It might be how to show up in meetings. Like, the executive I just mentioned, his goal of improving collaboration is asking a question before he provides his opinion. Like, that level of specificity. Or, “Making sure that I find something to agree with before I disagree with someone.” So, it’s 10 to 12 things like that, and then we actually track them.

Most of my clients have a checklist every day. And this is from the Marshall Goldsmith School, “Did I do my best to listen before I talk?” “Did I do my best to amplify others’ contributions?” So, yeah, breaking it down into that level of detail, I think is, again, it feels tedious. It feels something. But that’s how change happens.

And the data are there, like, that process on its own. There’s a reason I have a money back guarantee. If I’m coaching a senior executive and there isn’t quantitative improvement in their targeted behavior as rated by their stakeholders, theoretically, never had to do it, they get their money back. So, that is how serious I am about this process and how much it works.

I think there’s going to come a day when it’s going to happen, right? And that’s what it’s going to be, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years now.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, so then, when we were talking about the operationalizing, so if we’re zeroing in, it’s like, “Okay, betterment is the thing.” And then I’ll maybe take another step of specificity into, it could be fitness, it could be listening. You sort of, then, identify a sort of specific daily thing that you’re going to be getting after.

Tasha Eurich
That’s it. And it is not a crime to make it simple, easy, and fast. For me, 30 minutes a day, that’s all I had to do. And I talk about other examples in the book of people who maybe had a little bit more, like, resources mentally and physically at the time. Like, I talk about one woman who had five sort of daily habits, but they were really simple.

It was, like, “Wake up.” She had just gotten out of a really toxic marriage. And one of the things on her list was, “Wake up every day, grateful for the freedom that I now have,” right? Or, “Make sure I ping one or both of my sons and tell them how much I love them.” And all these things to kind of reconnect with herself and her life beyond her ex. I think if we keep it simple, it’s even easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And that’s just the magic. I’m thinking now about the 80/20 Rule, in general. So, in terms of, if we have in the entire universe of what’s your malfunction, what’s your deal in life, it’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, hey, it’s within the zone of the psychological needs of confidence, choice, or connection.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re already eliminated a lot of noise.”

Tasha Eurich
We have.

Pete Mockaitis
But even further, we got, “Okay, hey, it’s choice. Choice is the thing.” And then we can get even, even further, it’s like, “By golly, I’m going to be renovating this house I hate,” or whatever.

Tasha Eurich
Whatever, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And that, in fact, can become transformational.

Tasha Eurich
Over time, like, think about it. If you get one percent closer every day to a full sense of confidence or choice or connection, and if you do that most days, I’m a realist, not all days, most days, you’re going to see some pretty significant improvement in a shorter amount of time than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic! Well, Tasha, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Tasha Eurich
Oh, one thing that I want to mention, because it’s very cool and it’s in service for your listeners, is if anybody is curious about that idea of my resilience ceiling and how close am I to my resilience ceiling, for the launch of Shatterproof, we put together, it’s a really cool tool. It takes about five minutes. It’s an online survey.

You actually have the option of sending it to someone who knows you well, if you want their perspective on how you are kind of showing up, and you get a report back showing you your overall, like, how close you are. You get dimension scores. You get tools. So, if anybody wants to take that, I’m sure you’ll put it in your show notes, but it’s totally free, no strings attached. It’s Resilience-Quiz.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now can you share a favorite quote that you find inspiring?

Tasha Eurich

“Whatever you do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And I love this quote so much by Goethe, it is tattooed on my body. So, that’s my favorite quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Tasha Eurich
Well, I would go, just because it’s fresh in my mind, but that study that I talked about with Syrian refugees and need crafting, this whole idea of crafting our own needs is so new in the research. It took a brilliant young woman named Nele Laporte to kind of introduce it in 2019. But there’s so much promising research around that. I just think it’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Tasha Eurich
I would say nonfiction is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals. And I would say fiction, without question, number one, The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool?

Tasha Eurich
Favorite tool, ooh, we didn’t talk about this, the 222 tool. So, when you are super overwhelmed, you feel like you’re hitting your resilience ceiling, you take a deliberate time out. You ask yourself, “What do I need in the next two minutes, two hours, and two days?” So, the two minutes is psychological first aid. It’s breathing. It’s splashing cold water on your face. It’s saying out loud, like, “I am struggling and I feel overwhelmed.”

Two hours is something that is just for you, something that makes you happy, that relieves the pressure a little bit. Netflix marathon, happy hour with a friend, going to the gym. Two days is a deliberate pause on ruminating, analyzing, and problem-solving, as much as possible, with the thing that’s pushed you to this point.

I use this tool all the time and what I find is, because our subconscious mind is still working on it, but if we give ourselves the space to just relax and be, when we come back to it, not only have we helped a little bit with our need satisfaction, we usually have a better perspective on the problem. So, again, the 222 method, I use a shockingly large amount of days. I think I’m on, like, three by now, so. yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tasha Eurich

My favorite habit is drinking water.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that people really resonate with, they respond to, they retweet in your speeches and such?

Tasha Eurich

Yeah, the grit gaslighting idea seems to be really resonating with people. It’s giving language and permission to experience something that, I think, we shame ourselves for.

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

Tasha Eurich
Oh, goodness, I’m everywhere. TashaEurich.com. Every social media. I’m trying to build my Instagram, so if anybody wants to come hop on there with me, that would be amazing. But, yes, very findable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a final challenge or call to action for someone looking to become awesome at their job?

Tasha Eurich
Two-part question, “What would the best version of you do? And what if you could be you, but better?”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Tasha, thank you. This was fantastic.

Tasha Eurich
Thank you so much. Great to be here again with you.

1064: Timeless Wisdom for Greater Success and and Meaning in Work–According to the Torah–with Mark Gerson

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Mark Gerson shares timeless, practical insights about work–sourced from the Bible and supported by modern social science.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why Bible has helpful gems for folks from all religion–or lack thereof
  2. The one question that leads to greater meaning
  3. The optimal number of hours to work in a week

About Mark

Mark Gerson, a New York–based entrepreneur and philanthropist, is the cofounder of Gerson Lehrman Group, 3I Members, United Hatzalah of Israel, and African Mission Healthcare—where he and his wife, Rabbi Erica Gerson, made the largest gift ever to Christian medical missionaries. 

A graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School, Mark is the author of the national bestseller The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life. Mark’s articles and essays on subjects ranging from Frank Sinatra to the biblical Jonah to the Torah and science of clothing have been published in The New Republic, USA Today, Commentary, and Christian Broadcast Network. Mark lives with his wife and their four children.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Mark Gerson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome!

Mark Gerson
Pete, great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’ve been so excited to have this conversation with you for a while. One of my good friends and mentors, Mawi Asgedom, episode one guest, said you were one of the most unique, interesting people he has met in his life.

Mark Gerson
That’s so nice. Wow! I would say the same thing about him. Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
So, no pressure, Mark, we’re just expecting uniquely interesting things to be falling out of your mouth, nonstop here.

Mark Gerson
We’ll see.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom here, and you’ve got an interesting book title that’s a little different than some of the book titles we’ve had on the show and I just want to set the stage a bit. Religiously speaking, our listeners come from all sorts of backgrounds – Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, agnostics, the so-called nones from the Pew Research folks.

And you’ve got a provocative title, God Was Right: How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah Is True. Can you set the stage for us? Is the goal of this book to convert folks to Judaism?

Mark Gerson
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, what are we doing here?

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, the first question to ask is, “What is the Torah?” So, the Torah is the first five books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, what’s called The Five Books of Moses. What Christians call the Old Testament, we call the Torah, we Jews, or The Five Books of Moses. And then you have to ask, “What is the genre of the Torah? What kind of book is the Torah?” And that’s the first question you have to ask approaching any text.

If you’re reading a book of science fiction, and you think it’s science, you’ll say it’s not true, but then the answer is, “No, no, no, you’re reading science fiction. It’s not meant to be science.” So, the first thing we got to do is to get the genre right. What kind of book is the Torah? What kind of book is the Bible? The Bible, and I go in the book as to why it’s not the following things.

It’s not a history book. It’s not a science book. It’s not a cookbook. It’s exactly what Moses says in Deuteronomy 29 it is, it’s a guidebook. Moses says in Deuteronomy, “This book is for your benefit.” The Bible should not be in the religion section of bookstores. It should be in the self-help section of bookstores because it gives intensely practical guidance for everybody about how to live better lives, how to make better decisions, how to find meaning, how to find purpose, how to be healthy, how to negotiate any kind of challenges facing you, how to approach any kind of opportunity that you seek.

The Bible is the most relevant, eternally practical guidebook ever written. So, whatever anyone is thinking about, the Bible is likely to have the answer. And the Bible makes, in the course of being a guidebook, it makes hundreds, maybe thousands of psychological claims, sociological claims, all of which have intensely practical relevance to our daily lives in 2025, regardless of what faith tradition we come from.

And so, what I do in God Was Right, in several dozen chapters, on several dozen subjects, I go through, “Here’s what the Bible says. Here’s what modern social science says,” and then, “Do we see if they line up?” And they always do. And the reason why I approached it that way is because, for 3,000 years, people have asked, “Is the Torah true?”

And until now, we’ve only had faith and experience to go by. But in the 21st century, social scientists have, usually without knowing it, asked the same questions that the Biblical authors asked. So, now we can assess, with social scientific certitude, “Is the Bible true? Is it false? Or is it just a good book that’s right some places, wrong other places?”

And what I’ve discovered, in the course of doing this research, is that the Bible is true on every subject it touches, and it touches every subject relevant to our lives today.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Mark, thank you. Well, I just want to set the scene, set the stage, in that folks of all stripes can appreciate this, and if listeners are thinking, “Well, hey, this book seems to be doing it for people for thousands of years, and some folks are finding wisdom in it to this day, and Mark has some extra layers, then there’s richness to be enjoyed here in this conversation.”

And I love it, like you’ve got dozens of chapters in 700 pages unpacking this with fun titles, like, “Why the Israelites Hated the Perfect Food,” and “IKEA Succeeds the Torah and Science of Effort,” so it’s really fun to dig into these pieces. So, lay it on us, Mark, here, we’re all about being awesome at our jobs, why don’t we dig into maybe three insights or so that are really rich?

And if I may be choosy to prioritize, I’d like you to think through what are some of the most transformational insights that can really just be game-changing for a career, and yet are often overlooked? They’re not common practice, so they’re rare but powerful and they point to this ancient wisdom text. No pressure, Mark, but lay it on us.

Mark Gerson
So, let’s just talk about one example. Let’s talk about the Biblical Joseph. So, Joseph is the only person in the Bible who’s called a success.

So, Joseph has the most amazing career of anybody in the Bible. He goes from being an arrogant young man, and then he’s sold into slavery by his brothers, he becomes a slave, then he becomes a prisoner, and then he rises to become the number two man in Egypt, and the number two man in the world. So, he has an incredible career, and he’s the only person called a success.

So, then we have to ask, “When is he called a success?” He’s not called a success when he’s the number two man in Egypt, the pharaoh’s right-hand man. He’s called a success when he’s a slave in the home of Potiphar, and when he’s a prisoner in pharaoh’s jail. So, he achieved success in both these places. And the text goes through, not only that he’s called a success but that he receives promotions in both places.

He goes from being a lowly slave to the head slave. He goes from being a lowly prisoner to the head prisoner. He’s a success. He gets promotions. He achieves success in the same way that we would look at success. So, then we have to ask, “How does he achieve success?” So, what Joseph is, is the God-laden man in the Bible. He talks about God all the time.

So, what does that tell us? That tells us that Joseph is always finding meaning in his work. And when he’s always finding meaning in his work, when he thinks that God is with him everywhere, then he becomes a success. Okay, so how do we think about that in 21st century context? Well, in the 21st century, social scientists have identified a term called job crafting.

So, what is job crafting? Well, a great example of it was, and this story is attributed to both President Kennedy and President Johnson, but one of them visited the NASA headquarters, and they noticed how clean the premises were and they complimented the custodian on what a good job he was doing cleaning the floors.

And the custodian said, “I’m not cleaning the floors. I’m putting a man on the moon.” We see the same thing in a 2001 study from the University of Pennsylvania about hospital custodians, where certain hospital custodians view their jobs as cleaning the rooms, and other hospital custodians view the same job as creating a healthy healing environment for patients.

The people who find meaning in their work, the custodians who view their job as creating a healthy and healing environment for patients, end up getting far more promotions, making far more money than those who don’t. So, what does this teach us? It teaches us that success is not defined by the job you have but how well you do in that job.

So, Joseph is a success as a slave and as a prisoner, but he does very well in those jobs, therefore, he’s called a success. And by the virtue of being successful, he gets promotions. And what we see is exactly the same thing playing out in our day, it’s that those who find meaning in their work, those who can tell themselves a story about how they’re an integral part of creating something important, they get promotions and they make more money than those who don’t.

That’s job crafting. Joseph is the first job crafter. Now there’s a whole social science literature about it.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Mark, I like that a lot. We had Gary Burnison on the show, who’s the CEO of Korn Ferry, and I think, “Well, this guy probably knows a thing or two about advancement in career.” And I go back to this quote all the time, and he says, “I think you have to first start with purpose and start with happiness, because, if you’ve got that purpose and happiness, you’re probably motivated. If you’re motivated, you’re probably going to outperform and love what you’re doing.” And I think that that just resonates deeply right there.

Mark Gerson
Absolutely. The studies on job crafting just keeps showing how beneficial it is for one’s career. There was an analysis in 2019 of 122 independent studies that found that job crafting was associated with improved job performance, job satisfaction, and reduced burnout. And that’s in addition to the promotions and the financial benefits that accrue to people who job-craft.

So, I think what Gary said is exactly right, people who find meaning and purpose in their job, and people can find meaning and purpose in every job, because whatever job someone has is contributing to the production of a good or service that’s valued by others who are willing to part with their money for it.

So, there’s satisfaction, there’s meaning, there’s purpose to be found in every job. And people who find that meaning and purpose in their job, people who job-craft, just like the Biblical Joseph, end up getting that promotion and enjoying successful careers.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And what you described are some roles that seem like they wouldn’t be the most fun or rewarding in terms of janitorial services or, in Joseph’s case, you know, being literally a slave.

Mark Gerson
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet they’re bringing this purpose, this perspective. When you say job crafting, how does one do that in practice?

Mark Gerson
So, one does it in practice by, first, asking oneself, “What job am I in?” And then recognizing that every job has an important function and a crucial purpose. And then they have to articulate what that purpose is. So, the perfect example, I think, is of the hospital custodian from the University of Pennsylvania study. Hospital custodians are creating a healthy, safe, and healing environment for their patients. All they have to do is tell themselves the truth. They’re doing that.

And by telling themselves that truth, they’re setting themselves up for not only to be awesome at their job, but to be successful in the ways that we conventionally define success. So, no matter what job somebody has, the person with the job should think, “What purpose am I serving? What function am I realizing?” And by asking those questions and giving the very truthful answers that will come out of those questions, they’re job crafting and they’re setting themselves up for success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, just to get some reps in, could you share, let’s say someone works in the finance function of a content streaming organization, like Disney Plus or Paramount or something. Lay it on us the job crafting and the purpose.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, great example. So, if someone is in the accounts receivable department, they could say that, “Because of me, our company is able to get the revenues that it’s earned and, consequently, is able to pay all these employees, all my colleagues, and to create a life and a living for all of their families. If the finance function of the streaming department of a content studio did poorly, there would be a lot less revenue to go around. The company wouldn’t get what it earned, and lots of people would not be able to provide for their families.”

If that person in the finance function is in charge of, let’s say, audit or something like that, they can say, “Because of me and because I’m performing this role excellent, because I’m awesome at my job, the company’s books are going to be honest.”

And when a company’s books are honest, it’s the fundamental thing. It’s the foundation of any enterprise’s success. The company’s books have to be reconciled. They have to be honest. They have to be true and they have to be right. And without really good finance people, no organization can make that claim confidently.

So, if someone is doing audits in the finance section of a streaming company, they should tell themselves the absolutely truthful story that, “Because of me, my CEO, my colleagues, my shareholders, my vendors, every other stakeholder, can trust the numbers and, consequently, trust the business.”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I like that pathway in terms of, because, in a way, we can point to multiple stakeholders. Because where I thought that we were going to go first was the end consumer or customers.  And so, in a way, if you’re in the finance function, you’re a bit more removed from the end consumers’ experience of actually streaming the stuff.  But I suppose that you might draw your purpose pathway connections along that vector instead.

Mark Gerson
Right. I mean, the customer is not going to have any music to listen to or films to watch if the company blows up because its books are wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true.

Mark Gerson
And who’s there to assure that the books are right? The person at the finance function of the streaming company.

Pete Mockaitis
Now it’s funny, Mark, I’ve done this sort of exercise, and when I do so, sometimes it’s really inspiring and motivating, like, “Heck, yeah, I do have this purpose, and it’s really meaningful and that’s cool.”

Mark Gerson
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And other times it’s just like, “Yeah, I guess.” It doesn’t have as much sort of emotional resonance for me. And maybe that’s just the human condition of moodiness that we all have. But do you have any pro tips for thinking through, getting the most motivational purpose juice force from the exercise?

Mark Gerson
Let’s just take your example of the finance person at the streaming company. Everything that I said that he should think is absolutely true, right? If the revenues aren’t collected, the company’s in trouble. If the costs aren’t reconciled, the company’s in trouble. There’s no customer experience if the company is in trouble. There’s no other employees being paid and their families being provided for if the company is in trouble.

So, the job crafter is telling the absolute truth. He just has to liberate himself to tell that truth and to give meaning to his work, all of which is completely right. I mean, take the hospital custodian, no one would want to be a patient in a dirty hospital.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve smelled the urine in medical facilities and it’s a real bummer. A real bummer.

Mark Gerson
It’s a real bummer in a lot of ways. So, how much do we appreciate the custodian who makes it smell like the clean establishment it should be, the clean hospital it should be? A lot. We should a lot. And that custodian should be the one who appreciates his work as much as anybody because patients can only have the kind of experience that leads to health if they’re in a clean and sanitary environment. And the environment can only be clean and sanitary if the custodian is awesome at his job.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what I like about this is the chains of logic feel unassailable, like, “Yeah, this is true and it is hard to argue the counter.”

Mark Gerson
Well, that’s exactly the gift of the Torah. The Torah’s chains of logic are unassailable, exactly as you said so beautifully. It’s exactly right. Which is why we said at the beginning of the conversation that the Torah is a book, it’s a guidebook that can be appreciated, learned from and lived by, by people of all faiths because its secular logic is unassailable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I think we got one really handy nugget here associated with job crafting and purpose and how that ties to the story of Joseph. Lay another one on us, Mark.

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, the Bible says, “Six days you shall work.” God says in the Bible, “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest.” Okay. It’s interesting. He doesn’t say six days work shall be done. He says, “Six days you shall work,” teaching us that there’s something fundamentally important about work, independent of the output. That it’s important for the human soul to work. And there are lots of ways to work.

Someone who throws themselves into volunteering is absolutely working. Someone who’s home with her kids is absolutely working. There are lots of ways to work, but, “Six days you shall work, and on the seventh you shall rest.” Okay. So, let’s say someone follows that, and observant Jews follow it, Sabbath-observant Jews follow it, how many hours a week can you work if you follow that?

So, let’s say you can work 10 hours a day for five days a week. Now the sixth day, you really can’t work the whole day because part of the Sabbath is preparing for the Sabbath. So, you have to get home before the Sabbath and prepare for it so you’re ready for the Sabbath. So, let’s say you can work a half day on the sixth day. So, five days at 10 hours, one day at five hours, 55 hours a week. Someone who follows the Biblical formula for how much you should work and how much you should rest, and we can get into what rest is, it’s definitely not relaxing, can work 55 hours a week.

Social scientific studies of machinists in World War I and of Twitter employees in 2018 found that the optimal amounts of hours to work in a week is 55, the exact number. From 55 to 60, you have significantly-diminishing margin returns to your work. After 60, the work turns so bad that you start to compromise what you did in the previous 59.

So, the Bible gets it exactly right. The Bible’s telling us you should work 55 hours a week. And modern social science has completely, independently, the study of machinists from World War I and the Twitter study from 2018, they weren’t thinking about the laws of the Sabbath at all. But it turns out the Bible has exactly the number, to the number, of the amounts of hours that a week one should work to optimize production.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, 55 hours. That’s a good number to have in mind. And I’m thinking we had Morten Hansen on the show who had done a great deal of studying associated with high performers and what was the story there.

And I think he also landed in that zone. It’s, like, what they see when they study high performers, it’s somewhere between like 50 to 65-ish hours a week is the max. And beyond that, it’s sort of counterproductive. You’re better off just not doing that because it’s a negative. It’s harmful to push there.

Mark Gerson
Exactly, yeah. After 55, it goes to diminishing returns and then it quickly goes to negative returns. And the shocking thing is that’s exactly what the Bible says, “Six days you shall work,” 10 hours for five days, half a day on Friday, and that’s it, and then you have to rest. And what’s the rest? And this has also been proven by modern social science.

So, six days of work, the seventh day of rest. The rest is not relaxing. The rest is purposeful rest. So, what do we do on Shabbat? What we do on Shabbat is we inaugurate Shabbat on Friday night. We have a dinner with our family and friends. We pray. We have a great time. And then on Saturday, it’s not a day of sleeping as late as you can. Someone who sleeps as late as he can is considered a Sabbath violator. It’s a day of purposeful rest.

We play games with the kids. You might go to synagogue. You might study. You’re renewing the soul. And in that time of purposeful rest, what we’re effectively doing is preparing ourselves to be awesome at our job in the six days to come. So, if you want to be awesome at your job, what the Bible says is work six days and have purposeful rest on the seventh. And that purposeful rest will give you the mental and physical energy that you’re going to need to be great in the following six days.

So, if you want to be great at your job, keep the Sabbath. And, of course, someone could say, “I want to keep Saturday,” “I want to keep Sunday,” “I want to keep Wednesday,” whatever it is, but take one day and commit that day to purposeful rest.

Pete Mockaitis
And again, to the notion of work, a portion of that can be…it’s funny. If we count the childcare, Mark, then I’m blowing past my 55 hours, and maybe that’s why I’m so stressed and exhausted so often.

Mark Gerson
Right, yeah. Well, I mean, childcare can be, I guess some of it can be considered work and some of it can be considered purposeful rest. But let’s just take what we traditionally define as work. Like, more than 55 hours, people who brag about working 60, 80, 100 hours a week, they’re just wasting lots of hours and they shouldn’t brag about it. They shouldn’t do it. No boss should ask it. Why shouldn’t they ask it? Because modern social science is very clear that there will be limited productivity after 55 and negative productivity after 60.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I believe there’s also studies about video game developers will commonly enter a crazy busy season shortly before the release of the game. I don’t know if they call it crunch time. They have a name for it, but they see that exact phenomenon in terms of, actually, you’re just causing problems that you and others have to, now, undo.

Mark Gerson
Oh, very interesting. Yeah, I’m sure. Yeah, very interesting. I mean, it applies to everybody, and that’s kind of the point of the Bible. And why I wrote this book is because it doesn’t say, “Six days, you shall work, and seven days you shall rest for certain jobs.” It says it for everybody. So, the Biblical author might not have known about video game developers, but this formula certainly works for them.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And you brought up the point at the very beginning, like, “You shall work.” It’s not so much about output needs to unfold, but rather we, as humans, need to do work for our own benefit, the doing of the work is necessary. And even if AI makes universal basic income unlock for everyone effortlessly, it would be to our detriment to not be doing work.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, exactly. I remember, so Dr. Ruth was a very close friend of ours, and she would come over for Shabbat on most weeks. And I remember, I had a friend who was over and she said to him, “What do you do?” And he said, “Well, I just retired.” And we just saw this look on her face and she stares right at him, and she says, “You cannot retire. You can rewire but you cannot retire.” Dr. Ruth, as always, was exactly right.

And, Pete, getting to your point, we see this in the social science literature, too. This is the IKEA effect, which was discovered in 2011, which is that people value things more when they build the things themselves. People value the work of their hands. They value work independently of the thing. And the IKEA effect is so interesting because one would think that we would value pre-made furniture more than we would value furniture we have to make with our own hands.

Because everyone would say, “Well, I value my time at something. If I don’t spend my time on it, I should attribute that value to the thing, and I should value the pre-made thing more.” But we don’t. We value the things that we create with our hands more than those that we don’t. Now, why is this? It’s because the Bible was right when it says, “Six days you shall work.” Work has a psychic, spiritual benefit, independent of what the work is and even what the output is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that’s just true. There are also studies associated with elderly folks, folks that maybe they don’t expect much from them because their health is poor and it’s hard to get around and they’re long retired. And yet, when they adopt real responsibilities associated with doing some mentorship and tutoring, for example, this is a good study, their stress levels increase because, okay, now they got some responsibilities on their plate, and yet their life satisfaction and joy increases all the more.

Mark Gerson
Totally right. And, exactly, the Bible says, “Six days you shall work, the seventh you shall rest.” It doesn’t say until age 65, in which case you should rest all the time. It could, but it doesn’t say that. It’s because it’s a fundamental human need. Now, of course, the job that one can do at 20 is probably not the job that one can do at 80, or it might not be. But the person at 80 or at 50, just find another job.

And again, it doesn’t have to be a paying job, but find something else that can be considered work. And your example, Pete, is great. A mentorship program that imposes responsibility. Not something you pop in and out of, but saying, “I have to be at this place to do mentorship, to do teaching, to do tutoring, to do counseling,” which people of all ages can do really well, that’s work.

And if someone hits a certain age when they can’t do the work they used to do anymore, totally fine. Just identify what skills, what gifts, what talents you have and see where else it can be applied, but the answer can’t be nothing.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mark, lay it on us a third timeless insight to help us be awesome at our jobs.

Mark Gerson
Okay. So, let’s start with the story of Rebecca.

So, you have Rebecca and her husband, Isaac. And the question becomes, “Which son gets the birthright?” In other words, “Which son gets the mantle of Jewish leadership?” And Isaac, who has the ability to bestow it, he’s going to give it to Esau. Rebecca wants to give it to Esau’s twin brother, Jacob. Rebecca is right. Esau has his strengths, they’re discussed in the text, but the qualities needed for leadership, to perpetuate the Jewish people into the future are not one of them. The birthright has to go to Jacob.

So, Rebecca engineers in the moment, she’s a brilliant woman, engineers in the moment this ruse where Jacob is going to trick his father into thinking that he, Jacob, is his twin brother, Esau. So, how does Rebecca tell him to do it? Rebekah tells Jacob, “Put on Esau’s best clothes.” Now that’s interesting because the old man, Isaac, he’s blind so what does it matter what Jacob is wearing? But she says put on his best clothes.

So, what do we learn from that, and the many other mentions of clothing in the Bible? Well, the reason why Rebecca tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes is because of her insight, which is amplified throughout the Torah, which is that we are what we wear. So, she’s telling Jacob, “If you want to imitate Esau, if you want to be Esau, you have to wear his clothes,” because what we wear defines us.

Okay. So why is this relevant? Well, first, is it true and is it relevant? Well, there was a study out of Northwestern in 2012 where one group of participants was given a white coat. There were two groups of participants. They were given the same white coat.  One group was told it was a doctor’s coat. One group was told it was a painter’s coat. Then they were given tasks that required paying attention to detail.

Those who were told it was a doctor’s coat did much better. Just by thinking it was a doctor’s coat – it was the same coat – by thinking it was a doctor’s coat they did much better on attention-seeking tasks. There was another study out of Yale from 2014, which was a negotiation workshop. And the young men who wore suits made triple the profit of those who wore sweatpants. Same cohort of students, but those who dressed in a suit did vastly better than those who dressed in sweatpants.

And so, what does this teach us? It teaches us that what we wear is of fundamental importance for so many things, particularly being awesome at our job. Now, I think it’s a fortunate thing that this whole work from home culture is ending. But even if one were to work from home, what would be the lesson from the Bible, which has been validated by modern social science? Dress like you’re in the office.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, it’s funny, as we speak, and you’re looking so sharp, I’m looking at my blazer in the corner, I was like, “I should probably put that on right away.” So, thank you for that. And we have had that come up with Dr. Srini Pillay, what he calls psychological Halloween-ism.

Mark Gerson
Interesting. Great term.

Pete Mockaitis
When we dress the part, it psychologically impacts how you’re approaching things and showing up, so I could see that pathway with the suit. But could you actually give us some more detail on that study, the whole tale there?

Mark Gerson

Well, yeah, the two studies from Northwestern about just by wearing the same coat and being told it’s a doctor’s coat, you get attention-seeking tasks. And you have the Yale study, which showed that men wearing suits did three times better in the negotiation workshop than their colleagues from the same cohort of Yale students who were wearing sweatpants.

There was another study out of UNC from 1998 that said that female students who wore swimsuits scored worse on math tests than those who wore sweaters.

So, the lesson for being awesome at your job is no matter where you are, even if you’re working from home, just dress like you’re working from the office because, I love your term, psychic Halloween-ism, I would have used that in the book if I knew about it at the time, but it’s a great term and it says that we become what we wear, which is exactly what the Bible is telling us in so many different ways, in so many different places.

The canonical place is when Rebecca tells Jacob to put on Esau’s best clothes. Interestingly, not any clothes, “Put on his best clothes. You put on his best clothes; you’ll be Esau. And you got to be Esau to trick your father.” And it works. And, interestingly, there was another study that showed that much of the cure for female depression is in the woman’s closet.

Because when people are feeling depressed, you wake up in the morning, you’re feeling depressed, what will most people typically do? They’ll put on like baggy sweatpants, a big sweatshirt. That makes them more depressed.

So, what this study showed is that if you’re depressed, put on a flowery dress, mix up the colors, and then you feel the vitality that your clothing reflects. So, it’s such an easy hack right from the Bible, which is that if you want to be a certain way, dress that way. Don’t dress how you feel. Dress how you want to feel.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Mark, this is so good, and it’s funny. I mean, I’ve had years of working from home, and there was an era of my life in which I put a great deal of attention into my attire, and I had shirts made to my measurements, and it was when I was peak dating times, like, find a wife time. And I put serious time and money into my clothing, and I have not since my wedding day.

Mark Gerson
Well, it’s interesting. We can talk about the secrets of the top performers, too. So, Deion Sanders, of course, the NFL Hall of Famer, great quote from Dion Sanders, “If you look good, you feel good. If you feel good, you play good. If you play good, they pay good.” I mean, Tiger Woods, he always wore red on tournament Sundays because red, he said, is his power color.

Michael Jordan. So, Michael Jordan started the trend of wearing baggy shorts in the NBA. Why? He was wearing his UNC shorts under his bull shorts. Why was he wearing his UNC shorts? Because, to him, it channeled his beloved coach, Dean Smith.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, boy, there’s so much there in terms of the garments. And then, well, now as we talk about these athletes, it feels sort of like in terms of, like, ritual and memory and – what is it – embodied cognition.

Mark Gerson
Embodied cognition, that’s a term, yeah. Or enclothed cognition.

Pete Mockaitis
Or, sit in this place or with these things or see these reminders, that’s triggering an emotional, physiological state of being, and some physiological states of being are way more conducive to having smart, creative thoughts that are useful, versus just the opposite.

Mark Gerson
Right. And so, what it teaches, you want to be awesome at your job? What you wear matters. That doesn’t dictate what you should wear, but it does dictate that you should be intentional about what you wear.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Whether it’s your UNC shorts or a sharp orange jacket, whatever it may be.

Mark Gerson

Exactly. And so, why do I wear this orange jacket? Because I co-founded the charity United Hatzalah of Israel, which is the country’s crowdsourced system of volunteer first responders. We have 8,000 volunteers throughout the country. All EMTs are paramedics. And our goal is to get to a 911 call within the 90 seconds that separate life from death. We do about 2,300 calls a day.

Well, orange is our color because orange is the safest color at night. And we have a thousand volunteers on motorcycles, and so we have to have the safest color at night. So, I wear this jacket every day to channel United Hatzalah and the love I have for the organization, the respect I have for the volunteers and the purpose that I have with being the chairman of this great organization.

So, I have one of our board members sold his fabric company, and I asked him to make me an orange jacket, and I did. I started wearing it every day. He said, “Well, you can’t wear the same jacket every day.” So, he made me five of them. And I have our logo right here.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is perfect. I remember, I got this suit made to my measurements. It felt amazing. It was delightful in terms of, like, how I felt ready for anything.

Mark Gerson
Exactly, yep. Exactly. You totally nailed it, exactly. By wearing that suit, you felt ready for anything and everything. And what the social science suggests is you were probably more awesome at your job because you felt that way, and you felt that way because of what you’re wearing. It’s one of hundreds of great practical life hacks right from the Bible.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Well, Mark, tell me any final things you want to share before we hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Mark Gerson
Well, first, what a great conversation. So, I so appreciate it. But, no, I mean, I’d love to share anything and everything in the book. And “God Was Right” will be out in June. And you talked before about, before you were married, you paid great attention to your clothing.

Well, clothing is a separate chapter, but the Biblical formula for dating, romance, and marriage is totally fascinating and it’s been proven absolutely right by modern social science, and it’s unfortunately not practiced today nearly as much as it should be.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is not a dating show but we can’t just let that lie. Mark, can you give us the two-minute version of that we need to know?

Mark Gerson
Okay. Okay. Now I’m so glad you asked. Okay, so, the happiest marriage in the Bible is between Isaac and Rebecca, which leads us to ask, “Well, how did they decide to marry each other?” So, Abraham sends his servant, Eliezer, to find a wife for Isaac. So, Eliezer sees this young woman, and he only knows three things, and this is key, only three things about the young woman.

He knows she’s from Haran, which is important because Abraham had made souls in Haran. He knows she’s very fair to look upon, and she’s exceedingly generous. She brings water for him and all of his camels. On the basis of those three and only three things, Eliezer says, “She’s the woman for my man, Isaac.”

Then this young woman, Rebecca, is given the choice, “Do you want to go with Eliezer and marry Isaac?” She has never met Isaac, but she knows only two things about him. One, that he’s rich, so he’s a good provider, and, two, that he loves God. So, on the basis of knowing only two or three things, they decide to get married.

Then the text tells us in Genesis 24:67, he married her, she became his wife, and he loved her, in that order, teaching us that the Biblical formula for finding your spouse is identify two or three characteristics, no more. Whether his friends are funny, or whether she likes to ski, or go to the beach, they’re not in there.

Identify two or three genuinely important characteristics, and there aren’t that many to choose from, then just get married. Then start doing spouse-like things, probably iterative acts of giving, and then love will follow. The opposite of that is what people in secular society do now, which is they date for years, often the same person for years. eHarmony said the average dating before marriage is 2.6 years.

In the process, they’re looking for all kinds of characteristics which are completely irrelevant to a happy marriage. In so doing, passing up perfectly good people for no good reason and they eventually decide to get married when they fall in love because, as I said in the book, you can’t fall in love. Love is something you have to cultivate. Love is saying it’s intentional.

You might fall on your face, you might fall down, but you don’t fall in love. What the Bible tells us is that love follows commitment. First, they get married, then she became his wife, they’re two different things. So, marriage is obviously a legal process, then becoming a wife is a much more substantial process, iterative acts of giving, and then love follows.

And the social science demonstrates that the Bible, as usual, totally gets it right. So, the lesson for young people is identify two or three characteristics, then just get married, then start doing spouse-like things, and then you’ll experience love.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, now I’m curious about hiring in terms of do the same principles of having a very short list of critical factors in a candidate apply there too?

Mark Gerson
Yes. As long as those characteristics are the right characteristics, and that’s true in dating too, that two or three characteristics have to be the right characteristics. In hiring, it’s going to be two or three characteristics. And then, of course, you have to do background checks and references and all that.

Pete Mockaitis
May I ask for, I mean, you’ve hired a lot of people in your day, what are your top characteristics?

Mark Gerson
Well, I think one of the underrated characteristics is “What’s the character of the man or woman?”

Pete Mockaitis
Character.

Mark Gerson
Yeah, because if you can find, if you can identify, you can do tests or look to experience for technical capabilities, but you want to work with people of good character. You can trust them when there are, inevitably, adversity and challenges. You can have the confidence that they’re going to stick through it and work through it and be with you. That they’re going to be really concerned about customer problems, they’re going to be really good colleagues. So, yeah, I think character is a very important trait to look for in someone you hire.

Pete Mockaitis
So, character, in a way, can encompass many, many different virtues. Here it sounds like you’re talking about honesty, integrity, and, like, discipline or fortitude. So, when you say character, is that kind of what you mean by that?

Mark Gerson
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Character is encompassing. It’s honesty, integrity, diligence, rigorousness, taking responsibility.

So, I would say, look for people who have it within their character to take responsibility because problems are going to happen, mistakes are going to be made, and someone who takes responsibility for them, that’s the kind of person that you want to work with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there another key factor in addition to character?

Mark Gerson
Character, I would say, is the most important thing, and it is the encompassing thing. But also, problem-solving ability and resilience. And I have a chapter in the book on anti-fragility, which the Bible asserts in Exodus. And then modern social science has completely validated it as something that is both possible and very positive for people.

So, in Exodus, we’re told the more they were, talking about the Jews in the early days of the slave experience, the more they were afflicted, the stronger they became. Now, one would normally think the point of afflicting somebody is to weaken them. But the Bible says the more they were afflicted, the stronger they became.

So, teaching us that afflictions can be strengthening and modern social science has totally validated that, for instance, scientists who’ve had their first paper rejected have more successful careers than scientists who had their first paper accepted, so long as they stay in the profession, showing us that these setbacks, these challenges, these rejections can be a real impetus for growth.

So, I think, when looking for someone to hire, when looking for a vendor to work with, that’s a really important thing. What’s going to happen when things go bad? Are they going to take responsibility? Are they going to complain? Are they going to seek a solution? These are not easily detectable in interviews, but it’s something that every employer should consider and try to ascertain as best as he can.

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

Mark Gerson
Well, I’ll just go with my favorite from the Bible, which I think it was Leviticus 19:2, which is very simple, “Be holy.” Holiness is something that’s available to everybody of every faith in every time, at every strata of society. We can all be holy.

And what does that mean? It means that when confronted with the decision to do the right thing. And it’s such an inspiring piece of wisdom from the Bible because it’s telling us that holiness is completely accessible.

Everybody, anybody can be holy, should be holy. We can understand what holiness is because the Bible wouldn’t tell us to be holy if it were inscrutable. So, we can understand what holiness is and we can do it. And it’s just a great piece of Biblical wisdom to live by.

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

Mark Gerson
So, there was one study in the early 2000s, it’s a fascinating study, which is available for anybody to look up on YouTube, just go to Gorilla Experiment, where you have a bunch of girls throwing a basketball to each other. And then this big guy in a gorilla costume comes in the middle of the game and starts beating his chest. And then he goes off screen. He’s there for like 10 seconds out of the 60.

And then the question is, “How many people noticed there was a gorilla interrupting the game?” And the answer was fewer than half. So, you have this one-minute game of girls throwing the ball, a guy comes in with a gorilla, but because noticing is so hard and so counterintuitive, very few people actually noticed.

Then there was another study out of an Irish insurance company on this that says, “Who are the best drivers?” And this class of people are the best drivers to such an extent that this insurance company, Carole Nash, gives them lower rates. They’re motorcyclists. So, why are motorcyclists the best car drivers?

Well, let’s look at the cause of motorcycle accidents. The bulk of motorcycle accidents are caused by what the traffic experts have named “Look but failed to see.”

In other words, the driver, he looks at the motorcycle in front of him, but he doesn’t see it. So, it’s in his eyesight, the motorcycle, but because he’s not used to seeing motorcycles on the road, because his brain is conditioned only to see cars, he doesn’t actually see the motorcycle right in front of him, he crashes right into it.

So, that’s how important noticing is, is that car drivers very often don’t even notice the motorcyclist right in front of them, even though they can physically see him. That shows how hard noticing is. So, who are the best car drivers? They’re motorcyclists. So, why are they the best car drivers? Because if you’re a motorcyclist, you better be a really good noticer because there are all kinds of perils on the road.

So, motorcyclists become really good noticers and, consequently, they become really good car drivers. And this is the inspiring thing about it, it’s a skill that can be cultivated. The motorcyclists have cultivated the skill of noticing and, consequently, it helps them as car drivers and elsewhere in life.

And then we have to ask, “Well, why is this relevant in my life?” Well, the answer is motorcyclists know. And lots of accidents, and not just car accidents, lots of mistakes that we make in all endeavors of life just come because we’re not noticing things. I mean, maybe you don’t notice that someone in your life is having problems that you can help with. You just don’t notice it. And you just think it’s a normal course of things, but if you notice it, you’d see there’s something different, and you can step in and help that person.

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

Mark Gerson
Probably the most important part of my routine is I run six miles a day, I’ve not missed a day in over 20 years. I have an addiction to exercise. I need to run. And I do my Bible study on the treadmill.

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

Mark Gerson
They can go to GodWasRight.com or email me at Mark@GodWasRight.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?

Mark Gerson
Realize that what you’re doing is important. What you’re doing is, if someone is parting with his or her money for a good or service that you’re involved with creating or producing, what you’re doing is really important.

And you should just understand the importance of it and properly define the importance of it, just like we talked about with the hospital custodian who said, “I’m not just cleaning the floors. I’m creating a healthy environment for patients.” And there’s so much wisdom in that hospital custodian. And I think everyone who wants to be awesome at his job and to find meaning and happiness in his work should take that to heart and be like the Biblical Joseph and job craft.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Mark, this is beautiful. Thank you.

Mark Gerson
Thank you so much, Pete. What a great conversation.

1060: How to Use Sponsorship to Open Doors with Dr. Rosalind Chow

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Dr. Rosalind Chow discusses how to become a better sponsor to open new opportunities for others—and yourself.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why mentorship isn’t enough to advance
  2. How sponsoring others elevates your status
  3. Four things sponsors should do—and one to avoid

About Rosalind

Rosalind Chow is an associate professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research, teaching, and writing focus on how we all participate in social systems in ways that have implications for the maintenance or attenuation of inequity. Her current research focuses on how people can use their social connections to elevate others via sponsorship.

Chow serves as the faculty director for CLIMB, offered through the Tepper School of Business in partnership with Deloitte. CLIMB focuses on preparing Black and Latino professionals for leadership positions in the accounting industry. Prior to CLIMB, Chow served as the founding faculty director for the Executive Leadership Academy, an executive leadership program addressing the challenges facing the advancement of Black leaders in the Pittsburgh region.

Chow holds a BA in Psychology from Columbia University, and a PhD in Organizational Behavior from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She currently lives in Pittsburgh, PA, with her husband, Jeff Galak, and their two children, Lia and Simon.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Rosalind Chow Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rosalind, welcome.

Rosalind Chow
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about sponsorship, and your book, The Doors You Can Open. And so, maybe just first things first, a matter of terms or definitions so we’re on the same page. Sponsorship versus mentorship, what’s the distinction?

Rosalind Chow
So, my easy way of telling the difference is to ask yourself, “Who is being acted on?” or, “Who’s being asked to change?” So, with mentors, they change mentees. So, when we give coaching or feedback or advice, we’re essentially telling the mentee, “Here’s how you should be thinking about a situation. Here’s how you should be acting.”

Whereas, a sponsor is not asking the protege to be any different than who they already are. They’re actually asking an audience, some external other person, to see or think about or behave differently toward the protégé.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. That is clear and direct. So, that’s what we’re talking about here. Not so much getting advice, seeking advice-givers, but serving as a sponsor or seeking out and enjoying the benefits of having a sponsor in your world. So, could you maybe kick us off with an inspiring story of a professional who came to get a good understanding of these sponsorship concepts and saw cool career results unfolding from that?

Rosalind Chow
Well, so I start the book with the example of Kim Ng and Derek Jeter. So, if you’re not a baseball fan, he’s a very famous Yankee player. And Kim Ng, actually, was an assistant manager on the Yankees during the Yankee dynasty of the early 2000s.

She’s been working in baseball for a long time, but she only, in 2020, got to be a general manager of the Miami Marlins. And that was a big deal because she is the first, and to this day, only female general manager of a major baseball league team, had probably been ready and qualified to be one for at least a decade before that.

But really, she needed a sponsor. She did not need a mentor. She did not need anyone to tell her how to be a better candidate. She just needs someone to really convince other people that she was the right candidate. And so, that came in the form of Derek Jeter, who was, at that time, a co-owner and CEO of The Marlins.

And so, that would be an example where Derek Jeter clearly helped Kim Ng and her career. I would argue that it also helped elevate Derek Jeter as well. So, when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he was lauded not just for his ability and performance on the field, but also because of all the work that he did in helping to elevate diversity, equity, and inclusion in baseball as a whole. And Kim Ng was certainly touted as one of the ways in which that drive of his was manifested.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool and nifty. And so, there are so many threads to go down here, but I want to address this one head on, just in case there is a segment of listener who, they bristle or they resent the DEI trainings they’ve done, could you make the case for why this stuff is worthwhile and valuable and impactful for them and others in their careers?

Rosalind Chow
So, great point. Sponsorship is something that benefits everyone. And also, it benefits the people who are being sponsored, it benefits the people who do the sponsoring, and also benefits organizations. And so, I like to help readers think about organizations as, you know, organisms, where each part of the organism has certain things that it needs.

And what sponsors do is essentially make sure that the right nutrients or resources go to the right places where those nutrients or resources are needed. So, it’s not DEI necessarily related at all. It’s something that we all actually do already in our everyday lives. Whenever we recommend someone for an opportunity, or even when we praise someone, when we’re introducing them to other people, these are all forms of sponsorship that we engage in all the time.

The thing that I think people don’t recognize is that when we do that, sort of when we engage in that kind of behavior, yeah, we’re making other people look good, but we also look good by saying nice things, introducing people to each other, because, at the end of the day, what we’re helping is the group. And in the book, I have this conversation about how for people who care about having status, being seen as someone who helps the group is one of the best ways to increase your status.

And so, that’s why everyone should be a sponsor because it actually helps raise your own status. That’s what’s good for you, but also helps the group because it makes it so that the group has a better grasp of what sorts of resources are available, who ought to be working on what sorts of problems, so everything runs much more efficiently.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that metaphor, as I’m imagining the right nutrients going to the right places. It sounds then there’s sort of like an underlying presupposition here that sponsorship isn’t just talking up your buddy or trying to be nice and friendly, but that your advocacy is actually helpful in terms of, “No, this person really is awesome, and it seems like we might not be aware of that.”

And I’m having a memory flashback here. I remember we were reviewing resumes at Bain and Company, doing some recruiting at the University of Illinois, my alma mater. And so, we all had our, geez, we all went through like 500 resumes, and so we were going to share, “Okay, who do we think is great?” And so, we were going through them. And then someone said this name, and I said, “Oh, yes, she is my number one.”

And then I remember my colleague said, “Really? Why?” Like, this person was not even on his radar. And I was like, “Well, look, she was ahead of this. She started that. She figured out this. And check out this down here.” And so, it was like, “Oh.” And then he was like, “Okay, I see.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m not done yet.” And I had like six things that, and so he’s like, “Okay, okay, you know, I get the point.”

And so, it was telling for me, in a world of 500 resumes or a lot of noise or chaos or distraction or whatever, it is very easy to overlook and be completely unaware of the amazingness of people in your midst.

Rosalind Chow
Absolutely, yeah. So, Pete, I feel like what you’re highlighting there are kind of two things, that we live in a world where we’re just inundated with so much information. And so how do you get people to rise above so that others actually pay attention to them? And this is where sponsorship becomes really important.

One is maybe there’s not enough information, and so sponsors are providing additional information. But the other version is there is so much information that sponsors, essentially, are saying, “Okay, there’s too much information, but I’m going to highlight why this person is the right match for this opportunity or for this problem.”

And so, the other part that you’re highlighting that I think is implicit in what you’re saying is that there also needs to be some accuracy in making that match. And that presumes then, for you to make a good, accurate match, is that you understand what the nature of the problem is or the nature of the need, and you also understand the other person’s strengths and how they fit that need. And you need to be able to articulate that clearly to be an effective sponsor.

And if you get it wrong, and this is also where sponsorship is different from mentorship, if you get it wrong, it’s not just bad for the person you’re getting it wrong about. It’s also bad for you because in the future people are not going to be as likely to weigh your advice or your recommendations as heavily.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I think that’s helpful because it can be tempting to just, if you’re a friendly, helpful person, to just want to support, like, put in a good word for anybody, that’s like, “Oh, hey, I like them and I want to see them succeed and flourish and prosper. And here I am with some influence in a room so that’s a thing that I might just want to do to be a friendly fellow.” But to your point there, yes, that accuracy is key and it should, indeed, be the right nutrient and the right place.

Rosalind Chow
Right. Yeah, you want to cultivate a reputation for yourself as being group-oriented, as being a helper, someone who is willing to make connections when those connections make sense, but you also want to be a discerning helper, right? This is not, like, shotgun approach of like, “Hopefully, we’re going to send everything out in all directions and hope something hits.”

You want kind of more of that, like, sniper sort of accuracy there in terms of diagnosing, “Okay, this is your need. I have something in my arsenal that I can bring to bear on this problem that you have.”

Pete Mockaitis
And to that end, I’m curious, if folks are asking us to serve in a sponsor role, and we don’t think it’s the right move, do you have any pro tips on how to let folks down gently?

Rosalind Chow
Yeah, that one’s really hard. And so, this is why I do recommend for people not to ask people to sponsor them. This is not to say that you don’t let people know that you are looking for sponsorship, but you have to do it in a way that gives the sponsor autonomy and freedom to decide for themselves if they want to do it or not because, otherwise, it becomes very awkward.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. So, can you give us any scripts or pro tips or stories to illustrate how that’s done in practice?

Rosalind Chow
Yeah. So, my favorite way of approaching that sort of situation is to go to someone who you believe has influence in a particular domain, and you ask them for advice. So, it’s always, ask for advice, not help. Help makes it seem like you don’t know what you’re doing. Here, it’s not that you need help.

It’s, “I’ve thought about it. I have this plan or this desire. Here are my action steps in terms of how I plan on going about getting to this goal. Given your experience and wisdom, I would love to have some other person’s perspective on what I’m planning on doing just in case I might be going about this the wrong way or there’s something else I haven’t considered.”

In that way, you’re essentially conveying, like, “I have put a lot of thought into this. This is something I care about. I’m not just kind of flailing around and don’t know what I’m doing,” but it gives the other person an opportunity to weigh in on what your plan is. And, usually, at that point, is when they spontaneously start brainstorming with you about what you should be doing.

And if they’re being very thoughtful and think well of you, they will also then say, “Oh, well, that’s a step I can help you with,” or like, “Oh, I know exactly the person you would want to talk to if this is the thing that you want to be doing. Let me go ahead and make that connection for you.” So, putting them, you know, you’re pushing them in the direction of seeing how they can be helpful, but also offering them the opportunity to offer you that help instead of asking for it directly.

Now you could, at the end, be like, “That was so helpful. You laid out all these points. You mentioned this person who would be really helpful for me to get to know. Would you feel comfortable with making an introduction?” Now that would be, that’s pushing. But a thoughtful sponsor would be like, “Okay, let me think about that. Let me see if that makes sense.”

And I would also say for potential sponsors who find themselves in a situation where they don’t want to make the connection, there’s a couple ways you can handle that. One is you can just say, like, “I don’t really have the kind of relationship with that person that I would feel comfortable doing that.” And that’s just being kind of honest.

The other version is you can say, “Let me think on that and let me see what I can do.” And then you can, behind the scenes, you could reach out to someone and say, “Hey, this person came to me. I don’t really know if they fit with what you’re looking for at the moment. But, in case they do, I thought I just, like, give you a heads up, that they came across my radar. Would you like me to make that introduction and if not, like, no big deal.”

So, you’re still giving them the choice of whether or not you take their time in making this connection. Because the worst-case scenario is that you say, like, “Okay, I don’t really want to make this connection, but I’m going to do it anyway because I want to be a nice person.” And you introduce them to each other, and then now you have put the other person, that external person, that audience on the spot.

If they care about their relationship with you, they can’t just ignore the email. So, then they feel like they have to respond. And then if it turns out that it’s a total waste of their time, you, again, as the sponsor, have also suffered because now, in the future, when they see an email from you, they’re going to be like, “Ah, Pete, no.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I appreciate you speaking the truths of what’s the dynamics underneath the surface, and I totally agree and resonate. And I don’t know where I heard this but someone just called it the practice of a double opt-in for introductions, as in general. It’s sort of like and that’s kind of what I do almost always.

I was just meeting with my podcast mastermind group and I’m just thinking about how we always do that with guests, and say, “Hey, this person was amazing. Let me know if you want to talk to them,” because the prospective guest, you know, they already want to talk to all the podcasters. They got the book, they’re ready to go.

So, it feels nice on the receiving end. Like, I never am upset with someone asking if they may introduce, because it’s like, “Oh, that was thoughtful of you.” And I’m not put on the spot, and with the exception being, I’d say if there’s, like, folks who clearly always want these introductions, “I sell a thing and there’s a person who wants to buy the thing.”

There’s no need for asking permission. I always want the hot leads. Always. I think that’s probably fair and, generally speaking, in terms of folks, like, “This is clearly what you want always. So, we could just sort of skip right to it and accelerate.”

Rosalind Chow
Yeah, I mean if I am going to make an introduction without first getting permission from the person who is kind of the recipient of the introduction, is that I am very clear when I make the introduction why I am making it, and what one person wants, what the other person might be looking for.

So, I might say, like, “I remember in our conversation the other day, you were having a challenge with X, Y, and Z. And then I just happened to be talking with this person. It turns out they have expertise in exactly X, Y, and Z. So, I figured you should probably talk to each other because it seems like there would be mutual benefit here.”

So, what I really dislike is the thing where everyone’s on the email, and it’s like, “Oh, let me introduce…” you know, like, “Pete, let me introduce you to so-and-so. So-and-so here’s Pete. Take it away.” And there’s like no other context around why this introduction is being made. That one really irks me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. I suppose, unless of course, you have already talked to each other about each other, and now this is just the formality. It’s like, “Hey, you both know what each other is about, so here you are.

Rosalind Chow
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you’ve got a nice little categorization of four categories of sponsorship. Can you run us through what those are?

Rosalind Chow
Sure. So, it’s what in academic terms we would call a two by two, where you want to, first, think about, like, “Do the people know each other already? If yes, are you trying to maximize a positive impression or are you trying to minimize a negative impression?” So, for your listeners, I think it’s easiest to just stay on the positive side. The negative side is a whole other animal that we can talk about.

But so, assuming that what you want to do is create positive impressions, you’re either creating, because you’re creating a new impression, a new positive impression. If you’re thinking about this in marketing terms, this is when you’re introducing a new product and you need to raise audience awareness. And then there’s the confirming form of sponsorship, which is when people are already aware of the other person, and now you’re just essentially, like, boosting their already positive impression.

So, this would be again, going back to marketing, right? You have your product, it’s already been out for a while, but you’re just reminding people that this product exists in the world, and just refreshing their positive sentiments around that product.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that so much. Well, it happens all the time. It’s like I’m thinking about, I’ve had two guests on the show, Maui and Steve, and so they know each other, but it took a third party to say, “Wait, wait, Maui, do you know what Steve does? He’s doing this team clock business. You’re doing this leadership development business all the time. Have you talked about that thing that you’re both into?”

He’s like, “Well, no, I guess we never have.” And then away they go and a beautiful, fruitful partnership was born. And so, it’s funny and yet happens all the time, that we are just unaware of the tremendous assets that’s right in our midst.

Rosalind Chow
Right. Yes. And this goes straight, you know, going back to that earlier point about making sure that the right nutrients and resources go to the right places. Here’s an example where there were resources and opportunities that existed, but people were not aware of that potential match until you have a sponsor who is making that connection for them, often because that sponsor is having different conversations with each party than they typically have with each other. And so, that sponsor holds different information about each person than they hold about each other.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. It’s like, “We usually talk about our kids” or fill in the blank, as opposed to, “Oh, this completely different domain.” Well, let’s also talk about the negative prevention part of the two by two, just to round it out. The prevent and protect, can you lay these on us?

Rosalind Chow
Yeah, so prevention is, and this one’s hard, I think, to see in real life because it’s essentially the creation of a non-event. So, I talk about this in the book, it’s like if you’re familiar with the movie, “The Minority Report.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Rosalind Chow
This is Tom Cruise running around, as he does in all his movies, but he is part of this special organization where in the future, they have Precogs, these people who can predict things that are going to happen. Whenever they see a crime about to happen, Tom Cruise’s unit swoops in and essentially arrests the person right before they’re about to commit the crime.

So, the crime never actually happens. It’s been prevented from happening. So, this is when you’re a sponsor and you have a protégé, and you are kind of like, “Okay, I need to manage, potentially, like this information about them that might not work to their favor.”

Or, “There’s this opportunity and I think it’s a bad opportunity for them. And if they take the opportunity, it’s like not a good match. It’s going to make them look bad. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to try and make it so that that doesn’t even happen.” And we talk about this, usually, in terms of dead end-like projects, the projects that nobody wants to take. They’re not glamorous. They don’t get you sort of any sort of promotional type of credits in terms of being chosen to advance or get raises.

Somebody’s got to do them but, like, it should not be, if you’re a good sponsor, it should not be your protégé. So, your task as a sponsor is to just say like, is to try and head that off and get somebody else to take that on, and, essentially, protect your protégé’s time, their reputation. Another example is like if you know there’s a problematic person, like a problematic manager who tends not to treat their people very well, you may not want your protégé to be associated with them.

So, then, you essentially step in and you’re saying, necessarily like, “Pete’s too busy doing work on this project over here. Tony is going to have to find somebody else. Not going to happen.” So, that would be prevention. It’s preventing something bad from happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I may, on prevention. So, prevent a crime from unfolding to your protégé’s career. And so, I guess within the framework of sponsorship, we are asking other people to change, like, “No, don’t pick this person. Pick someone else.” Although, I suppose we could just dip over into the mentorship category and tell our protege very simply, “Hey, this seems like a really risky project. I would suggest you not try to get on it.”

Rosalind Chow
Yes. And so, one is, you’re absolutely right, one version, and this is always a yes/and. It’s not an either/or. It would be, in addition to trying to make sure that people don’t assign your protégé to this bad assignment, it is also telling your protégé, “If anybody asks you if you want to join this assignment, say no.” But sometimes, protégés or mentees or people who are lower in the hierarchy don’t feel like they have the ability to say no.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I got you.

Rosalind Chow
Right? And so that’s when a sponsor really does need to step in and be like, “Okay, I know they can’t say no, so I’m going to say no for them so that I take the heat for that. If they say no, they’re going to be seen as like not a team player, as someone who’s not willing to kind of do the hard work for the team or for the group.” And you don’t want your protege to have that kind of reputation. So, as their sponsor, and you’re saying no on their behalf, you’re essentially taking that risk off them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Rosalind, I appreciate the way you’re talking about the gritty realities because in a naive, idealistic view, would be, “Well, then that organization ought to abandon that project and find ones that are truly more value creating for the enterprise.” Or, “Hmm, it sounds like there’s some toxic cultural forces that really need to be cleaned up if these things are in existence.”

And so, like, yes, I guess there’s another yes/and. Like, yes, that should happen, but unfortunately, it can often be the case that these things exist and we have to deal with them.

Rosalind Chow
Yeah. I think my answer to that also is, like, there will always be the less desirable things to do in an organization that are still necessary for the organization to function. And so, one thing that a leader could be doing is thinking more systematically about how those projects or tasks are allocated so that it’s not just based on people volunteering or being voluntold to do them.

Or, make it very explicit that like, “Yes, this is not a fun thing to do, but it’s something that we’re now going to reward by making it more promotion worthy, so that everybody understands just how valuable it actually is.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And protect?

Rosalind Chow
So protect is one that we don’t see often but, actually, is consistent with, I think, how many people think of sponsorship, when they think of sponsorship or if they think of sponsorship, which is that whole proverbial, like, someone’s pounding the table for you in these backdoor meetings.

Well, the only reason someone’s pounding the table is because they’re disagreeing with other people. Otherwise, there would be no table pounding. And so, this is when people are talking about you, maybe they don’t have really great things to say about you, and your sponsor is there, and they’re saying, “No, I don’t agree with your assessment of this person at all. This conclusion is flawed. Maybe it’s based on inaccurate information, maybe incomplete information. Let me give you some context around what happened so you can better understand why they made the choices that they did.”

All of this is as, you know, we talked about earlier, it’s to mitigate these negative impressions. I don’t know that you’ll ever get to a situation where people then have positive impressions of a person who’s being talked about in this way. But if you don’t have a sponsor in the room who is reframing the conversation, bringing new information to light, giving a different interpretation to things that had happened, that’s when people are shown the door. So you definitely need sponsors to be there to protect you.

But hopefully, if you are doing sponsorship well, you won’t ever be in that position because your protégé will always be seen as positively as possible, and no one will ever have anything negative to say about them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, Rosalind, can you give us any other top do’s and don’ts for getting sponsors, doing sponsorship well?

Rosalind Chow
So, one of the main points of the book is that we typically think of sponsorship as something that only people with power can do. And it’s true that people who have lots of power are typically able to sponsor in kind of these much more visible, obvious kinds of ways. But that does not mean that people can’t be sponsors.

So, I like to encourage everyone to think about how they can be sponsors, usually in the form of, as we talked about earlier, what do you notice about other people and how they’re positively contributing to the group or to you?

Not only should you be letting them know that they’re having that impact, but you also want to make sure that other people are aware of that impact because, as you already pointed out beautifully, oftentimes people are completely unaware of what other people are working on or doing or even passionate about or things like that.

And so, any of us can go out and kind of amplify other people’s good news. There are no bad ramifications for saying nice things about objective, verifiable accomplishments that other people have either done or have expertise in. So that is the safest way to be a sponsor is just to say, “You know, I know Pete’s a great podcaster. I love being on his podcast.”

Pete Mockaitis
Fact.

Rosalind Chow
Right. Fact. Exactly. And there’s no cost to doing that, because you’re not asking for the other, the audience to go take a leap of faith in any real sort of way. It’s when we start projecting into the future, when you start kind of making some sort of a guarantee about how a person’s experience is going to be when they engage with this person. That’s when you start putting a little bit more skin in the game as a sponsor.

Pete Mockaitis
“He will not let you down.”

Rosalind Chow
Oh, yeah. Yeah, right. I know, right? So, be careful, like, how hard you’re pushing, because the stronger your guarantee is, the larger the penalty if you get it wrong. But so, everyone, though, again, if you notice people doing good things and you can speak to it confidently, there is never any downside to making that more well-known to others.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and this just makes me think of, like, any time we recommend any product or service or business to anyone ever, I can just say, “Yuri at Lille Flooring was quick and responsive, and installed my flooring beautifully within the price range that ChatGPT told me it should cost. These are facts. So, if you’re looking for a flooring person, and you’re like, ‘Oh, well that sounds better than what I’m dealing with right now. I would like to talk to this person. Thank you.’”

Rosalind Chow
Yeah, exactly. So, yes, being careful about whether or not you’re talking about your own personal experience, things that happened already in the past, versus things that are in the future and uncertain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well said. Well, now could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Rosalind Chow
So, you probably know of this idea of team players, right? And the question is, “How do you know someone is a team player? How do you identify who they are? How do you even know how they contribute to the group?”

We all have this kind of vague sense of, like, “Oh, Pete is a team player.” But then if you were asked, like, “Well, what do you mean by that? What does Pete do that indicates that he’s a team player?” Well, one version is like, well, it’s because you do things on behalf of the team. But there’s another version that these researchers found, which is that there are some people who, just by their presence in the team, actually amplify the performance of other team members. And they don’t even have to be talking to each other.

And that’s the part that kind of blows my mind, is that they have these tasks that people do together in groups, and some of the tasks don’t require anyone to talk to anyone, but just they’re able to statistically pull out the fact that when you have a team player in the team, they actually help other people perform better, just their physical presence. And I just find that so amazing.

I think what’s going to be hard for organizations is figuring out who these people are. And my guess is that at least some of what these team players are doing is they’re sponsoring their teammates. They’re saying, like, “Oh, okay, we’re working on this right now. Actually, Pete’s the right person to be doing that task because Pete has got the right skills for this.” And naming all the resources that are in the group and just making sure that they’re going to the right place.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rosalind Chow
Probably somewhere between Cryptonomicon, so that would be Neal Stephenson, and he has another one called Anathem. So, I’m just a big Neal Stephenson fan.

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

Rosalind Chow
You can go to my website, that’s RosalindChow.com. Also, I post fairly regularly on LinkedIn. And just to be clear, I don’t post about myself or my own research, actually. I like to post about other people’s research because I think there’s so much great research that happens in academia that doesn’t get kind of translated and sent out into the world for other people to know about. And so, that’s one of the things that I love doing on LinkedIn. So, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you will get lots of posts in your feed about new research that’s really exciting.

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

Rosalind Chow
If someone’s doing something that is really great and has a positive impact, go ahead and name that for them, not just to them, but to everyone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Rosalind, thank you.

Rosalind Chow
Thank you.

1059: Finding Peak Performance through Upgraded Emotional Regulation with Ryan Gottfredson

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Ryan Gottfredson shares science-based tools for upgrading the mindsets that hold us back.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to rewire limiting beliefs
  2. Keys to moving past your fears
  3. The key mindset shift that sets great leaders apart

About Ryan

Ryan Gottfredson, Ph.D. is a cutting-edge leadership development author, researcher, and consultant. He helps organizations vertically develop their leaders primarily through a focus on mindsets. Ryan is the Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author of Success Mindsets, The Elevated Leader, and Becoming Better. He is also a leadership professor at the College of Business and Economics at California State University-Fullerton.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Ryan Gottfredson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ryan, welcome!

Ryan Gottfredson
Hey, thanks for having me on.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to talk about personal transformation. It’s one of my favorite things.

Ryan Gottfredson
Mine, too. And I think I’ve kind of learned that the hard way, which is where my new book comes from. So, I’ve got my new book coming out called Becoming Better. And part of it comes from my failures in trying to develop myself and some of the things that I’ve learned from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you share with us, perhaps your most dramatic and instructive personal transformation?

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, I guess let me set it up this way. Like, I’m just curious if any of the listeners, if you’re listening to this, have you ever been in a position where you felt like you had the knowledge and the skills to be successful, yet you weren’t as successful as you wanted to be? I imagine most of us have been in that space and that’s an incredibly frustrating space to be in.

So, I’ve been there in several different ways. I think about, like in high school, my goal was to get a college scholarship to play basketball. And I think I was good enough, I had the knowledge and the skills to do it, but it didn’t happen. Fast forward, I’m in my doctoral program at Indiana University, and I think I had the knowledge and skills to be successful in my program, but I failed my first comprehensive exams. I went on to pass them the second time, but there was a failure moment there.

And then fast forward several years later, currently I’m a professor at Cal State Fullerton. I teach and do research on leadership, but I took a leave of absence to do some consulting work with Gallup. And 10 months into the job, and I feel like I had the knowledge and skills to be successful, but 10 months in, I got fired. And I never thought I would get fired.

So, these are three examples where I feel like I had the talent, the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be successful, but I didn’t perform at the level that I could have. And that said less about my talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities, and it said more about something else. And that’s what I call our being side.

So, we’ve got our doing side, which is our talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities, and we’ve got our being side, which is actually the quality of our character, our mindsets, our psyche, our consciousness, and even our emotional regulation abilities. And what I’ve come to learn is that, most of the time, when we feel stuck or when we fail, it has less to do with our doing side and more to do with our being side.

Pete Mockaitis
This is reminding me a little bit of Pat Lencioni, teams smart versus healthy. Just about all the teams he encounters are smart, but not all of them are healthy. And so maybe we could zoom into the Gallup situation. Could you share some details about what went down?

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, I mean, there was a couple of factors that went down. One was when I took the job, they didn’t necessarily communicate clearly what position I would be in. So, when I got into the role, it ended up being a much smaller position than what I had anticipated. So, I kind of felt like I was boxed into a corner. And what I was trying to do is try to expand out and do more than what they wanted me to do. So, there was some frustration there.

But, ultimately, one of the things that I learned is that, and this is only in hindsight, but what I’ve come to learn as I reflect back on that experience is, again, while I had the talent, the knowledge and skills and abilities to be successful, I actually had mindsets that didn’t set me up to be successful. And what I mean by that, and what I’ve learned in the mindset research that I’ve done, is that we all have mindsets, they all dictate how we see and interact with the world, and our mindsets can range in quality, from on one side of the continuum to being more wired for self-protection, and on the other side be more wired for value creation.

So, for example, many people are familiar with fixed and growth mindsets. So, a fixed mindset is actually a self-protective mindset. It’s something that makes us wired to avoid learning zone challenges because we don’t want to fail or look bad. Whereas, a growth mindset allows us to step into learning zone challenges.

And so, what I learned from my experience at Gallup is that while I did have talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities to be successful, I had some self-protective mindsets, like a fixed mindset, a closed mindset, an inward mindset that ultimately caused me to be more focused on protecting myself than on creating value for our customers, stakeholders, and team members.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s interesting as a continuum, self-protection versus value creation. And just conceptually, I’m hanging out there, like these things don’t necessarily, on their surface level, sound like opposites of each other. Like, black, white; short, long; cold, hot; self-protection, value creation. They don’t sound like opposites per se, and yet you say they represent the extremes or the opposing ends of a continuum.

Ryan Gottfredson
Yes. Right. When you think about a hero, like think about Superman, Spider-Man, right, why do we celebrate them as heroes? Well, it’s because they’re willing to step into short-term discomfort, right, they’re willing to step in and fight the bad guy, put themselves in harm’s way. They are not being self-protective. But the reason why they’re doing that is because they want to create value for the people that they’re saving.

So, if we ultimately want to be value creators in our world, then we have to have a certain degree of willingness to step into short-term discomfort.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it seems like there could exist a world in which you are being self-protected and also value creating.

I suppose, if you’re doing the same comfortable thing you’ve been doing for a long, long time that people appreciate, like, “Hey, you crank those widgets out real great, Ryan. Keep up the good work. Thanks, buddy.” You’re like, “Hey, I’ve been doing this for 10 years. It’s easy to crank these widgets.” So, I suppose some of those contexts exists. Although, as a counterpoint, I suppose you might say, “Well, by sticking your neck out a little bit, you could be creating substantially more value.”

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, yes, and what this allows us to do is to connect back into our motives, “Why is it that we are doing what we are doing? Are we doing the comfortable thing that we’ve done forever because it feels comfortable to us? Or are we doing it because we see it as our purpose and our way that we create value in our world?”

And, ultimately, what we’re finding that matters when it comes to leadership, when it comes to influence, when it comes to impact, is it’s less about what we do and it’s actually more about why we do what we do. So, if we’re doing something from a self-protective perspective, that doesn’t mean we can’t create value, but the impact is going to be limited. But if we do something from this place of kind of love of creating value, it’s going to have a much greater impact.

Pete Mockaitis
That tracks in terms of what is being transmitted and coming across and received to the people that you’re interacting with as you do the thing, in terms of love, like, “Oh, you care about me and my happiness and satisfaction with this project, this product, this process,” whatever.

And it is a good feeling to hear that, as opposed to, “Well, this is our policy and this is what we do.” And it’s like, “Oh, well, okay then. I didn’t mean to inconvenience you, service provider.” It’s not nearly as edifying and valuable an experience on the receiving end.

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah. And let’s bring this to life just a little bit more. So, I’m going to give you four desires, and I want you to tell me if society says these are good or bad desires, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ryan Gottfredson
We got a desire to look good, a desire to be right, a desire to avoid problems, and a desire to get ahead.

Pete Mockaitis
Look good, be right, avoid problems, and get ahead. I think, generally, society, well, it’s funny, like, I guess, it’s like a hypocritical mixed message is the answer from society on these matters. It’s like, if someone’s told you, “You know, Ryan, what I’m all about is looking good, being right, avoiding problems, and getting ahead.” I’d go, “Yuck. I don’t think I want you on my team, Ryan. That doesn’t feel like the energy, the culture, the vibe we’re going for here.”

And yet, at the same time, when one looks good, is right, avoids problems, and gets ahead, we pat him on the back, like, “Good job. Look at this star. Wow, Ryan is so wonderful.”

Ryan Gottfredson
You’re spot on. And I love how you articulated that, right? Because we could justify these desires. Because who likes to look bad, be wrong, have problems, and get passed up? Well, nobody likes that. So, when we have these desires, we’ve got to kind of ask ourselves, “Where’s our focus?” Well, it’s on ourselves. It’s me looking good, me being right, me avoiding problems, and me getting ahead, right?

And these are actually desires that are fueled by the more self-protective mindsets, fixed clothes prevention, and inward mindsets. And when I first started to learn about mindsets, this was really eye-opening because all of these desires resonated with me, right? To your point is I didn’t celebrate them, “Oh, look at me. I always want to look good.” But that was a core desire that my body had, that I wanted to avoid failure.

But what we’ve got to understand is there’s kind of this different side of the continuum with more value-creating mindsets and value-creating desires, such as to be able to learn and grow, to find truth, to reach a goal or a destination or a purpose, and to lift others. And here’s the thing about it. If I want to learn and grow, I’ve got to be okay failing at times.

If I want to find truth, I’ve got to admit that I’m wrong at times. If I want to reach my goals, I’ve got to wade through problems at times. And if I want to lift others, I’ve got to put myself on the back burner at times. And I don’t know about you, but those at-times moments are really tricky to navigate. And it’s our mindsets that dictate which way we lean in these at-times moments.

Do we lean more towards self-protection when we’re in a situation where we might fail? Or, for example, with from close to open, do we lean more towards doubling down on being right? Or are we willing to admit that we might be wrong to explore a new way of operating? And what we find is that, when people operate with more of these self-protective mindsets, is that helps them with their emotions in the short term, but inhibits their ability to create value in the long term.

And so, I think it’s really helpful to have a framework like this to help us to awaken to how our body is wired. Is our body wired more towards self-protection or more towards value creation? And what I found, so I’ve got a mindset assessment, it’s free on my website and people can take it and awaken to where they stand along all four of these continuums.

And to kind of give you a highlight of one of the things that I found, I’ll give you two highlights. One is, across 50,000 people who have taken it, only 2.5% are in the top quartile for all four sets of mindsets. So, most of us have some mindset work to do. Most of us, myself included, have some self-protective tendencies, and that’s natural.

But then another finding that I found interesting is I find that 60% of leaders in organizations have a fixed mindset as opposed to a growth mindset. And what’s interesting about this, if you were to speak to a room full of a hundred leaders and you ask them, “Do any of you have a fixed mindset?” I’m pretty certain nobody’s going to raise their hand.

Pete Mockaitis
“Yeah, we know that’s a bad thing.” So, it’s like, “No, we don’t like that.”

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah. So, despite the fact that most people think that they have a growth mindset, what we find is, at least leaders in particular, 60% have a fixed mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so funny because, like, we all know, if you read books and have been, like, listening to that improvement-y podcast that, “Ooh, ooh, growth mindset, good; fix mindset, bad. And, therefore, we don’t want to self-disclose that.” It’s like, “Do any of you…? Who in this room looks down on poor people?” It’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s me.” Like, people are not going to self-disclose that.

Although, sometimes you can tell from people’s actions and the way they’re treating folks that, “Well, you do.” So, we won’t cop to it. I’m intrigued then. So, what’s the magic of your assessment? How does it get folks to land in the fixed mindset zone without them just saying, “Yep, I got a fixed mindset”?

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, yeah, the assessment presents kind of polarized options to choose from, and these options like, so we’ve got some fixed mindset options and ways of thinking, and we’ve got some growth mindset options and ways of thinking. And to somebody with a fixed mindset, the fixed mindset options feel right. To somebody with a growth mindset, the growth mindset options feel right.

And so, it’s actually, what I’m finding fairly difficult to gain because it’s really about how our body perceives our world. And so, when we were presented with these two options, one generally is going to feel more right to us than another, and that corresponds to our mindsets.

And so, with two people look at it, if I have a fixed-mindset person look at it and a growth-mindset person look at it, they’re going to see those options and going to feel differently about those options. They’re going to see one as being good and the other’s going to see the other as being good. So, it’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, lay it on us then, Ryan, if we would like to be shifting our mindset, how is that done in practice?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, so the first step is always awareness. So, here’s the thing, our mindsets are the most foundational aspect of who we are, and they largely reside below the level of our consciousness. So, for example, how would you say most people respond to constructive criticism? They get what?

Pete Mockaitis
Defensive.

Ryan Gottfredson
Defensive, right? That’s our bodies’ kneejerk reaction, and it’s something that occurs at a non-conscious level. It just happens, right, “I get thrown into this defensive mode.” And so, that’s an indicator of the quality of our mindsets. So, the first step to elevating our mindsets is to become aware of our mindsets and their quality.

We tend to all think that we have good mindsets because, whether they’re wired for self-protection or for value creation, they feel good to us because they’re serving a certain job. The self-protective mindsets are serving the job of protecting our emotions in the short term. So, therefore, it feels good to us.

So, for example, many people seek to avoid taking risks. Well, they have a mindset about risks that kind of directs them in a non-conscious way. So, but if we could put labels and descriptions to these mindsets, then we could bring them to the level of our consciousness. Then we could become aware of them. So, that’s the first step, is becoming aware of the quality of our mindsets.

Then when we become aware of them, we might come to learn, “Oh, I have more of a fixed mindset,” or, “I might have more of a prevention mindset. Well, now that I know that, then I could do something about it.” And so, what we could do about it is what’s helpful for us to recognize is our mindsets at a neurological level, our neural connections in our brain.

And the reality is, Pete, in your brain right now, you’ve got a fixed mindset neural connection, and you have a growth mindset neural connection. Now, one of those is generally stronger than the other. And when one is stronger than the other, that becomes the default mode by which we process our world. So, let’s just say, I’m not saying you have a fixed mindset, but let’s just imagine that you do.

And that doesn’t mean that you can’t turn on a growth mindset at times. You can, you’ve just got to be intentional about doing that. But, by and large, your default mode’s going to be the fixed mindset neural connections. So, the reason why this is valuable for us to understand is because our neural connections are a lot like muscles. The more we use them, the stronger they become.

So, what that means, if we want to shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset, we’ve got to activate, regularly activate and strengthen our growth mindset neural connections, and this is kind of just simple things. This is things like meditation, gratitude journaling, watching videos related to this, or reading books or articles, having discussion questions, and then working on, like, journaling or self-talk exercises.

Research over the last 40 years says that if we could do these types of, I’m going to call them, experiments or habits, on a regular basis, like daily, then over the course of about 30 days, we’re going to see significant shifts in our mindsets.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s fixed versus growth. Can we do another one?

Ryan Gottfredson
So, there’s two exercises that I mentioned that I’m going to call they’re global mindset exercises. So that’s the meditation and the gratitude journaling. Both of those, researchers are finding, that will shift across all of our mindsets more towards being value creating. But then some of the other exercises that I mentioned, like reading books, reading articles, watching videos, journaling, discussions, we could tailor those specifically to the mindset that we’re working on.

So, for example, if I’m working with somebody that wants to develop a growth mindset, I’m going to recommend a Carol Dweck’s book, Mindsets. Or, if I’m going to be self-promotional, I’ll recommend my book, Success Mindsets. But if I want to work on developing more of an outward mindset, where we’re more focused on lifting others, then I’m going to recommend the Arbinger Institute’s book, Leadership and Self-Deception.

So, depending upon the mindset that we want to work on, we could cater those different activities – again, books, articles, videos, journaling exercises, discussions – more tailored to those particular mindsets.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Ryan, as I’m thinking about learning and neurological connections, I think the learning that is in me, deepest, comes from lived experience, in terms of, “I tried a thing and this is how it went.” And then I kind of get that connection up in my nervous system, like, “Oh, stay away from that thing. That’s bad news,” or, “Hey, that worked out really great. Hmm, maybe more of that would be good.”

So, as you lay down these things, I mean, hey, I’ve got a podcast about being awesome at your job. I love that sort of stuff in terms of, like, the content, the media, these exercises. But I’m thinking about getting out and having some real lived experience can make a world of impact on the learning and neurological connections.

Because I mean, part of me is thinking, “Hmm, if I want to get better at not being defensive with criticism…” I’m thinking about general, you know, approach versus avoidance and exposure therapy-types interventions. Like, “Maybe I would do well to get a lot of criticism and somehow enjoy and appreciate it as being good for me.”

Do you have any thoughts on this, Ryan, in terms of how can we take it out of the safe confines, if you will, of this zone of exercise to really get some experiential learning up in there?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, so great question. And, to me, that’s kind of a step two here. So, it is helpful for us to kind of push against some of our self-protective wiring in some of these ways, and I’m going to give some examples on how to do that. But before I do that, let me kind of tell a little bit of my own story. So, when I first learned that I had all of these self-protective mindsets, then I’m thinking, “Okay, what do I do about this?”

Well, one of the desires that I had at the time is I wanted to start a business. I got fired from Gallup. I come back, I’m a professor at Cal State Fullerton, but I decided I still want to do this consulting work. I’m going to start up my own business, or that’s what I would like to do. But I was really scared to do so because I had a prevention mindset. I was really, like, fearful of taking risks. I didn’t want…I was kind of raised by a dad who failed as an entrepreneur.

And so, I always kind of saw being an entrepreneur as being super risky and dangerous. And that’s not something that I wanted to do. But so, what I did first is I started to work on my promotion mindset, neural connections. I picked up a book, I don’t know if you’ve heard of it, it’s called The Five-Minute Journal.

And every day, I’m answering a question, which is, “What are three things that would make today great?” And this is something that activates the promotion mindset because I used to kind of wake up in the morning, and think, “How do I survive today in the easiest ways possible?” Well, after doing this over the course of a few weeks, I’m starting to think not, “How do I survive today?” but, “How do I make the most of today?”

And then by shifting my mindset now, I built up the courage to start actually practicing being an entrepreneur, taking the steps to start my own business. So doing the mindset work first helped me kind of break through some of my fears and insecurities, which allowed me to kind of push against some of these beliefs.

So, the reality is, and you’re spot on, so when we start to do this mindset work, we’re going to come up against places where we’re hitting a roadblock or a hurdle, right? Or, for example, as you mentioned, if we receive constructive criticism and we recognize that we’re really quick to get defensive, well, one, I’m going to suggest, let’s work on developing more of an open mindset.

But then, two, let’s actually strategically seek out constructive criticism. And there’s an approach that we could do that, right? If I’m going to seek out constructive criticism as a way to practice whether or not I get defensive, I don’t want to start with my boss, right? But maybe not even my spouse, right? But maybe I want to start with a good friend that I’ve known my whole life, that I have some sort of, you know, a certain degree of psychological safety with that individual.

And so, I want to start small and then, over time, I want to build that up and expand. So, that’s the second approach. So, first approach is let’s work on those neural connections first and foremost. Second, let’s now start, engage in experiments to practice in these different ways.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And as I think about that experience of receiving that constructive criticism alongside the journaling, that could really go hand in hand, in terms of, “Oh, I had some constructive criticism, and actually it was really useful and eye-opening and valuable in these ways.”

And then I imagine some of the journaling is, likewise, reflect back into times in your past in which you’ve received some constructive criticism that turned out to be very useful. And then I could sort of feel a shift happening in me right now, as I’m thinking, “My freshman year of high school, my teacher, Mrs. Judy Federmeyer, gave me a not-so great grade on my first writing assignment.” And I thought, “What is this? I am accustomed to A’s always. That’s just very unsettling.”

But, sure enough, that was extremely useful in identifying how to improve my writing. And now, what do you know, I’ve got a couple of books, I’ve got a career doing content stuff. So, thank you, Mrs. Federmeyer, for that feedback, even though, in the moment, it sure was a gut punch to look at a not-great grade for perhaps the first time.

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, spot on.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m thinking about how there’s variability in my day-to-day lived life experience in terms of the more that I am stressed, frustrated, exhausted, hungry, under-slept, just generally don’t have needs met physically and psychologically, the more likely I am to be in that self-protection mode.

Like, “You know, I really don’t feel like making that difficult phone call,” as opposed to, if I had all the things going for me in terms of, “Oh, I’ve had some wonderful friend conversations, some good food, some good sleep, dah, dah, dah,” I would feel much more equipped and ready to take that on. So how do you think about the daily fluctuation and variability of living this stuff?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, and I’m even going to expand it even wider because you’re spot on. So, I think it gets us to ask the question, “Why do some of us have more self-protective wiring?” Well, it’s really one of two large, broad reasons. The first is our life’s experience, and the second is our current culture and our current environment.

So, our life’s experiences are things like trauma. One of the things that we’re finding, the more trauma one experiences in their life, the more their body becomes wired to be self-protective. And that makes sense, right? It’s our body’s natural reaction to these difficult circumstances. The same thing goes with our current culture. If I’m in a work environment that doesn’t feel psychologically safe, I’m naturally going to turn and be more self-protective.

If I’m more hungry, if I’m more tired, right, those are also factors that are going to impact my body. So, what we’re starting to connect to, where we started was, we’ve got a doing side, that’s our talent, knowledge, skills, and abilities, and we’ve got a being side. And that’s effectively the quality of our internal operating system, how our body’s nervous system is actually wired to operate.

And so, mindsets is one way to gauge our altitude along our being side. Self-protective is more towards the bottom of our being side. Value creating is more towards the top of our being side. And so, there are factors that can temporarily kind of pull us down. But we do, what the research has found is we do tend to have a center of gravity where we tend to fall along that continuum from low being to high being.

And what I’ve learned is that, as we elevate along our being side, our body’s internal operating system, our nervous system, actually becomes more higher quality and more sophisticated, so that, even in the times where we are hungry, tired, stressed, we’re feeling a lot of pressure, our body is able to still stay in value-creation mode, even though we’re feeling the pressure or the pull to move into self-protection mode.

So, this is why this concept is really important for leaders, because when leaders step into leadership roles, now their stress, pressure, uncertainty, complexity elevates. And if their being side isn’t a very high quality, then they’re going to really struggle to navigate that particular environment because they’re going to pull and be more self-protective.

So, if we’re in an environment where it’s really high pressure, high stress, the only way that we’ll ever be able to navigate it more effectively is not by focusing on improving our knowledge, skills, and abilities. It’s actually on improving our being side, upgrading our own internal operating system so that we have the emotional regulation abilities to navigate those circumstances in a healthier, more productive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we talked about a number of ways to do these upgrades. I’m curious, from all your research, what does the science say is the most reliably effective kind of ROI in terms of being upgrade per minute, “I invest in doing the thing” that you would highlight for us?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, the biggest bang for our buck, so to speak, is maybe not the best place to start. So, here’s the way that I think is helpful to think about it, is there are what I call starter-level strategies, there are deeper-level strategies, and there are deepest-level strategies. Now, you don’t have to necessarily go in that order, but I do think that there is some value to that because it opens up our body more and more to doing that really deep work.

So, we’ve talked about some of the starter-level strategies. That’s things like meditation, gratitude journaling, yoga, even cold plunges. Those are all factors that serve to upgrade our nervous system. So, that’s our surface level. We’ve also talked about the deeper-level strategies. That’s focusing on our mindsets specifically. And that’s a deeper way, a more precise way of helping us elevate along our being side.

But at the deepest level, this is where we get things like psychological and trauma therapy. So, for example, research has found that EMDR, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, may be one of the most effective trauma therapy approaches to healing our body’s nervous system. If we have, let’s say, ADHD is something, it’s a neuro divergency that affects our being side altitude.

One of the things that research is finding is that neurofeedback therapy is helpful for rewiring our mind. And then, if we’re really going to go for the biggest bang for our buck, it’s kind of a controversial area, but it’s a burgeoning area of research. And what researchers are finding is that psychedelic-assisted therapy might be the best approach for us to upgrade our body’s internal operating system. So, those are some of the deepest level approaches.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Ryan, these three interventions that you highlight here, my impression, I’m not deep in the literature, is that they’re new, they’re hot, they’re trendy. And I’m curious, though, you’re saying they also have the most phenomenal results in the systematic reviews of the human randomized control trials?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yes. And here’s part of the reason why that is. Yes, they feel hot, they feel trendy, and here’s why. It’s because of technological advances, there has been more neuroscience research that’s been done in the last 10 years than all of time before that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And we talked about healing from a trauma. I just wanted to find terms with trauma. Now, is it fair to say that trauma need not necessarily be an unspeakable horror or crime that befalls us, but rather something that sticks with us.

For example, if someone made fun of us for something at an impressionable age, and it hurt a lot such that we want to never do that thing again, and it feels very uncomfortable if we approach that. Does that qualify as “trauma” in how you’re using terms here?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yes, and you defined that really well. So, trauma is not what happens to us. It’s our body’s response to what happens to us. So, it could be something relatively insignificant that changed how our mind and our body operate. Let me give you a personal example. I’ve got some emotional neglect in my past that has played a significant role in how I show up today.

But on a more minor note, I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, Pete, but I used to love to fly, like, go to airports, go on trips. I loved, like I just thought it was a lot of fun. Well, on one of my trips, I missed one of my flights. I was actually sitting there and I was waiting for my flight and the time zone, I didn’t switch the time zone on my watch, and I effectively watched the plane take off in front of me that I was supposed to be on.

And so, this is relatively insignificant. Most people have missed a flight, but for whatever reason, this jarred me, right? So now, every time I go to the airport, I’m anxious about my flights. I’m checking my watch like a hundred times an hour to make sure I’ve got the right time zone, right? And it’s changed how my body functions in that airport environment. So that’s a relatively insignificant thing that’s occurred, but it has altered how my body functions. And, therefore, it would be classified as trauma.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and what’s interesting is that it’s super conscious, I imagine. As I think about my experiences of that, it’s like you go to the airport, it’s like, “Oh, I hope I don’t miss this flight. No, I hate missing flights. Missing flights is the worst. I remember that time, the flight was terrible.” So much so as it’s not in the conscious brain, but it’s just in the body. Like, “Ah, I feel kind of antsy and agitated here at this airport.”

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah. So, when we start to connect to these ideas like anxiety, for example, the more that we…now there could be some chemical imbalances, right, that are impacting our anxiety. But when we’re having anxiety, that’s actually an indication that we’re not yet where we could be along our being side. That means that kind of our environment is feeling overwhelming and our body isn’t able to deal with that environment.

And so, the only way we’re going to be able to navigate that environment is, ultimately, and this is kind of why I love focusing on this. And here’s the core message is if we want to become better, transformation-ally so, we’ve got to focus on healing our mind, our body, and our hearts. And what’s kind of eye-opening to me is that, when most people try to improve, they generally don’t go there.

Where they go is they focus on, “How can I gain more knowledge, more skills? What’s the next degree or certificate that I need to get to be able to advance in my career?” They’re generally not thinking, “How do I heal my mind, my body, and my heart so I could show up as a more positive force for good within the space in which I operate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s very well put in terms of a distinction. And, boy, there’s probably so many reasons for that. It’s uncomfortable for us independently, individually, and it’s almost not okay to say in a professional work environment, in terms of it’s like, “Hmm, you keep making some sloppy mistakes in your client deliverables.”

And so, it’s like, “What I need you to do is heal your traumas.” And it’s like, “Are you allowed to say that to me? Should I talk to HR about you, sir?” But that might actually be what is necessary in terms of, if there is a block, an emotional thing going down that prevents them from doing the things that need doing, it may very well not be a matter of learning these spell-checks software or whatever the thing is.

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, let me give you an example. So, in the consulting work that I do with organizations, I’m helping to develop leaders. And some of the organizations that I work with, we’re kind of helping leaders go from good to great. Well, sometimes I get called in, kind of head of HR calls me up, and says, “We’ve got a CEO that is really wrecking a havoc. It’s kind of operating at this bad level.” And they kind of say, “Can you help this guy? Can we get him from bad to good?”

And, generally, I’m, “Yeah,” because I want to help, I want to help the organizations, and I want to help these leaders. In every single one of these circumstances where I’ve done this coaching with CEOs that are, I’m going to say, are operating at this bad level, and we’re trying to help them just to step up to that good level, every single time, what comes up in the coaching process is they bring up a trauma from their childhood.

I’ve had one CEO tell me, “When I was a boy, my best friend was my bike.” I had another CEO tell me, “When I was a kid, my parents divorced, and I didn’t really see my dad, and my mom really wasn’t around. I never was recognized.” Another executive, this wasn’t a CEO, but another executive said, “When I was a boy, I could never please my dad, no matter what I did.”

And all of these things have left an imprint on these leaders that causes them to show up as a leader in really self-protective ways. Some of them are, “Oh, I need to be seen. And so, I’m willing to run over others in order to get the fame, the accolades, whatever that might be.” And, ultimately, it’s because they’re driven by past hurts that have made them develop certain insecurities and fears that are holding them back.

And here’s what I’ve learned. We’ve all got these. We’ve all got past hurts. We’ve all got fears. We’ve all got insecurities. And unless we’re willing to lift up the rug and start to look at them and start to do work with them, they’re going to continually hold us back from becoming the people that we want to become.

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

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, I think we’ve covered it, right? But I want people to just understand that there’s really two paths that we can develop ourselves. One is by focusing on our doing side, and that’s what most people focus on. That’s our education systems, our athletic programs, most of our organizational development efforts.

But what I hope we’ve opened up for people is to help them to see that there’s another path, there’s another side for them to focus on, and that’s their being side. And I know that for many people this is new. And so, let’s open up this so that they have the opportunities to now start to do this work. And what I’ve learned is that when we improve along our doing side, it’s helpful but, generally, only incrementally so. But when we focus on our being side, it could be transformational.

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

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is by Anais Nin, and it is, “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” And I think that speaks to some of this being side growth that we’ve been talking about.

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

Ryan Gottfredson
I will point people, there’s a great TED talk by Alia Crum, and it’s all about the placebo effect, and it dives into mindsets. And there are several studies in that that I just think are incredibly fascinating. But one of those studies, it identifies how some of these exercises, like we’ve talked about, watching a three-minute video can shape our engagement, our performance, and even our blood pressure two weeks later. That’s one video.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to watch that video. And, hopefully, in a good way. It shapes in a good way or it makes our blood pressures sky high?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, well, it depends on the video. So, they showed them a video, they had two groups. One group saw a video that said, well, stress is bad, and another group saw a video of how stress is good. And the people who saw the stress-is-good video, they had higher engagement, higher performance, and lower blood pressure two weeks later than the group who saw the stress-is-bad video.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ryan Gottfredson
I’ll go with The Choice by Edith Eger. This is a memoir of a Holocaust survivor, and it’s less about her Holocaust experience and more about her life recovering from her experience. And I think she is such a great case study of doing this being-side work, which really started 20 to 30 years after her Holocaust experience. And it’s just an incredibly moving book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, I would say a tool that I use every day on my phone is the Insight Timer app. That’s what I use to meditate as a part of my being-side work.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ryan Gottfredson
Oh, next up, right after I’m done meditating, then I pick up my book, The Five-Minute Journal. And, to me, that’s been game-changing. So, I’ve been doing that for the last seven years, and I credit that to most of my growth and development.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate and folks quote back to you often?

Ryan Gottfredson
Well, I hope some of the ideas around doing side and being side helped, but I think a quick little tagline might be, “Success starts with our mindsets.” And if we want to elevate our success, we’ve got to focus on our mindsets.

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

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, I’d point them to my website, RyanGottfredson.com, also any social media outlets. And, in fact, if people wanted to comment, find me on social media. And if they were to comment in that they listened to this show, then I’ll give them access to my mindset assessment. And I’ll even offer up a free phone call with them to walk them through their mindset assessment results.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome with their jobs?

Ryan Gottfredson
Yeah, I mean, just go to my website. I’ve got two personal assessments that are there that are free. We’ve talked about one of those, the free Personal Mindset Assessment. And then there’s also a Vertical Development Assessment, which is a different way to measure our altitude along our being side. So, those are a couple of free resources that can help you awaken to your altitude on your being side.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, Ryan, thank you.

Ryan Gottfredson
Thanks for having me.

1051: Channeling Optimism as a Superpower with Sumit Paul-Choudhury

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Sumit Paul-Choudhury shares the science behind optimism and why it gives people an advantage in the long term.

You’ll Learn

  1. The case for optimism
  2. How to train your brain to become an optimist
  3. How to direct your optimism to where you need it most

About Sumit

Sumit Paul-Choudhury writes, thinks, and dreams about science, technology, and the future. A former Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist, he trained as an astrophysicist, has worked as a financial journalist, and, at the London Business School, received a Sloan Fellowship in strategy and leadership. Currently, he devotes most of his time to his creative studio Alternity, which puts the ideas in this book into scientific and artistic practice. He lives and works in London.

Resources Mentioned

Sumit Paul-Choudhury Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sumit, welcome.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hi, glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m feeling optimistic about this interview.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Me too, hopefully, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would like to kick it off. You’ve got a pretty dramatic story in terms of you share that you became an optimist on the night of tragedy. Can you tell us the story and how you came to this position?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah. So, well, it’s not so much that I became an optimist as I realized I was one starting at that point. So, some time ago now, my first wife died of cancer, or complications of cancer. And, obviously, this was a pretty bad time for me. But one of the things I did, or the main thing I did, actually, was in the aftermath, I was to think, “Well, how am going to get through this?” And I thought, “Well, the present is not great, obviously, but I have to believe that the future is going to be better. It’s going to be brighter than today is.”

And so, I started, more or less, kind of like a coping mechanism, really. I sort of declared myself to be an optimist. I said, “I’m going to be an optimist. I’m going to believe that the future is going to be better. And, in that way, maybe it will be.” And so, I started to do things that I thought might help me along that goal. And as I kind of did them, I realized a couple of things.

One was I realized that, actually, it was helping, and something that I kind of thought was frivolous. I thought optimism is kind of a fairly naive way to go about your life. I realized there was more power there than I had realized previously. And the other thing I realized was that, actually, I thought, “Well, this is coming at a very bleak time in my life.”

And then I thought, “Well, I’ve always been an optimist. This is something I’ve always assumed that things will get better. And even now in this darkest of moments, I still think things are going to get better.” And then realizing that I was an optimist and appeared to be quite strongly optimistic was quite difficult because I thought it was frivolous. I thought this was something that if you didn’t really want to think much about life, you’d just say, “Oh, I’m an optimist. Things will work out.” And that’s how you proceed.

So, both of those things came as something of a surprise to me, that optimism wasn’t this kind of throwaway thing, and that I’d always been one, which wasn’t something I identified with myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s powerful. Thank you for sharing. And I really relate to that. I remember, when I was 15, my dad died in a bicycling accident.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Oh, sorry.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was terrible and very sad. And, at the same time, in the mix of my thoughts, I remember thinking, “Boy, I’m so grateful that I had him for this long.” Because I just imagined, like, if he had left me three years earlier, I probably could have gotten into some real trouble, really, because I had some, I don’t know, wild rebelliousness within me.

And so, I was grateful for what could have been, that was not looking to the past, and you’re looking to the future, like, you believe the future will be better than today. Well, tell us, you know a lot of reason, fact-based, evidence-based things, is optimism rational, true, believable, defensible for the skeptic?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Well, I’m a science journalist, I should say. And that was one of the reasons I found optimism, or identifying as an optimist, to be difficult, because I kind of prided myself on being a critical thinker, or being someone who made all these decisions on the basis of evidence. Or, at least, that’s what I thought I was doing, right? And then I became a journalist. And, similarly, in journalism, you’re supposed to be a detached critical thinker.

You view things objectively, try and come up with the most accurate possible assessment of a situation, or of what you’re being told. And that doesn’t sit very well with the idea of optimism as this kind of belief that things will turn out for the better. And, actually, the more I kind of dug into it, the more I realized that actually optimism is kind of irrational, actually. I mean, people kind of often try and turn it into a rational kind of way of looking at the world.

And there are arguments for it and there are ways that you can kind of make it more rigorous. But at its core, optimism in the psychological sense is irrational. Psychologists refer to it as unrealistically positive expectations. It’s kind of believing that good things will happen more often than the numbers suggest or the experience of your peers suggest. And bad things will happen less often than the numbers suggest. So, it is basically irrational.

But having said that, you can make a good case for it. You can make a case for the fact that this irrational belief, nonetheless, helps us to get ahead in life. And when you kind of do the kind of research that psychologists have done, you discover that, actually, people who score as more strongly optimistic up to a point also seem to have better lives in many respects. Longer lives, healthier lives, happier lives, and more successful lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I want to dig into that. And I guess, with that strict definition of optimism, in terms of the belief that things will be better than they, statistically, are likely to be, I guess I’m curious, though, sometimes just having–we had Jamil Zaki on the show, and he was talking about hope, and that often our default assumptions are more cynical and more doubtful than the reality on the ground.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right, exactly. And I think that’s where optimism comes into its own, essentially. So, the reason that it’s irrational is because we don’t have the evidence to hand to say, “I believe this thing will work out.” We don’t have the evidence for that, you know, “I think I’m going to get this promotion,” say. You can’t say ahead of time that that’s definitely going to happen. Almost never in the real world are you in a position where you can say, “With 100% certainty, I know what’s going to happen,” or, “I know that things aren’t going to work out.” That’s just not the way the world works.

Most of the time you have to kind of try and make your best guess, and you know that your best guess is not going to be entirely correct. The difference between being an optimist and a pessimist in that situation is that as an optimist, you recognize that there are positive possibilities that you don’t see. There are positive outcomes that you’re not necessarily aware of.

As a pessimist, you kind of write those off. As an optimist, you think, “Well, there are positives. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know what those further solutions, those further opportunities might be,” but you make the effort to keep yourself open to them, to keep looking for them. And so, if they do exist, you’ll find them, right?

If you’re a pessimist, on the other hand, you don’t do anything. And so, you don’t kind of realize those opportunities. So, basically, I mean, you start off in this position where, whatever your best assessment is, it’s going to be wrong. If you assume it’s wrong and there’s no upside, then that’s going to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume it’s wrong, but there are positive outcomes out there that you haven’t foreseen, then you’ve got a better chance of achieving them.

Pete Mockaitis
This kind of reminds me of Pascal’s Wager.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Yeah, it is very much like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Except we’re not talking about death and eternity, so much as life and the immediate weeks, months, years ahead.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Right. Right, it is like that. Actually, I mean, it’s like optimism in its origins is actually a philosophical argument, not a psychological one. So, it actually doesn’t really come from, it’s become this kind of, you know, word for the way that we look at the world, and that’s essentially what it means to us today. And it has always meant that to some extent.

But once upon a time, it was a much deeper, more philosophical point about, “What way does the world skew?” You know, at a time when the kind of language of probability and risk and that sort of thing was not as evolved as it is today, you had to explain why bad things happened. And optimism was one way that you explained how that good things were more likely to happen than bad things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, the universe of statistics and probability and risk today is wild. I’m thinking about markets such as Polymarket and predicted and Kalshi, it’s like, wow, we’ve got a number of people putting money on the probabilities of all sorts of things. So, yeah, what an environment we find ourselves in.

So, well, could you share then a few of the biggest discoveries, the most fascinating tidbits you’ve uncovered within psychology that you share in your book, The Bright Side: How Optimists Change the World, and How You Can Be One?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main kind of thing about this, as I say, is that you can make a good argument for why you should be an optimist even though being optimistic is not rational. And the way that pans out is that, essentially, by going after opportunities you don’t necessarily know exist, you tend to realize them in due course. And that kind of helps you to kind of benefit from the upside, from benefits from upsides that you don’t necessarily see at the outset.

And where this kind of shows up, in day-to-day life, essentially, is that it makes you better at coping. I mean, as I kind of talked about with my own experience at the beginning of this, I was doing this inadvertently, but it makes you better at coping with setbacks. It makes you more able to kind of bounce back when you hit a roadblock. You don’t kind of think, “That roadblock is absolute and total and I’ve gotten nowhere around it.” You think, “Well, actually there are probably are ways around this even if I can’t see them.”

And that translates not just like to the decisions you make about your own personal life in terms of what might be happening to you in your family life or whatever, as my example goes. But it also translates to the area of relationships. So, optimists tend to work harder at their relationships, both kind of your social relationships and your professional ones. And so, that means that you tend to kind of persevere more. You tend to try a bit harder to get past whatever your current problem is.

And that, over the long term, tends to mean that things work out. But there is kind of a caveat in here, which is that it does have to be something that you kind of do on a routine, regular basis. If you just get wildly optimistic about a particular thing, a particular event, let’s say you are going for a promotion. If you get massively optimistic about that particular event, that doesn’t necessarily help because it doesn’t–you can’t change the odds in your favor all that dramatically.

If, however, you kind of take every opportunity you have to advance yourself, and you take each of those individually with an optimistic stance, that’s what tends to pan out over the long term because, sure, you’ll be wrong sometimes and some things won’t work out, but sometimes they do. And over time that accumulates.

So, optimism is not a short thing. It’s not a one-off, you know, wild overestimation of how likely you are to get lucky in a particular time. It’s a game for the long term. It’s something you have to keep trying and keep trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is really juicy stuff, and it reminds me of some of Dr. Albert Bandura’s research on self-efficacy, in terms of the beliefs we have about what is possible for ourselves really do translate into different results, not so much in a mystical law of attraction, universe bringing things into your life kind of a way, but rather a, “Well, hey, if you believe that it’s going to work out this way, or that you have the power to do a thing, then you’re going to go ahead and make an effort, and you get the results more often when you go ahead and make the effort than when you don’t.”

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Exactly. I mean, I think there are other ways in which this pays off. It pays off in terms of your relationships, I say, because people like optimists. People like people who are willing. And this is not difficult to understand, but, I mean, clearly, who’s going to kind of want to hang out with someone who tells you things are going to be terrible, right? I mean, you want to hang out with someone who says, “Things are going to be good. If you follow me, things are going to work out well.”

But if you kind of adopt that stance and you put in that little bit of extra effort, then you tend to kind of reinforce those relationships. And it works both ways, right? I mean, if you develop a stronger relationship, that then becomes a status resource, as it’s called, that you can then draw upon.

It means that when you kind of come to a point when you need something down the line, you’re more able to ring up that person you have that relationship with. You’re more able to kind of ask for a favor. You’re more able to ask for advice. And those are all the kind of things that, gradually, over time, add up to real material changes in your ability to achieve what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, could you share some fun stories that bring this all to life?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, I think the easiest place to see optimism at work at the moment, and you can take this however you like, really, is in the Valley. So, optimism is very strongly associated with entrepreneurship and with innovation. I say entrepreneurship, but I mean, essentially, anyone who wants to take a chance on doing something new or different requires a certain level of optimism because, at the outset, you can’t know that it’s going to work out.

So, whether you’re within a company or an organization, and you’re trying to do something differently or you’re trying to do something on your own, you need some degree of optimism to make it work. And I think there’s no kind of more successful example of optimism than the people we see who run the big tech companies at the moment and where they came from.

If you take someone like Mark Zuckerberg, he started out coding in his dorm room with a project with what eventually became Facebook. There was no kind of realistic way that you might think at that point in time that this was going to become one of the biggest companies in the world and one of the most powerful companies in the world, and that he would still be single-handedly in charge of that now. That this would be kind of his pet project.

Zuckerberg talks about this in terms of that language of the self-fulfilling prophecy. So, he talks about, you know, this is one of his favorite phrases that optimists tend to be successful, pessimists tend to be right. And this is the kind of thing about, so if you’re a pessimist, you can always kind of justify this to yourself. You can always say, “I was correct about that,” because you go and look for the evidence that supports your point of view.

You don’t do anything to confound it and, therefore, you end up being correct that something doesn’t work out. If you’re an optimist, you tend to ignore that and you build the thing, you build the multimillion, the multibillion-dollar company, and you go ahead and do it even though that’s not what conventional wisdom says you can do, even though that’s not something that someone working out of a dorm room is supposed to be able to achieve. That’s kind of where the power of optimism comes in.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. Could I have another story?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, in the story I tell in the book, I tell the story of how I eventually got my job at New Scientists. And it started off, when I was a kid, I was in my dad’s office. He took me to work when we were on vacation, when I was on vacation rather, from school, and I found a stack of magazines, New Scientists magazines, so science magazine.

I kind of thought at the time that writing in science were not very compatible occupations, which they, by and large, are not supposed to be. And so, I kind of looked at these, the stack of magazines and asked my dad, like, “Who looks after this magazine?” And he said, “The editor does that,” and I kind of, “All right. Fine.” And this is when I was about eight, and I thought, “That’s the job I want, basically. I like writing. I like science. That’s something I can do.”

And, obviously, at the age of eight, you don’t have any expectation that you’re going to be able to make that work, right, or what that means, essentially. But I clung onto that idea. And so, when I kind of went to school, I had to make my choices, I decided, “I still had this kind of thing in the back of my mind. This is the ultimate job for me, essentially.” It wasn’t that I necessarily thought I was going to get it tomorrow, but that was what I was aiming for.

So, when I came to having to choose between writing and science, initially I chose science because I thought you needed to be a scientist. And I thought that you could be a writer even if you didn’t have the training for that. So, I studied science, I studied astrophysics, I did all of that. And then I decided that I would switch to writing, which was kind of this leap into the unknown, essentially, at that point.

And it was kind of a, that was pure unbridled optimism. I thought I could make that work. I had no evidence for it. I had no background in writing. I had no track records. I had no particular expertise in that field. But I thought I’d give it a go. So, I did. And as it turns out, I did turn out to be able to make a career in writing.

But the most important thing, really, wasn’t that I was necessarily good at that. It was that by looking for ways to advance that career, I eventually lucked into a position where the physics background was very useful, which was in covering finance. From there, I kind of did that for quite a long time. I started a publication through a random opportunity, through someone I met through networking, carried on doing this.

And, eventually, after doing that for about a decade, I wrote back to New Scientist, and said, “Can I have a job?” And they said, you know, at that point, they kind of said, “Well, you know, maybe later, maybe if you get some more experience.” So, I got a bit more experience. I wrote back to them. And, ultimately, they gave me a job, a part-time position. It was a two-day a week position that I started out with.

And then, over time, I built up from there and, eventually, I became the editor in chief. And the kind of point I was trying to make here is that, really, I mean, there are a number of ways you can think about this. This was not a case of me saying at the beginning of this, I had the very naive, optimistic view that, you know, if I just went out there and did like, you know, wrote for a couple of years, I would somehow end up at New Scientist and end up in charge.

What it turned out to be was that much longer game, but every step along the way required me to take kind of optimistic leaps into the dark, essentially. It meant I have to kind of accept, I had to be optimistic about my chances of being a writer. I had to be optimistic about my chances of, once I’ve been a writer, of being able to run a publication.

And then I’d to be optimistic about my chances of getting into New Scientist. And once I was there, I had to be optimistic about my chances of progressing there. And so, there’s a succession of steps, each of them involved being open to possibilities that were not obvious at the outset. Each of them is kind of optimistic journey, a step down this line, that, eventually, ended up with me getting the job that I kind of set out to do, you know, 25 odd years earlier. And that’s kind how I got to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very cool. Congratulations.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. So, if we think, “Yes, that’s good. I would like some more of that,” but it doesn’t come so naturally to us, what do we do?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, there are a few things you can do, and some of these are given in the book. They’re not actually particularly complicated. The main thing is that we don’t take the time to do them. So, there are a bunch of exercises that people have suggested for how you can make yourself more dispositionally optimistic. So, the very specific optimism, I think we kind of know how to make ourselves optimistic about how to kind of G ourselves up for a specific challenge.

So, if we’re going for a job interview, or we’ve got a big project to pull off, whatever, I think we kind of all have an idea about how we kind of build our morale for that. But the bigger challenge is being optimistic in that longer term sense, in that persistent sense. And there are a couple of things that people suggest for that, or psychologists have suggested for that.

One of them, which I think is kind of something that has to become second nature, is called disputation. And this is the idea that when something happens, you need to try and explain it to yourself in a way that doesn’t kind of make it entirely an issue, you know, it doesn’t make it an inevitability. So, the idea is that we have different explanatory styles.

And one explanatory style is to say, “Well, I didn’t get that job,” or that promotion, or, “This project didn’t work because it was always doomed to happen that way,” “I wasn’t qualified,” “I’m not ready,” “I don’t have the right kind of skillset for it,” or whatever else, and to really internalize that. And, obviously, there’s always going to be some truth to that and you always need to reflect on the components of that that might have led to whatever situation you end up in.

But the other way of doing it is to think about, is to kind of to challenge that, and think about the other factors that were involved and how you might have controlled those, to think about whether there are external factors, whether you had a bad day, whether you had a personality clash with the person you’re talking to, whether there was a failure in the environment that meant you couldn’t deliver against whatever you’re trying to deliver against. So, with that, you have to keep doing it. It’s not something you can do once and then move on from.

It’s like having a little post-mortem every time something happens, and thinking about it and trying to come up with a constructive frame. And if you do that over and over and over again, you eventually become good at kind of coming up with an optimistic interpretation of what’s happened. And that then makes you better at coming up with optimistic interpretations of what’s going to happen, of the challenges that you face. It makes you better able to frame your challenges, your problems in ways that are amenable to solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can we dig it out into some particular questions or prompts or ways we might point our brain in the direction that gets there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So there are a few different ways you can do this. One is there’s a model called the best-possible-self exercise, which is kind of you sit down and you, essentially, spend 15 minutes talking about the best possible version of you. So, you try and you can do this in whichever way makes sense to you. You can do it as a written description.

So, one of the things I did when I was in my bereavement was, I did this as a blog posting exercise, essentially. I wrote down what I thought my life could be like. But you can do it that way, you can do it in terms of the things that you want to achieve over various timeframes. You can ask yourself what success looks like to you.

And the idea is to try and do that on a regular basis, to do it something like daily. You spend something like 15 minutes a day doing this for as long as you can manage, essentially. Initially, it helps to kind of do it over a short-term period, so do it for like two weeks or so. And then you can do it less frequently over time because it’s a lot of time commitment.

The thing about that is not something that we never do, but we don’t tend to do it very often. We only tend to do it when we have a particular decision to make. Whereas, doing it on a regular basis means that you keep kind of front and center in your mind what it is that you’re trying to achieve, what it is that you want to do, essentially, rather than being, getting lost in the fog of the moment or of the everyday.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about being lost in the fog of the moment or the everyday, if you do find yourself in that zone of sweeping condemnation or despair, do you have any kind of go-to tactics to lift yourself up out of there?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the one thing that’s useful there is to think about the pivotal moments in your life and to think about the what-ifs. You kind of mentioned earlier the what-if when your father passed. And that’s kind of a quite extreme example. But I think one of the things that’s useful to do when you feel like overwhelmed is to think about the what-ifs in your own life. Think about the points when things could have gone differently for you. And there’s two kinds of implications of that.

One is the ways in which they went right for you and the ways that your life has gone in the direction that you wanted to. And the other is to think about how you would have reacted if they’d gone a different way. Because, usually, particularly with the passage of time, it becomes easier to see that, actually, whatever happened was not the only thing that could have happened and the only way that things could have worked out. There are other ways that things could have gone that would have been equally satisfying.

And you can usually see that with a remove. And that helps you to bring perspective on the current moment. No matter what you kind of look at, if you’re looking at the moment right now and you think, “I can’t see a way out of this. I can’t see what happens from here,” you’ve probably felt like this in the past. There are moments in your past when you would have felt like that, and things either worked themselves out for the better, or you know how they could have done. And that, I think, gives you perspective.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think there’s a lot of upsides to optimism, and they pan out over the long term gradually, more than they do in the short term. One of the things about being an optimist, I think you have to be careful not to let it kind of override your basic kind of common sense about how to treat people. I think optimism is a question of directing the optimism that you have.

I think if you kind of think about where you’re optimistic in your life and where you’re maybe not so optimistic, that kind of helps you to identify areas where you might want to concentrate using things like that best possible self-exercise, or where you want to kind of think a bit harder about disputing your version of events.

It’s not that easy to necessarily raise your level of optimism hugely. And I’m not sure that that’s necessarily that healthy an exercise because if you do that, you run the risk of starting to dismiss the problems in your life, or the problems in other people’s lives, or the real challenges that you face. So, I think that with optimism, it’s more a question of directing the optimism that you have and trying to increase it in specific areas than it is with being blanket positive.

It’s not just about being happy or being relentlessly positive about everything. It’s about trying to focus on the areas where you need that optimism. And that’s also true when it comes to assessing what lies ahead of you. One of the things that optimists, an optimist sees opportunity everywhere. And that means you can find it quite difficult to pick one thing to focus on.

If you’re an optimist like I am, you tend to kind of, as sort of from the little description I gave you there of my career, you tend to kind of want to try and do everything. So, you need to bring a little bit of discipline to that as well in terms of what the specific things you want to do, the specific goals you want to achieve, the specific jobs you want to have, the specific roles you want to play. So, optimism is about targeting. It’s not just about being relentlessly sun-shiny. It’s about choosing where you want to increase your ability to see that brighter future.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any guardrails or pro-tips on how much optimism is too much, or when we’re potentially flirting with recklessness?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
I think the best answer there, really, is to listen to other people. So, generally, it’s the point at which you’re tipping over from constructing a version of events that suits you into denial. There’s a point at which people are saying, “You’re wrong about this.” And you need to kind of think carefully about whether they’re right or they’re wrong. You need to think about the data. You need to think about what the numbers say.

We’re disposed to ignore the numbers completely. You can’t ignore them completely. You need to pay a certain amount of attention to them. It’s clearer in things like in health outcomes. If you smoke 20 cigarettes a day, it doesn’t make any difference what you do. You’re going to have bad outcomes from that.

If you take wild financial risks, those also are not going to work out for you in the long term. So, there’s just a certain degree of remaining grounded and a certain degree of listening to what people are telling you.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, my favorite quote on optimism comes from James Baldwin, the Civil Rights activist. And so, he came out of, this is in 1963, he came out of a meeting with Robert F. Kennedy, who was the Attorney General at the time. And it was a very acrimonious meeting. Things had not worked out. They had not been able to find common ground. And Baldwin, as it happened, was doing a TV interview the same day.

And, in the course of that interview, he was asked, “Well, what do you think about the future of America? Are you optimistic or are you pessimistic?” And he kind of thinks about it for a minute. You can see it on the film if you watch it. He’s kind of thinking for a minute about what to say. And then he says, “I think I have to be an optimist because, otherwise, you’re accepting that human life is an academic matter.”

And what he means by that, I think, is that, you can’t afford to– it goes a little bit back to what you saying about cynicism, that you can’t really afford to say that life is a purely a matter of calculation about what is bloodlessly correct. Life is something we live, and you have to kind of be engaged with it. And that, I think, means being an optimist.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
There’s one that kind of sticks in my mind quite a bit, which is one by three psychologists called Armor, Massey, and Sackett. And that was, essentially, about what people think about optimism.

They basically did an experiment where they say, “Here are some scenarios that the people are facing.” Someone is offered a promotion. Someone is asked to organize an event and a few other things like that. And they asked people, “What stance should people have going into this? Should they be optimistic? Should they be pessimistic?”

And almost universally, across the board with all of these scenarios, the answer is they should be optimistic. And that’s kind of very telling because people don’t expect realism from others. People don’t think that realism is the best way to go into things. People think that optimism is the best way to go into a new challenge.

And then it’s kind of a rider to that, so, two, actually. One is the degree to which they prescribe optimism depends on how much control you have over the situation, which is not surprising in some respects. The other one, though, is that they didn’t think people were optimistic enough. We almost never think that anybody is going to be optimistic enough, or that we are going to be optimistic enough in dealing with these situations.

So, there is an enormous kind of psychological weight to optimism, but one that we tend not to allow ourselves when we’re in a professional context. We tend not to allow ourselves to express that kind of belief, I think, because we think we’ll be viewed as naive, or we think we’ll be viewed as being unrealistic in some way. But I think it helps to remember that, actually, almost all the time, everybody thinks optimism is the right way to approach a challenge. And that, actually, we probably don’t make enough use of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
The book I would recommend is Candide by Voltaire. An old book, it’s published in 1759. The title is Candide or optimism. And it is a book that sets up two different strands of optimism. It sets up one which is, I referred to earlier, this kind of grand philosophical version of optimism in which the world is set up a certain way and things must turn out for the right within it.

And another, which is much more kind of concerned with the here and now in the present moment. And I don’t think either of those two kinds of optimism is necessarily correct or incorrect. They’re both different kinds of optimism. I think it helps to think about both of them. The one in which you try and make sense of the world and the one in which you think about what you can do, what you can do to make your own situation better, what you can do around you.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the main tool I would say, the thing that’s really made a difference to me in the last few years, given that I’m a knowledge worker, essentially, is Roam, which is a personal knowledge management tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
My favorite habit is probably my version of the best possible self, which kind of takes various forms, but I do it over different time scales. So, I do one, which is sort of for the next month or so, I do one for the next year, and I do one for the next five years. The one that actually turns out to be most useful for me, I found, is the five year one, in point of fact.

Because I think the others, they get derailed very quickly. Things I need to do over the course of the next week, like everybody I set out with my list of to do, most of them don’t get done, you know, some of them do. The five year one, though, is like the compass needle of where I need to get to over the long term.

And I find that it makes it much easier to make all the little course corrections you need to do. And it makes decision-making easier when I’m thinking about what I want to be doing in five years’ time rather than what I want to be doing next week.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
So, the best place is my website, which is Alternaty.com, A-L-T-E-R-N-I-T-Y dot com. You’ll find more information about me and the book there, and some other resources fairly soon. Not up yet, but they’re going to be, they will be shortly. Otherwise, I’m available on LinkedIn.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Always stay open to possibility. If you plant many seeds, some of them will grow. If you go out looking for new opportunities, you’ll find them. If you stay where you are, if you carry on doing what you’re doing, you won’t. So, keep moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sumit, thank you. This has been fun.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you, Pete. Thank you.