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Mindset Archives - Page 2 of 26 - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Jan 08
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1118: Finding Consistent Motivation to Turn Intention into Action with Chris Bailey

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Chris Bailey explains the science behind intentionality and how it can dramatically increase goal attainment.

You’ll Learn

  1. The 12 main values that drive everything you do
  2. 
The simple reframe that significantly boosts motivation
  3. How to deal with resistance to action

About Chris 

Chris Bailey is an author and speaker who explores the science behind living a more productive and intentional life. He has written hundreds of articles on the subject and has garnered coverage in media as diverse as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, GQ, HuffPost, New York magazine, Harvard Business Review, TED, Fast Company, and Lifehacker. 

The bestselling author of The Productivity Project, Hyperfocus, and How to Calm Your Mind, Bailey’s books have been published in more than forty languages. He lives in Ottawa, Canada. His new book, Intentional, comes out January 6, 2026.

Resources Mentioned

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Chris Bailey Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome back for round four.

Chris Bailey
Round four, Pete. Are you serious?

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It is round four. The last round was, oh, about five years ago, so it’s been a while. But we are using the same pen and the same microphone so I feel like, since I respect you and think you’re a genius, that maybe I, too, am worthy of some sort of props, but maybe that’s reading too much into things.

Chris Bailey
Has the pen helped?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been pleasant. This is the Pilot Precise, by the way, RT, for those listening.

Chris Bailey
It’s the best pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, you raved about it in a previous episode, and I was like, “Oh, let’s check it out.” It was like, “Yep, I’m just going to buy dozens of these things.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I have friends who are into fountain pens and they have all these fancy pen rituals, pencil rituals, all these different weights. They send me these pens. They’re all garbage. I’m sorry if you’re a pen person. They’re all garbage, except for the Pilot Precise V5 RT. Come at me, pen people.

Pete Mockaitis
Noted. We’ll put that in the pulled highlight quotes there. So, well, I want to hear, we’re talking about your book, Intentional. It’s been about five years since we chatted. Tell me, what’s the most powerful thing you’ve learned in your life of productivity over these last five years?

Chris Bailey
About values. Now, before your eyes glaze over, whenever I’ve heard the term values, my eyes have glazed over. I am not exaggerating. When I hear the word values, I think of the corny corporate exercises I’ve done in the past where somebody like brings in a sheet of paper and there’s a hundred values and they say, “Circle the values,” and I like them all, you know, grace, humor, whatever. And there’s very little research behind those.

But it turns out, there is a fascinating body of research behind what we value on a fundamental human level, and that there are 12 main values that drive pretty much everything we do. And that when we don’t want to do something, we’re usually going against the grain of our values. And so, I’ve been into this idea. You know, we’ve chatted about this three, going on four times, this idea of becoming intentional.

I’ve always wanted to write a book on becoming more intentional, but I’ve never found enough stuff around values to share, stuff around intention to share, until I encountered values, which are the research shows, that’s been validated across 60 different countries, hundreds of thousands of participants, full credit where credit is due to Shalom Schwartz for discovering this methodology of motivation, essentially.

It was kind of the missing piece that pieced together all of the things that I’ve been incubating on intentionality over the last decade. And it was an unlock for me. It was as if everything was aligned. And I don’t want to oversell. I don’t think I’m overselling.

Once you see what the values are and stuff and how the different levels of intentionality in our life fit together, there’s beautiful, fascinating science behind it. Of course, we don’t always accomplish our intentions, which is a whole other thing, but it’s fascinating, it’s beautiful, and it’s powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And part of me is tempted to say, “Give me the 12 now. List them.”

But first, you say it’s a big unlock and there’s hard science and research. Can you tell me what are some of the main discoveries of this research and what impact does it make when you apply it?

Chris Bailey
So, there’s different fundamental motivations we have in our life. There are two kinds of axes of motivation that we have that motivates us in our work, in our life, any context that we’re in.

There’s whether we’re motivated to enrich other people or ourselves. And there’s whether we wish to conserve things as they are or improve things as they are. And so, these are the fundamental motivations in our life that our values fit inside of.

And the key to keep in mind is that, with all 12 of these values, we’re all different. Your values are different from mine. Although good pens aren’t a value, but there are associated values actually with a good pen and good microphones. We have the same microphone.

The key to keep in mind is we all have all 12 at a different level. So, there’s self-direction, which is going our own way. There’s stimulation, which is enjoying novelty in the moment. There’s pleasure, which is, you know, sense pleasure, it’s a good meal or a good bath or something. There’s achievement, so accomplishing good things.

There’s power, right, a power over resources and other people. There’s face is another one of the values, which is how we come across to other people. There’s security, so personal security and societal security.

Tradition is another value, so the customs that surround us. Conformity is very, interestingly, to me, a fundamental human value, you know, kind of this fundamental conservation of living within the expectations of other people. Humility is a fundamental value.

Universalism, I find to be a beautiful value, which is protecting and advancing the welfare of people and of nature. And benevolence is the final 12th value, which is kindness and serving others. And so, across, and all these values fit into those kinds of four motivations, ourselves or others, or improve and change.

And so, we all have all 12 in different extents. And anything that we could be doing in the moment, anything we could possibly be doing in the moment, fits inside of these values. A good pen is pleasure. That’s the pleasure value.

Pete Mockaitis
Pleasure. Stimulation. Power.

Chris Bailey
That’s stimulation maybe a little bit because it feels so good. Self-direction, if you chose it yourself. If you heard it from a friend, if everybody you know is using this same pen, that fits with conformity. Humility, using a simple $3 pen, or, however much this costs, instead of a fountain. Everything we do is motivated by these values.

And so, our values are the broadest intentions in our life. They’re what we ultimately hope to accomplish. And so, the more that the goals we have fit with these values, the more we actually care about them. And the more they feel like a natural extension of who we are. And then it goes down to the various levels of intentionality in our life, but this is at the very top.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Chris, you know, as you were speaking, my natural consultant brain, thinking, “Is this a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categorization set? Can I think of anything that does not fall into them?” And, well, I’ve only been thinking for about 40 seconds and I was having a hard time digging one up. So, we’ll say it’s pretty good.

Chris Bailey
Well, I can name one or two. I can name one or two.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear it, yeah.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, health is one that doesn’t fit. But these values, they’re a motivational continuum. So, they are what could be possibly motivating us in the moment. And health is interesting. That was a big question I had when I looked at this theory, it’s like, “Okay, where is health in this?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s power. I’ve got the power to get out of bed, the power to have the energy for the day, the power to walk up a flight of stairs.

Chris Bailey
Well, that’s the interesting thing. It depends on the person. So, women are more likely to see health as a pleasure value because they feel good in their body.

Pete Mockaitis
Being in pain sucks. Fix that shoulder with a physical therapist. Ugh.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s self-direction, right? You can go your own way. Some people see it as that achievement. Other people see their body as an achievement that they can, yeah, bro.

Pete Mockaitis
“Muscle ups, bro.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, they’re a true motivational continuum. It’s beautiful that these are what drive everything we do. So, uncovering the ones that actually motivate us is paramount for achieving the goals that we set.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it is interesting because I’ve noticed that I really like feeling like a winner – achievement – and I really don’t like feeling like a loser. And some of this can even be neurotically nonsensical, you know, in terms of, like, if I’m taking out my trash and I can’t fit the week’s trash into my trash bin, I feel like I am being a poor steward of the earth’s resources because it’s like, “Oh, you know, this huge garbage bin wasn’t enough for you, huh? So now the whole world has to see, ‘Oh, that family can’t handle consuming a moderate amount.’”

And so, it’s like, “But, like, who cares? Like, nobody actually cares.” And yet this is, this is inside of me. And it’s kind of, and I guess there’s maybe conformity, right, “Hey, all of us fit our stuff inside the trash bin.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, there’s universalism in there, wanting to protect the nature. There’s face, right, looking at how you come across other people. There’s achievement, wanting to crush the garbage down to a certain extent. It’s all in there. And so, this is the fascinating thing about values, is because they’re essentially our ultimate intentions in our life. They’re what we care about most.

But every single intention that we set, whether deliberately or not, because that’s another curious thing, intentions don’t have to be deliberate, they can be automatic. A habit is our brain forming an intention that will do something automatically for us. Maybe that’s too much to get into on the podcast, but in every moment, especially when we make these deliberate intentions, we’re automatically evaluating a series of options before us using our top values as a trade-off.

And so, the values that tend to win out in the moment tend to be our strongest values. It’s interesting. They’re behind the scenes of our life pulling, because, of course, we don’t always follow through with our intentions. Intentionality, it’s incredible, it’s beautiful, but the road to hell is also paved with good intentions. But these values are behind the scenes because they’re our true motivational nature, pulling on the strings of what we will do and what we won’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what’s so intriguing is, as I’m thinking about, yeah, with any goal you could feel them at war. And I’m thinking about, I’ve been on both sides of the overweight threshold, according to the body mass index. And food, I mean, boy, it is stimulation, it is pleasure, it’s so good.

And yet, when I am having, on a hot streak of weight loss, what’s doing it for me is achievement in terms of, I’m tracking those calories, like, “Look at that, another day a deficit. Winning!” It feels good. And so then, they’re at war. It’s like, “Well, do I want the pleasure of this cheesecake or do I want the pleasure of winning a caloric deficit for the day?”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, and that’s the thing with these, like, weight loss goals, is an interesting one because 40% of the world’s population at any given time are trying to lose weight, so about half of us are. But we tend to go about goals like that the wrong way. So, we set a goal, ‘Yeah, I’m to lose 10 pounds this year so I look good, have six-pack abs by beach season.” We have this idea of ourselves.

But a goal like that is built around face, right, the value of face. It’s how we come across to other people.

But if your top value is pleasure, and maybe self-direction or something, a different goal would be better, right? Like, instead of that lose the weight to have six-pack abs by beach season built around face, maybe it’s, like, experiment with three different ways of eating – self-direction – to find the one that’s most enjoyable.

And so, you can have the same set of actions that lead you to different goals, but they are actually motivated. And this is something that is also interesting about intentionality, is there are many, and I love this idea. I love this idea.

So, there are many different layers of intentionality in our life. So, we set intentions across all kinds of different timelines, right? We have our values, which are our ultimate intentions. They last the length of our lifetime. Then we have the intentions that are a bit shorter than that, which are called our priorities. Like, “Be healthy” would be a priority.

Then we have intentions that are shorter than that, still, which we call goals, things we want to accomplish in our life, stories of change that we’re creating. Then we have, you know, we kind of go down in timeline. Then we have the plans that we have. Goals should ultimately lead to the plans that we set.

And then we have the smallest of intentions at the very bottom of this. I call it the intention stack in the book. It’s just, essentially, all the layers of intentionality in our life. And at the bottom, the very bottom, we have the present intentions we have in the moment.

So, somebody listening to this podcast, the present moment intention might be, “Listen to the podcast and enjoy it.” Then the plan might be, it might fit inside of a broader plan, like a chore to wash the dishes or something. Then it might fit inside of a goal, like in, you know, “Learn more about self-development and how to be awesome at my job.”

Then it fits inside of a priority, which is “Make a bigger contribution,” which fits inside of a value of, let’s say, benevolence, helping other people, plus achievement. And so, there’s always this stack on top of what we’re doing in the moment. But sometimes it’s aligned to what we care about. Other times we don’t care at all.

And so, it’s fascinating when you begin to deconstruct intentionality and look at the science of it, what it’s shaped like, and how it works, and how we can kind of, I got to say harness, it’s kind of a corny word, but like harness it to do the change that we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. And I think this is, it opens up, and you called it an unlock. It does open up a lot of possibilities in terms of, “Oh, I wasn’t even thinking about approaching this thing with that value as a lens, but because I’m really into that value, it may well behoove me to explore how can I do such a thing to provide for more humility or universalism or benevolence or whatever the thing is.”

Chris Bailey
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Chris, I want to maybe take a little time out here because it almost feels as though some of these values are good-er, more morally virtuous, right, true, noble than others in terms of, like, let’s say universalism, benevolence, humility. We think, “Oh, what a swell fella, or a gal, who exhibits a lot of those things,” versus, “You know what I’m really about is pleasure and power and looking awesome. That’s kind of what’s important to me.” That almost feels hollow or like a less good life.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I talk about this in the book, too. My top value is self-direction. It’s not even close. But my number two is pleasure. I love nothing more than to…well, I like self-direction more, but I love nothing second more than to just lie on the couch after a busy day and put on a good show or a podcast, and order some Uber eats, like a big sushi platter and just indulge for the night.

And this was a very reflective process that I went through in piecing together this book is, “Are there good values? Are there bad values?” And I’ve, ultimately, come to the conclusion that, “No, there aren’t good values or bad values. There are certain values that are more conducive to certain goals.” But if you’re able to accommodate the values of others, in addition to the values of yourself, I think you’ll be fine.

Power is one that comes to mind, too, because out of all the values, out of all the listed values, it’s the very least common. It’s at the very bottom across the population level, and, sure enough, it is for me, too. I never want to have power over any other person ever in my life.

But, power, if you look at the world around us, it has a place in what we do. Any organization that has a hierarchy, for example, you have different layers of the hierarchy, and you need power within that organizational structure. Every charity has a CEO. Every nonprofit has a CEO. Every congregation has a priest.

So even the most virtuous of places, these values have a place. Conformity, right, maybe also a frowned upon value. But there’s a great benefit to going along with the expectations of others in certain scenarios, right, for accommodating other people. I’m the most self-directed person you might ever meet. And I don’t want to listen, you know, if somebody else tells me to do something, it makes me not want to do it.

But I remember my grandma telling me, like, “Wash the dishes now,” and I’d do it because I had such a respect for her. And that conformity and tradition, all these values live relative to one another, too, which is interesting. They live right next to each other in these values pie, this pie hierarchy – pie-archy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that is a really intriguing perspective there that these values, they’re motivational forces and they don’t necessarily lead to great or catastrophic outcomes for civilization or humanity when they all kind of come together. And what’s interesting about power is you said, you define it as, it is power over others or yourself or circumstances.

Chris Bailey
Or resources, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Or resources, yeah. I’ve got a, my buddy Ronnie, he had a funny saying, he said, “Laundry is power.” I was like, “What?”

Chris Bailey
What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
And then I think, one day, I had done all, I mean all of my laundry, and I’m beholding this dresser full of organized socks matched and shirts folded, underwear. And then, as I beheld this arsenal of complete laundry, it’s like, I really did, I was like, I’m ready for anything. I’m ready for anything. I felt powerful in that moment. I understood what he meant.

But I, like you, have no interest in controlling the legions of people. In fact, that sounds like a huge headache, like, “Oh, my gosh, that administrative load would be such a stressor.”

Chris Bailey
And that’s the interesting thing. I don’t want to, like, overload people with this value stuff right now, but I break it down more into, like, you can break down the 12 into 19, actually, of them, where you can break down power, for example, into power over resources and other people. Self-direction, you can break into self-directed thought and self-directed action.

And so, it’s very interesting that there’s this. It’s just a fundamental organization to human motivation that we don’t understand. But when you do understand it and you can fit through these different layers of intentionality, the goals that you have with your values, and then see how those goals connect with the daily actions that you need to take, what you get is your goals become a vessel between who you are on that fundamental level, so what motivates you, and what you do on a daily basis.

And so, we are sharing the fat loss example. Same set of actions, but with a different frame around them, with a different motivational frame around them. Imagine if your goals were all like that. This is actually the thing that bothers me about a lot of goals and goal books and stuff like that, is when you look at the actual research on goals, we have to achieve them by becoming more intentional across the different layers of intentionality in our life.

But we so often see them as static, something that shouldn’t change. But goals should evolve. We should be editing them. We should be dropping them. We should see them as fluid things. And goals, in my view, they’re basically just a story of change that we’re in the middle of creating in our life. And we need to see them as more fluid and ready to change, because so often a goal is really no different from a prediction of what we believe will happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, this is really juicy, and so, conceptually, we can hang here for a long time, but I’d love to perhaps shift gears into, “Okay. All right, Chris, my mind is blown with regard to these values, they’re important, and I should be considering them thoughtfully as I’m trying to go about making stuff happen.” Could you share with us a little bit of the step-by-step in terms of, “Okay, I got a list of values. That’s kind of cool. I got some things I want to be achieving, what am I doing with that?”

Chris Bailey
Yes, okay. So, let’s get tactical with this stuff, because, yeah, we have to be. So, you have your values, maybe you do a values test. I partnered with a company to build a test for the book. You don’t have to take that though, because there are certain ones that’ll kind of attract you more, and others that’ll naturally repel you.

And so, what you’ll find is that, when you look at those 12 values and the pie that they’re a part of, you’ll naturally gravitate to some and be repelled by others. Look to the ones that you naturally gravitate to and pick the top two, let’s say, two, three. Stop there. These are what you build your goals around. And then you have a list of goals, right?

How often do we actually sit down and capture the goals that we have that we’re in the middle of creating? And so, I highly recommend a weekly review where you sit down, you capture, and then you review, on a weekly basis, all the goals that you’re in the middle of creating.

And so, every goal, so in the book, I call it the intention stack. So, at the top, it is values, then priorities, then goals, then plans, then intentions, daily, weekly intentions. And, ideally, during this weekly review, or whatever cadence it makes sense for you to review these goals on, you want to look at both your values, which is the motivational force, and the actions, which is how you actually make progress towards these goals in the first place.

So, I think step zero is realizing that goal attainment, the process of goal attainment, is it’s not 99% action. It’s like 80% action, 20% planning. We need to plan more and act a little bit less, because by planning more, we actually act more over the longer arc of time, especially once the initial burst of motivation wanes.

So, during that weekly review, edit your goals, edit your goals, edit your goals. How can you edit them, like with that weight loss example, how can you edit your goals so that they fit more with what you value, so you actually care about them, right? Because the easiest way to tell if something’s a priority to you is you’ve achieved it already, right?

So, the fact that something is yet to be achieved, probably means, on some level, that it isn’t a natural fit for who you are, because it doesn’t fit with that motivational force, right? We do what it makes intuitive sense to do in the absence of intentional action.

So, during that weekly review, how can you edit your goals so they’re more in line with what you value? And how can you bite off a little bit of the goal until your next review, whatever cadence you’re doing this over?

So, if you’re doing it over a week, what do you want to bite off in the next week? Make sure it’s enough that you can chew, or not too much that you can chew, whatever the analogy is there, and schedule time blocks for it.

Practice intentionality on a more granular level. Set a few weekly intentions. Every day, set a few daily intentions so these intentions can actually flow down into one another. So, edit your goals. And, as well, if you find that a goal isn’t motivating that you can’t edit it to the point that it fits into your life, consider dropping it.

Because then we get a chance to try more goals on for size that are actually a fit with what we want to get out of our life and our motivational nature. So that’s one way is that goal review where we bridge, essentially, who we are with what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very cool.

Chris Bailey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’d love to dig into some of your perspectives for, if we’ve got a goal that is not so appealing, well, one, you might learn via the editing process that it needs to be dropped. But before that, do you have any cool examples of folks who were able to just turbocharge motivation and progress by thoughtfully tweaking their goals so they are better fits for their values?

Chris Bailey
This is interesting, right? Because is gray intentionality such a beautiful idea? And then the rubber meets the road, right? The road to hell is also paved with good intention. So, intentionality is both vital because any time we act towards our goals, there was an intention behind it.

But sometimes, it’s also useless because there’s a lot of times when we set an intention only to not follow through, or procrastinate on an intention, or lack the desire to accomplish it. And so, there’s essentially two factors in a goal, in an intention, in something we want to do, that attract us or repel us away from that thing.

So, there’s aversion, which, you know, it’s like, “Get this out of my face, this goal out of my face.” And then there’s desire, which attracts us to a goal. And both of these are forces that work with every single goal that we have. And they’re different over the timeline of a goal, right?

So, if you’re at the very beginning, the very inception of a goal, your desire is going to be through the roof. Your motivation level is going to be so, so high. But then reality sinks in, “Oh, there goes gravity,” and then our motivation level plummets, and our desire can turn into aversion.

So, a lot of it’s like realizing where you are on that timeline of goal attainment. But aversion is a very interesting feeling that we experience along the way, because aversion is what leads us to procrastinate on something.

So, the more aversive something happens to be, which is a combination of “How boring is it? How frustrating is it? How unpleasant is it? How far away is something in the future? How unstructured is it? How meaningless is it?” so lack of connected with our values, the more of these triggers that a task has, the more likely we are to procrastinate on it.

And so, that’s another key is realizing that and understanding what triggers a task sets off. So, if something’s unstructured, like meditation is a great example of this. We were chatting a bit about meditation before we hopped on the horn here and hit the record button.

It’s one of the most aversive things that you can do, right? It’s helpful because it’s so aversive, right? If you can focus on your breath, you can focus on anything. If you can become engaged with your breath, you could become engaged with anything because it’s so boring, because it’s so aversive.

But when you accommodate the fact that it’s so unstructured and unpleasant, by working within the aversion, so a simple example of this, shrink your resistance to it. So, this works for meditation, it works for anything you don’t want to do that takes a little bit of time.

You might have a conversation with yourself like, “Okay, do I want to meditate for half an hour today? No. No, I don’t. What about 25 minutes? No. What about 20? No way in hell. What about 15? Yeah, I could do 15.”

And so, you essentially shrink the task until you no longer feel that resistance level so that you’re at a point where you can get started on the thing. And that increases your desire to actually moving between different levels of this intention stack. You move from that goal layer to that action layer that’s at the bottom.

And so, when something’s unstructured, that’s a sign you need to add structure. When something’s meaningless, it’s a sign you need to connect a goal with your values. Edit it so it’s aligned with your values. When something’s boring, frustrating, it might be a sign you need to step back and plan out on a logical level how you want to become more intentional about that thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about, well, these procrastination triggers, I think I learned them from you as well as what are the top researchers on procrastination. What was the book? I think we both read it.

Chris Bailey
Was it Tim Pytchyl?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s the one. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
Oh, Tim is fantastic, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and he lists those out, and that’s helpful to think about it on those dimensions. And I guess that’s what, to your point about doing more planning, that’s what you can, you can get kind of meta with this. It’s like, “Huh, I have not done these three weeks in a row. It seems something is amiss here.” And so, rather than say, “Well, I just got to knuckle down and buckle up, you know, to get after it.” It’s like, well, maybe there’s some redesign that needs to be working here, or maybe the goal needs to be abandoned.

Chris Bailey
It’s interesting, in writing this book, I chatted with lot of monks, as well as scientists, because monks study intentionality on a different layer than scientists do. They’re not observational, they’re experiential. They observe the causes and effects and conditions in our mind, and we can learn a lot from them.

And one interesting thing that I asked one of the monks, I was deep into the research on where intention comes from, because we set all these intentions, right? And some of them we set automatically, which I call our default intentions.

‘Cause some come from automatic sources. We are on a road trip, we need to go to the bathroom, and so we set an intention at the next pit stop, “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” We don’t even think about this. We do it automatically. So, biological sources, sources to avoid pain and experience greater pleasure also lead to a whole other wealth of intentions.

The lessons we have learned in the past. So, the things we have learned changes, they change our relationship with what we know to be true, which leads us to set an intention differently the next time, whether we do it out of habit or energy, or whether we do it deliberately.

But one source that a monk mentioned that wasn’t in the research that kind of allowed me to piece together other areas of the research was – and he phrased it so beautifully – is our self-reflective capacity.

Our self-reflective capacity, by looking inward, asking questions of our inner world, we are able to set different intentions from the ones that we would do out of biology, or out of basic pleasure and pain, or out of lessons we have learned, to truly go our own way and set the best intentions that lead us to the outcomes that we want, whether we want to be more accomplished at work or lead a more enriching, meaningful life by connecting with our values at work, at home.

We need to tap into that capacity more often. And so, it doesn’t just have to look like meditation or journaling or something. It can look like just going for a walk and then letting your mind go to where “What problems are you in the middle of? How can you solve them with setting intentions that are more conducive to what you want?”

They could look like brainstorming with somebody, so somebody that really gets you thinking. It can look like asking questions of your inner world and looking at what arises out of them. Like, we all have these moments where we go from autopilot mode to being deliberate about what we do.

So, if your whole family was gone for one morning or something, and you woke up and your phone wasn’t there, and so you couldn’t rely on habit in bed and you just laid there. Eventually, a moment would come where your mind would set an intention to do something, where you would set an intention to do something, whether it was a habit or whether you waited for a little bit longer to look at what you truly wanted to do in that moment.

It’s the same like if you’re listening to music and a song ends, pause, and then eventually your mind will set an intention to listen to the next one, which will end up being more enjoyable than the one that you were just listening to on autopilot.

Life is the same way, right? It’s by charting this deliberate course that we experience more meaning because it’s in connecting with that self-reflective capacity that we can be with what we value. And so, our values that compete with one another in each moment, the ones that are truest to us can win out, and then we can truly, truly go our own way.

Tthe truest intentions that we can set, like you were getting at, they come from not just acting, but reflecting, whether that’s on a logical level or on a more intuitive level where we look and connect with that self-reflective capacity that we all have.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Autopilot is, in some ways, the opposite of intentionality. I mean, even if we establish those habits intentionally and we’re executing, living them out in an autopilot mode – I’m getting philosophical – on some dimension, the autopilot is intentional, but from like a presentness way of looking at it, it’s not so much.

Chris Bailey
Well, this is why, in the book, I delineate between our default intentions and our deliberate intentions, because we have these default intentions that we have. Habits are great. Habits are amazing. But when you look at an intention as just a plan that we will do something, this habit energy, as I refer to it in the book, and as monks refer to it actually, there’s quite a bit of power in that.

We don’t have to worry about making ourselves a cup of coffee in the morning. Our brain, our body goes through the motions automatically until we’re sitting there like with a cup of coffee. We don’t even have to be fully awake enough to notice it.

But you’re right that, eventually, that moment comes. It’s kind of like the movie montage where, like, somebody’s living their dull humdrum life and the scene is gray and it’s raining outside, they’re going through the same motions. But then, like, boom, somebody dies, or something pivotal happens, where that character has a fit of awakening and decides to do things differently, and decides to go in a different direction from the one that they were going in.

And then like cut to the badass working out montage, or like somebody writing for hours through the night, or piecing together some math problem, you know, something like that. But we all have these similar fits of awakening.

And all that is, is going from the habit energy of relying on our default intentions to the deliberate intentions that we can all set in the moment. Well, here’s something mind blowing about default intentions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, please.

Chris Bailey
Our values are constructed out of our default intentions. Like, seeing that in the research, it sent shivers down my spine, I’m not going to lie. It all came together. Our values are who we are on a fundamental human level. They’re what motivate us on a fundamental human level. And what motivates us more than who we are by default? Our default intentions.

And our deliberate intentions, the life we want to live, the contributions we want to make, the work we want to do, that’s the layer of deliberate intentions we layer on top of who we are by default. So, it’s, really, when you look at the science of intentionality, it explains everything that we do, everything that we think, and everything that we are. And molding that is the ultimate skill, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, that’s good stuff and worthy of chewing on and reflecting upon in depth. I know we’re at our last few minutes, but I want to hear two quick things from you. One, tracking goal progress, something that you’re into, you write about. Do you have any favorite principles or tactics or systems in that zone?

Chris Bailey
Oh, yeah, tracking your goal pace is one of my favorites. So, I use this whenever I write a book, where I make a spreadsheet. Two lines. One is my pace line and the other is my progress line. And it works for any cumulative goal, miles ran, for example. And all you do is you print it off and so you track between today and your target day.

You have a pace, say you want your book to be 70,000 words, so you have the pace line that goes up at this beautiful linear pace. And then you have your actual word count relative to that. Simple tactic, but incredibly helpful for goal tracking.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve made the spreadsheet myself in many contexts.

Chris Bailey
Oh, man, we’re living the same life, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bailey
Same pen, same mic, same sheet.

Pete Mockaitis
And you have said it a few times, and I love it, that any productivity intervention must earn back the time that you spend on it, or else it is counterproductive. Since I like to talk about favorite things at the end of each episode, can you share with us a couple favorite tools, tactics, productivity interventions that just crush it on this metric of yours?

Chris Bailey
Okay, I feel I’ve mentioned this on a previous one, but it’s five years ago, so maybe your listenership has cycled out or something. No, they’re probably still out here.

Pete Mockaitis
Never. They’re still there. They’re still there.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, okay. Hey, everybody, again, I hope you remember me five years ago. Rule of three. At the start of each day, fast forward to the end of the day, what three things will you want to have accomplished? It’s my favorite intention setting ritual. I do it every day, every week, every year, so that when I do my daily intentions, they can feed into the weekly and the yearly ones. They all work together like beautiful magic.

Tools. Tools. Man, you know what? I’m going analog these days. I love having a physical book, because I feel my eyes are glazing over from looking at screens all day long, and just practicing a bit of interstitial journaling between tasks. It allows me to really just reflect for one short little paragraph, “What do I really want to get out of what I’m going to do next?” So, an analog pen, of course, the Pilot Precise V5 or V7 RT.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, any final thoughts, Chris?

Chris Bailey
After looking at the research on intentionality, I used to think intention is beautiful, and you see how complicated it is. And it’s in that complicatedness that I think we see our humanness, right? And so, I really think that it’s intentionality that makes us human.

And by connecting with that, you know, talked a lot about deliberate intent, we got to love our defaults, too. They’re who we are. They make up our values. Love your defaults and then you can layer on even better goals, better intentions on top of those.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chris, thank you.

Dec 22
0

2025 GREATS: 1066: How to Thrive When Your Resilience Runs Out with Dr. Tasha Eurich

By | Podcasts | No Comments

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.

Oct 30
0

1106: How to Rewrite the Hidden Beliefs that Hold You Back with Muriel Wilkins

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Muriel Wilkins uncovers the hidden assumptions that dramatically shape how you work and live.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to spot when a belief has stopped serving you
  2. The 7 key beliefs that hold you back
  3. The key to reframing your mindset

About Muriel

Muriel M. Wilkins is the founder and CEO of the leadership advisory firm Paravis Partners. She is a sought-after, trusted adviser and executive coach to high-performing C-suite and senior executives who turn to her for help in navigating their most complex challenges with clarity and confidence. She is the coauthor of Own the Room: Discover Your Signature Voice to Master Your Leadership Presence and host of the award-winning podcast Coaching Real Leaders. She holds an undergraduate degree from Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Learn more at murielwilkins.com.

Resources Mentioned

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Muriel Wilkins Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Muriel, welcome back!

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

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

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you so much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muriel Wilkins
That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Muriel Wilkins
Yeah, different outcomes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Muriel, thank you.

Muriel Wilkins
Thank you, Pete. Always a pleasure.

Oct 09
0

1100: How to Be Bold in the Face of Uncertainty (According to Science) with Dr. Ranjay Gulati

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Ranjay Gulati discusses how to resource yourself for courageous action during times of uncertainty.

You’ll Learn

  1. The critical question to ask when you’re feeling fear
  2. The six resources of courageous people
  3. The simple mental shift that leads to braver actions

About Ranjay

Ranjay Gulati is the Paul R. Lawrence MBA Class of 1942 Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. His pioneering work focuses on unlocking organizational and individual potential—embracing courage, nurturing purpose-driven leaders, driving growth, and transforming businesses. He is the recipient of the 2024 CK Prahalad Award for Scholarly Impact on Practice and was ranked as one of the top ten most cited scholars in Economics and Business over a decade by ISI-Incite. 

The Economist, Financial Times, and the Economist Intelligence Unit have listed him as among the top handful of business school scholars whose work is most relevant to management practice. He is a Thinkers50 top management scholar, speaks regularly to executive audiences, and serves on the board of several entrepreneurial ventures. 

He holds a PhD from Harvard University and a Master’s degree from MIT. He is the author of Deep Purpose (2022) and How to be Bold (2025), both published by Harper Collins. He lives in Newton, Massachusetts with his wife and two children.

Resources Mentioned

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Ranjay Gulati Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ranjay, welcome!

Ranjay Gulati
Thank you. A pleasure to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about boldness and everyday courage and all the ways we can make that happen.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you today. And I think, you know, this has been a topic I’ve been studying for the last four years, so seeing it come to fruition is a relief and a delight both at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, just before we pushed record, you started saying great stuff about why right now, right now is when it’s really important to tap into some extra courage and why. So why don’t we pick it up right there? Why now?

Ranjay Gulati
Well, the one thing I don’t need to tell you, you already know this, is that we are right now in what Harvard Business Review calls an uncertainty crisis. We have technological uncertainty, “Where is AI going and how is that going to affect my job?” We have regulatory uncertainty, “Where are tariffs going? How is that going to affect my job?” We have geopolitical uncertainty, “How is that going to affect me and my job?” We have political uncertainty. We have environmental uncertainty. We have health uncertainty. And now there’s uncertainty everywhere.

Now remember, uncertainty is not the same as risk. Uncertainty is where you don’t know the outcomes. Risk is where you, kind of, more or less can model the outcomes, you put some pros and cons, you put some probability on them. And the last piece of the puzzle to understand is when there’s uncertainty, uncertainty activates in the human brain. It really goes right to the primitive brain, the survivalistic kind of reptilian brain, and activates the primal human emotion of fear.

And fear hijacks the amygdala, so you can’t even think straight. And you go into what people usually call fight or flight, but rarely do we fight. It goes to flight or freeze mode. And so, it’s normal to recognize and acknowledge that it’s scary, “I’m scared, but what am I going to do about it?” And that’s where courage comes into the picture.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly, an uncertainty crisis. That sounds like one of the most anxious crises you can have. It’s a crisis about uncertainty itself. And I like that distinction there in terms of risk, right? It’s like, “Huh, maybe I’ll try this thing, and it’s either going to work or it’s not. All right.” That’s risk. Whereas, uncertainty is like, “We have no idea what could unfold in terms of, like, what the options may well be.”

And, yeah, it’s sort of funny, in a way. It’s almost sort of like the air we breathe or the water we swim in. It’s, like, you say that, and it’s like, “Well, yeah.” But it’s like, “Oh, wait a second. It wasn’t always like this.” It wasn’t always like this, but, yes, now that is our everyday reality. We are besieged by uncertainty on numerous dimensions, almost always.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah. And I think, honestly, I think the question is, “How do we then deal with uncertainty? And how do we deal with the fear?” And I want to go back, when you talk about courage, is to go back to the Wizard of Oz. And if you remember the character, the Lion in the Wizard of Oz, and what does the Lion want? He wants courage.

And, ultimately, when he reaches the Wizard after this tortuous journey, and he tells the Wizard, “I want courage,” and the Wizard says, “But you already have courage because you got here, you took actions in spite of your fear.” And so, I think it’s the first starting point to understand this journey that I’m talking about, is courage is taking action in the face of fear. It’s not the absence of fear.

Very few people in this world are fearless. Most of us experience fear when we encounter uncertainty. And the question is, “How do we build tolerance for that fear? How do we learn to outwit fear? How do we learn to tame fear? How do we learn to face fear? How do we learn to normalize fear instead of succumbing to fear?” That gets to the heart of the issue, is that, “What is my response to normal fear that I’m going to experience in these trying times?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Ranjay, that sounds nice, to have that set of skills, in terms of just our experience of living life and our emotional internal state of mind. I’d also love it if you could make the case for us. Perhaps you have a story of someone who mastered some of these skills and saw some cool results in their career. Or, what’s really at stake for us, whether we continue bumbling along as we are, versus really mastering some of, well, the nine Cs we’re going to get into of being courageous?

Ranjay Gulati
So, courage can manifest either in an instant. There’s a moment that comes up and suddenly you have to step up or not. Or, it can be very deliberate, well thought-out, and how you kind of operate and think through that. Let me give you examples of both. One is an instant one who is Brandon Tsay. So, Brandon Tsay is a young gentleman in his mid-20s, mild-mannered, slightly built, very pacifist gentleman.

In fact, he told me that he’d never really ever gotten to any fist fights or anything like that. He always ran away from a fight. And he’s a cashier at a dance hall in Southern California, a dance hall started by his grandmother. And he’s working behind the cubicle where there’s a cashier desk. And just a typical ordinary evening, the gentleman walks in with a gun.

And Brandon knows right away this is not good. Now the question is, “What is he going to do?” So, one side of him is saying, “Let me duck under the table. Maybe he won’t see me, and this, too, shall pass. I will be there to live fight another day.”

But something gets into him, and he comes out of the cashier’s area, through the door outside, into the lobby, and gets into a fight with this guy who starts punching him. In the process of punching Brandon, who’s taking the punches, he manages to pull the guy’s gun away and gets him out of there. He has no idea why he did it.

Now I had to really probe with him to understand why he did it, but it was in the moment. Now let me juxtapose this against another character whom I interviewed who was a former student of mine – Frances Haugen. Frances is Harvard MBA, you know, hard-charging, doing a great job, having a phenomenal tech career and is now at Facebook.

And she is very troubled by the content on Facebook and what it’s doing to people. And she doesn’t do much about it, she’s just thinking about it and is troubled by it. Then she sees one of her own close friends getting radicalized by Facebook content.

She also sees internal research showing that Facebook knows what their content is doing. So, she has to do, “What am I going to do?” She spends almost a year deliberating on what she’s going to do. Ultimately, she decides she’s going to be a whistleblower, even though it may end her career, which it did. But she felt she had to do something.

So, these are two very different characters, but if you try to understand, and none of them, neither one of them had really shown, they were not like these heroic people who were former Navy SEAL, you know, had been out there, they were always kind of on the front of things, but something activated in them, the capacity to take bold action in the face of uncertainty.

And that’s what I try to understand. How did they resource themselves? How did they find the self-courage to do something they, otherwise, would not have done in the face of uncertainty?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny you said Frances Haugen. I was like, “Wait, I know that name. That’s in the news. Oh, yeah, that Frances Haugen, the famous whistleblower.” So, she was a student of yours.

Ranjay Gulati
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you knew her, pre-whistleblowing times.

Ranjay Gulati
A long time ago, yes. Not very well. She was one among many of my students. But I wouldn’t have flagged her.

Pete Mockaitis
But she wasn’t like a fiery. Yeah, nothing?

Ranjay Gulati
No, I would not have flagged her and said, “Oh, she’s, one day, going to go and whistle-blow.” You know, I think that was my learning. In many instances, these are ordinary people who somehow find in themselves the capacity to be courageous.

Mahatma Gandhi was an ordinary Indian gentleman who wanted to be an English lawyer. He wanted to live in England. Nelson Mandela was not about to be a leader.

So, you have all these people who somehow, and that was what my learning was, “How do they resource? What triggers them? And how do they resource themselves to become courageous?” Because I believe courage is a choice. It’s a choice we all can make and it can really unlock our human potential in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, yes, I’d love to dig into exactly this. When you say “What triggers them?” it’s interesting, you have an equation, which I find intriguing, that fear equals uncertainty, plus loss of control. And I was chewing on this for a while before we got on because, I suppose, if we have something real bad is going to happen to us, but we’re certain of it, the feeling isn’t so much fear.

Like, let’s say, “I’m going to get fired. I know it. Layoffs are happening. I am right in the crosshairs. I’ve got a meeting scheduled with HR, and they never schedule meetings with me. Many other people have been fired. So, it’s pretty much a certainty. I’m going to be fired.” Because there’s no more uncertainty, it doesn’t really feel like fear, so much as I guess dread, disappointment, sadness, resignation.

And then loss of control, there’s uncertainty if we go to the casino, but we chose to be there. Hopefully, we set good limits, “I have $100 to lose at Blackjack,” or whatever. And so, it’s like, “Yeah, there’s uncertainty, but I’m not afraid. This is fun. This is exciting.”

So, anyway, I was just mulling over your equation, and that’s what I came to, but you’re the master. Tell us about this equation and how it impacts how we approach situations.

Ranjay Gulati
So, back to what I was saying, when the human brain, when normal people encounter uncertainty, it typically comes also with feeling of loss of control. And when you have both those things happening simultaneously, it activates in us the primal human emotion of fear. In fact, one of the books I read had a whole chapter on what they call the good coward. Because we use the word cowardice or coward as a very, very negative label. It’s one of the worst things you can call somebody.

But actually, I found cowardice is normal. That’s the default for most of us human beings. Courage is an exception. So, the default for most of us in our jobs, whenever we encounter any form of uncertainty, whether it is job uncertainty, or it could be a project uncertainty, it could be a proposal uncertainty, it could be whatever form of uncertainty, the natural, normal human response is one of fear. And we need to get okay with that and not be, first of all, ashamed.

I used to be ashamed of my fear. When I’d get scared, I’m like, “Oh, I’m not allowed to be ashamed, fearful. I mean, geez, look at James Bond and look at Clint Eastwood and look at Jason Bourne and look at all these people. How can I be scared?” Because in my mind, courage was fearless behavior.

But then once I understood that, once I understood that fear was a normal human response, and once I understood that I needed to find a way to tame my fear, I then tried to understand, “How do people, others, how do they resource themselves and what can I learn from that? Are there some systematic things?”

And I found, actually, a body of research that I tried to understand, it was fragmented, and understanding the research and my own research into this, I was able to triangulate and come up with what I thought was a set of practices that all of us can use to make courage accessible to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very appealing. So, here’s a great starting point, that cowardice is the default, fear is to be expected, no need to shame ourselves. Just understand, “Yep, that’s what’s going to happen here. That’s the natural response.” And, thusly, we can choose to go about doing some empowering. So, yeah, let’s do that.

I understand you’ve got, in your book, the nine Cs of courage: coping, confidence, commitment, connection, comprehension, calm, clan, charisma, and culture. Could you maybe give us the one-minute snapshot of what you mean by each of these things? And then we’ll just have some fun digging into the juiciest bits.

Ranjay Gulati
So just to, first, classify them, the first six Cs are at individual courage. The last three are about organizational courage, or team courage even. So let me start with the individual courage. The first one being coping. It’s important to understand that human behavior is not only rational, but it’s also interpretive. It’s how we look at situations. How do we draw meaning in storytelling? What is our story?

So, the first piece of coping is, “What’s your story?” If you have a story about, “I need to do something. I’m committed. It’s not “I’m interested.” It’s, “I’m committed,” that’s a different way of coping with the fear. The next one is comprehension, which is, “I’m looking at the gray, the foggy uncertainty out there. I’m not going to just leap into it. I’m going to do what a firefighter does. I’m going to tiptoe my way in and learn and take small steps into it.” So that’s comprehension.

Another one is connection, “I’m not going to go alone. Courage is not a solo sport. It takes a village. What kind of support do I have that boosts up my courage? I know there are people who give me emotional support, resource support, information support, and even feedback support. Do I feel boosted by the people who are backing me up?”

The next one is conviction, “Do I have conviction? Do I believe in it? Is there some kind of moral imperative underneath it? I need to do this because…” “How does it tie to my purpose?” The next one is confidence. Confidence is not just that I have the skills to do this job. Underneath it is this kind of can-do spirit, “I’ve got this.” How do you build up that kind of a Navy SEALS mindset? How do you build that up to be emboldened?

The next one is calm, “How do I keep calm in the face of the turmoil that fear can unleash? What are the rituals I might have? How do I focus attention on the task at hand and not get distracted? How do I reframe the situation? How do I maybe even use humor to lighten up the situation?” That’s individual courage.

You can then go to collective courage, which I’ll summarize by saying it’s shifting from me to we, “How do I get us all bought in to this idea that we’ve got to do something? How do I make it part of a culture? How do I make it part of our collective rhythm? It’s something we’re meant to do.” So that, in a summary, is the arc of the book, that courage is a choice. You can change and build courage muscles.

Because if you know how to resource yourself, you will find a way to be a lion king. A lion, I’m sorry, not Lion King, the Lion in “The Wizard of Oz.” Different musical.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, no, both are excellent and inspiring. Well, there’s so much good stuff to get in here. What I like a lot is comprehension makes a lot of good sense in terms of, “Well, yeah, if there’s a ton of uncertainty, we can get better comprehension and mitigate some of that by going step by step, taking a peek, doing a test, learning, having a conversation, okay, getting there. And action, absolutely. Hey, I’m about to do some stuff. That’s tricky, that’s demanding a lot of me. Let’s make sure I feel well, well-supported, connected with my people.” I like that a lot.

Tell us a little bit when it comes to coping and story. I think that could be a little bit tricky because sometimes I try to tell myself better stories to feel different things. And I know what I’m doing, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, I know you’re trying to trick me into seeing this differently and feeling differently about it, but I’m still scared. I’m still angry. I’m still annoyed. I still don’t feel like it,” like whatever. So, what are your pro tips in terms of coping and storytelling to yourself like a master?

Ranjay Gulati
So, the first thing I’ve realized is we are the biggest storytellers to ourselves. And these stories that we may or may not even be familiar with, it may be implicit, it may be buried deep in my psyche, have a powerful grip on us. They not only shape how we look at situations, but they also shape how we look at ourselves in those situations.

I’ll give you an example. In a recession, how do companies behave? Ninety-one percent of companies just go cost-cutting because the narrative they have is, “In times of uncertainty, survival is key. So cut costs, do whatever you need to do. This, too, shall pass. We’ll see it on the other side.”

Nine percent of companies, only 9% have a different narrative. They see adversity as opportunity, “This is a unique moment to leapfrog everybody else. Yes, it’ll be risky. Yes, there’s uncertainty here, but, you know, this is a unique opportunity. They don’t come very often. So how are we going to leapfrog everybody else in these down markets where everybody else has got their head in the sand?”

So, you start to see how these kinds of self-narratives, individually and collectively, become part of our way of facing uncertainty, because narrative, our own self-narrative, changes our sense of identity, how I see myself. It also changes the way we look at situations around us and the meaning we attribute to those situations.

So, I interviewed a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer, who is now a commando in Ukraine, behind enemy lines. He said, “Look, I just had to do this. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do anything.” So, what’s my story?

And a lot of people in work have an affirming story that, “I want to have an impact, I want to make a difference here. I want to get ahead. I want to be responsible. I want to be somebody someday.” Others have a rather negating story, “I don’t know if I can do it. I’m not sure. That’s too risky. What if it doesn’t work out?” So, “What’s your story?” is the starting point for this journey.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. It sounds like there’s many flavors of story and they’ll take you down different paths, not just in the rough binary of, “Do this. Don’t do this,” but, “How are we going to approach it? And why is it worthwhile or not worthwhile to do so?” We can examine the story in terms of, “Okay, this is the story that is present.” Do you have any perspective on, once you’re aware of that, what’s the next best step?

Ranjay Gulati
You know, there’s an old saying, “Change your story and change your life,” right? And I think there’s some truth to it. This inner story is kind of like a central operating system that impacts everything we do. We’d like to believe that we have a rational calculative machine in our brain, cost benefit, does the math, looks at the expected value, pros and cons, SWOT analysis, scenario planning, we do that.

But there’s a parallel system that overrides all rational calculus, and that is this interpretive system. And you got to find a way to take and harness that. And a lot of courageous people harness that when they take bold action. Whether you look at Frances Haugen, it was her realization that, “I have to do something,” or, Brandon Tsay, in the moment, saying, “I have to do something.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s interesting. As I think about being in Frances’s shoes, you can very easily tell a story, in terms of it’s like, “Well, you know, corporations, they’re going to maximize shareholder value. So, naturally, of course, Facebook is going to try to do whatever it can to maximize engagement on their platform, and that’s just sort of how business works. And I’m just one of tens of thousands of cogs in this machine. And if I’m not digging this job, I could just try something else.”

And so, like that is a story and that is reasonable in terms of, “Okay, yeah.” I guess, none of those things you would just say, “That is utterly false,” but, like, that is a reasonable story. But then she took another one, it’s like, “What I’m beholding is evil. And it’s quite likely, if I do nothing, nobody else will either. So, it is up to me to stop this evil.” And, likewise, those two, those points are also valid, reasonable, rational. And so, which story you’re operating in really would direct the subsequent steps and path.

Ranjay Gulati
Absolutely and very well said. But I think story is the first step in this courage journey. The reason I have all these other Cs is because then you resource yourself. So, take Frances, she didn’t do it alone. She forged connections to really help her find that courage. It took her almost a year to do this after she first thought about it.

She was talking to a reporter who was guiding her on what needed to be done. She was talking to a law firm that helps whistleblowers on what needed to be done over there. She had a friend of hers who was a priest giving her personal feedback on how she should do it. She was talking to her parents who were giving her the moral support, and saying, “Come on, you got to do something.”

So, connections played a key role over there. Another one is confidence, “How did she build up her can-do muscle?” “I got it. I can do it. And you know what? I’ll be okay on the other side of this.” So, there are several other resourcing tools I found. So, it wasn’t just an isolated thing.

Brandon Tsay had moral conviction, “This is my family thing and I’m the custodian here, and my mother who’s passed away is looking up from there and I’m going to hide under a table?” So, he had a moral conviction. So, conviction played a key role as well. Right? So, each of them has resourced themselves in different ways.

Back to Frances Haugen, she didn’t do it all at once. She kind of decided to methodically understand and do it step by step. So that’s why I had to build this model, if I may, of “What are the resources available to all of us to build up that courage muscle?”

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, that’s really powerful, “My mother’s looking down from heaven. And so, who am I going to be? Am I going to be hiding here?” And I think that’s really a beautiful illustration of the power of story there, because, in a way, like they’re just facts. Like, “My mother previously passed away.” Like, that is a fact, that is a reality that is present in his world. But then when we bring that into the picture, it is transformative.

Ranjay Gulati
And I think the part to understand for all of us is, if we look at the magnitude of what these people did, and we’re like, “I could never do that.” But I think it’s really important to understand how they resource themselves. It wasn’t just a James Bond, Jason Bourne move, where you’re jumping off of a cliff with or without a parachute, and somehow magically you survive.

These people are very thoughtful. And how do we do that? We don’t have to be a Navy SEAL or a Marine to do this stuff. And back to the workplace, I think my realization about the workplace is, it turns out, the two most common emotions people experience at work are fear and anger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a bummer of a work day, “I was angry and then I was scared, and then I was angry again, then scared some more.”

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah, and I think, if there was more courage, more people would be able to live up to their full potential. I think that’s what happens when we live frustrated lives because we don’t. In fact, some research on regret shows that people have much more regret about inaction than about action. And I think we should all contemplate that, “How am I tackling the natural normal?” It’s okay to be scared, by the way, first of all, right? That’s normal. The question is, “What do I do with the fear response?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, you mentioned Navy Seal for the second time, and I did want to dig into the confidence point. My listeners are often saying, “I want more confidence.” Tell us, how does one facilitate, cultivate more of this can-do spirit, Navy Seal, getting after it, kind of confidence?

Ranjay Gulati
So, I was really struggling with this chapter because I thought, “Do people really want to know how to build more confidence? Come on.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, they do. We do.

Ranjay Gulati
There’s actually some great research on the subject by a Stanford psychologist named Albert Bandura. He didn’t call it confidence. He called it self-efficacy. And there turned out to be two broad flavors of self-efficacy. One is very domain specific, “I’m the master of my craft. I’m a great marketeer. I’m a great salesman. I’m a great technologist. I’m a great HR professional. I’m a great whatever.” And you need that.

Domain mastery is critical to having confidence, but is not sufficient. There’s another meta skill that, loosely, we can call a kind of a can-do mindset, “I got it.” Where, you know, if you look at Captain Sullenberger, he had never landed a plane on a water body, right, but that’s what he had to do when he had to land the United Airlines plane, when the engine shut down after the flight taking off from LaGuardia. It’s this kind of, “I’ve got this” mindset.

In fact, when he was interviewed by Katie Couric afterwards, and Katie asked him, like, “What did you have to do to land the plane?” He said, “Oh, I knew what I had to do. I had to have the wings exactly level. I had to have the nose slightly up. I had to be flying above the minimum flying speed, but not below it and not too high above it either. And I had to do them all at once.”

And then she says, “But there was a big if.” And then he turns around, and says, “I knew I could do it.” How did he know he could do it? He never trained for it before, never simulated it before, but he said, “I knew I could do it.” That is confidence. And how do we cultivate that kind of inner spirit is one of the hardest challenges for all of us. But once we have it, we’re the Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. So, tell us, what do we know from the good doctor Bandura and other research about how one cultivates such a spirit?

Ranjay Gulati
So, he talks about a number of things. In fact, his original experiment was to train, I don’t know, 10, 12 Stanford students who were fearful of snakes. I think they’re called Ophidiophobes, and who say, “I’m scared of snakes” to come into a lab, and then he showed them a corn snake. Corn snakes are harmless, but they look vicious. They’re huge. They don’t bite. They don’t know anything else, but they’re huge.

And he was going to make them hold it. And they’re like, “I don’t want to be even in the room with it.” And so, he talks about first creating micro-wins, small steps. He talks about rehearsing failure modes, “What’s the worst thing that can happen? I want you to start thinking about what’s the worst thing that can happen.” And slowly start to build evidence and build self-belief that, “You got it. You can do it.”

Or, another example of this, a modern example, is what Navy SEALs do. They make the Navy SEALs in training go through all kinds of crazy scenarios. And once you’ve gone through boot camp and training, you’re like, “There’s nothing that’s going to surprise me.” So, how do you create this kind of inner muscle, that, “I can handle”? And that kind of can-do spirit, I think is key.

I think if you look at teaching, by the way, I teach at HBS, and we teach by the case method, which is a very Socratic method, where students can speak. My first time, I’m like, “God, people will ask crazy questions. They might make crazy comments. They might get into arguments with each other. What am I going to do?” So, you start to learn and you see different scenarios and you kind of build your domain-specific craft. But there’s a meta skill, you’re like, “You know, I’ll figure it out. We’ll figure it out.”

So, there’s a specific skill and then there’s a meta skill. And I think that is key. And I think, I had to do that myself, by the way. Also, I have a pilot’s license. The first time I flew, I was scared, terrified, even with the instructor in the plane. Then afterwards, after starting my flight school, I thought, “Okay, I’m okay as long as he’s in the plane with me because he’s a seasoned guy. He can land a plane without an engine. He’s done it all. He’s been around. He’s been flying for 25 years. I’m okay.”

But then I had to get on a plane by myself, and I’m like, “Oh, there are so many things that can go wrong. I haven’t trained for all of them. I need him on the radio. Hey, Jerry, are you going be on the radio? Because if I get, if there’s something crazy happen, I want to be able to call you, my lifeline.” But ultimately, I had to fly away from home base where I couldn’t radio him.

Now you’re on your own. You’re like, “Oh, Seattle SeaTac Airport is saying I’m flying too close to commercial lanes. What do I do? What do I do? Do I go higher or lower?” So, how do you build that kind of can-do muscle?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, it sounds like the two key principles there was, one, getting progressive exposure, like to the snakes, “A little bit, a little bit, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.” And then another is the meta skill of, “Oh, again and again and again, I have entered into situations that were murky and tricky and unclear, and I managed to figure it out. And this will be similar to my previous historical experience. Therefore, I could feel confident.”

Ranjay Gulati
Absolutely, the evidence builds self-belief. How do you let evidence build self-belief? A third version of that is how do you rehearse failure modes? You have to rehearse failure modes, “What can go wrong? Let’s go through everything that can go wrong.” And the rehearsing of failure modes also quietens us down because you’re like, “Okay, what can go wrong here?” And you start to rehearse the failure modes to see that there’s nothing outside the realm of your thinking.

And they use this, actually, a lot also in kind of flight anxiety schools, where people who are paranoid about flying would never get on an airplane. Well, airlines don’t like that, so they all have these flight anxiety management schools where you can go online or in-person and take a class, where they make you sit on a chair that feels like an airplane seat, and it vibrates when the plane is taking off.

You put on your seatbelt. They even have some turbulence, so you simulate the turbulence, you simulate the plane landing and taking off. So, the idea is to kind of immunotherapy, if you will, but a bit of kind of rehearsals, but, ultimately, you’re trying to let evidence build self-belief, that growing of self-belief.

And, you know, sometimes, I’ll tell you what confidence comes from, I’ve found. I’ve seen this in sports a lot, actually, by the way. Sometimes the biggest source of self-confidence is somebody else believing in you. That’s what coaches do so well. The great coaches, they believe in their players. And when they believe in their players, if you think about one of the classic plays was Duke-Kentucky game, National Championship.

I think it was a semi-final, maybe, I think, considered one of the best games ever. Coach K was the coach of Duke. And there was, I think, 2.5 seconds left, something like that. And Kentucky just scored a basket. And they were now, I think, one point ahead. And Duke had two and half seconds to get the ball across the court and hit a basket.

And when the players were asked, Grant Hill threw the pass, and I’m blanking on who threw the basket, but what is his name? Famous. He was an NBA player afterwards. They did it because they knew their coach believed they could do it. And if the coach believed they could do it, they could do it.

So, building self-belief is a huge part of the story as well. So, find yourself somebody who believes in you, and you’ll start to believe in yourself. That’s what moral-emotional support really is.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful and beautiful. And to the rehearsing failure modes, I mean, maybe you strap into a chair that’s vibrating, but I think sometimes that could just be a matter of really just thinking it through and visualizing the situation. I remember after I left Bain and started my own thing, it was spooky because I didn’t have revenue and my savings were depleting day after day, month after month. It’s like, “Oh, my gosh. It’s like the money is disappearing before my eyes. I’m not accustomed to this.”

And it’s funny, but before I examined that, I almost thought, “Well, what happens when a person’s money balance hits zero? What happens then?” Unexamined, it was like, “Well, I just assumed that I’m homeless and sleeping in an alley.” It’s like, “No, that’s not actually what happens.”

And so, to think about, “Okay, imagine a world in which I have $0. What happens? Oh, I go get a regular job. What are my other Bain people doing? They’re going doing strategy stuff for like Kraft Foods or something. Okay, so I would go be a cheese strategist. This is really the worst-case scenario. And I might even find it interesting, figuring out cheese pricing opportunities or whatever.”

So that’s, that’s much less terrifying than being homeless and sleeping in the alley, and much more realistic. But unexamined, that’s just sort of where the emotions can take us to. And that’s not very, very helpful for making wise, calm decisions.

Ranjay Gulati
That’s a great example. An illustration of what I was saying is that, ultimately, we are all engaged in a mental process to tame or even outwit our fear, right? And if we can tame or outwit our fear, we can take courageous steps in our lives. So, it’s acknowledging, so if we’re at work, it’s first is acknowledging that, “You know what? Fear is a normal human response to uncertainty.”

And guess what? It’s very common in the workplace. But most of us are immobilized by fear. But if I really want to have, I want to thrive and live up to my fullest potential, I got to do something about this fear business. And there are some methodical ways to think and act that allow people to behave courageously.

And that’s what I want to learn. And I hope that, you know, my hope, at least, is in this project is to help people find the resources they need to say, “Here’s a…” for lack of a better word, “…a toolkit that I can use to resource myself to act more boldly.”

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

Ranjay Gulati
No, I think, ultimately, I have just one line which is, the forward to the book is written by the Dalai Lama.

Pete Mockaitis
A good get.

Ranjay Gulati
Yeah. And he says, “Courage is an inner journey.” It’s really an inner journey. In my mind, courage is a choice. It’s really a choice. You have to make a choice. If you make a choice, “I want to be courageous,” you will find a way to be courageous. It is ultimately a choice. And I think, you know, I haven’t touched on even the second, last one third of the book, where courage is contagious.

You can build a courageous team. You can build a courageous organization. You can bake it into the DNA. You can be a courageous leader who fosters courage in other people. That’s the next piece of the journey. And I think every person, aspiring leader, needs to understand that. Are you leading a winning team or a not losing team? Are you playing to win or are you playing not to lose?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, this reminds me of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fisher,” where his coach, I don’t know why that still fires me up. He’s like, “Are you playing to win or are you playing to not lose? They’re not the same thing.” And so, you know, he gets the idea from his other coach. Anyway, a fun movie. But now, share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Ranjay Gulati
You know, I already scooped myself when I said courage was an inner journey, but I will add a little bit more to it. What the Dalai Lama says in the forward is, “When we recognize our interdependence, our courage naturally expands beyond personal ambition toward the greater good.”

And I think we should contemplate that. That we have to have a more expansive view of ourselves. And when we do and we see the interdependence of ourselves with the world at large and other people around us, we act with more courage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Ranjay Gulati
There’s a book by Jim Loehr, L-O-E-H-R, called The Power of Story. And the title says it all.

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

Ranjay Gulati
I have a diary in which I take notes, and then I have my little Post-it notes that help me deal with short-term issues. So, I have a diary that I write down my longer-term projects and my thought processes there, and then I use this to kind of keep track of myself. So, you know, living in the world of ideas, there’s always things coming your way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Ranjay Gulati
Getting up early in the morning and, hopefully, trying to work out before the day gets ahead of you.

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

Ranjay Gulati
Look, LinkedIn is a great place to find me. I have a newsletter there. I’m reasonably active on it. Otherwise, I have a website where I post a lot of the same similar videos and stuff like that, which is RanjayGulati.com

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

Ranjay Gulati
I think we all need to ask ourselves, “Am I really living up to my fullest potential as a courageous human being? And how can I resource myself to be more courageous?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Ranjay, thank you.

Ranjay Gulati
A pleasure. Thank you so much.

Sep 11
0

1092: Transforming Stress into Your Superpower with Dr. Rebecca Heiss

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Rebecca Heiss shares powerful perspectives for reframing stress.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why stress fuels meaning and purpose
  2. The formula that helps harness stress
  3. The 6-minute practice that reframes stress

About Rebecca

Dr. Rebecca Heiss is a stress expert dedicated to transforming our fears into fuel we can use through her T-minus 3 Technique. Her research has been designated “transformative” by the National Science Foundation. When she’s not on stage, she is happiest when hiking or surfing with her two spoiled rotten dogs Guinness and Murphy. 

Resources Mentioned

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Rebecca Heiss Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, thanks so much for having me on, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting. Your research has been designated as transformative.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
I like this. This is important. The air quotes, the transformative. It is. Yeah, it’s crazy, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Tell me what is this transformative research?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, I’m a stress physiologist, and rather than telling people to get rid of their stress, I help them to transform their stress and actually have it serve them. So, I think it’s a fool’s errand to try and get rid of stress these days. And it only makes people feel worse because they can’t do it. You’re not supposed to get rid of stress, right? So how can we actually use it as a competitive advantage instead?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I would love to hear any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made about how this is done in practice?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Sure. Well, I’ll start with the research that really drove me to dive deeper into this, and it was really about stress mindset. So, they were looking at 30,000 Americans over the course of eight years’ time. And, essentially, the question that arose was, “If you have very high levels of stress and believe that stress is bad for you,” well, those people die at very high rates which is probably unsurprising to all of us because we have high stress levels, and we’re like, “Oh, gosh I have to get rid of it. It’s really bad for us.”

Here’s the surprising bit about that research. The people that had very high levels of stress but simply believed that that stress wasn’t bad for them, that it was just energy, or that it was good, they had the lowest mortality rates of the entire study. So, that’s lower than people who had very low stress to begin with.

What that means is that it’s not stress that’s killing us. It’s the belief that stress is bad for us that is actually the real culprit here. And so, I am really interested in understanding stress mindset and how we can begin to shift it so that we can perform like Olympic athletes and break world records under high-pressure situations.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’ve heard this research as well and I’m thinking about the book The Upside of Stress. So, yeah, I heard about that, and I thought that was really interesting and striking. But we believe kind of what we believe, right, Dr. Rebecca?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, sure.

Pete Mockaitis
How do we shift a belief? Like, I think, if we have had experiences with stress, it’d be like, “That sucked. And, oh, my gosh, you know, I gained all this weight,” or, “I was having trouble sleeping,” or sort of whatever, we think too stressful times, we’re like, “Yeah, that was definitely bad. I don’t see how I can flip that belief, even though it would be nice if I had the opposite belief.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Cool. So, I’m going to give you my formula in a second, but before, I’m going to challenge your belief. So, here’s the question that I asked in my research. I want you to think about a project or an accomplishment that you’re most proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah? Now go back in time to when you were in the middle of that project. What was your stress level? Now, on a scale of zero to 100, I had the vast majority of people saying something like 5,842. Like, they were stressed out of their gourds during the time when they were doing their most meaningful, purposeful work.

So, yeah, sure, it might suck sometimes, but it’s also adding meaning and joy and purpose to our lives. And it’s unfortunate that we look back on it and think, “Yeah, that was good,” but we can’t live it in the moment. And so, my job is to help people recognize that stress really is a barometer for how much we’re caring about something in the moment, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that really does check out. And at times, it’s funny, when I feel overwhelmed, I have had the thought, “I wish I cared about this less. It’s, like, that would feel so much easier right now, but I am just being a stickler for having a high standard on this thing.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Sure. And, honestly, this is the weird thing about humans, and I love this about humans because we’re such strange, complex creatures, but we’re also the only animal on Earth that creates stress for ourselves. Robert Sapolsky, another stress physiologist, he wrote a great book called Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, and there’s a reason, right? Lions, take lions, for example. Great hunters. They fail 80% of the time. Like, 80%.

If you fail at something 80% of the time, you would sit there, beating yourself up going, “Gosh, I’m such a lousy hunter. I can’t believe they even let me hunt with them. Like, I’m so terrible at this.” Lions, they miss a hunt, they take a nap. There’s no, like, thought that is creating more stress. And that’s exactly what humans do. We create more stress for ourselves. In fact, my research from last year showed that we create more stress for ourselves trying to get rid of the stress. So, yeah, that’s a big problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. Tell us about this research, we create more stress for ourselves trying to get rid of stress.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much the whole summary of it. You nailed it right there.

Pete Mockaitis
But, I mean, what was the experimental design such that this was uncovered?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, no, it wasn’t that exciting. It wasn’t that exciting. We listed 3,000 Americans, working Americans, ages 20 to 70, and asking a whole bunch of questions about their levels of stress, how different coping mechanisms, how they handle. And, you know, we went from everything from massage to prayer to, you name it, looking at various ways to intervene with their stress.

And people who ended up doing more interventions, reported feeling more stress after those interventions. And this backs up a lot of the research that was done and came out in 2024 in the Journal of Industrial Relations, looking at 90 different workplace interventions, and none of them actually helped reduce stress with the exception of one. There was one. I want to make sure we put an asterisk next to. And that was service to others.

So, I think this is really remarkable because we don’t talk enough about this with stress. We certainly talk about cortisol and all of the negative effects of stress. What we don’t talk about is oxytocin, which is another major stress hormone, which is this hormone of courage that encourages people to reach out and connect through the stress. And that’s really powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes. You know, this reminds me, talk about service to others, and I’ve shared this story before. One time I had a stressful situation. I needed to move out and I had a landlord who was difficult, and I just knew she was going to give me a hard time, you know, about like, “Oh, you didn’t repaint this section.” I was like, “I’m pretty sure I don’t have to, but, like, meh.” You know?

So, like, I knew it was going to be difficult, and it was very hot and there was a lot to be done. And you know that whole family, you know, in the mix, and I just decided that I wasn’t going to do this to please this landlord because I don’t really care about her opinion at all.

And I wasn’t going to do this to reclaim as much of my security deposits as possible because that was, hmm, she’s probably going to unjustly kind of capture as much as you could, regardless. And so, I didn’t have high expectations there. But I did remember that I had kind of a hard time moving in with power not being on and whatnot.

And I thought my purpose here is to give the next tenants the best possible experience when they come in and go, “Ah, this is home.” And that really did ease a lot of the toils, as opposed to me being grumbly like, “Oh, my gosh, tenants aren’t supposed to repaint. This is ridiculous. Aargh!” I was like, “Oh, someone’s going to come here and say, ‘How lovely! This is our home.’”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Isn’t that beautiful? Like, what a wonderful experience that you created. And not only did that probably help your stress, but it also relieved the stress of the person coming in. And so, this creates this lovely ripple effect of community. I think it’s so special. So, I love it when people are stressed. I’m like, “That’s great. You’re doing meaningful, purposeful work. How amazing.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, service to others. Let’s dig into it. Is that kind of your top thing we’re recommending here in your book, Springboard: Transform Stress to Work for You?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, it’s one of the tenets. So, I walk people through what I call my fearless stress formula. And, of course, you know, listen, the science is a really complex science. And in order to communicate it clearly, like every other author, I’ve broken it into three simple steps. Trust me, you’re going to have to read the references, go into the citations. It’s all there. But we try and make this as simple as possible.

So, the first step is simply, “Is it a tiger?” That’s the question. It’s the tiger. So, the tiger represents the fact that our stress response is really built for three minutes of screaming terror through the jungle. It’s a life and death situation. That’s what, whether you’re actually in a life and death situation, or whether you’re getting a full inbox, or a ping, or a ding, or a landlady who’s really upset with you, we’re having the same response.

And so, recognizing that it’s not an actual tiger, i.e. “This is not going to kill me in the next three minutes,” is the first step.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot because the specificity of, “There’s not a risk of it killing me in the next three minutes,” because it’s quite possible for our brains to immediately craft a story for why, “Well, no, this is super high stakes because if I blow this presentation, I could get fired and then I wouldn’t have the money to be able to pay for the mortgage. And we’ll be foreclosing on.”

So, it’s like, we can create a, “Well, no, this is, in fact, nearly life or death-ish.” It’s like, “Hmm, no, three minutes will make or break, life or death, is really what we mean here.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
That’s it! And, Pete, what you just did is it’s literally what I teach people. This is catastrophizing, it’s completely normal. It’s what our brains love to do, and it’s a feature. It’s not a bug. They’re protecting us from all the ways that this is going to go catastrophically wrong. And 99.9999999% of the time, you’re not going to actually die.

And so, at this stage, I ask people to invite the tiger in for tea. Don’t try and avoid it. We’re not trying to avoid the stressor. We’re saying, “Come on, let’s sit down. Let’s name you. What are you? Who are you? What are you all about? Oh, you’re not actually going to kill me. Great. If I can sit for three minutes with it and not be dead, then I can move to the second stage, which is the transfer stage.”

“That’s where I’m taking all of this energy that my body has created for me. Thank you very much, body, for this, right? I now have all of this stress energy that is helping me to perform in this moment, to rise to the occasion, which is a gift. And so, now I can use this energy. Instead of stressing and being anxious and worrying, I can shift it into energy that is excitement energy or joyful energy or even productive anger.”

Like, your example is great. You’re angry and you used that anger to do something that was helpful for somebody else. So, this shift is really about curiosity. And I ask people to try and get curious in the moment, like, “What is this feeling that I’m having?” Because when they do that, two things happen. One, curiosity and fear cannot coexist.

Like, there’s literally no brain mechanism that allows for it because for 200,000 plus years we never had a tiger charging them, and we’re like, “Huh, I wonder how fast it’s coming? I wonder how many stripes it’s got?” Like, those people died. And so, when we get curious, we kick ourselves out of this fear response and it frees us up to say, “What else could this possibly mean?”

And then our brain looks to our body, and if we’re sitting open-shouldered with a smile on and acting as if there’s a potential for adventure, our brain shifts into this mode of excitement, and it can begin to use all of this energy for other possibilities.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the third step?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
So, the third step of the formula is the trajectory. So where do we want to point all of this? Now we’ve got all of the butterflies in alignment, where do we want to point our stress energy? And what people mostly do is they point it away from the stressor, right? It’s like, “How do I avoid this? How can I minimize this? How can I calm down?” which is the opposite of what we want to do.

We want to run directly at the stressor in small, tiny, incremental ways to get through it onto the other side with more resources and more energy available to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now when it comes to the curiosity, what are your top recommended questions or explorations there?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Oh, I love that. You know, I think it’s really individual and, especially, very individual to the particular scenario. But a couple of good ones that I use frequently is, “What joy can this bring me? What will I learn from this? How will I grow from this? What adventure might I have?” Those are easy very applicable questions that really work for almost any scenario.

And I want to be careful here because I don’t want to sound Pollyanna-ish, right? People get horrible diagnoses every day. And I’m not saying you have to be joyful or have an adventure when you get a cancer diagnosis. What I am going to say is you still have energy that you get to use. And you can use that anger, that frustration, in a way that actually projects you forward through the stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess, I’m thinking there’s also some not so helpful curious questions that we could entertain. What do you recommend we not chase down?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Sure. “How can this go horribly wrong?” Although, here’s the thing, Pete, even if you do that, I’m actually okay with it because when you stay in curiosity, what you’re doing is you’re forcing your brain to go from that limbic system, that emotional processing center, to a more logical frontal lobe. And so now we’re actually listing out all of the horrible things that are going to go wrong, and we’re sitting in it.

And it’s going to light up our logical brain to go, “Well, okay, that’s a possibility, but is it a probability? Hmm, likely not.” And as long as we can stay in that curiosity, I wouldn’t say there’s a bad question. There are some that are better than others, but I don’t want to limit people to say, like, “I should never say X, Y, and Z,” because I guarantee you that’s where your brain is going to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess, I suppose I have a knack for, if I ask myself a question, generating lots of potential answers for it such as, “Man, why am I freaking out about this so much?” “Oh, well, because of dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.” And it’s like, “Oh, well, now I’m feeling all the more unpleasant.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Good. No, that’s good for the moment. I don’t know if you’ve heard this before, and I wish I could remember the person’s name – it’s bothering me – who coined the phrase, “Name it to tame it.” And what we’re doing with emotions is we’re actually naming them and it takes away their power. Because it’s not that, “I am angry,” or, “I am stressed.” It’s that, “I have it. This is a piece of what I’m experiencing.” And what it allows us to do is create a little bit of emotional distance.

So, one of the steps within the transfer stage is to begin to act as if. So, once you get all of those answers down on a page, what would be your best possible outcome? Like, what is the story you want to be telling right now? And when you select it, how would your body position itself if you were having an adventure, if you were going to learn something from this?

And then I ask people to, like, throw their shoulders back, put a smile on, like, “I’m still really anxious. This is not going well.” But when you do that, you actually give your brain feedback because your brain is constantly looking to your body, going, “What does this signal mean? What’s happening right now?”

And if you have a smile on and your shoulders are thrown back, your brain goes, “Interesting. This must not be a life and death thing. Maybe we’re okay. Maybe we’re excited about this.” And it opens the door of that possibility. So, acting as if there’s a potential for excitement or a potential for learning and growth is half the battle.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I believe that and I’ve experienced that, and you’re reminding me of some Tony Robbins action of power moves and all that. But could you share with us some of the underlying research there that shows that that is valid and legit?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, Amy Cuddy’s research out of Harvard, and this went through, oh, my gosh, she did a TED Talk on this research probably five years ago. And it received such critical analyses because people were, like, really questioning her methods. And it went through, I mean, years and years of scrutiny. At the end of the day, it turns out she was right.

So, this research is basically looking at the physiological response to the way our body is positioned. So, when we put our shoulders back and we have an open position or a superhero pose, and we put a smile on our face, or even a pencil in my mouth, when you mentioned Tony Robbins’ research, “I put a pencil in my mouth,” it kind of forces a smile and it’s more of a grimace. It doesn’t even have to be a real smile.

But what that does is it feeds back into our limbic system and creates the release of the same neurochemicals, the same hormones that we would be experiencing if we were smiling for real. And this research is so fun because there were graduate students that were paid to put their pencil in their mouth and come in and listen to lectures.

And they found those lectures to be funnier when they had a pencil in their mouth. They found those lectures to have more humorous content. And it was just because they themselves were smiling without even recognizing it.

I think we often think that we smile because we’re happy, which is partially true. But the larger truth there is that we are happy because we’re smiling.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a couple examples of folks who tied all this together and, in fact, saw some stress, but then did these three steps and were able to make that really work for them?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
So, I’ve been studying stress research for decades now. And there was a moment, about 10 years ago, when I quit my job, sold my house, and divorced my husband in a single month. Unfortunately, yeah, yeah, how about that? Unfortunately, my sister-in-law was diagnosed with a terminal disease and it’s one of those moments that really pulls the rug out.

And I looked at my life and I realized that, had that been my diagnosis, I’d be really disappointed with the life that I’d led. And so, that month, I quit my job, sold my house, divorced my husband. And I realized in that moment that I really needed to apply all of the research that I had been doing.

And so, this is actually when the fearless formula evolved, is I started to take everything in, and I was like, “Wow, this feels. I don’t have a place to live.” And when I tell you I have no plan, I mean the household, and I was like, “Where am I going to sleep tonight?” And so, yeah, it was a big moment.

And I had to recognize, “It wasn’t life and death. This couldn’t be an adventure. Take these small, tiny little steps forward, backwards, sideways, left, right, because the outcome doesn’t ultimately matter.” It’s that I’m taking action every day toward and through the stressor itself. And that’s actually how I launched my speaking career.

I really had always wanted to be in speaking, and I decided that my first small step was to call myself a speaker. And my second small step was to build a website. And my third small step was to give a free talk. And I just kept repeating this and recognizing this, “I’m not dead yet. I can still use this energy. I can take small steps forward.” So, yeah, there’s one.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, cool. Congratulations.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Well, thanks. It’s been fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, can you help us more with the belief side of things? So, it’s like, okay, that’s cool. That worked for you. Okay, that’s cool for the people who put pencils in their mouths in the study. What is some more of the most killer evidence that this belief that stress is advantageous for us is, in fact, true?

[24:20]

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah. The 2013 study that looks at your purpose and meaning and your stress level. This was probably one of the most formative experiments for me in that, you know, I turned 40, I’m freaking out because, “What is life? And how do I make it meaningful?” And, so of course, the super nerd that I am, I looked to the research, I looked to the science.

And it turns out that the number one correlate to a meaningful, purposeful life is stress. So, past stressful events, current state of stress, and even future worry and anxiety. And that tripped me up. Like, that was a, “Whoa! How is this even remotely possible?” Because, to me, I’d spent so much of my time trying to avoid stress, trying to run away from it.

But what if we are, in fact, running away from the very thing that brings our life meaning and purpose? And I think that’s a really powerful reckoning to have, is to say, “Oh, gosh, yeah, when I care about something, I’m stressed. And if I’m stressed, that has the potential to bring purpose and meaning into my life.”

And so, the research that we did last year, I had people walk through my fearless formula for 30 days. They did journaling activity just so we could keep track and make sure that they were following the protocol, and they decreased their perceived stress levels, 85% of them decreased their perceived stress levels, and we had a massive increase in the heart rate variability of the participants.

So, heart rate variability, for anybody that’s not familiar with it, is just a biological measure of how well you adapt to stress. So, more heart rate variability, typically, is better. So that was a pretty convincing nod to this stuff. This stuff, there may be something to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m a big fan of heart rate variability. In fact, I have an Oura ring and a Lief device, which is hardcore.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Nice!

Pete Mockaitis
It sticks to your body and all that. So, what I find really fun about that is, it is not within your conscious control.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
No. Hard numbers. Yep.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like this, your heart is doing what your heart is doing. And you can use some breathing, which helps. But, generally speaking, as you’re living your life, that’s there. So, over these 30 days, their perceived stress decreased. What does that mean? Their meaning was also decreasing? Or, what’s the story here?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Great, great follow up. So, no, because here’s the weird part. So, we did a perceived stress assessment at the beginning and at the end, and we also did a meaning assessment as well. And so, while their perceived stress had decreased, their actual level of stress hadn’t changed. So, this is interesting, right? They’re still reporting the same number of stressors. They’re still reporting the same, of course, cumulative stress. They’re still reporting the same micro-stressors, but their perception of it had shifted.

So, they were able to actually use the stress, their mindset itself had shifted to the point where they could use it differently. So, they’re not changing their stress level. Those stressors are still coming at them. They’re changing their mindset around it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, what are the sorts of things they were doing in these 30 days?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
So, they were walking through the T-minus-three technique, the fearless formula. So, they were identifying tigers at the end of the day. So, “What was the tiger that found me today? What stressors did I experience?”

They’d take two minutes to write out all of the stressors. They then take three minutes to transfer that energy to say, “Okay, how can I get curious about this? What did I do? How did I explore this? How did some of it become an adventure?”

And then they’d take the last two minutes of this. Again, it was a six-minute total intervention. And then the last two minutes were, “Where did I point the stress energy? How did I use it? How can I continue to use it tomorrow? What are my follow up actions that I’m going to take?” And so, six minutes, 30 days, pretty massive results.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. So, they’re writing it by hand?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yep, by hand. Oh, good question. Very important. Yeah, again, our brain does a weird thing when we type. It’s not quite as effective. So, by hand, in a journal, that was sent to each of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious, good doctor, what if we find ourselves in the opposite boat in terms of, we’re just kind of dragging, we’re just kind of like not really feeling it, our lives aren’t sort of…?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Lethargically moving through life?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s not sort of an easy-peasy vacation, but it’s sort of like, “Hmm, I’m not really stressed. And I’m also not really jazzed. It’s like maybe work is going just okay, and other dimensions of life are fine, but you’re not really feeling all that freaked out or motivated to get after much.”

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, I’d say you’re in the meh zone. Like, “Meh.” Which, you know, look, I’m not going to prescribe anything to you. I’m going to say, “What do you want out of life? If you want meh, you’ve got meh. That’s great.”

Otherwise, I’d say, “Okay, what’s a bigger goal you can pursue? How do you bring stress into your life? How can you create some type-three fun, which is the type where you’re like, ‘This isn’t fun at all. This is just, like, it might be a good story 10 years from now, but it’s not fun.’” You actually hype up the level of stress in your life.

So, yeah, I’d say try some new things. Get out there and find some novelty. Do some discomfort exercises. We talked at the very beginning about staring at each other for, like, a very uncomfortable period of time. Connect with people. Put yourself out in a way that is slightly uncomfortable. And I would keep a journal because we’re really bad at in the moment at assessing our own levels of stress or what we think is going to kill us.

What I often find in these journals, and I keep some that I call a disaster diary, where I follow my own protocol, right? And, like, “Here’s the things that’s going wrong today. And here’s where I think I’m going to die. And this is my tiger.” And then I’ll go back in a month, five months, six months, a year. Most of the things I don’t remember, right?

If it really was memorable, I might have learned something from it, but nothing actually killed me. I mean, as far as I can tell, I’m still in the flesh living and breathing. So, when we recognize that, again, things can shift in perspective a lot.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, I think the biggest thing to mention is to recognize that stress isn’t something to be rid of. And that the more people tell you to get rid of your stress, the more stressed out you’re probably going to become because you believe something is broken with you.

Nothing is broken in you, right? You’re not doing it wrong. You’re not meditating wrong or getting massages wrong. Like, stress is part of life and it should be. So, stop stressing yourself out about stress and use it differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I also wanted to get your hot take. Having read this research earlier, I was thinking about how that would be, that’s a great belief. I’d like to have it. And so going through 30 days of journaling sure sounds like a very robust way to get the memo thoroughly.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, it forces you. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, like, okay, message received. But I thought, “Well, hey, we’re rather more susceptible to suggestion in hypnosis.” So, I thought, “Well, there’s probably some cool hypnosis track I can find for this.” And I couldn’t find any of them anywhere because all of the stress-related hypnosis were about how to, like, chill out and relax. It was like, “No, no, I want one that’s going to make me think, ‘Hey, you’re stressed, but good news, buddy.’” You know, and I couldn’t find that anywhere.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, that’s maybe, well, maybe you should create it. Maybe I should create. Maybe we should. This is a new product.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe my soothing voice. Speaking slowly.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
I mean, look, the placebo effect is really powerful. I mean, I’m sure you’ve read the housekeeper study.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, with the calories?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re decreasing your body fat and your waist to hip ratio in four weeks because you believe that you’re doing more work or that it is. I think humans are more susceptible than they think they are to shifting their mindsets. And, look, don’t believe it. Try it. Like, force yourself to do it for 30 days and see what happens. Record your heart rate variability. That would be my challenge to you. Yeah, do it. Do it and I expect a full report please.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
You know, my favorite quote is probably from my grandmother, who told me when I was freaked out over all of these colleges that I was trying to apply to, and I didn’t know where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with my life, she said, “Don’t let your options be your burdens.”

And I thought that was one of the most brilliant things anybody has ever said. I think the world that we live in presents us all with a lot of options at work, at home, in life. We are flooded with opportunity. And the more we can avoid feeling overwhelmed by them, the better off and happier we’ll be.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
My favorite study is probably the milkshake study. Are you familiar with milkshake study? Have you done this already?

Pete Mockaitis
Is this the one where they gave people different calorie contents in the milkshakes, but they lied to them about what’s inside?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so same caloric value in both milkshakes. One was the luxurious milkshake, the high fat content, really high calories, and the other was the diet shake. And, basically, people who had the high fat milkshake said, “Oh, gosh, I’m so full. I couldn’t possibly…” And their ghrelin levels actually increased.

And so, they actually did feel more full. So, there was a physiological response to this high fat milkshake, despite the fact there was no difference between the two. Whereas, the diet milkshake folks were like, “Oh, gosh, I’m starving. I only just had this diet milkshake,” and their ghrelin levels stayed the same.

So, I think this is, to me, one of the best placebo setups ever because you’re seeing not only are people vocalizing and sharing, like, how they feel but their body itself is having a hormonal response as well, which I think is fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
My favorite book is probably Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I think it is a must-read. It is probably marketed toward women. I think it is a must-read for all genders, for all people. It’s just a brilliantly written book about the way the world is perceived and the way we can un-tame ourselves, yeah.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Probably my WHOOP. I love my WHOOP band. I’m constantly, I’m a data freak, so measuring my heart rate variability and all of those things.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Favorite habit is reading 10 minutes a day. It’s a simple, straightforward, very small step that I can incorporate at night and it helps me wind down and really get ready for processing all those thoughts as I sleep.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
“It’s not a tiger,” “Curiosity and fear cannot coexist,” and, “Invite the tiger for tea.” Those are probably the three. I actually had somebody who got a tattoo of a tiger sitting down for tea. So those are probably the three most resonant quotes.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
My website, RebeccaHeiss.com. You can get in touch with me there. You can email me. You can reach out directly to me. Or, my Instagram is @DrRebeccaHeiss. Please feel free to reach out. Love to hear from you.

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

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
Yeah, my final challenge to each of you is to stay stressed and lean into it. Start charging, running at that roar rather than avoiding the tiger.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Dr. Rebecca Heiss
It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much, Pete.