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Apr 21
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1051: Channeling Optimism as a Superpower with Sumit Paul-Choudhury

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Sumit

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

Resources Mentioned

Sumit Paul-Choudhury Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sumit, welcome.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Hi, glad to be here.

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Me too, hopefully, so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Oh, sorry.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very cool. Congratulations.

Sumit Paul-Choudhury
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apr 17
0

1050: How to Shift Your Mood and Keep Your Cool with Dr. Ethan Kross

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Ethan Kross shares simple, science-backed tools for managing your emotions.

You’ll Learn

  1. When avoidance is actually helpful
  2. Effortless strategies for quickly shifting your mood
  3. The emotional regulation framework used by the Navy SEALs 

About Ethan

Ethan Kross, PhD, author of the national bestseller Chatter, is one of the world’s leading experts on emotion regulation. An award-winning professor in the University of Michigan’s top ranked Psychology Department and its Ross School of Business, he is the Director of the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory.

Ethan has participated in policy discussion at the White House and has been interviewed about his research on CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Anderson Cooper Full Circle, and NPR’s Morning Edition. His research has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New England Journal of Medicine, and Science. He completed his BA at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD at Columbia University.

Resources Mentioned

Ethan Kross Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ethan, welcome back!

Ethan Kross
Hey, thanks for having me, Pete. Always great to be here with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I loved our first conversation about your book Chatter. And now we’re talking about your book Shift. Tell us, what made you think that this book needed to exist in the world?

Ethan Kross
Well, the recognition really came from just talking to people about my first book, which you just mentioned, Chatter. So that book really dealt with, “What do you do when you get stuck in a negative thought loop that you just can’t get out of, worrying and ruminating?” I would give talks about that topic, and the audience would be incredibly receptive to the tools that I would share with them.

But then they’d have loads of other questions about their emotional lives, beginning with, “What is an emotion in the first place? Why do we have them? What do they do for us? Are the bad ones good, or can they help us in some way? And what about if it’s just a momentary increase in emotion that I want to regulate, not necessarily a thought loop?”

And the way I think about the experience I had, it was like I had just given a talk on how to combat heart disease, but people had questions about inflammation, cancer, diabetes, and all sorts of other chronic ailments. And so, it really motivated me to dig into what we know about this messy emotional world that we live in and what we could do to manage our responses to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly surprising discoveries you’ve made. So, you’ve been researching this kind of thing for quite a while at Michigan. Is there insight you share with audiences that make people go, “Whoa”?

Ethan Kross
First off, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to managing our emotions. People routinely ask me, “What’s the one thing you should do if you are experiencing…?” fill-in-the-blank, A, B, C, D, or E, anger, anxiety, envy, you name it. I can’t answer that question because what I know from the science is that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Ethan, if I may, whenever I’m talking to the AI robots, they tell me deep breathing is the answer to calm down.

Ethan Kross
Well, deep breathing can be useful for some people in some situations, but so can a boatload of other strategies. We recently published these studies that looked at how people managed their COVID anxiety during the pandemic. We tracked people for several days over the course of a few weeks, and every day we asked them to tell us, “What did you do today to manage your anxiety about the pandemic?” And we also had people rate their anxiety.

And what we found was there were lots of things people could do to feel better about what they were going through. But, on average, people use between three and four different tools each day. Not one, not just deep breathing. Between three and four, some people use a lot more, some people use a little bit less.

But what we also found, Pete, was that the tools that worked for one person on one day were remarkably different than the tools that worked for someone else on the same day. The tools that worked for one person on one day were sometimes different from the tools that worked for them the next day.

So, I think of all of this now a lot like how I think about physical fitness. A lot of us share the same goal to be physically fit, to be physically healthy. But how we get there can be quite, quite different. If I just look in my immediate social circles. What I do is different from each and every one of those other people in my group, right? We may all like to lift little weights, but I like to do some high intensity stuff, and sometimes I’ll do yoga. Another friend might throw in some Pilates or a different regimen. There are different ways to achieve our goal, and that is true of being emotionally fit as well. So, that’s one thing I want everyone to know. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

Another aha, there’s no such thing as a bad emotion. So, we often think, you know, if we’re feeling anxious or sad or anger, there’s something wrong with us. These are emotions we want to rid ourselves of. In fact, we evolved the capacity to experience those emotions because they’re often functional as long as we experience them not too intensely or not too long.

Anger alerts us to the fact that our view of what’s right and wrong has just been challenged and there’s something we could do to fix the situation. Anxiety tells us that there’s a looming uncertain threat on the horizon. Maybe we should pay attention to it. Now, clearly, for so many of us, so much of the time, those otherwise adaptive negative emotional responses become harmful because we can’t turn them off, and that’s where the science of shifting that I talk about in my book comes into play.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, this is good, and there was an author, I think it was Susan David, who wrote a book, and she had a cute little abbreviation about emotions, it’s, “What the funct?” That’s spelled F-U-N-C-T, like, “What is the function of this emotion?”

And I found that to be a much more helpful question when I’m having conversations with myself than “Why are you here anger?” because it’s almost like it creates defensiveness. It’s like if you screwed up something at work, it’s like, “Why don’t I have this document yet?” It’s like, “Ugh!” It almost, like, sparks defensiveness, and you can give some, “Well, I’m angry because of all these things!” And sure enough, then we’re really reinforcing that anger.

And what I’d like to do is sort of quickly understand and move past it to be more effective in whatever context I am. So, I think that’s great to note that they’re not bad things to be fixed but they have a function within them.

Ethan Kross
That’s right. And so, what I like to tell people is that if you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you. It means you’re operating the way you’re supposed to operate. But, these tools that we possess, these emotional tools that we have, they’re unwieldy tools, right, as you just described, and we don’t get a user’s manual for how to manage them.

And that’s really what I try to do in this book, is provide folks with a science-based blueprint for how to understand how to turn the volume on their emotions, up or down, shorten or lengthen how long they last, or even jump from one emotion to another. And there are lots of things you could do there. And interestingly, Pete, there’s also, there are a lot of myths about how we should shift that are actually wrong.

So, maybe we could go into some of those myths because those are often fun and they’re helpful ways to introduce some of the tools. Myth number one, avoidance is always bad. So, we often hear that you should never avoid your problems, face them head-on. This was a lesson that was drilled into me from a young age.

It’s absolutely true that chronically avoiding your problems doesn’t tend to work out very well for people. So just suppressing, denying, drowning yourself in substances that may provide you with some temporary but not long-lasting relief. These are things that many people do. They’ve been shown to be harmful, but we have over-generalized from that observation to assume that all forms of avoidance are harmful. They are not.

Pete, have you ever had an aggravating interaction in person or an email?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes.

Ethan Kross
And you’re smiling already, so I’ll take that as yes. And the temptation existed to respond right away but you combated it. You took time away. You distracted maybe for a couple hours, maybe for a few days, and you came back to the experience and found that it was a lot easier for you to work through it rationally. Does that resonate with you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. “The Lincoln Letters,” right, that’s a historical legend, which I think is true. Lincoln was angry, he wrote some letters, and he put them in his desk and just kept them there.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So that’s a way of being strategic with your attention, right? You don’t have to choose between approaching or avoiding, as we often describe it. You can approach your problems and then take some time away and then come back to them. You could do that repeatedly. And research shows that being flexible in that regard can be quite helpful. So, avoidance is not always useful. Attention is a powerful tool. You want to be flexible with how you wield it.

Let’s talk about being in the moment. We often hear that the goal should be to always be in the moment. Now it’s absolutely true that being in the moment can be helpful when we get stuck in a negative future or past. But there are also ways to travel in time in your mind to help you deal with the problems you’re experiencing, and these are easy, powerful tools that we all possess.

So, I call this mental time travel. Rather than say in the moment, I could transport myself into the future 10 years from now and think to myself, “How am I going to feel about this thing that’s really bugging me right now 10 years from now?” What that does is it highlights something I know at my core to be true, that whatever I’m experiencing as time goes on, it will eventually fade in its intensity.

The reason I know that to be true is the same reason why you know it to be true, and so many of our listeners do as well. We’ve experienced millions of emotional reactions over the course of our lives, and most of them follow the same time course, the same what we call temporal trajectory. Our emotions get triggered, and then as time goes on, they eventually fade.

Now we lose sight of that when we’re struggling, when all we could think about is how awful and consuming our circumstances are. But jumping into the mental time travel machine into the future, it makes it clear that what we’re going through is impermanent. That gives us hope, which turns the volume on our emotional responses down. So that’s mental time travel into the future.

You can also go into the past. I do this a lot, too. I opened the book with a story of my grandmother who narrowly escaped being slaughtered along with the rest of her family during the Holocaust. She lived homeless in Poland for years before she escaped to the States and built a new life. When things feel really bad for me, I jump into my mental time travel machine. I spend some time with her in the frozen Polish woods.

I don’t have to spend a lot of time, just a little bit, and it powerfully makes clear that what I’m going through pales in comparison to what she endured, and that broadens my perspective quite well. So, myth number two, you should always be in the moment. No, you shouldn’t. First of all, if your goal is to always be in the moment, good luck. I don’t think it’s actually possible. The brain evolved to travel in time.

Traveling in time is something we do in our minds, helps us plan for the future, learn from the past. What we all, I think, want to be doing is focusing on “How can we be better mental time travelers?” And that means sometimes recalibrating in the moment, but also traveling strategically in our minds into the future and past, depending on what our goals are. So that’s another myth.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to dig into that notion of, it’s a mental travel, time travel to the past, think about being in the frozen woods of Poland, and that gives you some perspective that your current problems aren’t so bad. I’m curious, is there a way to do that poorly?

For example, I think some might say that if we are quick to imagine much greater troubles elsewhere and dismiss the feelings we have about our current state or situation, that might be, I guess, “invalidating” of the emotion and potentially counterproductive. How do you think about that?

Ethan Kross
I don’t think so. Here’s why. It’s a misnomer to think that you apply these tools, and all of a sudden, a real difficult spot in your life turns into a birthday party with cupcakes and soda and warm cups of tea and pizza, right? That’s just not the way emotion regulation works. So, what ends up happening is, instead, as you get these shifts, these down regulatory shifts in amplitude or duration.

Amplitude meaning how intense the emotional response is or how long it lasts. You’re making it feel more controllable, and so you’re not just saying, “Oh, this is nothing and doesn’t mean anything at all.” I think that’s probably pretty rare, that a kind of traveling into the past and thinking about, “Well, you know, things could be worse.” I don’t think it just turns it off.

Having said that, Pete, I always recognize that there are instances that defy the norms. And so, is it possible that that could happen? Sure, absolutely. And in a minority of cases, like, I wouldn’t be willing to bet that that never does occur. But here’s the good news, that if you find yourself trying mental time travel into the past in this way, and it’s leading to the kinds of outcomes that you’re suggesting, don’t use that tool anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s easy. Sure.

Ethan Kross
Use a different one. And that’s an ace in the hole on the one hand but it’s the truth on the other. Like, I don’t respond well to burpees. Are you familiar with burpees?

I hate burpees. It doesn’t mean they don’t make me feel good. Guess what? I don’t do them. They benefit a lot of people. They don’t really benefit me. And there’s a whole boatload of physical exercises like that. I don’t do dips. It’s too hard on my shoulder. And we could go down the list. I’ll spare you my injuries and idiosyncrasies. But the same is true when it comes to managing our emotions and these tools that I’m talking about.

Some people benefit enormously from what we call expressive writing. Sitting down with a problem and just journaling about it for 15 to 20 minutes for one to three days. Just let yourself go. Talk about your deepest thoughts and feelings. Take it wherever you want. Connect it to your past, your future, whatever you want to do.

Research on that shows that that’s a really useful tool. And, in fact, in that COVID study that we ran, that I mentioned earlier, that was the most predictive of anxiety reductions of all the tools we looked about. But guess what? It was also the least frequently used tool out of the 18 or so that we administered, probably because it’s hard to do. Like, sitting down for 20 minutes. Who has 20 minutes? We all feel like we don’t.

I say this because you have agency in how you decide to assemble the tools that you apply to your life. And again, I think that should be a breath of fresh air because so many people I meet, they say things to me like, “Oh, I tried mindfulness. I tried meditating. I tried diaphragmatic breathing. It didn’t work for me. It works for everyone else. What’s wrong with me?” Again, nothing wrong with you. We know that there are these person strategy fits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like the way you used that term phrase there, assemble the tools. Because sometimes there may be some assembly required. And I’ve been thinking, like lately, some tools I’ve been leaning on a lot, which are new and yet super handy, is that we had a guest, boy, back in the day, Michael Kerr, talked about putting together a humor first aid kit.

And I have diligently followed his advice and even used like a flash card application to assemble mine. And so, I’ve got, like, over a hundred things that I just thought were laugh out loud funny in the moment that I’ve captured, and then I just review them. And then it’s like, “Oh, I remember that time at that trade in Cancun, the trader did this thing, and it was so funny.” And so, it’s great to just have like 10 rapid-fire jokes, it’s like, “Oh, I’m in a better mood.” And there it is.

Ethan Kross
It’s so funny you bring that up. One of the things that we often talk about social media, how it’s bringing about society’s demise, and there clearly are some ways of interacting with social media that are harmful, but I like to remind people that sometimes it can be beneficial from a mood regulatory point of view. We don’t talk about that as much.

And your example makes me think about how I sometimes engage with social media to help improve my mood. Before bed, I will often watch these ridiculously silly short reels, and they bring me such emotional delight. I just find these pranks and other kinds of things, and I’ll laugh at them, and you know, they’re short, and then I’ll send them to some of my buddies, and they’ll send me back the teary-eyed emojis, they’re laughing, and then we both write back that our partners are elbowing us to stop laughing because we’re making too much noise and they don’t understand our humor.

And so, that little exercise of watching a funny video is both instantly elevating my positive affect. It’s also enhancing social connections. A simple thing you could do. So, let’s talk about simplicity for a second, though, because I think that’s another myth we can address. We often think that managing our emotions is hard, you know, “Pull up your sleeves. Get ready for the battle.” Sometimes it is, no question about it. But it isn’t always hard.

There are lots of tools that exist that are relatively effortless to implement. So expressive writing would not be an example of an effortless tool. That’s a pretty effortful tool, right? You’ve got to sit down, 15-20 minutes, you’ve got to write hard. But there are lots of things that you could do that are pretty easy. I’ll just kind of spit off a few. Spit off. Spit out. Mention. Mention a few sounds a lot more appetizing than spit off.

Music. I’ve been listening to music since I’m five years old. I’m guessing you’ve been listening to music for a while, too. Why do you listen to it?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s fun. It sets the vibe or the mood.

Ethan Kross
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
In terms of I got young kids, like, “Let’s have a dance party,” or it’s like, “Are we are we feeling silly? Are we feeling like cue the Rocky theme to spark the motivation, or ‘Eye of the Tiger?” It’s like a movie, that we’re going to score this thing for the emotion or vibe we’re looking for.

Ethan Kross
There you go. So, close to 100% of people, when asked, “Why do you listen to music?” they answer that question by saying, “I like the way it makes me feel.” But if you then look at the percentage of people who, when they’re struggling, reach for music as a tool, it’s only between 10% and 30%. percent. So, music is an example of one way of harnessing your senses to shift your emotions.

All of our senses, sight, sound, touch, smell, hearing, I’ve probably left a few out, those are some of the major ones. Part of the way your senses work is through emotion. So, the senses refer to the different apparatus we possess to take in information about the world around us. Part of the reason we’re taking in that information is so we understand how to navigate the world, and a key part of navigating the world involves understanding what’s safe, what’s not, what should we approach, what should we avoid.

So, your senses are intertwined deeply with your emotions. Again, you know this to be true, like we all do, right? Sounds can elicit emotional responses. Scents, you’ve got a multibillion-dollar industry that deals with just spritzing yourself with scents to change the way you feel about yourself and change the way that other people feel about you. It’s called perfume and cologne, right? Hotels pipe scents into their ventilation system to change the way their patrons make them feel.

Pete Mockaitis
And cars.

Ethan Kross
Food, restaurants, cars. Cars do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m working on that delivery.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, little spritz. I mean, it’s wild. For me, it’s wild. I don’t want to assume that everyone thinks it. I find it amazing. I look at the world through this filter now of our senses managing our emotions. Like, restaurants, why do we pay all this money to eat? This is an emotional experience. It’s not like we’re just lining up for an IV drip. We could get away with just an IV drip, right? Like, getting all the nutrients we want from somewhat no flavor bypassing senses.

Pete Mockaitis
Oatmeal and multivitamins and protein shakes, and move on.

Ethan Kross
Yeah, but even those are spiked with senses. Instead, we spend sometimes hundreds of dollars on these fancy meals. It’s all about an emotional experience. Touch. When a touch is registered from someone who we accept the touch from, that can be an amazingly pleasant experience. We caress our children, our partners. Some people even do it themselves when they’re showing, like they self-soothe, they kind of rub their face, right, when they’re trying to feel better about stuff.

So those are just some examples of very, very simple things you could do to get momentary shifts in emotion, and there are many, many others like it. So, all right.

Let’s talk about one more myth having to do with other people. Other people can be an amazing resource in our emotional lives when it comes to shifting, but they can also be a liability. And one of the things that we often hear from those around us and our broader culture, I think, is sending us in the wrong direction when it comes to how to engage with other people, when it comes to our emotional lives. And this is directly relevant to the work experience.

We often hear that when you’re struggling you should find someone to vent your emotions, to just get it out, let it go. Express it, don’t keep it inside. What we know about this is that venting your emotions can be useful for strengthening bonds between people. Good to know someone is willing to listen to me, take the time to listen and care.

Problem is if all you do is vent, you leave that conversation, you feel good about the person you just connected with, but all the problems are still there because you haven’t actually worked through it. They’re not just still there, they’re even more activated because you’ve just spent all this time rehearsing the awfulness of the situation.

So, if venting isn’t the solution, what is? It’s a two-step process. Find someone to talk to about your problems and spend some time initially getting it out. They do need to listen and learn so that they can help you. Empathy is good. But once they have a sense of what you’re going through, and once you feel heard, then, ideally, talk to someone who can help you put your experience in perspective, someone who can help you work through the problem. Other people are in an ideal position to help you do that because the problem isn’t happening to them. So be wary about venting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, yeah, there’s a lot of cool stuff and a lot of places we can go. I want to check out what you said with regard in your book. It was a powerful sentence. Well, I wish I could quote it directly. Maybe you can. You said something, like, “We cannot control what triggers our emotions, but we can control the trajectory of them,” in terms of like the intensity and how long we’re there.

So, one, I think that’s a heck of a statement because, one, if there were a way, you would know about it, like you of all people, having studied this for so long, so intensively. So, I think that’s kind of telling, in and of itself, that to be realistic about what is, in fact, possible for us as a species. Could you elaborate on that?

Ethan Kross
You ever had the experience–where do you live, Pete? What city or town?

Pete Mockaitis
I live near Nashville.

Ethan Kross
Near Nashville, okay. You ever, on a muggy summer day, walk down the street and just catch a whiff of someone who doesn’t smell very good and experience an emotional reaction?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Okay, yeah.

Ethan Kross
Okay. Yeah, me too. That reaction was out of your control. You happened to encounter something in the world, it activated your senses, in turn, activated an emotional response. We experience emotional reactions like that all the time. We see things, we hear things, we think about things that just pop up in our head. We don’t know why the thoughts pop up in our head, but they elicit emotions. We don’t often have control over those different experiences. They just happen.

However, once those emotions are triggered, then that’s our playground, then we can get in there and alter the trajectory of those emotional responses, right? Like, you catch a whiff of that stinky person, maybe you could choose to inhale more deeply. That might perpetuate the response. You might close your nose, pull your shirt up over it. You might start thinking about how selfish is it for this person to carry them in this way.

Or maybe you might think otherwise, “Well, you know, maybe they’re not aware. Maybe they don’t believe in wearing deodorant.” Lots of ways you could think about the situation to alter the trajectory of that response. And so, this is a chapter in the book, and the setup for it is, several years ago when I was doing research as I do now, I came across an article that said that 40% of adolescents sampled in this study did not believe they could control their emotions.

That statistic just floored me because if you don’t think you can control your emotions, why would you do anything to actually try, “I don’t think there’s anything I can do to get healthier, to get more physically fit. Why am I going to go to the gym and do these painful things,” right? It just doesn’t make sense. You need to be motivated in order to use these different tools.

And, of course, I’m a director of a lab called the Emotion and Self-Control Lab. I’ve dedicated my life to understanding how people can control their emotions. And so, when you dig into it, what I’ve learned is that those 40% of students were right if they’re thinking about the trigger of our emotions. We can’t always control the trigger. We don’t have control over all the factors that could activate an emotional response.

What we can control is the trajectory of those emotional responses. And I think just knowing that can be really empowering, too, because it means that if you do find yourself experiencing a dark thought that you’re ashamed of, recognize that that’s not always under your control, but how you engage with that thought is.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, it sounds, is it accurate to say, in your informed, researched view, that no matter what you do, smelling a stinky person is going to trigger an emotional response, just period, even if you’re like trained with exposure to lots of stink for weeks at a time, you’re still going to have a degree of emotion trigger problem?

Ethan Kross
Well, no, no, no. Hold on. Hold on. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ethan Kross
Not. No, no, no. You can certainly train, be trained, or train yourself to become immune to certain kinds of provocations. This is often referred to as stress inoculation therapy. Stress inoculation is often utilized in various military trainings, where the idea is, “Okay, put people under stress, under relatively controlled conditions so that they’re used to it, so that when they find themselves in those situations in everyday life, they don’t respond with this huge reaction.”

You, I’m sure, just as I, like we’ve experienced many things the first time around. They were tremendously distressful, but then you realize you get through them. There are things you could do, and they’re not so bad later. Sometimes you don’t even register anything at all. So, certainly, if we have our eye on a particular kind of situation that provokes us, we can train for it, so to speak, to either reduce in its intensity or get rid of it altogether.

That said, you can’t train for every situation in life, and some situations are likely going to always trigger an emotional response. Certain kinds of, I would argue, sensory events. Pain as an example.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, we always have control over, or influence, over the trajectory of the intensity and the length to which we are experiencing an emotion that is triggered, and we may, in certain circumstances, be able to train for, inoculate against certain triggers doing a thing. And so, I’m thinking that hypnosis is one interesting kind of intervention if people have phobias or kind of reactions to things.

There seems to be some good science supporting that, “Oh, okay, with a hypnosis intervention for some people who are hypnotizable, they are not so triggered after kind of going through that.” And then also, you mentioned like a training or inoculation. Let me just make an example. Let’s say I, and it’s true, I feel pretty irritated when I’m interrupted, whether in speaking conversationally.

As well as just sort of, like, you’re doing a thing. It’s like, I’m doing a thing, and then there’s an interruption, like a knock on the door. It’s like, I am kind of flustered by such things. And so, that’s just kind of in there, kind of like involuntary.

I remember there was a time, someone knocked on my door, I was in a podcast interview, I actually gasped, like, “Huh!”

And so, if there’s a thing in us, like we find there’s a trigger that we know is not helpful, and here, for me, it’s being interrupted, I’d like to feel more adaptable and less inclined to being flustered upon interruption, what’s my playbook?

Ethan Kross
Well, that gets to the final chapter of the book, and it’s about “How do you go from knowledge to action?” And what I do in that final chapter is I give you a framework for identifying situations you want to target to minimize the emotional impact they have on you. It’s called W.O.O.P, and here’s how it works.

So W.O.O.P. is an acronym. W is wish. What’s your goal? State your goal. Maybe for you it’s to not be perturbed every time you’re disturbed. The first O, that’s an outcome. Okay, well, what’s the outcome that will come about if you are successful in accomplishing this goal? “Well, I’ll be more emotionally healthy and maybe I’ll have better interpersonal relationships.” The point of that first O, focusing on the outcome, is to really energize you, to put in the motivation to achieve this goal.

Now let’s get to the second O, which is obstacle, “What are the personal obstacles that may stand in the way of me achieving this goal? Well, I just have this automatic reaction when someone disturbs me. I just, I can’t take it. It affects me to my core.” Okay, now we at least know what the problem is. Let’s get to the final element of this framework, the P, which is the plan, but it’s not any plan. It’s called an if-then plan.

If I’m disturbed and I find myself going to that dark, dark place that Pete goes to when he’s disturbed, then, and then you plug in what you’re going to do. And what you’re going to do is use one of the 20 or 30 shifters you’ve just learned about, and maybe a combination of them to stay calm in that moment, to broaden your perspective, so that you can achieve your goal.

If we were actually training for you to achieve this goal, I would have you write those different elements down, maybe once, maybe twice, and have you read them over a few times. Research shows that this framework is incredibly useful for allowing people to achieve all sorts of goals because what it does is it systematically targets each of the impediments of goal pursuit and it nips them in the bud from the start.

This framework has been applied with older adults to help them with emotional and health goals. It’s also been applied to kids as young as first graders who are trying to improve the way they achieve. This also happens to be a framework that is mightily similar to what one of the most successful organizations in the world uses before complex engagements, i.e. the Navy SEALs.

The Navy SEALs do something very, very similar when they’re planning a mission, “What’s our goal? If we achieve this goal, what is going to happen? What are the obstacles that might stand in the way? And then for every obstacle, we’re going to come up with three to five different specific plans, so we’re virtually never caught off guard.”

Now, we can’t plan for everything, and the good news is that if you are caught off guard, you still have knowledge of these other tools we’ve been talking about to fill in the blanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Ethan, tell me, any final shifter you want to make sure to get out there before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ethan Kross
You know, I think we covered a lot. We covered senses, we covered attention, we covered some perspective-taking, we covered people. Physical environments, get a healthy dose of nature, put some pictures of loved ones around your office to give you an emotional boost when you need it. Yeah, I think we’ve covered a bunch of it. We’ll leave a little bit more for people to discover.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, now can you share a favorite quote?

Ethan Kross
“This too shall pass.”

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

Ethan Kross
The study I talk about in chapter one, which tracked newborns and through adulthood, they’re still being tracked, and found that the ability to manage one’s emotions in childhood predicts all sorts of great things later in life. But even more importantly, that capacity is not fixed. It’s malleable. You can get better or worse at managing your emotions, which I love that finding because it really speaks to the agentic side of what we’re talking about, that your destiny is really in your own hands.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Ethan Kross
I’ll give you two. One is pretty common, “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. And, in a different direction when it comes to fiction, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite Ethan original nugget or soundbite that people are vibing with?

Ethan Kross
If you experience negative emotions, there’s nothing wrong with you, there is everything right with you.

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

Ethan Kross
www.EthanKross.com.

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

Ethan Kross
Learn about the tools that are out there for managing your emotions. Leading other people, I think, starts with leading yourself. The tools that I talk about, decades of research, hard work went into identifying them, but the take-homes are really, really simple and straightforward. So, learn about those tools, practice them to find the tools, the combinations that work best for you, and share them with other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Ethan, thank you.

Ethan Kross
Thank you so much. Always a pleasure, Pete.

Apr 10
0

1048: Transforming Insecurities into Strength and Action with Margie Warrell

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Margie Warrell explores how to build the courage to move beyond fear and unlock new possibilities.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to identify your insecurities and overcome them
  2. The two dimensions of courage
  3. How to take action despite your fear

About Margie

Margie Warrell is a five-time best-selling author, keynote speaker, leadership coach, and Forbes columnist. With twenty-five years of experience living and working around the world, she has dedicated her life to helping others overcome fear and unlock their potential.

From her humble beginnings on a small farm in rural Australia to her former role as a Senior Partner at Korn Ferry and Advisory Board member for the Forbes School of Business & Technology, Margie has learned that courage is essential for every worthwhile endeavor. A mother of four and an advocate for women’s empowerment, she inspires others to live bravely and refuse to settle in any aspect of life.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Margie Warrell Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Margie, welcome!

Margie Warrell
Great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m super excited to hear your perspectives on courage. And I want to start by hearing, what’s one of the most surprising and fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about courage in your career and researching this matter?

Margie Warrell
Ah, it’s probably that courage is not always about stepping bravely forward, putting yourself out there, saying a big yes and climbing out onto the far limb. Sometimes courage is saying no, sitting still, doing nothing, and reconnecting, disconnecting, pressing pause on all the doing and the bold acts of bravery, and just reconnecting with who we’re being, and being still and being unproductive. That is, sometimes, even more challenging and requires even more courage than being busily in action.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Could you share with us a story that illustrates that?

Margie Warrell
Well, look, I’ll share from my own life. So, I am someone who has a bias for action. I am someone who tends to be an Energizer bunny, sort of productive, productive, doing, doing, doing, doing. That’s almost my comfort zone is to be out there, furiously working hard, and doing a lot of things and juggling many balls. And that can be, in some ways, affirming of a sense of identity, and I’m in action.

And so, for me, over the years, is recognizing that there is actually a deep-seated fear of slowing down and doing nothing because, “Well, what if I become lazy? What if I never achieve anything again? What if this means I’m amount to nothing? What if…?” And so, just looking at where fear is pulling the strings and sometimes pushing me into the state of doing and busyness, and actually confronting that and going, “You know what, I don’t have to do more to be worthy. I don’t have to achieve more to be worthy. I am worthy.”

And, actually, right now, the most valuable thing for me to do is to just sit and pause and get really present and grounded in who I am and what I’m about rather than being in action. And then that enables me to then actually upgrade my action so that when I go back into action, I’m far more aligned, have far more clarity, much more intentional about what I’m doing. So, does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, intriguing. And I’d love if you could share a little bit more in terms of what are the scariest things that may be lurking for us in the solitude, in the quiet, in that silence?

Margie Warrell
Well, we have to come face to face with just like who we are at the deepest place because it’s easy, busyness can be a great tool for distraction. When we’re busy, it almost can be addictive because it can be feeding us and giving us a sense of significance. And, I mean, we all want to feel significant in our lives. To be human is to want to feel significant in some way. And we can achieve that through healthy means and we can achieve it through unhealthy means.

And I think that the busyness can provide that sense of, sort of like, “Oh, you know, look at all that I’m doing.” And people are going, “Wow, aren’t you doing a lot?” And so, the confronting part of just pressing pause on that is to go, “Who am I if I’m not doing that? And what are the deepest fears that are sometimes lurking there out of immediate line of sight?”

And I think, for many of us, there’s a deep-seated fear of being unworthy, of being judged and found wanting, “You are not smart enough. You are not clever, capable, experienced, intelligent, educated, likable, lovable, leader-like enough,” insert something before the word enough. And I think it’s part of the deep work of growing into who we can become to kind of pull back the covers on those fears.

Because they’re not always obvious but they can pull invisible strings that shape how we show up, how we speak up, the presence that we give to other people, how we lead, whether or not we are in tapping into our own intuitive sense of what’s going on around us and what’s going on for the people around us so that we can speak into their listening and be someone that builds trust and others come to count on  for the integrity and the character and the courage that we bring to situations, but not always loud courage, sometimes quiet courage.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say enough, I always wonder, enough for what?

Margie Warrell
Yeah, enough. Enough of what gives us a sense of innate worthiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Enough to have worthiness.

Margie Warrell
And so, yeah, when people say enough, that can be many things, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, enough for your life to, fundamentally, have value.

Margie Warrell
Yeah, for you to have value.

Pete Mockaitis
A human being identity.

Margie Warrell
Yeah, and I think that can be, we can carry sometimes a sense of inadequacy in that we’re flawed, fallible in some way. And of course, let’s face it, we are all flawed and we are all fallible in some way. None of us are, get a 10 out of 10 on every category. That is part of the human condition, right? And so, my experience for myself, but also working with people, many whom have achieved incredible success, there’s often this insecurity in them that can be driving and driving, and actually can drive them to be work really hard and achieve amazing things.

But actually, they get to a level and that insecurity, if they haven’t done the inner work required to make peace with their vulnerabilities, to heal those childhood wounds, then that insecurity actually can cap them and ultimately can be a saboteur.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would love to get your pro take. You’ve been working with many CEOs of large organizations with your time at Korn Ferry and your own work. So, just for funsies, could you share with us, roughly what percent of super high-achieving, big-deal executives have substantial levels of insecurity?

Margie Warrell
Well, substantial is a big word. But what percentage of high-achieving executives have some insecurity? I don’t want to say 100%, but I would say close to it because we all have something in us that can feel insecure at times. We all have moments of feeling insecure. None of us are invulnerable to things that can trigger something in us. So, I would say it’s close to 100 % of high-achieving executives have moments where they can feel insecure. But it’s whether they have their insecurities or their insecurities have them.

And so, when you use the word substantial insecurities, well, then that’s where, obviously, there’s a lot of insecurities that are running them versus them going, “Yeah, I’ve got this thing. This can make me feel insecure, but I’m self-aware enough.” And that’s where that self-awareness is so crucial to being a great leader, to being an effective executive, because we aren’t being governed by our insecurities and our fears.

And, of course, our fears don’t always show up as, “Oh, I’m really nervous. I’m so scared I’m going to mess this up.” You know, it’s not necessarily paralysis, it’s not panic, it’s not outward, overt self-doubt. More often, those insecurities can show up as intellectualizing emotions, being controlling, not delegating downward effectively, micromanaging, second-guessing people, being someone that is not okay with being challenged, so people don’t challenge because they know that this runs a risk.

And so, there’s lots of different ways that our insecurity, and let’s just be clear here, insecurity is just another term for an unfaced fear, an unprocessed fear.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, so you nailed it in terms of that’s what I mean by substantial insecurity, like you have a hard time being wrong or letting someone else shine, or clearly acknowledging humbly, it’s like, “Yeah, you know a lot more about this thing than I do. So, I’m going to let you take over.”

Margie Warrell
Yeah, you bet.

Pete Mockaitis
“And, hey, I like your idea better than mine. Let’s go with yours and forget what I said.”

Margie Warrell
And not just that, but actively seeking that out, too, and saying to people in the room, “Hey, look, I don’t know everything. You know, what is it that I could be missing here?” And actively soliciting people to put forward opinions that may actually contradict or, if not contradict, may not line squarely up with your own.

And when they say those things, that you might actually disagree with, you might actually think they’re wrong. And maybe they’re critical of you and the judgment that you’ve made, that you don’t get defensive, and you go, “Wow, tell me more about that. Tell me more about that.” And that people never have to hesitate to say that. And, to me, that is an indicator of a leader who has done their work, and who is well and truly leading from values and not emotions and not insecurity.

Because no matter what anyone says about them, they don’t get triggered by that, they don’t take offense, “How could you say that?” They’re, like, curious, they’re humble, they’re eager to learn and they listen with an ear to how they could be wrong. And then they always acknowledge when they’ve changed their mind and they share that, and go, “You know, I thought this, but, yeah, I realized I was wrong. I wasn’t factoring in these other things,” and they can share that openly. And there’s a lot of senior executives who are not in a place where they’re able to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s what I’m getting at. I think you’ve painted a lovely picture on what I mean by substantial insecurity versus substantial security. So, could you give us a very rough figure, like, at the top levels, who’s got that substantial insecurity and who doesn’t as a rough percentage?

Margie Warrell
I would say a solid 50%.

Pete Mockaitis
Fifty-fifty, all right.

Margie Warrell
Yeah, I mean, that could vary and it varies in organizations because there’s different cultures. So, I’ve worked in organizations where the culture is very grounded in purpose, and values, and authenticity, and people who posture and who are ego-driven, you know, overtly ego-driven. Their behavior gets, their, like, white bloods, they get ejected out.

Like, they can be really brilliant at what they do. But it’s like, at the end of the day, people are recognizing, “Ah, very ego-driven.” They’re an insecure person, even though they might be brilliant at what they do. And so, then there’s cultures where, “You know what, it’s about what are your numbers? Honestly, we don’t care much about all the other stuff. What are your numbers?”

And sometimes the people who get the best numbers are people who can be massively ego-driven and not the least bit, or very only mildly self-aware. And so, it’s all about, “Hah, who’s winning?Who’s winning? And who can get the biggest number fastest?” And that gets rewarded and that gets promoted.

And so, you end up with an executive bench of people who are all very, very ego-driven, competitive, but not necessarily particularly self-aware.

Whenever executive teams don’t make great decisions, and you see over time, there’s a leakage of value and the organization starts to lose edge and the culture grows, there’s toxic elements to it and disengagement and higher turnover, etc., it’s never because the people on that executive team lack intelligence individually or collectively, that they lack expertise and skill individually or collectively, that they lack access to information and resources.

It is because of the ego, and I’m talking about ego, I’m talking like, “I got to prove that I’m right and you’re wrong,” and there’s a defensiveness and it’s that insecurity at play because that undermines the dynamics in the team, and it undermines the quality of decision-making. There is not open, candid conversations. There is silos. There is protecting of information. There is a whole lot of conversations going on outside of the room. There is not good upward and sideways feedback.

And all of those factors at play, they are what create this slow leakage of value that, over time, you see organizations start to lose edge. And so, yeah, it’s not that they don’t know what to do, it’s that they’re not doing what they know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this reminds me, we had Pat Lencioni on the show and talking about smart versus healthy with regard to teams and dynamics and how it’s, a lot of times they got the know-how, but in terms of the courage and going there and having those conversations, it’s great.

So, it sounds like we’re pretty strong on the case here for how having more courage will help you be more awesome at your job with regard to just feeling good, facing down those monsters, as well as better teamwork, etc. Any other key things you’d put forward in terms of the case for why professionals would be better off with an extra dose of courage?

Margie Warrell
Well, let me just share, there’s two core dimensions to courage. And we often focus in on the field of fear and do it anyway, “Be bold. Take a risk. Put yourself out there. Set a bold vision. Have the crucial conversations. Take those risks for yourself, professionally,” in terms of then leading how you manage others.

But what we often fail to factor in is the second dimension of courage, and that is the regulation of our fear, the management of our anxious thinking. Because courage is action in the presence of fear and the presence of risks, real or perceived, but often we’re more afraid than we need to be. And right now, it’s a perfect case in point.

There are a lot of people right now who are feeling incredibly anxious because there is immense uncertainty. Yes, there is a new administration in the White House. There has been massive disruption. The markets are volatile. People are worried about the future. But you know what? There’s always been uncertainty. We’ve always had disruption. And, yes, it may feel like, “Oh, no, but not like this.” But these times have come before and they’ve gone before.

And so, a lot of the time we are victim to what’s called certainty bias. When we look back at the past, we know how the story ended, so we go, “No, it wasn’t like this,” because we don’t know how the story is going to end. But five years from now, we’re going to look back on this moment right now and go, “Oh, well, you know, it worked out,” and because there’s going to be new uncertainty.

So, often people are feeling more anxious than they need to be, and anxiety magnifies our perceptions of risk. And people pull back and they triple on what they can control and they try and find certainty so they get really short-sighted, and then they fail to take the very actions that would actually expand future possibilities, that would grow and accelerate learning curves, so that they’d be in a better position for whatever unfolds out the other side of this disruption, whether that’s Gen AI, whether that’s regulatory policy changing, etc.

And so, I think it’s just so important for people to realize it’s not just about, “Be brave. Just put yourself out there.” It’s also going, “Where am I scaring myself because of how I am perceiving all of the risks and all the uncertainty and all the unknowns? And where am I being a little short-sighted and not looking far enough ahead to the horizon and go, what is it that I could be doing right now that will put me in a better position, one, three, five years from now?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us what are some of your favorite tips, tricks, interventions, actions, things to do to get more courage?

Margie Warrell
Well, obviously in The Courage Gap, I talk about five key principles for closing that gap between what we could do and what we actually do, between our insight and the impact we make for ourselves, for others. And the first one of those principles is focusing on what it is that you want, what is the highest outcome you want to achieve.

And that could be, right now, today, “With an employee, my boss, a co-worker, I’m having a difficult time with. There’s a lot of frustration. Maybe I’m feeling really resentful toward them. Maybe I’m feeling underappreciated.” So, ask yourself, what is your highest intention for that relationship? Or, if it’s your career, “What is my highest intention for my career over the next one year, three years, five, 10?”

Because, if we’re not clear about what it is we want, our vision and our values, then our attention is going to be held captive by what it is we don’t want, because fear is a really potent emotion. We naturally gravitate to the negatives, to what’s wrong, to what we can’t do, to what we hope won’t happen.

And so, there is a huge power that we unlock within ourselves, but also it expands our field of vision of what actions we can take when we connect to what it is we do want and what our highest intention is, what our ultimate outcome is, because what we focus on expands. Energy multiplies by a factor of what our attention is on.

And so, that is a key principle. And many people don’t realize how much of their time and how much of their energy and how many of their conversations are all about what is wrong, and what can’t be done, and what shouldn’t happen, and what a pain their boss is, or what a pain this colleague is, versus “What can they do? What do they have? What do they want? How can they work better with this colleague? How can they help foster a better relationship with their boss?”

And the way I could go about doing that versus kind of being stuck in either a self-pity, you know, feeling like a bit of a victim or getting stuck into a blame like, “Ugh,” or just having a story that we are powerless to improve our situation, which is never true. And the biggest way we disempower ourselves is telling ourselves we can’t do anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say highest intention, you mean highest in the sense of most noble and in fulfillment of our deepest, most important values, as opposed to just a really big achievement, like high, like Mount Everest high.

Margie Warrell
The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. So, you can have a really high intention to live a life of adventure and do amazing things, and that means you want to climb Mount Everest. But it also could mean, “I want to have a really good relationship with the people on my team. I want to do what I can to be the kind of person that I would want to work with.” But the highest intention, whatever it is, it has to align with our deepest values. So, what are your deepest values that want to define you and how you live your life?

And it’s funny you mentioned, you know, climbing a mountain. Several years back, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with my husband and our four teenage children, which was a pretty bold, audacious undertaking at the time because we lived at sea level in Australia. We didn’t go mountain climbing on weekends for fun because there weren’t any mountains near us. And so, it was pretty bold to kind of go, “All right, let’s do this.”

But one of my kids, Ben, said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to climb Mount Kilimanjaro for dad’s 50th birthday?” He did this whole PowerPoint deck. He rallied the whole family behind this vision of climbing to the rooftop of Africa for dad’s 50th, “Our family will always remember it.” So, we created an intention for, as a family, right, to do this thing that would be so cool. There was a chance we weren’t going to get to the top. The altitude can really take a toll on our bodies, particularly younger bodies. My youngest was 13 at the time, but that intention to do that is what kind of galvanized our collective resolve to go, “Let’s try.”

And as it was, we did make it to the top of Kilimanjaro. It was a really tough day, but our intention will always align with some value. I mean, I have no desire to climb Mount Everest after climbing Kilimanjaro, but for us as a family, like this would be a really cool thing to do as a family. That was a value.

But for some people, it could be, “I want to just build a business that contributes to my community, that serves the needs of these customers, these people in my local geography,” or maybe it’s to do something that’s on a global scale, but there’s still a value that it’s aligned with. But for people listening to this, I know for me, professionally, I have always wanted to do work that aligned with, one, yes, my value to make an impact for others, to help others live their purpose, to use their talents for the greater good, but also to use my talents in a way that honors those talents.

And so, we all have different talents. People, we come out of the womb with different gifts and, yes, we have to hone them. But so it could be that you just really want to do something that lights you up. You’re leveraging your strengths fully. We thrive the most when we are leveraging our strengths in service of something that’s meaningful to us versus something that’s purely superficial. And while when we’re younger, sometimes it is superficial. As we go through life, people who thrive the most are doing things, they’re working hard toward meaningful goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I guess that’s what I’m zeroing in on when I say highest intention is it’s like, you could have, maybe you want to build a business to prove everyone wrong, “They thought I couldn’t do it. Look at me now.” Or it’s like, “I want to have a sick Lamborghini.” So, these are things that motivate some people. But I’m guessing that if we dig deeper into values work, those wouldn’t be, in fact, the highest intention that have the most potency for boosting the courage.

Margie Warrell
Well, look, and if you love cars and you want to have a Lamborghini, like, great, knock yourself out and work hard for that Lamborghini. I’m not a car person myself, but if your sense of security and identity is coming from sources outside of yourself, then you will always feel a little insecure. Because once you’ve got that Lamborghini and you drive it right up the main street of town and you’ve got the music blaring and you’re making sure everyone’s looking at you, and they’re like, “Wow, you’ve got a Lamborghini.” It’s like, “Great, it feels good. Like, yeah. See? See my Lamborghini?”

But, okay, after a while, it gets a little, it wears off. We habituate to, “Okay, now what do I have to do?” Because it’s a cup with a hole in the bottom. It’s never going to fill up if your sense of worth and value has to be externally validated all the time. And that’s not to say, it’s natural to want to have external validation. I love external validation.

But if that’s what our identity is built on, it’s going to be built on a house of cards because, you know, what happens if you lose your Lamborghini? What happens if you lose all your money? That can happen. That does happen to people. And so, I think we have to be really careful about where our sense of identity comes from. And there is no greater source of identity than being really living in alignment with our values. It is got to be an internally sourced identity versus externally validated all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve got five principles. The first is the highest intention. What’s the next?

Margie Warrell
Second is re-scripting the narratives that are keeping you stuck, stressed, or living too safely. So, of course, we all tell ourselves stories all the time, like, “Oh, it’s a nice day out there today.” As it is, while I’m talking to you, I can see the cherry blossoms coming out here in North Virginia. But sometimes our stories get in our way and keep us from doing the very things that would serve us.

So, our stories can stoke up our fear. They can make us feel more stressed like, you know, we tell ourselves stories, “Oh, it’s the end of the world,” “I’m never going to get another job,” “I’m too old.” There’s a lot, I’m surrounded by people who use even language, “It’s a nightmare situation. I’m never going to be able to figure this out.”

And so, they make themselves feel more stressed than they need to be. But sometimes our stories can give us air cover for living too safely, for going, “Oh, well, you know, it’s not so bad. And everybody else has got it worse than me. Or, at least I’ve got a job.” And I’m like, “Yeah, but are you happy in your job?” “Yeah, but at least it pays the bills.” I’m like, “Come on, like life’s short.” And so, we can often tell ourselves stories that keep us from taking the very actions we’re wholly capable of taking.

Sometimes we tell ourselves lies. We call them vital lies, the soothing myths, truths that spare us from having to look at ourself and go, “What is the price I’m paying for the story that I’m telling myself? It’s making me feel okay in the moment, but it’s actually keeping me stuck. It’s actually keeping me from connecting in more meaningful ways with other people, or making a change that I know deep, deep down, I really need to make because I’m not feeling a sense of purpose. I’m not feeling like I’m living the life I want to be living?”

And so, just recognizing that if your stories aren’t making you feel more powerful, like they’re not empowering you, if they’re not aligning with something that gives you a sense of meaning and purpose, and if they’re not making you feel more positive about your future, then your stories are working against you.

And I often say to people, like, “Tell me, what’s your ultimate vision of success?” And then they’ll go, “Well…” And when they let themselves really connect with that vision and they focus on what they want, I’m like, “Well, what story would you need to be telling yourself for that to become your reality?” because our beliefs are the software of behavior. Everything we do is belief-driven. So, what’s the story that you need to tell yourself so that you’ll take the actions to create the outcomes you want?

And if you’re feeling stuck in your career or you’re feeling like you’re hitting your head against a wall, I would just say to you, like, “What’s the story you’ve been telling yourself? And what emotions does that create? Where is that keeping you playing too small? Where is that keeping you stuck in excuses? Where is that keeping you showing up in a more diminutive way than really serves you? And so, what’s another story you could tell and re-script that story? Because you create your stories, but your stories then create you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the third principle?

Margie Warrell
The third principle is about embodying courage and connecting to the sources of courage within us, but also around us in our relationships with others. And often we don’t recognize how we’re moving through the world in an anxious state. John Wooden, the great iconic basketball coach, once said, “It’s not about how tall you are. It’s about how tall you play.”

And often we don’t realize how much fear is trapped in our bodies, keeping us from showing up, stepping up, speaking up, walking into a room in a way that not only changes how others perceive us, but changes how we perceive ourselves. Some great research out of the Kellogg School of Business that found that postural expansiveness literally shifts how people perceive us, as well as how we perceive ourselves, regardless of our actual status on an organization chart. And so, just stand tall and take a deep breath and reset your nervous system, named a nervous system for reason at that ground level, and, likewise, connect with people around you who make you feel braver, who help to quell the doubts versus to feed them.

 

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the fourth?

Margie Warrell
That’s about stepping into discomfort and really resetting our relationship with discomfort. All of us are wired to want to avoid what’s uncomfortable, but the more willing you are to do uncomfortable things and embracing discomfort, embracing the growing pains, it actually will expand your behavioral repertoire to do the very things that are going to set you up for success.

And there is a lot to be said for recognizing that our fear constricts what we do. And the more we’re willing to get comfortable, practice getting comfortable being uncomfortable, then it expands us to do all sorts of things. Because when you’re willing to feel anything, it emboldens you for everything.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And the fifth?

Margie Warrell
And the fifth is all about making peace with our failures and making peace with ourselves for failing to show up as the person we most want to be sometimes because no one is brave all the time. And the more we can be kind to ourselves in those moments when we either try something and fail, or we fail to try, and that little inner Chicken Little wins out, then the quicker we’ll be able to pick ourselves up, to dust ourselves off, to learn the lessons that our failures and our mistakes hold, and then to move forward more wisely.

And for those who are listening who can be really hard on themselves, I think this final step which is about finding the treasure when you trip can be the most, the biggest unlock because we’re so often really hard on ourselves. And when you’re really hard on yourself, it doesn’t make you braver. It actually makes you live a little smaller and hold back from taking the very risks that would serve you most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about the rescripting narratives for a bit. Could you give us a common narrative that you’ve seen hold folks back and an example of a finer script to replace it?

Margie Warrell
Yes. So, as people are moving up in their careers, often they’ll look at management, the leadership, and it’s them, they over there, you know, “They don’t care. They have no idea what’s going on. They’re just, you know, they’re all so disconnected and removed from what it’s really like to try and run this business at the ground level and deal with the clients, etc.”

And so, there’s this kind of othering of those people in management, those who are on the executive team. And the reality is those people were once in your shoes, and sometimes people become the they, and they realize, “You know, if only management…” I’m like, “You are management. You are the they, like this is you.”

But wherever you sit on your career trajectory and on some org chart, recognizing that you have the power to be a leader at every level. And so, rescripting it about how you see yourself in your own power, like, “I am a leader. I have the ability to influence change here. And, sure, I mightn’t have as much as the person at the top, but I have the ability to lead change in the sphere of influence in my workplace every day.” So, that’s one re-script.

Another key one I hear people talking about is other people and saying things like, “Ugh, they’re so intimidating. They don’t care,” and they create negative narratives, and maybe there’s some evidence to support them. But when it comes to saying someone is intimidating or something, “That person is an a-hole,” or something like that, ask yourself instead, “What is it that’s going on in me that needs me to judge them? That person’s going to be how that person’s going to be, but how do I choose to show up?”

So, I choose to show up as someone who is empowered and is focused on bringing value regardless of how the behavior of others around me, and by reclaiming kind of the power that I get to choose how I show up, regardless of what other people are doing. And that often when we call other people intimidating, actually they’re not intimidating. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about them that’s making you feel intimidated. It’s got nothing to do with them. It’s got everything to do with you. So, yeah, there’s a couple of examples right there. I hope that’s of value.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, thank you. Well, tell me, Margie, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Margie Warrell
Well, I would simply say if there’s something that’s causing you stress right now, that just keeps coming up again and again, maybe in different clothes, but it’s just a recurring issue, in there, lays your greatest growth. In there is an un-face fear, there is fear in some form that’s kept you from addressing it more effectively.

Maybe taking ownership for something that you’re doing that’s contributing to it, that you’d rather blame it on everyone else. But recognizing that those things that test you the most, also teach you the most and can be the catalyst for your highest growth and transformation.

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

Margie Warrell
Anais, Nin, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

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

Margie Warrell
My favorite study is the work of Amy Edmondson out of Harvard on psychological safety, and that it’s the teams that report the most mistakes that are actually the highest performing because they feel safe enough to be able to share the truth.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Margie Warrell
My favorite book would be The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck.

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

Margie Warrell
My daily planner.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Margie Warrell
Reading wisdom literature first thing in the morning over my cup of tea in the early hours to set my intention for the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a Margie original sound bite or nugget that people quote back to you often?

Margie Warrell
Yes, and that’s “Living bravely is indispensable for living well.”

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

Margie Warrell
They can head over to my website, MargieWarrell.com, or just connect with me on LinkedIn or anywhere that you hang out on social media, or my Live Brave Podcast.

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

Margie Warrell
Thank you. I invite people to take my courage quiz. If you head over to my website, to “The Courage Gap” page, you’ll see The Courage Quiz, and I invite you to take it because it’ll help you identify where the courage gaps are in your life and how you can close them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Margie, thank you.

Margie Warrell
Thank you.

Apr 03
0

1046: Boosting Your Drive to Enjoy Sustainable Success with Molly Fletcher

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Molly Fletcher reveals the key to building a career that’s sustainable and fulfilling.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to stop the negative self-talk and shift your mindset
  2. Why burnout happens–and how to avoid it
  3. Practical steps to build lasting resilience

About Molly

Hailed as the “female Jerry Maguire” by CNN, Molly Fletcher made a name for herself as one of the first female sports agents. During her almost two-decade career, Molly negotiated over $500 million in contracts and represented over 300 of sports’ biggest names.

Now as a World’s Top 50 Keynote Speaker, she delivers her inspiring message to audiences around the world. She is the author of multiple books, and her latest book, Dynamic Drive, became an instant USA Today #1 Non-Fiction Bestseller.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Molly Fletcher Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Molly, welcome back!

Molly Fletcher
It’s awesome to be back with you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so we’re talking about your book, Dynamic Drive, which sounds like something I’d sure love to have more of. Could you kick us off with maybe a super inspiring story of someone who was struggling but then made the switch and saw that sustainable success on the other side?

Molly Fletcher
Yeah, Pete, that’s awesome. Well, I think, fundamentally, I’d frame it with the fact that, as an agent for you know, almost 20 years as a sports agent, what’s so fascinating is that the fans see, with sports, all these moments of achievement. Like the fans see the trophies and the accolades and the big contracts, and these pivotal peak moments of achievement.

But, for me, what I saw every day, all day, day in and day out, for, literally, decades is everything in between the moment of achievement, everything that got them there, who they became in that pursuit, and what happened after the achievement, and who did it again and again, and why, and how. And so, they operated differently, and that is in part what Dynamic Drive is, is this pursuit of better every single day, and I unpack seven principles that are critical to living that way, and, in many ways, parking complacency to the side forever.

And so, it’s this focus not on a moment in time or on achievement, which is really the traditional definition of drive, this linear pursuit of an outcome, and dynamic drive is this continuous pursuit of better in a way that’s sustainable and anchored in purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that sounds like it could fire me up, sure.

Molly Fletcher
Are you fired up?

Pete Mockaitis
So, can we hear about someone who kind of lost the path, but then got back in the groove?

Molly Fletcher
Well, absolutely, I mean, I think that is, in part, my mission, is to help people recognize when they could be sliding into complacency and don’t really recognize it. You know, I talk about that there’s a big difference between contentment, which is totally a great thing to have your toes in the sand with a book in your hand on a beach and be content, and there’s a totally different thing when we think about complacency, which, to me, is this unintentional parking of something in your life that potentially actually matters to you a lot.

And so, I tell a story, actually, in the book about a gentleman that I really walked through something that I think is probably really helpful for your listeners, which is an alignment audit, which is an opportunity to pull back and say, “What are the things in my life that really, really matter to me? What are my most important people, things, behaviors, beliefs that matter to me deeply, you know, physically, mentally, emotionally, relationally, spiritually?”

Write all those down, and then rate yourself on a scale of one to ten on the amount of time, attention, and energy you’re giving those things that you’ve identified matter to you a ton. And so, I unpack a story in the book, to your question, of a gentleman by the name of Dave. And what he realized in doing that was, “Gosh, I got a gap. I mean, I say that my son is A1 and just such an important part of my life but I miss every one of his games and I go hunting every weekend.” And I say that it matters but he rated himself a five, and so that was a gap.

And I think we can all recognize the roles that we play in our life – wife, mother, sister, daughter, neighbor, parishioner, community member, leader. There’s a myriad of roles we play in our life, and I think we’ve got to recognize, “How do I show up as the best version of myself in those roles and be remarkably intentional about living into that in service of really leading the life and leaving the legacy that we want to leave in alignment with the things that really matter to us?”

And there are so many moments in my own life where I was pursuing this thing that I was told, candidly, as a wife and a mother when we had three kids in 12 months, Pete, which is sort of hard, it’s a little crazy, right? I mean, we had one and then we had twins. And everybody was like, “Molly, you can balance all this.” So, the peak of my career, 300 athletes, and coaches, team of agents, like you can balance all this.

And so, that was what I was trying to do, was I was trying to balance all of these things, which was a lot of things. And then I was finding myself completely exhausted and drained and feeling like a total failure and just fried. And, fundamentally, what was happening was I was attempting to take all of these various things and go to bed at night with a teeter-totter perfectly balanced, and I actually don’t even think that’s what we want.

I think what we want is alignment, which means that sometimes we will be out of balance, but it’s on purpose, right? Like, when I wrote my book, I was a little over-indexed from a work perspective. I’d take about a month plus in the summer and go to our cottage in northern Michigan where I’m out of balance with work, but I’m totally in balance, you know, I’m aligned with something that’s deeply valuable to me and my family.

So, I think it’s just critical to say, “What are the things that matter most? How can I live into that?” which isn’t balance, it’s alignment. And I had a guy that I interviewed actually on my podcast, Pete, and he said that when he, and this would be an example, he said that when he was going to play in his very first Super Bowl ever, and this guy was like selling shoes at Foot Locker a year before, so this was just incredible for him.

He, essentially, told his family, like, “Hey, I am fully locked in for the next two weeks, training for the Super Bowl. Like, my phone is going to be, I’m going to be locked in.” So, he was out of balance, but he was aligned with a really remarkably unique window of time and had communicated that to the people in his life who really matter, and then was able to have a really special experience.

So, he was getting ready to have a really incredibly unique and super special experience in the Super Bowl, so he was a little out of balance with his family, but he had communicated that in service of ensuring he could perform at his best in a moment, professionally, that really mattered to him.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I think we had a guest, Dan Thurmon, who wrote a book called Off Balance On Purpose, and he’s, like, a yearly cyclist and gymnast.

Molly Fletcher
Cool.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s a good visual, it’s like, yeah, there will be times in which you choose to be off balance, but in so doing, you get some momentum and a direction, and so you kind of handle your stuff appropriately elsewhere with the communication and the heads-up and all that kind of thing. Well, then tell us, when it comes to having a dynamic drive, what’s the big idea or core message that makes it all possible?

Molly Fletcher
Absolutely. Well, purpose is fundamental to dynamic drive in the sense that it’s the red thread that threads through it all. In other words, I think when we know why we do what we do, it changes what we do and it changes the way that we show up in moments that can be hard. And we know that when we’re pursuing a better version of ourself, we can unlock greater joy and greater fulfillment. We can align with the legacy that we want to leave.

And so, purpose is so critical because, you know, I think about athletes and coaches that I worked with, who had injuries and rehabs and trades, but if they were clear on why they were doing what they were doing, it gave them the strength to overcome, at some level, the speed bumps and the hiccups and the challenges, and we’re all going to have them.

But when we know why, and I often tell an analogy, sort of a metaphor of sorts where it’s like you have two high-rise buildings and you say to an individual, “Hey, look, I’m going to ask you to walk across the high-rise building, I mean, on a plank, across these two high-rise buildings. I’ll lay the plank over the top. It’s an inch and a half thick; it’s a foot and a half wide. It’s kind of a sunny day. Eighty percent of the people that walk across this plank to the other side make it. It’s a thousand feet high, five hundred feet apart, let’s say, 80% make it, 20% don’t.”

And I’ll ask a room of 1,000 people in a keynote, “Would you walk across that plank for a million bucks?” And I get five hands. “How about would you walk across for 5 million bucks?” and I get a couple more hands. And then I ask, “If the most important people in your life, the most important people in your life are on the other side, and the only way you could save them is if you walked across the plank?” Everybody’s hand shoots up before I can finish the sentence.

In other words, when we know why we’re doing something, it fundamentally changes our ability to show up in that moment with the kind of mindset that we need to execute. And so, I unpack seven keys, mindset, of course, being one of them, to living this way. But I’m watching you and you have a question, you’re contemplating something. I want to give you a shot here, Sparky. What do you got? Talk to me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one, I mean, you’ve crafted quite the visual, that I am imagining, and it is sort of terrifying, you know, thinking about the heights and whatnot. I think it reminds me of skydiving and more here. And so, yeah, it really does, emotionally, experientially, in the gut, crystallize a concept that can be very theoretical.

It crystallized a concept that can be a very theoretical and rational, it’s like, “Oh, yes, my family is important to me. Like, yes, I should have purpose, yes. Yes.” And yet, when you put it that way very sharply, it becomes quite clear, “Millions of dollars would be pretty cool but not worth risking my life for,” versus, “My family, no question.”

So, it’s kind of like, if you’re willing to risk your life for something, and yet not something else, then it’s not too far of a stretch to say, “Well, then how will you spend your life? How will you choose to invest your finite hours before you expire in that which is truly meaningful?”

And it’s quite easy to get sucked into all kinds of things that you’re like, “Well, wait a second, this is cool and helpful, but it’s not my purpose. This is fun and interesting, and I’d like to be helpful to other people. I don’t want to let them down. I want to make good use of my degree in certain reasons, rationales, excuses, any of them,” but it’s a much higher bar and far fewer things are worth risking our life for and, thus, spending our life in pursuit of.

Molly Fletcher
Absolutely. And I think that fundamental question, that is so important to consider, kind of to your point, is, “What are you chasing?” I had a friend who, I mean, she’s got a promotion and raises and all these things, but she was looking at me, saying, “I’m exhausted. I’m traveling constantly. I’m disconnected from my husband, and my daughter and I are sideways. I’m not sleeping. I’m gaining weight. I’m not exercising,” and she was just in a really tough place.

And I remember looking at her, and she had a huge job, and she had gotten this promotion, and I said, “What are you chasing?” And she looked at me, and was like, “What kind of a question is that? What do you mean?” Well, I’m like, “Well, like, it doesn’t sound like you’re having, fundamentally, like, just fun and it sounds like you’re compromising some things that matter. And so, like, I’m just trying to, I mean, what is it?”

And I’m, like, waiting for her to go, “Well, I’m going to do this for six months so that I can do X.” She goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, what is it all for? I mean, your daughter is 16. What is it all for? What are you chasing?” And she didn’t have an answer. And so, I think it is a very difficult question to answer, but it’s a really important one to answer because we want to know that.

Otherwise, I think sometimes we just find ourselves on a treadmill on 10, holding on for dear life, with an incline of 10, and we’re not really sure where we’re going and why we’re going there. And so, I think we just have to take the time and the energy to get aligned in that regard so that we’re connected to the things that do matter to us.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, help us out, if some listeners are having a similar stuck response, “Uh, I don’t know, Molly,” what’s the path or the sequence by which we get some clarity and insight there?

Molly Fletcher
Well, I mean, the alignment audit, I think, is really powerful that we sort of just unpacked, which I think is a really cool way to get aligned with what matters, how much time and attention are you giving to the things that matter. So, that’s really critical and foundational relative to the opportunity to live with balance or alignment, not balance, in fact.

But then I unpack seven principles in Dynamic Drive, and one is mindset, right? So, oftentimes, we have what I call an inner critic that we want to turn into an inner coach. So, we think about in our lives the way that maybe an inner critic might talk to us, which is, “You can’t,” “Why me?” “I’m not good enough,” “I’m not this enough,” and we have these automatic thoughts to the tune of almost 80,000 a day, and some of them are that inner critic.

And so, what we want to do is, first, recognize the things, the scripts, the self-talk that are not taking us where we want to go, that are keeping us a little bit stuck, and then we want to shift that to truly a bit of an inner coach that’s going to take us where we want to go. So, I’ll give you an example.

Let’s say you say that exercise is important to you but the self-talk is, you know, “I just don’t have time. I mean, how in the world am I supposed to take time to exercise or work out when, I mean, I’ve got this job and I’ve got emails, and I’m married, I have kids, and I’ve got dinner, and I got all these things? And, like, I don’t have time. I don’t have time to work out.”

And, fundamentally, pulling back and saying, “Okay, well, what if I shifted that story to, when I take time to work out, I feel better, I sleep better, I make better food choices, I show up better for the people in my life who matter most? I need to take the time every day to ensure that I protect that time and I exercise because I show up better for the people in my life that matter.”

And then, when the inner critic comes in and that self-talk or that thing that might keep us stuck in this place, we shift to that better script. And I also encourage people to reinforce that new script. Maybe it’s something you write on your whiteboard in your office. Maybe it’s a sticky note on your desk. But we want to keep that new script in front of us so that, when we do slip, and that inner critic starts to find its way in, we can suffocate it with that new script.

So, mindset is a really, really critical place to start. And then, I talk about energy and discipline and curiosity, resilience, connection, you know, confidence, obviously, is critical, but this is a way of life that isn’t linear, in the sense that we might find ourselves in certain moments where we need a little bit more discipline, or we need a little bit more curiosity, or we’ve pushed hard and we need resiliency.

And so, it isn’t like A to B, B to C, C to D, right, and then, “Whoop, we’re there.” It’s the ability to circle back in and touch the things that we need in the moments that matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s lovely in terms of the reframe, what it’s for, makes all the difference as opposed to simply, “Well, I should. Well, you know, the government recommends I should have 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous aerobic activity each week.” It’s like, “Okay, that’s not much of a pull.” It’s like, “I should do it.” Or, now that I’m 41 years old and married with children, trying to have a hot bod is not really a motivator the way it was as a youth.

Molly Fletcher
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, in the dating market with competitors that I had to pass it in the pursuit of the lady. So, yeah, that makes the world of difference, is getting clear on the underlying purpose or benefit, which serves as an antidote, a counter-response to the inner critic and head trash going on.

Molly Fletcher
And I think, oftentimes, people talk about burnout so much today. I actually think burnout is really a result of doing too much of the things that don’t align with what matters most to you, that don’t align with your purpose. I don’t think burnout is a result of working too much. I think it’s working on the things that don’t matter to you.

And so, I also think we can keep burnout at bay because we’re pursuing something that is deeply critical to what matters to us relative to who and how we want to be and do whatever it is that we do in our life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. So, I’m curious then, if we find ourselves in a spot where, let’s just say with jobs, like, “Hmm, that’s ringing a bell, Molly. I am feeling a touch of burnout, and it’s because I don’t actually, deep down, care much about what I’m doing. It’s a job. It pays bills. That’s handy. It would be cool to do some other things, but I don’t know,” how do we start to work with that?

Molly Fletcher
Yeah, for sure. Well, I think we also have to recognize that, not everybody’s work is going to also be their purpose. Is it ideal and optimal? Absolutely. But the purpose might be that we have to shift our mindset to one that then allows us to make the life for our children a little bit better than ours was, or gives us an opportunity to do X or Y.

So, we want to take the time to, certainly, if we can do the work that we believe is our life’s mission, that is absolutely ideal, no question about it. And I think what I would push somebody that’s in that place to recognize is maybe there’s an opportunity to understand, beyond the paycheck and beyond the check clearing and beyond the money, what, in fact, is underneath all that, that is making an impact in a way that’s deep and real and substantive?

I spoke at an event for a payments company, a financial payments company, and it was interesting. The leader really pushed, you know, you would say, “Well, I didn’t wake up in all my life where I was dying to run payroll for people.” And she really pushed people to understand that, “Look, we execute against the payroll of, I mean, just enormous amounts of individuals in the world. And that then, in turn, creates meals and family dinners and people sitting around a table.”

And so, look, is that a stretch? Maybe, but maybe that’s a way to reframe it in service of saying, “You know what, this isn’t really about payroll. This is about something bigger and deeper than that.” And then I think we have to have the courage to recognize that maybe, that our legacy, the thing we want on our tombstone, isn’t directly aligned with what we do day in and day out, but it feeds the thing that is, in fact, maybe be more deeply threaded relative to our purpose.

I would encourage people to recognize the power of saying, you know, I think, oftentimes, people will say, or will hear, “I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a choice.” I think that we actually have more choices than sometimes we really want to face. And I think we have to have the courage to really go, “Do I not, really? Like, maybe there is something that I could change. Maybe there is something that could pivot, that would allow me to align my purpose more directly to the work that I’m doing and in service of me feeling like I’m living into that more deeply.”

And I think taking the time to explore the fact that we have a fair amount of control on where we put our energy, more so than, I think, sometimes we can admit to, and it’s hard. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but, I mean, we have to, at some level, have the courage to ask ourselves some difficult questions that could help us create that alignment.

And I think we also have to have people around us that have no agenda, but to help us be the best version of ourselves, that can help us unpack maybe where there’s gaps and opportunities for us to step into our purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. And I’m curious, then, you’ve got seven keys to unlock our dynamic drive: mindset, energy, discipline, curiosity, resilience, connection, confidence. That’s a lot for an interview. But we talk about mindset here, it boils down to a set of beliefs, kind of shaping how we see the world and ourself in it. Are there any just phenomenal core beliefs that just make a world of difference in terms of having that drive?

Molly Fletcher
I think, fundamentally, it’s recognizing that talent alone and our sort of isn’t enough to sustain high performance, to even potentially get to the best version of ourselves. Like, to me, talent is a fantastic thing, and we all have God-given talents. But, for me, I can tell you as an agent, there was a lot of athletes and coaches that had a lot of talent, but they didn’t get there or stay there, because talent isn’t enough. So, we need talent plus curiosity, plus discipline, plus mindset, plus energy.

Molly Fletcher
I think that they, fundamentally, recognize that it isn’t about a finite moment in time, that it’s an inside-out pursuit of better, not an outside-in pursuit. In other words, it’s not about pursuing an outcome, it’s about who we’re becoming from the inside out. And it’s not over indexing on a focus on an outcome or a moment in time, but rather on who we’re becoming in that pursuit of that outcome, of better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then, I’m curious then, does that translate into some mantras, some convictions or affirmations or things that we return to if we’re feeling some drift away from these bedrock beliefs?

Molly Fletcher
Absolutely. I mean, I think when we think about that, I appreciate that question, I mean, one is it’s where obstacles, where some people might see an obstacle, if you’re living into dynamic drive, you see opportunity. You see what’s possible. I tell a story in the book about a baseball player I represented who went from a starter in the big leagues to a closer, then back to a starter, All-star Hall of Famer.

Now, in that moment, when the world thought he’s insane, “What is he doing? He’s too old. He can’t do this,” and everybody thought it was a gigantic obstacle, he saw it as an opportunity, so it was a shift. So, we’re walking into a meeting, we’re walking into a conversation, we’re stepping into some change, we’re stepping into a challenge that most people, and, traditionally, we might think is a complete and total obstacle, but when we recognize and shift the story that we tell ourselves to being an opportunity, I think it’s pulling back and saying, “You know what? I’m going to choose where my energy goes before everyone else in the world decides for me.”

And I think that’s so fundamentally important to recognize, is that if we don’t choose where our energy goes, other people will. I think another mantra, to your question, would be that most people overestimate talent and they underestimate discipline. I think about the key curiosity. Curiosity creates chances is often a mantra that I say. Curiosity can create choices, for sure, in our lives if we’re curious.

And I think when we think about resilience, what feels important to recognize is that resilience is about fundamentally recognizing the difference between being good and being terrific, being outstanding at whatever it might be in our lives, personally or professionally. It’s about recovering fast. I think about tough days we have, tough conversations, tough moments, tough meetings, tough phone calls. We have them. We’re all going to have them, and particularly if we choose to live into dynamic drive. We’re going to have hiccups.

What’s critical is that we recover very quickly, and part of that is going to that mindset key and shifting from what potentially is an obstacle into an opportunity. And, for me, through the lens of sports, I saw so many athletes miss shots they should make, putts they should make, spray, you know, their drive off into the rough, but what they do is they don’t let it unravel. They tell themselves the right script for them, and then they reset. So, obstacles being opportunities.

I think the other one, when we think about connection, Pete, that I think is important, that I share a story about a contract I negotiated for a coach who then changed his mind the next morning after signing six contracts and a record-setting contract. And the mistake was being too transactional that I made.

And so, I think when we think about connection, it’s keeping relational at the center, not transactional. I often say we want to be relational, not transactional. And in all the keynotes that I give, whenever I have a conversation with the leaders or the stakeholders before a keynote, I’ll often ask, “Are relationships important to the work that they do?” And, I mean, literally, I’ve done a thousand keynotes, and nobody says, “No, relationships don’t. This is not really that big of a deal for us.” Everybody’s like, “Oh, totally. I mean, relationships are everything.” So, being relational, not transactional.

I think the other one is that confidence, you know, when we think about the key and the principle of confidence. Confidence doesn’t come from being comfortable. Confidence comes from taking action inside of maybe a little bit of discomfort. That’s how we actually strengthen our confidence. In other words, we can’t sit in a corner and think our way to being and showing up in the world more confidently. We have to take action to do that.

Confidence comes from stepping out of your comfort zone into what I often call the stretch zone. So, those are a couple little mantras that I think are important to lean into.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, thinking about resilience, tell us, you’ve got a cool vantage point, having seen a lot of athletes with a lot of resilience, how do we get there, to have that mental toughness to really keep on stepping up? They say that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And, it’s funny. I found that sometimes that’s true and sometimes it’s not. It’s like, “No, I feel like I was maimed by that. I feel wounded and harmed by that encounter as opposed to strengthened.” So. what makes the difference and how could we indeed get back up stronger?

Molly Fletcher
I would argue that it’s not even about getting back up, back to the watermark of where we potentially were, but actually better because of maybe that hiccup, that moment in which we needed to wipe off our knees. I think what’s important is, number one, as leaders, potentially who are listening, or parents, we often want to catch people before they fall and sort of save them from that.

But we need these moments where everything doesn’t always work out perfectly and we “fail,” but that builds our resilience muscle and gives us the confidence to keep pushing and stepping back into moments that are a little bit of a stretch. And I think we live in a world, particularly as a parent, where we sort of kind of shield our children from the falling and the skinning of the knees, and I think that they need to do that. And, obviously, I mean, if they’re running out in front, you know, there’s obvious moments when we want to stop somebody from something.

But there’s also moments where, “You know what, let’s let that hiccup happen, and let me be right there as a parent beside him to help him navigate out of it.” Or, as a leader, putting, you know, allowing somebody to have a little bit of a hiccup, potentially, in service of helping them strengthen and recover from that moment and show back up better.

I think we have to be intricately aware of the importance of everything not going swimmingly every minute of the day, and allowing ourselves to recognize the power and the confidence that’s created, the strength that’s created when we have to recover. Think about working out, right? It fundamentally is taxing the muscles when we go lift, but that is in service of them building up again and building and coming back stronger.

So, there are so many opportunities in our lives when we can step into that moment, ask that question in the meeting, like, push. You know, people often ask me, because I’ve negotiated so much, like, “How do I get better?” Reps. Like, work the barista at the Starbucks for, like, an extra shot of espresso for fun. Like, I negotiated a buy-two-get-one free kind of orthodontics thing for our daughters when they were getting braces when they were young.

That’s a safe environment to practice asking for what you want, and it might not work and that’s okay. But I think we strengthen that resilience muscle by stepping into the stretch zone. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. We want to try to do it in as many safe moments as we can, but we want to recognize that what happens as a result of that is we strengthen that muscle and we can come back maybe just a little bit stronger the next time, and the next time, and the next time.

But we have to tell ourselves that. I have a thing on my computer, Pete, I call it my smile file, and I just drag and drop like emails and notes and LinkedIn and all that. I mean, it’s just a blessing, and I’ll just drag and drop them from time to time into my little smile file. And after maybe a tough day or a tough moment or a tough meeting or a tough conversation, or anything, you kind of open that up and look at it, and go, “Okay, you know what? I got this.” Right?

And maybe it’s something physical on your desk. As an agent, athletes, they go to film to reset. That’s how athletes often will recover. They’ll go watch their best golf swings. They’ll watch them standing over a putt in a critical moment in training, they go watch their at-bats when they’re just crushing it. And they remind themselves, “Okay, yeah, right. Like, I got this,” and they get that in their head before they step back out to the next moment.

And I think we, as business people, we don’t really go to film, but what can we lean into that can help us reset? Sometimes it’s a smile file or something physical.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s beautiful. And as you talk about it, it’s funny, we had a guest who talked about having a humor first-aid kit, so I just assemble things that I think are funny, and that’s helpful for a mood pick-me-up, for sure.

Molly Fletcher
A hundred percent.

Pete Mockaitis
But the smile file, I like it, in terms of it’s generally me being awesome, crushing it, winning, performing well. Cool. And then I I’m thinking, maybe I’m overthinking it, Molly, but I think it could be quite powerful to have sort of subfolders in your smile file associated with kind of wherever the self-doubt is cropping up. It’s like, “Oh, I’m no good at sales. It seems like I’m always blowing the meeting when I finally get it,” or whatever it is, like, “I’m not good at speaking,” “I’m not creative,” “I’m a bad husband,” sort of fill in the blanks, you know?

Then to have, it’s like, “Well, time out, let’s review some film, or smiles, or let’s review some historical evidence. Yes, I had a disappointing outcome a moment ago, and let’s just put that in the context of, ‘Oh, yeah, there was that one time I closed that massive deal out of nowhere. Oh, there’s that one time I won over that person,’” etc., and it seems like that’s sort of not just a humor first-aid but a first-aid for any emotional mental wound of confidence that’s hitting you.

Molly Fletcher
A hundred percent. I mean, I think that’s great, I mean, I think to have those subcategories. I often will tell salespeople to pull back and think of, “What are the most, your top ten, top five sort of rebuttals, like pushbacks when you’re selling, for example? Go attach a story to that, that aligns with how you’ve actually created a positive outcome for an existing client, relative to what is often maybe a rebuttal or pushback that you get. And build up that story bank of great stories that you can then lean into to help offset what is, an often, common rebuttal.”

To me, that can be really powerful, too, is stories are such a powerful thing that we can use whether even if it’s externally as well, so we can preload those. And so, when you said those subfolders, it made me think of the way that I often think about that from a sales perspective, that can be a powerful thing to do, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good, that handling objections, like handling your own inner critics’ objections to your worth or competence.

Molly Fletcher
Totally. Yes, for sure.

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

Molly Fletcher
“When you ask for the business, you get advice. When you ask for advice, you get the business.”

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

Molly Fletcher
There was a study out of, I talk about this in Dynamic Drive, I want to say it was out of Princeton, but it was a really interesting study about the power of dopamine that it has on our pursuits. And so, essentially, it was recognizing the fact that when we acknowledge our effort along the way, and that we actually drip dopamine that helps us continue to pursue it.

And so, it’s just important that, as we set goals, that we don’t set them in isolation. And it proved it scientifically relative to the power of recognizing that, “Hey, I’m doing a good job. I’m on the right track. Things are tracking. Like, we’re going to do this. We’re going to get here.” It actually drips a little bit of dopamine that helps keep us motivated, because motivation, you know, it wanes, right? So, sometimes we can tap into that natural substance we all have inside of us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Molly Fletcher
The Alchemist was a book I read when I was young. And, to me, it was just an incredible story, really, of purpose. And that’s probably my favorite along with the Bible.

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

Molly Fletcher
I would say it is, essentially, my energy audit that I unpacked in the key, but it is a tool that ensures that I protect and create micro-breaks throughout the day and protect the things that really give me energy throughout the day because I think if we don’t carve out micro-breaks and other things that give us energy, it’s not sustainable to go back to back to back all day. We’ve got to make sure that we build in those breaks.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, you hear quoted back to you often?

Molly Fletcher
“Be where your feet are,” is something that I often say about being present, and people seem to really connect to that. “Be where your feet are,” that we tell ourselves that when we need to really show up and be present.

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

Molly Fletcher
My podcast Game Changers with Molly Fletcher is awesome, or a place to start, or MollyFletcher.com.

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

Molly Fletcher
To me, that would be a final, I would say, that’s a really powerful call to action for people is to do an alignment audit. Identify the things in your life that matter most, rate yourself on how you’re doing in those things, and then, if there’s a gap on a 1 to 10 scale of greater than 2, that’s an opportunity to step into maybe some change, an opportunity to get better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Molly, thank you.

Molly Fletcher
Thanks so much.

Mar 31
0

1045: How to Stop Overthinking and Build Mental Resilience with Joseph Nguyen

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Joseph Nguyen discusses the hidden relationship between thinking and suffering—and offers a powerful framework for achieving peace of mind.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to spot and stop negative judgments
  2. How to PAUSE overthinking
  3. How to beat procrastination with SPA

About Joseph

Joseph Nguyen is the author of the #1 international bestselling book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, which has been translated into 40+ languages. He is a writer who helps others realize who they truly are beyond their own thinking and conditioning to live an abundant life free from psychological and emotional suffering. When he’s not busy petting his three cats that he’s allergic to, he spends the rest of his time writing, teaching, speaking, and sharing timeless wisdom to help people discover their own divinity from within and how they are the answer they’ve been looking for their entire lives.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Joseph Nguyen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, welcome!

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you so much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your area of expertise. Your book, Don’t Believe Everything You Think, has just taken off tremendously. Congratulations.

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
And the title is so good. It’s so funny, Amazon auto-completes if you type, “Don’t believe everything you think.” It’s like, “Nice.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great advertisement, I guess, and a great slogan just to have all over Amazon. It’s what it should be, instead of all the stuff that we don’t need to be buying.

Pete Mockaitis
Don’t buy many other things here.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you take us through the journey a little bit of how you and your relationship to thought and the insights that you discovered came to be in your own personal lived existence?

Joseph Nguyen
A lot of what I’ve come to realize comes from, this is not new information. This has been here for eons, thousands of years, from everyone and so many different countries, cultures. I mean, I draw influence from Western philosophy, Eastern philosophies, Zen Buddhism, Christianity. So much cognitive behavioral therapy. Like, you name it, there’s probably some sort of influence there.

But I think the only time that I was able to actually integrate it into my life was when I sort of hit a rock-bottom moment where, after I really tried as much as I possibly could all the options that were available to me, like, I mean, there’s therapy, there’s acupuncture, acupressure, there’s going vegan. I did all these things and it didn’t really quite work until it forced me to look internally.

I was trying to do everything to change everything outside of me, so changing people’s behaviors, how they viewed me, how they judged me, wanting and trying to earn other people’s approval, love, all these sorts of things, all these attempts at finding what could only be found within. So, I think the moment where I kind of hit rock bottom, which was a point in my life where, I mean, I had a business that was growing. It was going great. I accomplished a lot of the goals that I had, but at the cost of my own mental health.

So, every single day, I was just so chronically anxious, borderline depressed. I was probably depressed. I just wouldn’t admit it to myself that that was it. And I just didn’t know when the next client was coming from. I didn’t know if we’re going to have enough money, food. My partner, now wife, she had a lot of physiological illnesses.

So, she had gastroparesis, and so she couldn’t eat, got a feeding tube, hospitalized multiple times. All of that was happening concurrently with, basically, my business falling apart. Then my business partner and I split. I went 50,000 into debt at around 21, 22 years old. And so, all of that happened within a span of about a year.

And so, that was probably the rock-bottom moment that I hit, where I thought, after accomplishing everything that I wanted, that it would give me this internal peace and joy, but it did the exact opposite. And that was because I didn’t realize where peace comes from, and it doesn’t come from manipulating the environment or other people or the world to whatever I think it needs to be. It comes from releasing that desire, that need to change everything outside of me except myself.

So, rock bottom, I think pain is a great motivator and catalyst for change. Most people, like myself, probably wouldn’t change if it wasn’t absurdly painful. So, I’m actually very grateful for those experiences, but it’s quite difficult to go through it. But that was the genesis of the turning point for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for sharing that. That’s heavy, and it’s a lot. And I think what you’re articulating dead on, we just chatted with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, who discussed the arrival fallacy, this notion, “Ah, yes, when this happens, then it’ll be smooth sailing. I’ll be happy. I’ll be free. I’ll be at peace. All my problems will be solved.”

And it just doesn’t work out that way. And sometimes we don’t believe it until, as you’ve said, we experience that pain. We have arrived and go, “Uh-oh, shoot, these feelings are still there, that lack of peace is still there.

Joseph Nguyen
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what then? What happened next?

Joseph Nguyen
So, it basically forced me to look inside, because I was trying all these modalities to help, and they did help to a certain extent, but it didn’t really change that much. And it puzzled me, because I thought to myself, “I surely can’t be the only one going through this. So that’s when I started looking for a lot of different solutions.

And then I started questioning my own experiences, and other people’s experiences too, which is I think most people, if not every single human, goes through extremely difficult and challenging events and times or even traumas.

And so, I started to ask myself and run thought experiments, where it was like, “If two people, have similar traumas, how is it possible that one person can spiral downwards and fall into a deep depression and isn’t really able to get out of it, while another person who has gone through something similar is able to make amends and make peace with the past and become okay with what happened?”

And not only that, but become empowered by what happened and go on to want to help other people not experience the same thing. How is that possible if we can’t go back and change the past? So, neither one of them went back to alter the events in any single way, which means it’s not the events that was changed, but their own thinking about what happened to them.

And so, that sparked an epiphany, which was, our emotions don’t come from external events, they come from our own thinking about the events, which is our own judgments, our own opinions, our own criticisms about the event, or even ourselves and our own thoughts about whatever happened. And so, that was what kind of made a giant light bulb moment for me, which is like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s no way to change the past, but I can always change the way that I’m viewing it. Is this helpful or hurtful? This sort of incessant nonstop negative judgment of life, of myself, of other people?”

And so, that spawned a whole slew of new questions for myself, which was like, “Why do I do that? Why do I constantly wish things were different? Why do I constantly tell myself that I’m not enough, not good enough, not smart enough, not whatever it is, and repeating these stories to myself?” And I never stopped to ask myself, “Is that actually helpful? When has overthinking helped me?”

And so, I realized then that overthinking doesn’t solve problems, it creates them and exacerbates them. And I just didn’t understand that I could just not judge, negatively judge, the things that are happening in my life or myself. That was an extremely liberating moment for me. And, I mean, most of the thoughts that we have, we have over 60,000 thoughts in a single day. How is it possible that every single one of those thoughts is true? There’s no way, right?

And if it were true that we are our thoughts, what happens to the thought that just passed our minds, that just left? We’re still here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d disappear.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re still here, right? So, that means we are something beyond our thoughts. Same thing with emotions. If we are our emotions, if I am depressed, or if I am anxious, if I am those things, or I am happy, what happens when those things pass, anxiety or happiness? I’m still here. How is that possible?

So, we are not our thoughts and we are not our emotions then. We are something greater than that. And that is the feeling and the space that I sink back into to finally find some peace because I realize that everything in life is transient, including our thoughts. And if we are the common denominator that is still here, then those fleeting things can’t be possibly us. That was the eye-opener for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Wow, there’s so much good stuff here, and I’m just drawing all kinds of connections. I recall I was in a therapy session once, and I posed the same question, and it’s like, “So, is it true that, like Nietzsche or Kelly Clarkson says, that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” Or, is it the opposite experience in which, “No, I had a bad thing happen to me and I’m somehow less strong, weaker, not as capable as a result of the experience”?

So, it’s like, “So which is it? And under what circumstances, and why, and what’s the distinction?” And he didn’t give me the easy answer, “That’s one of the greatest questions of therapy.”

Joseph Nguyen

He was amping you up, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, I mean, and that is one of the assertions, I believe, of cognitive behavioral therapy or of Shakespeare. There’s nothing good or bad, but rather thinking makes it so, and our cognitive distortions or our thoughts about things and judgments shape the emotional reactions and experiences we have. And we had a Navy Seal Alden Mills sharing some similar notions, like, “Hey, is this thought helpful or hurtful? All right. Well, then let’s bring some energy to the helpful thoughts.”

And we got some real wisdom there. It’s, like, we cannot be our thoughts, we cannot be our emotions, because our thoughts and our emotions are ever shifting and changing. And that sounds wise and familiar. Is this coming from a wisdom tradition? Or is this a Joseph original?

Joseph Nguyen
Oh, no, nothing is original from me. Creativity is just a blend of a lot of different parts and combining it into something seemingly new. But it’s all from Eastern philosophy, some Western, right, some Stoicism, Zen, Buddhism, in that there’s tons of psychology in there, right? Like cognitive behavioral therapy uses so much of this in terms of questioning our own thoughts, our own emotions, trying to figure out the root cause of all this. So, all of that, I definitely stand on the shoulders of many, many giants from centuries or millennia.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you put a stake in the ground, and it seems like you’ve got some real conviction here, that it is, indeed, our thoughts and judgments and overthinking, over-thoughts, about a situation that is the source of our depression, anxiety. And I’m thinking, is it the only source, the primary source? Are we sure about this? It sounds true-ish, but what’s our best evidence for it?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, in terms of emotions, there’s no way to really prevent “negative emotions.” Those will always come and go. What I propose in the book is less about preventing them, but to reduce the time spent experiencing those emotions. Because a lot of times, we are replaying and ruminating on memories of the past, and bringing them into the present moment and reliving that experience from a certain vantage point of it, which may or may not be true, I don’t know.

But if it makes us feel a lot of anxiety or depression or resentment, is that possible for us to change? And if so, then how? And so, in the book, I started to realize, like, let’s say there’s a lot of people in veteran hospitals or recovering in Alcoholics Anonymous or tons of people who have been through so many different things. How is it possible that there’s people that have gone through something similar, but then have different results?

So, it’s like, “What are they changing? They’re not going back in the past to do that, so they’re changing something now in the present moment to alter their experience.” And so, that’s where the book is coming from, which is like, “What can we do now that things have happened, and becoming more resilient, right?”

This is building and training emotional regulation and resilience rather than a prevention of emotions in totality, because a lot of times, sometimes emotions are very helpful. They help to protect us. They help give us signs. All emotions are messengers to help us and to show us what we need to pay attention to. That’s all emotions are.

But if we believe them to be the only source of truth and an ultimate conclusion about ourselves, then that’s where we run into trouble. And, let’s say, if we’re really depressed, then we might think about ourselves, and say, “We’re not enough. We’re not lovable. We’ll never find love.” These sorts of beliefs about ourselves, which is what I call “thinking” or “negative judgments,” those things are not necessarily that helpful and they harm us more than help us.

And so, is it possible to let those things go? And if so, how? So, for me, why I use the word “thinking” in particular is because it’s the best word I could find to explain the phenomena of just ruminating negatively on something. So I make a distinction in the book, thoughts versus thinking. A thought is a neutral observation or intuitive prompting about an event that happened.

Pete Mockaitis

“I would like to eat some food.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that is a thought.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, that’s a desire.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, that could be a desire.

Pete Mockaitis
A thought and a desire.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, and then thinking, on the other hand, is a negative judgment about an event or your own thoughts. So, let’s take a scenario.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m overweight. I shouldn’t eat all this food.”

Joseph Nguyen
Right. See, “should” is a great indicator that we’re thinking, right? That’s usually a preliminary word that we use before we judge ourselves. And so, an example of this is, let’s say it’s raining outside. A thought is, “It’s raining.” That’s a neutral observation. Thinking, on the other hand, would be something like, “Why is this happening? Why does this always happen to me? This rain completely ruined my day. I’m always unlucky like this.”

All of this thinking about the thought of it raining is not as helpful to us and is the source of all this suffering. So, let’s say we did have something planned and it rained and it ruined our day, that’s unfortunate, right? Like, we had plans, we planned for it, but is it possible to not let it ruin our entire day? Is it possible to let go of this emotional suffering within a few minutes?

And so, that’s why I say that’s the thinking part of whatever is going on. And although we can’t change the event or even our initial thought of it, we can always let go of the thinking or judgment about whatever is going on, and that’s where the power lies. For example, thoughts have no power over us unless we believe them to be true, right? So, the belief in the judgment is what causes this suffering and is the difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, now, as you use the word “thinking,” I am wondering if we could have other, do some other thinking, or judging about the rain in a positive fashion, in terms of, “At last, the crops will be nourished by this rain,” or, “You know what, let’s just frolic like a child.”

And so, in your definition, would you still call that thinking even though it has maybe a positive vibe or feeling associated with it?

Joseph Nguyen
I think there’s two different categories of what we can call positive thinking. On one hand, it could just be an intuitive prompting. An example of that would just be, “It’s raining. Let’s go outside and play in the rain.” It doesn’t necessarily have to skew towards, “This is the best thing that’s ever happened in the entire world.”

See, like where we can over-exaggerate positive thinking is equally where we can fall short of it because who’s to say it is the best thing in the entire world? Because if it’s raining here, it might flood somewhere else. So, it’s very difficult to just, ultimately and conclusively, say if this is good or bad. And so, if we are overly positive about something, then it opens us up for, “Well, what if that might not be the case?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, so it might feel good, but we’re not necessarily getting closer to truth or accurate representation of reality.

Joseph Nguyen
Correct, yeah. And we can skew both ways, and that’s when positive thinking can then open us up all sorts of cans of worms. But that’s not to say that positive thinking doesn’t work, and I don’t want to say that at all. It certainly does work, but the question is, “Is it sustainable? And is it based in reality?” So, if we observe the rain, and we’re like, “Oh, look, it’s like nourishing the crops,” like that’s a neutral and true observation, like it is feeding the plants and all that stuff, and we can feel good about that.

But what I also observed as well was, once we let go of the negative judgment about things, we are naturally at peace. We are naturally more joyful. We skew towards that way. And if you look at children that are a couple years old, they skew towards happiness. They’re smiling, they’re happy, unless they’re like hungry or like something is physiologically wrong. They’re generally just very positive, very happy, laughing all the time.

And that’s our natural state as well if we don’t negatively judge whatever situation is going on. If we let go of worrying about the future or ruminating and resenting the past, that is our default state. So, you don’t necessarily have to try to be positive. And other examples I love giving is, think about or recall a time where it’s like you were very anxious, or stressed, or overwhelmed. Like, how much thinking is going on?

Pete Mockaitis
Plenty.

Joseph Nguyen
Too much, right? But then if we flip and invert the question, recall a time when you were your happiest, in a total state of flow, and you lost track of time, how much thinking was going on then?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s, I guess per your definition of thinking, like, very little. Although, if you’re in a flow and doing a thing, you naturally have to—

Joseph Nguyen
You’re having thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you’re having thoughts, but you’re not thinking in the Joseph-sense of the word.

Joseph Nguyen
Right, you’re not negatively judging the thoughts or experience that you’re having. You’re just in it, you’re fully immersed. That’s when you lose a sense of self, actually, and that’s when we are no longer psychologically suffering. And some people in the spiritual community will call this like the death of the ego. It’s when you just dissolve and you feel at one with everything. That’s what flow is and why a lot of times people will say like that’s this ideal state for humans to be in.

Athletes experience this very often when they’re in and playing a game during a competition. They’re not so much thinking about what’s going on. They are just intuitively responding and being there. And that’s like our ideal state that we’re in. Actually, the times that athletes think too much, they tend to miss the shots, or think too much about something and overanalyze, and that’s when they freeze and choke when they could have definitely done something different.

The same thing is true for our own lives. The more that we constantly just ruminate, judge, and criticize ourselves, other people, events, we tend to freeze, and go into fight-or-flight mode, and act as if our life really is in danger, and operate from a place of fear rather than love and expansion and joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Joseph, we’re getting near a zone I’ve been pondering for a while, which is, you talk about when we feel a sense of peace or joy and flow, contentment. And I’ve been reflecting on the distinction between contentment and boredom. Because, in terms of an external view of the situation, they’re almost the same.

It’s like, “Nothing’s really happening right now.” And yet, when we feel bored, we’re restless, agitated, and, I guess, negatively judging, “I don’t like that nothing’s going on right now,” versus when we are content, it’s like, “Ah, nothing’s going on right now.” And that feels restful, rejuvenating, restorative, and we like and appreciate the space that we find ourselves in.

So, I guess that is perhaps one of many examples of the judgment we bring to a situation, shaping it, but I’d love your pro tip. If we find ourselves bored and would rather be content, what should we do?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, great question. So, boredom is not necessarily a bad thing. Boredom, a lot of times, is the birth of creation, new things, new hobbies, new thoughts, new ideas. If we’re not bored a lot of the time or sometimes, then we’re actually just recycling a lot of the same material from the past and constantly going and we feel like we’re in the hamster wheel. So, boredom is not necessarily bad. And when you see kids get bored, what do they do? They invent.

Pete Mockaitis
They invent some games.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly. That’s what humans do. When we’re bored, we create, and so it acts as a great motivator. But where things can go a little bit south is when we say, “Oh, instead of being content with what’s happening right now,” let’s say we’re on vacation, “I should be working. If I’m working these hours, I could make so much more money or I have all these emails I need to get to.”

You’re not able to actually enjoy yourself in the present moment, and you’re constantly thinking about the future and all these things you need to get done, that’s when the “boredom” or what we would call that in that case, that’s when it robs our peace and takes it away from us is when we think we need to be doing something else other than what we’re currently doing or experiencing.

So, in that case, what I love recommending to do is just to schedule those things and just, like, if you’re on vacation, like that’s the boundary you need to draw for yourself. But if we don’t draw boundaries, it will creep in. All of these beliefs that we have, all these negative judgments that we have about ourselves or what we should and shouldn’t be doing, they will come in unless we set that boundary for ourselves.

Like, “If I’m on vacation, my phone is off,” or, “I’m not taking emails or whatever it is.” But without those, they will creep in and they will start to fester and become uncontrollable at that point. And this is really a practice of presence more than anything else. Are we able to do and give our full attention to what is happening right now in front of us? Or, are we distracted and thinking about something else in the meantime?

Peace comes from being present. It is a natural byproduct of doing so. The more that we are able to do that, that’s the happier we will be, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m reminded of the Scientific Journal article, “A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind,” which, I think it was Kahneman and company looked at just that in terms of empirically checking with people and, “Hey, what are you doing? What are you thinking about?” and seeing the results. So, that’s that there. When you say boundaries, my first thought is sort of external things, like, “I will not be picking up my smartphone,” “I will not be answering emails on vacation.” Do you have some thoughts for boundaries we have, like with ourselves and our own thoughts or experiences?

Joseph Nguyen
Those are the most important boundaries because we can change everything external but if we don’t change anything internally then we’re still going to suffer a lot emotionally. So, some of the most important internal boundaries that you so aptly alluded to are the judgments that we’re making that is really at the core of our emotional suffering, of our resentment towards others, to ourselves.

If we don’t draw that boundary, and say, like, “We will no longer judge ourselves in this light,” then we’re going to keep doing it. And we do this mostly because we’re not even aware that there’s an option out, that, “Oh, we can just not judge everything that’s going on? Like, there’s a way that, as I go about my life, I don’t have to constantly narrate and say this is good, this is bad, this is right, this is wrong, this should be happening, this shouldn’t be happening?”

We just aren’t taught that. Most people just don’t know, and I wasn’t aware of that until I was basically smacked in the face with it and had to hit rock bottom to find it. But that is probably the most important boundary to set, which is, “Can we let go of the judgments that we’re having about ourselves, the world, whatever’s happening? Are we able to enjoy it as it is?”

When we go about life, most of the time we judge everything, “This person’s good,” “This person’s bad,” “This person’s evil,” “This person’s not,” “This is beautiful or ugly.” Like, there are so many things that happen. But when we walk in nature, like how many of us are saying, “This flower is ugly. This flower is like beautiful,” or, like, “This tree is crooked or what”?

Like, we just observe and enjoy nature as it is rather than constantly pick apart every single thing that we think is wrong with this tree. As soon as we do that, that’s when we suffer. So, nature is a great way to reset because of that and it brings us back to our true nature, ironically, of just being aware and giving our full attention to someone without judging them. That’s what the basis of love is, unconditional love, which is to fully accept someone as they are without wanting to change them, without wanting them just to be something different.

Full acceptance of that is where peace comes from. This not only goes for people, but for situations, anything. That is the root of unconditional love. And use that thought experiment for yourself. Like, when do you feel most loved by someone? When they’re constantly judging you, nagging you, saying you should do this, saying you should be different, you should be better, you should be doing any of these things, or when they fully accept you as you are without judging? That is the goal of everything.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. My children would say, when we do hugs and kisses in flying blanket mode.

Joseph Nguyen
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
But it falls into a subcategory of what you’re describing. I like that notion about the narration that we’re just doing it all the time, and it might not even seem too intense, like, “I’m such a stupid idiot.” But even just like, “Oh, oh, oh, the sun is kind of in my eyes. Oh, it’s kind of hot. Like, oh, I’m getting tired.”

Like, there you are in nature, you might not be condemning the tree for being crooked, but we are narrating and judging – well, I am often – experiences they’re in, in terms of like the air temperature or the illumination that is not perfectly aligned to the preferences I have in that moment.

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, and that’s where all the suffering comes from, is just what we wish would happen, what we want the world to be. But peace comes from letting go of what we wish everything would be and accept it for how it actually is. And, yes, same goes for anything in life, people, even ourselves. In AA, like one of the first steps is acceptance. The five stages of grief, acceptance is what you’re trying to go for.

And in CBT, acceptance of whatever emotions we’re feeling is also a core component of the whole process. So, at the end of it all, like all these different modalities are pointing to the same thing, which is, “Can I let go of the judgment that I’m having of whatever is happening and going on?” Once we’re able to let go of that thinking mind, the fear-based mind and the judgmental mind, then we’re able to find a little peace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you said that we have the option to stop the narration, and I am a frequent Audible listener who likes to pause my audiobooks. And I understand you’ve got a little acronym you can walk us through.

Joseph Nguyen
Yes, exactly. So, this acronym, I tried to make it as actionable as possible in terms of, I mean, what we’re doing is letting go of the judgments. That’s the whole purpose of this. And so, this makes the act of letting go a little bit more tangible. So, the first letter in the acronym is P, which is pause. So, pause and take deep breaths, and you don’t need to get fancy with it. Just take five deep breaths. There’s no specific way you need to do it.

But it’s been scientifically proven that taking deep breaths allows us to lower our heart rate, to regulate our emotions, and to come back to center. So, just do that in the beginning of anything, because it’s really hard to regulate or do anything or make decisions or come back to yourself when we’re in a fight or flight mode. Next is A, which is ask ourselves, “Is this thinking useful?” Just like the other psychologists you mentioned before, like, “Is this thinking making me feel the way that I want?” If not, the next step is U, which is understand that you have the ability to let that thinking or judgment go. We always have that power. We may not be able to control our thoughts, but we can always control our thinking about the thoughts, and therein lies our entire power to change our experience of life.

S is, say and repeat the mantra, “Thinking is the root cause of suffering.” You can use any mantra in this matter. Another one, for example, would be, “I let go and choose peace.” Any mantra rooted in truth will work, and it needs to be short and memorable. What mantras do is that it’s very difficult to think of two things simultaneously.

So, what it does is it focuses your attention on this one thing, which means you can’t be thinking about the future or ruminating about the past. So, it forces focus and attention on something that is true. So, repeating that for maybe 30 seconds to a minute is really all you need, and that will slow the thinking mind. It will calm things down significantly.

That’s the basis of Transcendental Meditation as well, what a lot of the Tibetan monks use to go beyond the mind and to achieve oneness with the universe. But we take it here and you’re able to use it in real time.

Then E, the last step is to experience your emotions fully without resistance. So, we’re not trying to bypass the emotions by just not thinking about it. We’re actually removing the judgment of the emotions because what we resist persists. So, if we are resisting the anxiety, it usually gets worse, which is why a lot of times, when someone has a panic attack, they’re much more prone to more panic attacks simply because that’s how, it’s just like self-fulfilling, so to speak.

It’s like once we experience something and don’t want it to happen, we just put up a wall and just constantly resist it. But in physics, an object in motion will stay in motion, right? But also, for every force, there’s an equal and opposite force happening. So, if you have this force of an emotion and you’re resisting the emotion, that emotion is going to constantly be there and it’s going to stay stuck unless it passes through your system.

Anything that is stuck creates a significant amount of suffering. So, for a slightly more comical and light-hearted example is, like, if you eat a lot of food and it doesn’t pass through your system, what happens? Like, a week, a month passes, it’s going to be very painful and it’s going to cause all sorts of issues.

The same thing is true for our thoughts and emotions. The more that we hold on to our thoughts and don’t let them pass through, the more it’s going to cause us a lot of emotional suffering. Thoughts, emotions, all these things are transient and meant to pass through us, just like water flowing through a river.

As soon as a river is dammed up, that’s when wildlife begins to dwindle, fish begin to die, all these things start to happen. But as soon as the river is able to flow, that’s when life begins to flourish. That is the same thing for our own lives. So, letting thoughts and emotions pass through us without resistance. So, the way to do that is to create space within ourselves, to honor and hold the emotions, and to not judge them.

See them as another entity, like our inner child, or even one of our own children, and to hold them within our hearts, and to give them space to be there, without judging them, without saying, “You shouldn’t be here. Why are you here again?” That’s what we say to these emotions a lot of times, like, “Why are you still here, anger?” And we’re angry at the anger, and so it just compounds.

But as soon as we say, “Oh, you’re welcome here. You’re not an enemy. It’s okay.” As soon as you give children space, time, and attention, things begin to settle and we’re able to regulate. The same thing is true for all of our emotions and it passes so much more quickly when we’re doing this rather than kind of putting up a wall. So that’s the whole entire process.

Pause, take deep breaths. A, ask yourself, “Is this thinking helpful or useful?” U, which is understand you have the ability to let that thinking go. S, which is say and repeat the mantra. And E, which is experience your emotions fully without resistance.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. And if I may put some numbers into this, so you had a mantra, I counted, it was about seven words. Is that around the length that we’re thinking about? Like, if you push it to 20, it’s outside mantra zone?

Joseph Nguyen
Probably. It just creates so much more thinking and you’re probably going to have to try to remember, “Am I saying it right? Did I forget a word?” And you’re trying to make it as simple as possible so that you don’t have to overthink it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then with experience, I think when I’ve resisted, historically, it’s been almost out of a fear that, “If I begin to experience this sadness, this sorrow, this grieving at this deeply unfortunate thing that has occurred, then will it swallow me? Will it persist for a long time and impact the things I need to do this day, this week, this month?”

And so, I can sometimes push away. But you say with the water flowing situation, and that which we resist persists, we are better off experiencing it fully. I mean, Joseph, for those fellow aversive pushers, away-ers…

Joseph Nguyen
Master push-up-ers, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
…how long are we in for a rough emotional experience if we allow it to hang out?

Joseph Nguyen
I will say shorter than if you’re resisting it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Joseph Nguyen
So, the irony in it is that, when we’re pushing it away, we think that we’re not dealing with it but we’re still suffering. We’re constantly thinking about it, we’re wishing it were different, we’re ruminating on it constantly, but what we don’t understand is that when we just allow it to be there, that it passes so much more quickly.

I think neuroscience is saying now that it takes about 90 seconds for an emotion to be regulated in our bodies. The only reason why it’s prolonged most of the time is that we begin ruminating on the event or judging the situation that happened, and it resets that time period. So, we’ll go 90 seconds, and right before that, we think about it again, we’ll judge it again, and it keeps prolonging the cycle.

And so, it only takes a few minutes to do this and to let go, and it’s not like the entire emotion will go away, but the intensity of the emotion will be drastically reduced than what it was when we were resisting. And, over time, as you build the muscle of emotional resiliency and emotional regulation, it becomes a little bit easier to do every single time. And the threshold in which we become overwhelmed is significantly expanded, so we can take on a lot more in life.

We’re able to do a lot more. We’re able to endure a lot of these events with a lot more grace and a lot more love. But, yeah, it’s definitely scary to kind of allow these emotions to come in because we think that we might not be able to handle it. We might crumble under the emotion. But you have to ask yourself, like we were saying before, like, “Am I my thoughts? Am I this emotion?”

And think about all the difficult times and trauma that you’ve been through, and all the trauma, like, you’re still here. So, I mean, you’re greater than every single emotion that you’ve ever experienced. And the same is true now and it will ever, and it will be true forever because those things are not us.

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, beautiful stuff. Could you share any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, I would run micro-experiments with yourself. Like, you actually don’t have to believe anything that I’m saying, ironically, like the book title. Test it out for yourself. See if it’s true, if thinking is the root cause of your emotional suffering. And the way that you can test this out is to try to suspend judgment, negative judgment about yourself, your own thoughts, your own emotions, external things, people, circumstances.

See if you can suspend judgment for about seven days. That’s it. You don’t have to do a month. You don’t have to do a year. Just see if you can let go of the judgments that your mind is creating, for seven days and see how you feel afterwards. If it significantly improves your emotional well-being, awesome! Continue doing it.

And if it doesn’t, that’s completely okay, and you can find another modality that might work for you. But at the very least, try it and see what happens. And it is only through our own lived experience that you know what truth is, rather than just taking someone’s word for it. So, that’s what I would encourage everyone to do, and just see for yourself.

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

Joseph Nguyen
One of my favorite quotes is actually in the book, which is from Jonathan Safran Foer, which is, “I think, I think, I think. I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, very good. Very good. Thank you. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Joseph Nguyen
The neuroscience study that I was alluding to before, I don’t know exactly what experiment it was.

But they were studying about how long it takes for our emotions to actually pass through our systems, and it was about 90 seconds, which was mind-boggling to me because I thought it would take, you know, like multiple minutes or at least like, I don’t know, 10 minutes, for like, if you’re angry of something, like it feels like it takes way longer than 90 seconds.

So, that was a profound shift in me to realize that, “Oh, my gosh, like it is possible to let go of a lot of these emotions quite quickly.” And it’s actually important to follow this. You don’t have to follow this process, specifically, but you can follow any process, but it’s really important to do it in real time as you’re going about your day.

So, this process is, if you’re experiencing something in traffic, or your boss says something, or your parents say something, or your friends says something that creates a negative emotional reaction within you, it’s important to use the process then rather than only use it in the morning or in the evening like meditating, right?

That way you are actually strengthening your emotional resiliency throughout the entire day. It’s a little bit easier to find peace when you’re alone in your room and it’s dark, your blindfolds are on, there’s like Zen music, right? It’s like a little bit easier to find peace there, but the true test is, “Are you able to find peace while also, like let’s say your boss is screaming at your face, or making fun of you, or your friends are doing something that you don’t really approve of, or your parents are criticizing you in front of other family members?

That’s the time that you’re truly tested for, if you’re able to find peace. And this is something that you can use during those times rather than you need to bust out like a 30-minute meditation just to find a little bit of alleviation. So, that’s one other thing I would do, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. And a favorite book?

Joseph Nguyen
This one’s very interesting, maybe slightly controversial, but it currently is Outwitting the Devil by Napoleon Hill.

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

Joseph Nguyen
I like to use this particular framework on just when I’m doing work because I have issues, a lot of times. Just like procrastinating like most people or just putting off things that I know I need to be doing. And one of the most effective things that I’ve done is to follow the SPA methodology, which is just, if I’m overwhelmed by something, just take the next smallest possible action, so SPA, and doing that.

So, if it’s, “I need to write another book,” that’s a pretty big task, pretty scary, daunting, and it’s like, “Am I able to bust out a whole book in this one session?” Now, that’s typically what the mind thinks of. But if I break it down to the smallest possible action, like, “Am I able to just open the Word document? Can I just do that?” And I’m like, “Yeah, I can definitely click on Notion and open it up. I can definitely do that.” And if I still can’t do that, “Can I just sit at the computer desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Joseph Nguyen
So just keep breaking it down.

Pete Mockaitis
“Sit up from the couch.”

Joseph Nguyen
Yeah, sometimes it’s hard, right? Sometimes it’s really hard. And so, it’s okay if we need to break it down into those baby steps, but that works wonders for me. So, it’s like, “Can I write one sentence?” And when I write one sentence, I’m going to want to write another sentence, like I’m just going to go.

And, lo and behold, there’s like a couple dozen sentences, a couple hundred words pass, and that was way more progress than if I force myself sit down and write my book. That’s a big task. So, smallest possible action is what I like to default to when I am frozen in procrastination or analysis paralysis.

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

Joseph Nguyen
Our emotions don’t come from external events, but from our own thinking about those events. That is something that people just didn’t really realize, and so it’s like a massive epiphany moment for them. Other ones are just like, “I didn’t realize that I could just stop judging. I had no idea I could just not listen to that incessant negative critic in the back of our minds, and that I could just be and just be present. I don’t have to be thinking about something else or doing something else. I can let go of whatever that incessant chatter is, and to finally find a little bit of peace.”

Yeah, that big epiphany was like, oh, yeah, during the times that we are happiest, like we’re not really thinking about anything else, or ruminating on anything. We’re just there, fully engrossed by the moment. And so, those are probably like some of the biggest nuggets that people have gotten.

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

Joseph Nguyen
Probably, I would say my website and newsletter, so JosephNguyen.org, J-O-S-E-P-H N-G-U-Y-E-N.org. You’ll be able to find like my newsletter there, sign up for it. I do have a YouTube channel. I don’t post that often but a lot of the content there is evergreen. All my socials are just itsjosephnguyen, I-T-S and then Joseph Nguyen. Those are probably the best places to find me, but email is where you’ll be able to be up-to-date on any new projects I’m working on.

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

Joseph Nguyen
Let go of the fear of being judged. The more that we’re afraid of being ourselves, to be awesome at our jobs, the less effective we’ll be. And sometimes being ourselves will ruffle a few feathers. People will judge us one way or the other, even if we’re playing conservatively and not really showing that much at work.

People are still judging us anyway. So, we might as well be judged and criticized for being who we truly are rather than masquerading ourselves behind something else. And the more that you’re able to be yourself, the more awesome you’re going to be at your job, the more that you’re able to lean into your own gifts, your own talents, your abilities. All of that is usually held back if we’re afraid of what other people are thinking.

So, stand up for yourself, do what you believe is best for the work that you’re doing, and definitely defend it, and to not just let it be pushed over. Because at the end of the day, if you’re coming from a place of love, generosity, true selflessness, and wanting to do the best that you possibly can, there’s no shame in that at all. So, if you’re going to be criticized, definitely be criticized for doing what you believe is right, rather than hiding behind and playing it small.

Pete Mockaitis
Joseph, beautiful. Thank you.

Joseph Nguyen
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been such a pleasure and so much fun with you. I love your energy.