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Mar 05
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1134: Creating the Moments that Make Work Come Alive with Daniel Coyle

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Daniel Coyle shares how to infuse ordinary work moments with greater meaning, joy, and fulfillment.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why shared improvement beats self-improvement
  2. The three minute visualization that liberates tremendous clarity
  3. Why vulnerability comes before trust–not after

About Daniel

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code, which was named Best Business Book of the Year by Bloomberg, BookPal, and Business Insider. Coyle has served as an advisor to many high-performing organizations, including the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians. His other books include The Talent Code, The Secret Race, The Little Book of Talent, and Hardball: A Season in the Projects, which was made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves. 

Coyle was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and now lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife, Jenny, and their four children.

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Daniel Coyle Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, welcome back!

Daniel Coyle
Hey, it’s good to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about flourishing. You’ve done some great work here with your book and a lot of research. Could you kick us off by sharing what’s perhaps one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and workers and flourishing?

Daniel Coyle
Two of them. One is that it’s still happening. It feels like we’re living in this dystopia sometimes, but, man, there’s a lot of good stories of human flourishing. And by flourishing, we should kind of define it, I guess, which is joyful, meaningful growth. Joyful, meaningful growth, like the highlights of our lives, the thing we all want for ourselves and our kids and our work and our colleagues.

And the biggest surprise of it, when I went into this sort of researching, finding people who were flourishing, I had the assumption that I had learned, which was that kind of you flourish alone, like it’s up to you, right? We’re in this individualistic culture. It’s like my deal.

And what I found over and over again was that’s not how it works. That’s just not how it works. There’s no hermits in caves in Switzerland who are like kicking ass flourishing. We require other people to bring out the best version of ourselves. It’s we are pre-wired for this. You can try all you want and grind all you want and try to be the solo mountain climber but, in the end, flourishing is a human ecosystem and it’s interdependent.

And if we think back on the times in our lives where we’ve grown the most, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts, as they say, that you weren’t by yourself. You were surrounded by people. When we look at stories of great success, the narratives we receive are often stories of the solo hero. But scratch that just a little bit, just look half an inch beneath and you will find ecosystems of support. And that’s what those places are building.

They’re building community. It’s the power of community. And where that gets really interesting is applying it to our workplace because a lot of times our workplace are built under that similar assumption that everybody’s you’re on your own, man. You get promoted by yourself, you get reviewed by yourself, but the places that I visited were really good at creating that kind of connective energy and that group brain that makes one plus one equal ten.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love that so much, and it’s funny that I think I’m coming around to realizing something that has been on my mind for 28-ish years. And it was this, back in high school, I participated in a marching band. I was in alto sax, if you’re curious. And I was amazed at marching band camp.

So here in the summer for about two weeks, like 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.-ish, we just played music and tried to move to different spots on the football field over and over and over again. And so, yeah, and so we’re talking about seven hours, day after day after day to put together a little marching band show.

And so I always thought, “You know, this is fun.” I was there. I liked meeting people, you know, it was a thing to do, my brother did it, and I just had a good time just hanging out with people and playing some music, doing a show.

But I always thought, during marching band camp and many times afterwards, “Boy, if I could just buckle down by myself and put that kind of energy and attention and time into an endeavor, the way we do in marching band camp to do a little music show on a football field, what kind of incredible things would I be able to achieve? What kind of flourishing and growth could I encounter?”

And, well, you know what, Daniel, it may not surprise you, you’ve done the research, 28 years later, I still can’t do that by myself.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, right. It’s true. That’s how we’re wired. It goes deep. Think, let’s just move the camera back a few hundred thousand years, right? Who’s going to survive? The group that can cooperate and do their marching band, call it killing a mammoth or whatever, or the lonely, strong, courageous lone wolf guy? I mean, there’s no question.

So when we play a game, let’s say we’re trying to do something and we’re both wired up to some machine that measures our overall happiness and energy and our brain waves, our shared success lights us up way more than our individual success.

Like, if you want to tap in, if you see your life as like a journey where you need a lot of energy and a lot of ideas, don’t do it alone, right? Really finding these ways to connect, finding these communities. And the power of community, that’s a word that I always thought was such a boring word, like you’d see community meeting on a sign and it would kind of be like, “Oh, snooze,” you know?

But what I’ve realized in looking at these flourishing places is that they don’t see community as a noun, they see it as a verb, as a set of actions. If you’re going to form a community, it’s not just, “Oh, yeah, we swim in the same area at the same time.”

Super intentional about creating these little pauses where people come together in the workplace. Super intentional about creating spaces where people can explore questions, simple questions like, “How should we march across this football field? Like, how should we play this song?” The workplace version of that.

And they’re not operating as lone wolves. They’re creating spaces where they can come together and explore that mystery, and all their brains are lighting up and they’re growing and changing and they’re creating these little, I don’t know, like little gardens, right? And like what happened with you.

And I think everybody has their own marching band camp experience back there where you come out of it and you say, “I’m kind of different now. Like, I grew and I helped other people grow.” And that’s like the most core human energy.

And what’s interesting is that we’ve kind of like hollowed it out of the workplace. Like, all the fun and energy that is possible for humans when they come together to do projects, our workplace has been really good about, like, eliminating that in some ways. There are a lot of works that feels very hollow.

I’ve heard it called the emptiness epidemic where it’s like, “Oh, man, I know exactly what I have to do. I have all the information. I have exactly my markers, you know, my KPOs. I’ve got everything that I need, but I just don’t have any meaning and I don’t feel like that energy and I don’t feel that connection.”

And so these places are kind of the antidote to the emptiness epidemic that I think a lot of us are feeling around the workplace right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there are so many places to go there. So if you find yourself in that spot, exactly as you described, you’ve got all the marching orders, the clear KPIs for evaluation, and it’s just kind of lifeless, what’s to be done?

Daniel Coyle
Well, you know, what’s to be done? What’s to be done? It’d be great if I could be like, “Here’s a silver bullet that will solve all the problems.” That doesn’t exist. Two things I would say, though. First of all, reflect on where you are getting a sense of aliveness.

There’s a little litmus test that you can give in terms of flourishing, which is, “Who do I feel most alive with? Is there anybody in this? Who do I feel most alive with?” And the second is, what are you growing together? What are you making together? What are you growing? So ask that.

Find locations in your life. Find the spaces, the conversations, the relationships where you feel that energy in that sense. That’s the first thing. And then start experimenting a little bit. Your culture, your community is the 15 feet around you all the time.

And these little moments, I call them yellow doors, little moments that maybe green doors, for sure we go through them, red doors we don’t. Yellow doors are kind of this where you’re not sure whether you should go through it or not.

And what I saw in these places is that they had the habit of reaching out and, you know, we talk about relationships like they’re a machine, like, “I’m going to go build relationships.” Relationships grow. They grow in tiny moments of warmth, eye contact. And they grow in questions, just asking questions, “What’s energizing you about this podcast right now, Pete? Like, what are you responding to?”

Like, questions that are in the moment where it actually makes people come alive and respond. And, all of sudden, you’re on a different depth with them. You’re on a different level. And the third thing I would say is get good at pausing. Like, our workplace life these days resembles a race, right, an information race and a project race.

And the places that I visited and the people that I visited were exceptionally good at stopping and zooming out a little bit. And when they zoom out, they’re asking questions like, “What does this mean? Like, where is this headed? Who might help me here? What is this going to look like?”

And I really began to see pausing as like the ultimate ninja skill. Anybody can work harder and faster. And in the age of, obviously AI, we’ve got all the answers are right here. We can just go, go, go, go, go and sprint. Every day is a sprint.

But the places that I visited had this ability to say, like before a team would go out on a project, they wouldn’t reflect. They would preflect, like do a pre-flection where it might be like, “Oh, what do we want this to, what’s the ideal outcome? What’s the end state we’re going for? Let’s talk about that for a second. Let’s talk about what’s energizing us about this project. Like, what are you most curious to learn? Where are you curious? And then let’s talk about like, what if everything goes sideways? What does that look like? Like, how will we know we’re screwing up?”

And then afterwards they would do an AAR, similarly, a pause. It feels like a waste of time. The project’s already done, right? But the pause afterwards where you say, “Okay, what went right? We all share. What went wrong? We all share. And what are we going to do differently next time?” It takes like five minutes. Navy SEALs do it. A lot of high-performing organizations do it. Do a preflection and then an AAR.

And they’re just these moments that inject meaning and relationships to what could be just cold, hard KPIs projects. And if you don’t get good at investing at creating those moments, which just take a short amount of time to put some, like, life and oxygen and curiosity and realness and authenticity into them. And that happens in a pause. That happens by everything I just did, was a series of questions, right, “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn? What could go wrong?”

Like, I think we’re so good in our culture as being as worshiping at the altar of the answer, like, “Oh, that guy’s got all the answers. She’s got all the answers. That’s great. They’re so good.” That’s cheap. Like, I’m sorry, but the world has always changed and the answers are going to be different tomorrow than they are today. So having an answer is less valuable than it ever has been in the history of the world. You can get answers a lot of places.

Having great questions, however, is becoming more and more and more valuable. And those questions don’t just exist as informational questions. They exist as spaces for people to come together and explore those questions together to say, “What’s really going on?” so that they can actually build shared mental models and build shared relationships.

Those relationships are the energy source that powers you in your career, in your personal life. You could take all the studies of long-term adult development and they’d add up to one thing – relationships, relationships, relationships. That’s all that makes us happy. That’s all that makes us fulfilled. And so if we approach everything as transaction, we end up kind of hollowed out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. It’s like, Well, yes, that was the top thing. I remember we had Robert Waldinger on that very long-term study of Harvard graduates, and that was the thing. It’s like all about love and relationships. Also watch out for alcoholism.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, don’t drink too much and don’t worry about much else. Like, it’s more powerful than genetics, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Okay. So that’s a lovely piece in terms of it doesn’t take a ton of time to inject meaning and relationship human bits into efforts. And I’m thinking about that ritual of always checking in how it went. And I remember I was stunned by, we had a mega church pastor, it might’ve been Clay Scroggins or someone on the show – we’ll put in the show notes – who said that that was a thing that they did after every Sunday worship day, like on Monday, that was just like, “Hey, how did that go?”

And I remember I was so struck by that because it’s so beautiful in that you can really create some cool compounding results in terms of, “Oh, man,” like I’m thinking about this James Clear Atomic Habits type stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Yes, right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Oh, shucks, if we get 2% better at putting this thing together each time, then, my goodness, I guess that’s how churches could become mega. This is a pretty amazing experience.”

Daniel Coyle
That’s how everything becomes mega, isn’t it? It’s like everything is a spiral, Pete, you know. This shape, it’s a natural shape. It’s not a machine, but all natural learning, like your learning, my learning, your listeners’ learnings.

If you really think about it, they’re doing just what that pastor did, which was like, you have an experience, and then you got to go back and get a little feedback about it, and that elevates you a little bit, and then you do another one, and then you get a little feedback, and that elevates you a little bit. And that spiral upward is what we’re all seeking.

And the problem is that we mistake it for a ladder. We mistake it for like a straight line thing and it’s never straight because there’s going to be some wrong turns, there’s going to be some failures. And one of the most useful concepts, there’s been a concept that I learned during this book that just blew me away and I keep thinking about it all the time as a parent, as kind of an entrepreneur, as a writer, and that’s the distinction between complicated and complex. Is that a familiar distinction to you?

Like, I always thought that was the same, like you. I thought they were like similar, like it’s complicated, it’s complex, same thing. It turns out that’s deeply wrong. Like, complicated things come together the same way every single time. Like it’s building a Ferrari, right? If I give you all the parts of a Ferrari and I give you the instructions and you put them together in that way, you will get a Ferrari every time.

Complex things change. Complex things, when you interact with them, they move and they respond. And so the mental model is like, “Is this more like building a machine or is it more like raising a teen? Like, there’s no instruction book. Everything I do changes the dynamic.”

And so our lives, our careers, our learning is way more complex than it is complicated. And so adapting it, knowing that our path is going to be curving, knowing that we’re going to fail, knowing that failure is going to teach us something, knowing that the only way you can figure things out is to kind of act your way into them.

Actions and experiments are incredibly powerful for that reason. That’s why science is so strong. It’s actually trying to figure out what’s there, probing, and then learning, and then probing again, and learning, and probing again.

And when we take that kind of stance toward the learning in our career development, it puts you in the front seat more, like it’s a more active thing and you start to see failure not as a verdict but as a learning process where it’s like, “Oh, totally, that conversation went off the rails, but guess what? I’m never going to make that mistake again, you know?” That was powerful.

And change in that stance can be, I’ve just seen that over and over again in my career of hanging around with high-performing organizations, that learning bit, you know, we kind of always tip our hat to it. It’s good to be a learner, but, man, this world changes fast. It’s not just like morally good to be the learner. It is, by far, the most powerful stance you can take toward reality.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also love that notion that if teams are regularly having these exchanges with one another, that goes miles in terms of – well, I guess growing, not building – growing the relationships.

Well, so as I think about these relationships growing and getting stronger and having these kinds of exchanges, I think that’s also just going to do loads for psychological safety. Amy Edmondson was on the show talking about that, and we’ve had others who put it very simply.

People see stuff that’s dumb all the time but they’re probably not going to mention it unless you’ve got some sort of relationship or belief that that’s going to go somewhere.

Daniel Coyle
That’s so deep, isn’t it? And that word safety is a tricky one a little bit because it implies that we’re going to make everyone feel very secure. But, in fact, it’s about courage. Like, the courage to say, “Oh, I noticed that was off and we can fix it.”

And so what I’ve seen leaders do over and over again, because we’re naturally like hierarchical, right? So for all the young leaders out there, the most important words you can say are like, “Hey, I screwed that up before,” or, “Hey, what do you think?”

If you could change one thing to actually go kind of overboard in taking off your crown of power and inviting people into, again, let’s go back into question space, where they can explore it together, that’s where relationships are built in that exploration when we’re stepping into that uncertainty.

And the deeper level of that is really all about how vulnerability works. Like, I think our story in our head about trust and vulnerability, we’ve got it deeply wrong. Like, we normally think, “Okay, Pete, I’ve got to trust you before I can be vulnerable. So I’m kind of looking to see if you can earn that, right?”

We’ve got it backwards. Moments of vulnerability are what create trust. It’s called a vulnerability loop. When you’re vulnerable, that gives me permission to be vulnerable, and now we’re closer. And think about your best friends in the world. Are they people that you earned the trust of? Or are they people that you were, like, thrown into struggle with and people that you were very vulnerable with?

Those are our best friends because that’s how vulnerability works. It doesn’t come after trust. It comes before.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, could you share perhaps a story with us of folks who were not so much flourishing and then they incorporated some of your pro moves here and saw a real increase in that flourishing?

Daniel Coyle
Pro moves, I like that. So there’s one story, I guess this might resonate. I’ve been consulting with the Cleveland Guardians baseball team for the last 13 years. And when we started, they had just started a large organizational effort to build the organization around the general, and basically, back context here. They’re one of the poorest teams in baseball.

In baseball, there’s no salary cap, so the Yankees can spend four times as much money on their players every year. So the Guardians can’t buy players. They have to make players, grow players. And like every baseball team, they’ve got a sort of a school system of there’s minor league teams, single A, double A, triple A. And it’s like a giant baseball school. And so we have to figure out, “How can the Guardians compete in such an unfair game?”

And so we created a generative question, which was, “How do we help every player improve?” And we oriented all the departments around it. And we quickly realized, “Man, if players are going to improve, we need to really improve our coaches. Our coaches need to be learning fast.”

And so our first move, we said, “Well, let’s bring in expert coaches. We’ll tell them how to coach.” We brought in Michael Phelps as coach. We brought in NFL coaches, Navy SEAL guys, and it felt good. It felt like it was a really smart thing to do.

But then as we watched it, the coaches did what everybody does, which is they kind of resisted. Nobody likes being coerced from the top down. Nobody. Nobody likes that. Go tell your kid to clean their room and see how fast they clean their room. It doesn’t work.

So we flipped it. We flipped it around. We created a question space. We put the coaches in small groups and said, “Okay, guys, who is the best coach you ever saw? And what did they do?” That was it. All of a sudden, at these tables, the conversation starts to bubble like champagne. All of a sudden, they’re throwing out stories and ideas and concepts.

And we went from like top down saying, “Do this expert stuff to…” “You guys, we’re going to value you. You’re really smart. Let’s bring those out.” We turned that into our model of excellent coaching, which we still use to this day.

And there were a million other little programs like that, whereby, sort of flipping the polarity from “Here are the experts. Here’s best practices. Follow these instructions,” from coercion to, “Whoom! Let’s explore this together. What energizes you right now?” and aligning that with what the academic studies and what works with coaching.

And over the last 13 years, we’ve made the playoff eight times. We’ve won as many games as the Yankees and spent $1.3 billion less. We’re adding up to more. We’re growing. We’re getting a little better at growing players. It’s not easy, and we haven’t won the World Series yet, but it has been alive. It’s been energized. It’s been challenging, but it’s been really joyful.

And so that’s kind of the piece where I see it happening. And when I see that happening at the highest level of sport, where everything is quantified and where things are extremely difficult, it gives me some hope that it can happen where the places that are maybe away from the bright spotlight.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I love, though, the notion of we flip it and then you ask the question. So can you share with us, you’ve given us a couple fabulous questions, can you give us a few more of your faves that unlock some cool flourishing action?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, no, I really like flight checks. It’s a concept out of IDEO. Flight checks is you do with your team. And all of these are all social, right? You can do it by yourself if you want to, but it’s always better to do with other people.

Pre-flight, you know, “We’re about to do a project, let’s do a pre-flight, let’s do a mid-flight, and let’s do a post-flight.” And the questions are always really basic, it’s like, “What’s been the biggest positive? What’s been the biggest negative? Are you still energized by where we started out? What did you learn?” These basic sort of check-ins.

There’s one question that I really like before a team gets together because, you know, lot of times you’re coming together, you don’t know each other. And there’s an exercise called the 4HS that’s really powerful.

And it’s kind of a relationship builder or relationship grower, rather. Let’s use our language correctly here, Pete. 4HS, you get to a small group and everybody shares their history, just a little bit about their history, “Where are you from? Where is your family from?”; their heartbreak, “What’s something that broke your heart?”; their hero and their hope for the coming year. Super simple. Take a couple minutes. You go around the horn.

But what’s happening is you’re turning off your narrow attention system and you’re opening up your relational attention system. You’re creating connective energy in that moment. So that’s one that I really like. It’s really basic.

And there’s one more that is more for individuals. It was taught to me by a Columbia University psychologist, Lisa Miller. It’s called the Counsel Exercise, and I’ll just describe it or we could actually do it if you want. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to walk through it?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s walk through it.

Daniel Coyle
All right, let’s walk through it. Close your eyes, picture a wooden table, just a simple wooden table, and around that table, picture people living or deceased who truly have your best interest in mind, who are truly deeply on your side. And let them come and take a seat.

And now picture yourself walking in and taking a seat. And now ask them if they love you and listen to their response. And now ask them, what is it that is important for you to know right now about where you are headed? What is it that is important for you to know right now about where you are headed, and listen to their answer?

And now you can open your eyes. And that’s it. It’s a little grounding exercise. How did it go for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, I bet people cry when you do this.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. I know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, I’m tearing up a little here. And it’s so funny, it’s, like, that’s always inside of us. And yet, unless you pause and really go there, because in some ways it’s, like, we like to rush. We like to get their answers, like, “Do I really have to visualize the table? And now I’ve got to visualize people. And now I to visualize me walking in the room, you know?” As opposed to just, “What’s the answer?” And yet it makes all the difference in terms of it hitting home.

Daniel Coyle
It makes all the difference. It hits home, right? I love how you said that. Those people are always with you and yet we don’t sort of stop and turn and listen to them. And so a lot of this stuff is about getting in deeper touch with what we really value, what’s really beautiful in our lives, what’s really true in our lives, and creating space in our work, in our home life where we can stop and do that.

And our ancestors stopped a lot more than we did, right? Old-time life was filled with moments like that, rituals where you’d think about the people who came before and think about what they meant, and look at treasured objects and symbols. And our life has been like kind of ruthlessly stripped of a lot of those pauses.

And so it’s up to us to smuggle them back into our life, to take a second and feel that powerful stuff that’s, like you say, it’s waiting for you. It’s not something you had to build. We all have got, that’s called your counsel. We’ve all got a counsel. They’re with us all the time.

And listening to them at those moments can, it’s not just comfort. For me, the powerful part of it is the clarity that you get from that because you get a new sense of what matters and what doesn’t matter. And that’s actually incredibly stabilizing in this world where it feels like we’re always chasing something, chasing shiny objects.

It is incredibly stabilizing to have a moment where you can stop and activate what you’re born to do, you know, let go of control, and connect to what’s really there. It’s just like the most powerful skill and it’s half an inch beneath the surface waiting to come out.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I love so much about this is, you know, I’ve had guests and they say things like, “Oh, form a personal advisory board.” I was  like, “Okay, that’s good advice. Yeah, sure. Good thinking, uh-huh.” And then we’ve had Tara Mohr on the show who did some great thoughts about thinking about sort of like an inner mentor, a wiser, maybe older version of you who cares about you, and you do a visualization, you speak with them. And that’s cool and powerful as well.

What I like here is you kind of, wooh, merge those in a groovy way. And, well, for me, just to share, it was sort of a notion of having some worries, concerns, anxieties associated about the future state of some things. And then to feel the reassurance from these people that, you know, my capabilities are vast. In one way or another, we’re going to figure this thing out and there’s really no need to to get all worried about all this stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, I know. It’s a good feeling, right? It’s just stabilizing. I just love that. Grounding, right? It’s grounding.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Daniel Coyle
So you got that for a big one, and then you’ve got all kinds of other little ones. Like, there’s a little deli in Michigan that has grown into a $90 million community of businesses that does a nice job of teaching this stuff. And he talks about, Ari Weinzweig, who’s the CEO, he talks about SBA, which is stop, breathe, appreciate. Like, to have a minute where you stop, breathe, and appreciate – SBA.

It’s another good one, but it’s just like, I think most of us could use three or four of these things in our holster, you know, some to do in a team context, some to do in an individual context, some to do in kind of a more, “I’m going to retreat and think about things” context. But, yeah, the world wants to lift us off the ground, and so we have to have our own tools for grounding ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you also have a turn of phrase, nurturing beautiful messes. What does that consist of and how and why should we do that?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, when I visited these places, I thought when I’d visit them, they’d be tidy. I thought that these flourishing places would like have all the answers. And as we’ve said, what they had was a lot of questions. And then what they would do is explore those questions in a messy way.

Like, to go back to the Guardians and the coaches gathered around trying to come up what the best coaches did. That was not a nice, neat process. There was a ton of slack in it. There was a ton of little rabbit holes that people chased down because that’s actually how growth works.

Think about a time where you grew the most. Was it a time where you didn’t fail? No, it was probably a time where you failed a decent percentage of the time, right? Was it a time where you understood or you could execute every single plan that you came up with? No, it was a time where you were probably forced to improvise a little bit.

And so with these flourishing places and these flourishing people and this flourishing community, what there was was this kind of self-organizing around obstacles that was invariably messy. Because if it’s not messy, you’re not doing it right. If it’s not messy, you’re not giving people the freedom to self-organize and take a role.

We had a moment over Thanksgiving where my wife and I were putting on a dinner for our family and maybe 25 people. And turkey was about to come out of the oven and nothing was ready. The table wasn’t set, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And I kind of looked around, you know, sort of did the father thing, like kind of skeptical, like, “Is this going to come together?” And then, you know, all of the kids and all their friends, it was like one of those Walt Disney, like fast motion things.

Everything’s perfect. Candles are lit in a tiny amount of time, way more than if somebody had said, “You do this, and you do that, and you do this.” It was a little messy and that’s what gave it the energy. Mess isn’t actually mess. Mess is agency. And when you give people agency in a space, you end up with a much better result than if you kill agency.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of good sense. Okay. Daniel, as people think about this flourishing stuff and we’re getting excited and, like, “Yes, that’s cool. I want that more. Yes, please,” what would you say are your top do’s and don’ts for professionals who maybe don’t have leadership, managerial authority, but want some more flourishing and they want to get it going and want to avoid any missteps?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. Well, the do would be get a three-by-five card and make a mark on it for every day, and start paying attention to where you feel most alive and where you feel you’re contributing to stuff, to something that’s kind of alive and growing. Just notice that. That’s all. That’s the first step.

Like, if anybody gives you like a set of instructions on how to flourish, then that means it’s not actually a good set of instructions, because it is up to you. It is not something, but that’s a guidepost. Look at what’s already happening in your life. Where are you feeling that energy?

And as far as a don’t goes, I think the biggest don’t would be to don’t do it alone. Like, share your story with other people, and share your journey with other people, and share your struggles with other people. That is the thing that will create the energy that will allow you to get through. We live in a world of self-improvement, but shared improvement is way more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I totally resonate with that. And I’m thinking about, I’ve had times with accountability groups, some men’s groups, my podcast mastermind group, and it’s been transformational. And what’s really cool is you don’t necessarily have to have these humans in your own workplace.

Ideally, you could, if you have some great fun team experiences and, hopefully, you can move in those directions if that’s not currently happening. But even if nobody wants to play ball, you can tap into some of this goodness with your other communities and relationships around you.

Daniel Coyle
Exactly. It’s a whole ecosystem, so explore it.

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

Daniel Coyle
I love, I always go back to, I think it was William Faulkner who said, “Only connect.” Only connect. The clarity of that and that has always made, at the end of the day, what’s it about? It’s about that.

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

Daniel Coyle
You know, I keep getting taken with this, it was a priming one. A lot of the priming experiments have been a little bit debunked, but the difference between when you’re approaching a task, the difference between saying “I’m nervous” and “I’m excited.”

Like, I feel that in my body. When I say I’m nervous, it just gets worse and when I say I’m excited, it’s a reframing of that. And some of that reframing stuff I find to be like personally super applicable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Daniel Coyle
The Right Stuff. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer. There’s a feeling when you’re reading some books where it just feels like you can feel the top of your head coming off. And I don’t know if you ever felt that with a book or a song or anything, but it’s like that, that knocked me out. Tom Wolfe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Daniel Coyle
I like a great pencil, a great mechanical pencil.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I have the same one!

Daniel Coyle
Come on, dude.

Pete Mockaitis
I got multiples.

Daniel Coyle
Check it out. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
This is a Graph Gear by Pentel, for our listeners.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, for our sponsors. But it’s great, right? Like, I really get a lot of joy out of that. You know, it’s like that stuff matters. It’s a little sacred.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Daniel Coyle
I think I got to say, like trying to get it, I don’t do it every day, but when I do have a workout, like a hard workout, that is like, makes me feel so much better.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. 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?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, you know, culture isn’t something that you say or something you are. It’s something that you do. It’s a set of relationships moving toward a goal.

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

Daniel Coyle
DanielCoyle.com

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

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, I would say that the call to action would be to make one random reach out to somebody who you haven’t connected with in a long time for no reason. Just reach out, an old friend or something like that, and see what happens. That would be the challenge. It’s like renewing those acquaintances ends up just being the highlight of a day.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to dig into that a little bit because I think that folks naturally can feel some emotional resistance, like, “Ooh, that’s kind of weird. We haven’t talked in like three years. They’re going to think I’m trying to rope them into a multi-level marketing scam. How do I say it?” You know? What do you say to folks who are having a little bit of emotional resistance to this thing?

Daniel Coyle
You know, try it. I mean, everything good is on the other side of fear, period. So that you’re feeling fear is absolutely appropriate, right? But I would also turn them to the work of Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, who has people do this at scale.

And you can see the numbers where it’s like the people who are asked to talk to other people on the train are really pessimistic about it. They think, “Oh, this is going to suck.” Guess what? Highlight of their day. People who are asked to, “Just stay by yourself on the train. Just prepare for your work. Focus on yourself,” they end up enjoying it a lot less than they thought they would.

So there’s this flip. We think we’re not going to enjoy these interactions, but we are built, you are pre-wired to enjoy and appreciate and be energized by them. We can’t help it.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Daniel, thank you. So much good stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Super fun, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Feb 26
0

1132: How to Find Deep Satisfaction While Pursuing Excellence with Brad Stulberg

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Brad Stulberg shares foundational principles for making the process of self-development more fun and fulfilling.

You’ll Learn

  1. What true excellence looks and feels like
  2. Why to stop chasing happiness—and what to focus on instead
  3. The best tool for building focus and concentration

About Brad 

Brad Stulberg researches, writes, and coaches on performance, well-being, and sustainable excellence. He is the bestselling author of The Practice of Groundedness and Master of Change, and coauthor of Peak Performance. 

Stulberg regularly contributes to the New York Times and his work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic, among many other outlets. He serves as the co-host of the podcast “excellence, actually” and is on faculty at the University of Michigan. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Brad Stulberg Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Brad, welcome back!

Brad Stulberg
Pete, it’s a pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about excellence. That’s one of my favorite things. And so you will share with us the way, but I’m very curious upfront. You have achieved excellence in lifting vast quantities of weight. Can you tell us a little bit of the story of this journey and what that illustrates about excellence?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I can. So, I am an armchair power lifter, I’d say armchair because I’m not actually being a national or world-class level or anything like that. But I got really into deadlifting, in particular, maybe five or six years ago, and I’ve just been working toward the craft for that period of time.

And my PR deadlift is 530 pounds. I pulled that at a body weight of about 200 pounds, so more than twice my body weight, which is a pretty, pretty significant pull.

And the way that I like to think about pursuing excellence in the process of that is, yeah, I’m working toward this goal of deadlifting a lot, but the deadlift is also working on me. So I’m learning about the power of community. I’m learning about being comfortable, being uncomfortable. I’m learning about fear. I’m learning about vulnerability. I’m learning about resilience. I’m learning about patience. I’m learning about setbacks.

So all of these things that happen in the gym are life lessons that I can carry with me into my marriage, into how I raise my kids, into how I write, into how I show up for my community members, and so on and so forth. So I think it’s actually like this really nice encapsulation of excellence because, on its face, all dead lifting is is lifting a bunch of weight from the ground to your hips.

But it can be full of meaning because of all the things that you learn in the process of trying to lift that heavy-ass weight from the ground to your hips.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you maybe give us an example of, I imagine, there’s a lot of little learnings associated with, “Oh, place my feet like this, or grip it like that, or train according to this schedule with this many reps and weights, etc”? Can you share with us an abstraction or a carryover or a takeaway that goes beyond the deadlifting itself into other domains?

Brad Stulberg
One of my favorites that has impacted me is when you’re attempting a really heavy lift, perhaps more weight than you’ve ever lifted before, there’s often a real element of fear. And that fear is not because you’re scared that you’re going to miss the lift, I mean, unless you’re competing in the Olympics, no one really cares if you make the lift or not.

It’s a fear of what it’s going to feel like. Like, it feels genuinely uncomfortable, like death, to try to pressurize your body to lift that much weight. And a couple of years ago, I was about to attempt a PR and my training partner at the time, his name is Justin, he looked at me and he just said, “Brave new world.”

And what he meant by that is, “I don’t know if I’m going to make the lift or not, but it’s sure going to be interesting to see.” So I didn’t walk up to the bar scared because that’s not a good position to make a lift in. I didn’t walk up to the bar lying to myself and saying, “I know I’m going to hit the lift,” because I didn’t know if I was going to hit the lift. I walked up to the bar with a mindset and an attitude of curiosity.

And what I’ve learned since is that it is literally impossible to be scared and curious at the same time. So the neural circuitry that is involved in fear and that is involved in curiosity, it competes for resources. So you cannot be curious and scared at the same time.

So when we’re taking on big challenges, when we’re confronting unknown horizons, if we can go into those with a mindset of brave new world, like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but let’s find out,” that shifts us out of fear and into a more playful state that allows us to perform our best.

You asked how that transfers outside of the gym. It’s probably self-explanatory, but one very concrete example is when my wife gave birth to our second child in the delivery room, I looked at her and I’m just, like, “Brave new world. Like, we know how to do one, but I don’t know what two’s going to be like. Brave new world.”

You take on a big writing assignment, or you get a new job, or you get a promotion and you’re feeling a little bit apprehensive, “Brave new world. Like, let’s find out what this is all about.” And it’s that mindset of curiosity that is so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
So, brave new world, well, now I’m thinking about the book and all of the dystopian things. So we’re not talking about that at all. You just mean we’re entering into a new world, a reality that is fundamentally different from the prior reality. And so we could experience fear, terror, “Oh, my gosh, what the heck is this going to be about?” or more of a sense of curiosity, wonder, fun, enchantment, like, “Oh, here’s an adventure that we’re going in on.”

Brad Stulberg
That’s 100% right. And there’s so much research in performance science that shows that that mindset of adventure, that mindset of curiosity, is associated with not only feeling better, but with performing better. There’s this incredible quote from the late basketball player, Kobe Bryant, who was asked if he’s the kind of player that plays to win or plays not to lose.

And he answered by saying, “I’m neither. I play to figure things out.” And he went on to say that if you play to win, then you become fragile because if you lose, you’re frustrated. And if you play not to lose, you’re constantly on your heels. You can never really assert yourself. You’re always in this, like, kind of preventing the worst state.

But if you just play to figure things out, if you play to learn about yourself and learn about the game, you’re going to end up playing the best that you can possibly play. And this came from Kobe Bryant. He was known for his killer mentality on the court. Yet, when he stepped onto the court, he didn’t try to be a killer. He was just really curious.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s just a lot of fun. And when you’re in a fun groove, a lot of things flow nicely from that just naturally.

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s very much related to having fun, and having fun is one of the best competitive advantages there is. I think there’s this misnomer that you either have to be full of intensity or full of joy. But in my research for this book, what I found is that the most excellent performers, they have both intensity and joy. Intensity and joy can coexist at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I don’t remember who pointed it out, but I think they were critiquing the notion of the optimal dosage of stress in the stress response curve. And there is a theory, and it probably holds true in some contexts, like, “Oh, if you’re too low on stress, you’ll underperform because you’re sleepy. If you’re too high on stress, you’ll underperform because you’re freaking out.”

And so you want to be at just the right level of stress, or a medium level of stress. And yet, if you look at high performers doing their thing, they don’t look medium stressed. They just look like they’re having a ball.

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, but I think that they are. I’m so glad you brought that up. That’s the Yerke-Dodson’s curve, I think, you’re referencing, in the optimal performance zone, which is different for everyone. But, yeah, it’s exactly what you said, that you want to have this optimal amount of stimulus or stress.

So I do think, like, when Steph Curry steps on the basketball court, or when a Grammy award-winning musician takes the stage, or when a master chef is competing on one of the Food Network competitive reality shows, I do think that they’re feeling adrenaline. I think they’re feeling nerves, but I think that they’ve learned to laugh at themselves and to smile while feeling that way.

Like, they have trained themselves to embrace that is this, like, signal of growth or of, “My body is getting ready to do its thing, and I’m going to do it with a smile on my face.” So I personally experience this. I do a fair amount of public speaking and I’ve become desensitized to it just by putting in all these reps. But every once in a while, I still get nervous out of my mind. And this happened recently.

I was speaking for this new book in New Orleans, and it was at this historic theater. And it was my first time speaking at a theater where I was down on the stage, and there were thousands of people up, and the lights were on me, and the acoustics were perfect.

Like my heart rate was through the roof, my palms were sweaty. I mean, I was feeling a lot of feels. And I remember telling myself, “Man, I got to practice what I preach.” So the first thing I said is, I’m like, “What I’m feeling, it’s not good or bad, it just is. And it’s like my nervous system getting primed to perform.”

And then the second thing I said is, “How crazy is it that I’m getting paid all this money and that they invited me to this theater to give a talk?” and I just kind of laughed at myself. And then I went on a stage and I nailed it because I didn’t go out on stage with, like, this mindset of, “I’ve got to do well,” or, “I’m terrified.” It was like, “I’m terrified but it’s kind of hilarious that I’m even in this position to begin with.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I love that. It’s kind of hilarious that you’re in this position as opposed to, “Oh, better not screw it up. They paid a boatload of money. I don’t want to rip them off by bombing this here.” Like, that’s a whole ‘nother zone of thought, which is the opposite of fun and will lead you to a not high-performing place.

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, 100%. And what ends up happening is then you take a negative, which is you’re feeling nervous, and you turn it into a double negative, which is you’re feeling nervous and you’re freaking out about feeling nervous. Whereas, if you can just feel nervous and not turn it into a double negative, well then you’re fine.

There’s research from Olympians, and particularly swimmers, that shows that world-class athletes and non-world-class athletes, they have the exact same physiological sensations before a big race. So their heart rates are the same, their cortisol, their stress hormone is the same, their perspiration rate, so their sweat rate is the same.

The only difference is that the non-elite athletes, they freak out about those feelings and they try to make them go away. In the elite athletes, they smile at the feelings. That’s it. Same feelings. It’s just how you appraise them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Well, I also want to ask, was there a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you made while putting together The Way of Excellence?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I think that this notion of intensity and joy coexisting was something that I kind of knew but I didn’t really have these concrete examples for. And then in reporting on the book, I found, time and time again, in every elite performer, whether they were an athlete, a business person, a creative, an entrepreneur, an executive, they all have this ability to flip a switch and become very intense. And at the same time, they experience deep joy and they have a lot of fun in what they’re doing.

And I think part of the reason that’s surprising is, I think, especially in maybe more like masculine-coded spaces, there’s this kind of David Goggins approach to greatness, where, like, you always have to be pissed off, you always have to be angry, you’ve got to have a chip on your shoulder, you’re out to kind of, you know, beat everyone else and beat yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
You got to stay hard, Brad.

Brad Stulberg
You got to stay hard, that’s what he says. You got to stay hard. And I did find that a lot of excellent performers, like, they have the Goggin switch, like they can flip that switch, but it’s just that, it’s a switch and they turn it on and then they turn it off. And when they turn it off, they can be the most fun, loving, humorous, kind, soft people. And then they turn that switch on when they need it.

So it’s not that the stay-hard Goggins approach is all wrong. It’s just it’s not the only thing. Like, it’s a switch. And great performers, they know when to turn that switch on, but they also know that if they try to keep that switch on more than they need to, it’s going to actually hurt their performance and hurt their joy in life. So not intensity or joy, but intensity and joy. And, man, like, I would never bet against the person that has a lot of fun working hard toward a big goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. And so you suggest in your book that the pursuit of excellence is not just for elite performers, NBA athletes, Navy SEALs, etc., but for everyone. Can you expound on this thesis?

Brad Stulberg
I define excellence as involved engagement and caring deeply about something worthwhile that aligns with your values and goals. So excellence is not winning at all cost. Excellence is not perfectionism. Excellence is not rote optimization. It’s not having a 47-step routine that starts at 4:00 in the morning that you need to broadcast for everyone on social media.

Excellence is not impeccable genetics. Excellence is not a standard. Excellence is a process of identifying something that you care about and giving it your all. And if you do that and you work really hard at it, eventually, you’re going to get some good results.

And the results matter. It’s not to say results don’t matter. The only people that say results don’t matter are people that are, like, gazillionaires because they’ve had all this conventional success. Like, winning matters. Getting a promotion matters. Achieving matters. Oftentimes there are very real financial ramifications, new opportunities you get.

So the results matter, but the results aren’t the thing. The thing is the focus and the intention and the deliberateness that you bring to the process. And that’s what, ultimately, gives you the best chance at achieving a result, and that’s what shapes you as a person.

So when you pursue heartfelt, genuine excellence, yes, you’re working towards some goal. You might want to run a marathon. You might want to get promoted to the C-suite. You might want to start a company. But that goal is also working on you. That goal is shaping you as a person. That goal is teaching you about yourself. And true excellence is this bidirectional relationship between the person and the thing that they’re working on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Like, the deadlift, you say, you work on the deadlift and the deadlift works on you. And so it is with any number of things that you’re working on, is it is shaping you while you are pursuing that end.

Brad Stulberg
One hundred percent. The metaphor that comes up time and time again in the book that I just love is of mountain climbing. The top of the mountain is really narrow. All the life is on the sides. Like, the experience that you have isn’t on the summit of the mountain, it’s during the actual climb.

And the day that you win the medal, you’re on the podium for two minutes while they sing the national anthem. You get the promotion to the C-suite and everyone celebrates you for that day, and then the next day it’s back to doing the work.

You get the fancy house or the nice watch, well, now you got to live in the house, and guess what? You’re still five minutes late, even when you’re looking at a Rolex, it tells you you’re five minutes late. So we spend an inordinate amount of time and energy thinking about the summit of the mountain, but we’ve got to pick the right mountains to climb because all of our time and energy, it’s not spent on the top of the mountain, it’s spent on the sides. And, to me, excellence is about climbing as well as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
And can we hear your distinction between genuine excellence and pseudo-excellence?

Brad Stulberg
I define pseudo excellence as the performance of greatness or the performance of excellence, which is very different than the real thing. So pseudo excellence, in extremis, is the influencer that wakes up at 4:00 in the morning, that has their nose taped, or their mouth taped, or God knows what taped because whatever hole you’re supposed to breathe out of changes once a week.

They cold plunge and they video themselves cold-plunging because you got to give a hype speech for everyone on the internet. Then you have to eat a super restrictive breakfast or maybe your intermittent fasting. Again, depends on what month of the year that you’re in.

And you go on and on and on with all of this complex elaborate kabuki, and what you are is you’re winning a world championship of drawing attention to yourself on the internet but you’re not actually winning a world championship of anything else.

The best athletes, the best entrepreneurs, the best musicians, they don’t have elaborate 47-step routines that they film for Instagram because they don’t have time for that. They’re too busy actually doing the thing. So pseudo excellence, again, is like this performative, “Look how great I am and look at all these steps I do to be great.”

Whereas, actual excellence is, “I don’t have time for any of that. I’m a craftsperson. I show up and I write. I’ve got a team to run. I show up and I run that team. I’m an athlete. I go to practice. Like, I keep the main thing the main thing.” That’s one of the big differences.

The second big difference is pseudo excellence often feigns this attitude of nonchalance. Like, “Eh, like, I’m too cool to care, you know? Eh, maybe I’ll win, maybe I’ll lose.” It’s kind of like, “Eh, I’m too cool. Don’t bother me, I’m too cool to care.”

Whereas, genuine excellence, like there is deep caring and earnestness because you actually give a damn about what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. You say that caring is essential to excellence. And I absolutely have found that people will say, when I meet them and they say, “Oh, what do you do?” “I’m a podcaster.” “Oh, fun. What’s your show?” “How to be Awesome at Your Job.” “Oh, okay. So how do I be awesome at my job?” It’s like, “Well, I’ve done a thousand plus interviews. So I don’t know how to say this succinctly, but I guess I’ll say care, because fundamentally, foundationally…”

Brad Stulberg
That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
“…that’s not the whole thing, but it’s maybe half the thing and the most foundational thing, in my belief in terms of being awesome at your job, or most things.” So I think we are aligned on this, but I want to hear you preach the gospel of caring to being essential to excellence.

Brad Stulberg
All right, Pete, you can probably remember when you were in middle school, there were popular kids and they were too cool to care. So they sat in the back of the classroom, they never tried in gym, and they made fun of all the kids that tried, right? Well, those kids weren’t cool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “Trying is lame.”

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, in reality, those kids were just scared and insecure. And they were scared that if they tried and they failed, it would be embarrassing. So it was easier not to care. It was easier to feign nonchalance.

And a lot of adults have yet to outgrow this tendency because when you care, when you do something in earnest, when you really pour your all into something, you make yourself vulnerable to failure, and you don’t have an excuse.

If you sit in the back of the class and you joke around, well, when you get a C, it’s because you sat in the back of the class and you joked around. If you sit in the front of the class and you try your hardest and you get a C, it’s because you just didn’t have what it takes.

And in order to be excellent, in order to be awesome at your job, you’ve got to make yourself vulnerable. You have to care. You have to risk failure. You have to risk heartbreak. And at a certain point, it’s inevitable that you are going to fail and you’re going to get your heart broken. But the benefit, the upside of all the meaning and the satisfaction and the potential performance gains that you get from caring deeply, way outweighs the downside of occasional heartbreak and occasional failure.

So, yes, you have to care. I have this pennant that sits above my writing desk that just says, “GIVE A DAMN” in all capital letters. And I just think, like, that’s it. You only live once, and that’s a cliche, but we’re all going to die. There are things that are worth giving a damn about, and we should give a damn about those things. That’s what makes life meaningful, is figuring out the things that align with your values and giving them your best shot.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when it comes to caring, we’ve got you’re all in, committed, you’re putting yourself out there, you’re vulnerable. And then you’ve got the folks in middle school who think, “Trying is lame and not cool. And I’m not down with that.” I’m curious, is there a mushy middle when it comes to caring that perhaps many of us could find ourselves in?

Brad Stulberg
I think that there is. I mean, there’s this famous quote from T.S. Eliot that says, “Teach me to care and teach me not to care.” And I think that what he meant by that is, like, you do have to care really deeply for all the reasons that we just said, but you don’t want to become so attached to something that, if it doesn’t go your way, it ruins your entire life.

So you don’t want to be the Olympic athlete whose entire identity is wrapped up in running, and then you get injured and you no longer know who you are. So the way around this is to care deeply and to be all in, but not all the time. And to have a couple different components of your identity that you care deeply about.

So you can care deeply about your performance as an athlete, you can care deeply about your being a husband or a wife or a mom or a dad, you can care deeply about your knowledge work job. That’s okay. What you don’t want to do is fuse your entire identity to just one thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. In your book, you start with the biological, psychological, and philosophical foundations of excellence. Can you share with us what are these defined? And are there any transformative practices that make all the difference within these three domains?

Brad Stulberg
The biological underpinning of excellence is really simple. All living species have this hardwired imperative to survive, to persist, and to flourish. And for the longest time, all that meant was not getting picked off by a predator and becoming old enough to pass on your DNA via reproduction.

We humans, we are really the first species that can have values and goals beyond survival to reproductive age. We want to create, we want to contribute, we want to innovate, we want to build things, we want to make art, we want to design software and make companies, and do all these incredible things. There is this innate drive towards growth in all of us.

And sometimes it gets whacked out of us by society as we become adults, we kind of can go through the motions, or we think that we don’t have what it takes. But deep inside all of us, it’s just, we’re biologically programmed. We are a striving species, right?

The ancestors of ours that became content, they didn’t pass on their DNA, they died off. Like, the apes that survived were the strivers, the ones that were never content, they kept looking for better opportunities. That is our hardwiring. So, biologically, there is this strong desire to flourish and to push toward creation and contribution that all of us have.

Psychologically, we tend to feel best not when we are chasing happiness, but when we are chasing satisfaction and meaning. And there’s this whole happiness industrial complex that says that the goal is to be happy, but happiness is kind of like a butterfly. Like, every time you try to squeeze and catch it, it just slips through your fingers.

Whereas, the pursuit of excellence, as I define it, involved engagement, caring deeply about something that aligns with your values and goals, that leads to more lasting contentment, satisfaction, and meaning. And, of course, there are periods of joy and happiness along the way.

And then, philosophically, every single philosophical tradition, East, West, prehistory, modern times, at the center of all of these is doing what you can to live into your full potential. And that’s excellence, right? It is the standard, it is the process of becoming the best person, the best performer that you can be.

And when we get down to the heart of it, we humans, from whatever way you cut it, we are programmed to pursue big goals and to care deeply about them and to try to develop ourselves along the way. Like, that is what we are made to do as a species. So we should reclaim that and we should try to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And now, when you mentioned the happiness industrial complex, could you give us some examples of how folks can get derailed by going after the stuff that doesn’t really satisfy?

Brad Stulberg
I think that one of the biggest ways that we get derailed is we think that some kind of achievement is going to make us happy, “So if I just get this promotion, if I just get that bigger house, if I just get that award or that accolade, then I’ll be content.”

Researchers call this the arrival fallacy, and it’s just that. It’s this fallacy that we think we’re going to arrive but we never actually arrive. So the trap is that we can work really hard toward a goal because we think the goal is going to make us happy. But if we don’t actually enjoy the process of working toward it, we’re going to be just as miserable as when we started.

So how do you overcome this trap? What’s the practice? The practice is to make sure that you actually want to spend time on the sides of the mountains that you’re climbing. And don’t climb someone else’s mountain. Because it’s not the summit that’s going to make you happy. It’s whether or not you can find meaning and fulfillment in the climb itself.

I think another way that we chase happiness is, sometimes, we try to avoid discomfort and we try to avoid friction at all cost, or we’ll numb discomfort and friction. We’ll do this with alcohol, with drugs, with gambling, with porn, on and on and on.

And, again, I’m not a purist, I’m not a saint, I have moral failings just like the rest of humanity, but I do think that sometimes we go too far with trying to eliminate friction because we think it’s going to make us happy, when what that does is it makes us empty in longing, and we actually can inject meaningful friction into our life.

The messiness of striving for a goal and having missteps, that imbues life with meaning. The messiness of an actual relationship with another corporal body and all their imperfections and frustrations that comes with it, that actually gives our life meaning. Having to try really hard to do something, that gives our life meaning.

In the book, I have this hypothetical, which is increasingly becoming a reality, which is I say, “Imagine that with AI, with the press of a button, you, Pete, could compose the greatest, greatest musical composition ever. It would win all the Grammy Awards.” Do you think that you’d be really satisfied winning all those awards if all you had to do was press a button?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I’d feel like a fraud and just always wonder, “How come no one else pushed the button?”

Brad Stulberg
Right. So the point is that what imbues the summit of the mountain or the Grammy with meaning is the years and, in many cases, the decades of hard work and struggle that went into it. And I think, increasingly, technology is affording us opportunities to press these buttons.

And it’s not to say that we should never press the button. DoorDash is great. Sometimes I love being able to have food delivered and I don’t have to go out and get it. Wonderful. Great technology. But if our whole life becomes pressing a button to get a result, I think that the result isn’t happiness. The result is emptiness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this really gets me thinking here. A friend and guest of the podcast, Kwame Christian said, I don’t know if he made it up, but he said, “You don’t get bonus points for not using all of your resources.” And I’ve been thinking about that a lot because, in a way, it feels like you do because there’s something to that, the struggle and the meaning that comes with doing hard things and the effort.

And, in some ways, if you have resources, like push-button easiness, and you don’t use them, you kind of do get to feel some extra victory and meaning, like, “Hey, I did it without leaning on these pieces.” But yet, at the other side of the coin, I think there are times when it may very well be ideal for us to go ahead and use the resources.

I’m thinking about, for example, if folks struggle with attention and they think, oh, maybe seeing a psychiatrist and looking at medication for ADHD things is cheating, or, “I’m trying to lose weight and I’ve been struggling. Ozempic or Rogovia or some of these drugs, that’s cheating.”

And so I’d love your hot take on this, Excellence Master, on how we think about using our resources, the easy button. Is cheating a real thing?

Brad Stulberg
I mean, cheating is a real thing. Cheating means that there are rules to what you’re doing and you break the rules. I do not think that taking GLP-1 for weight loss is, by any means, cheating. I don’t think that taking medication for attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder is in any way cheating. I think that these are all really valuable tools in the toolkit and we should do everything that we can to flourish.

What I am saying is that if one’s entire life becomes pressing that button, then the result will be emptiness. So if there was a medication that you could take that just eliminated the need for effort in anything, I would not take that medication. I don’t think that would be good.

If you have struggled with your weight and food noise your entire life, and it just absolutely hampers your ability to flourish, of course, you’re going to take that medication. You don’t get extra points, to quote Kwame, or you don’t get a trophy for white-knuckling it. What that makes you is an idiot. Take the medicine.

I think that the metaphor that I like to use is, coming back to where we started, right, like deadlifting. If I were to go into a gym, and instead of deadlifting, I were to go into the gym with a forklift, and have the forklift pick up the barbell for me and then leave the gym, I would get nothing out of that experience, right? It would defeat the purpose, even though I could deadlift more weight.

But I don’t because the whole point of that experience is to exert effort and to struggle toward a goal. However, if I go to IKEA, you better believe it, I’m using the forklift to pick up the bed. I’m not trying to pick up the bed at IKEA because the point of going to IKEA isn’t to lift weight, it’s to get the bed.

So there’s a time and a place to use the forklift. And I think that people default to this extreme, which is like using the forklift is cheating. No, that’s nonsense. It’s like kind of like the barefoot people. And, listen, I don’t want to make enemies.

For some people running barefoot is great, but like shoes are an incredible technology. You’re not tougher if you don’t wear shoes. However, if your entire life becomes cushioned and padded to keep playing the metaphor, yeah, like you might be missing out on something.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. I think that’s well said because there are so many domains of our life, like we are facing multiple challenges, sometimes it feels like too many darn challenges all at once. And so if there are tools, approaches that make results in one domain easier, there are sensible, you know, pros, cons, risks, rewards, cost, benefits, side effects, doctor advice, all the things, right? Then, yeah, have at it. That’s kind of where I’m coming out is…

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, you just don’t want to do it necessarily in the primary thing that gives your life meaning. Here’s another example, okay? My primary craft is writing, and I don’t use AI when I write because I don’t want to, and the value that I get out of writing is actually the satisfaction of struggling and working really hard.

However, I use an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of my revenue and expenses. I don’t sit there and add up the math on a sheet of paper because that’s not my primary thing. And, like, that’s it. And I think you got to identify, like, “What are the primary things?” And then outside of those, you should absolutely use all these technologies and resources to make life easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, in the domains of focus and concentration, you mentioned those are our core pillars of excellence. If folks are struggling with distractions or difficulty with focusing, do you have any top tips on prevailing amidst this environment?

Brad Stulberg
I think that the key thing is the last thing that you just said, this environment. So this environment is very much rigged against us. And I think reclaiming focus starts with trying to design these micro ecosystems around you that make it easier to focus. So what does that mean? It means that when you sit down to read a book or to do work or to have an intimate conversation, don’t bring your phone into the room with you.

Don’t have it face down and off. There’s research that shows that even a phone that is face down and on silent, like we all do, it detracts about 40% of your ability to focus because, even if you don’t reach for the phone to pick it up, the amount of willpower it takes to resist reaching for the phone and picking it up encroaches on what you’re doing.

So remove the phone, remove the digital devices, create these spaces and times throughout the day where you can really settle in and engage with depth and with full focus. So get upstream, change the environment. That’s the first thing.

The second thing I’d say is, much like the industrial revolution gave us cars and forklifts and all these things, and as a result, many people, we don’t live the same kind of active lives as our ancestors did. So you need to go to the gym to exert yourself, to be “physically healthy.” I think, increasingly, we’re going to have to do that for our mind.

So, for me, what is going to the mind gym? There’s nothing better than reading a book. And I’m biased because I’m a writer and my livelihood depends on people reading a book. But there is so much research that shows that the art of sitting with a hard copy book, and focusing and reading it and taking notes on it and having associative creative ideas, like that builds one’s ability to focus more than anything.

So I would say, much like if you want to train a muscle, you’re going to train three days a week for 30 minutes a day, you’ve got to start thinking about your brain like your cognitive muscle. And in order to train that muscle, there’s nothing better than setting aside time to read a book.

Something else that can be really helpful is just, in these small crevices throughout the day when we’d, otherwise, reach for like the adult pacifier, i.e., a phone or something to distract us, just to sit with your own thoughts.

So a great way to practice this that I do all the time, is I’m out to dinner with my wife or with a friend and they have to go to the bathroom. So instead of picking up my phone while they’re in the bathroom, I just sit in the restaurant, right? I just sit with my thoughts. It’s like three minutes.

When I am running errands, I’ll go into the grocery store, I’ll leave my phone in the glove compartment of the car so that when I’m waiting in line, I just have to sit and wait in line. So just reinserting these small moments of time when we de-habituate to the perpetual distraction.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you expand upon the research showing that simply reading a book is transformational for our capacity to focus?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, a lot of this comes out of the work of Nicholas Carr, and he began this about a decade ago. And what he found is that, when we read a hard-copy book, because it’s not hyperlinked, our brains don’t have the option to click away from it, okay?

So, like, even if you’re reading on your computer, like there’s a hyperlink, there’s a click, it’s just kind of asking your brain, like, “Ooh, there’s something more exciting, there’s something new, there’s something novel.” Whereas, when you sit down and read a book, like the whole package is in front of you.

When you read a book, you also cannot multitask. It is impossible to be both reading and doing something else at the same time. You just can’t. I mean, maybe you could, like, walk really slowly while reading, but you can’t read while you do the dishes. You can’t read while you drive a car, at least not safely. So it also is this forcing mechanism to single task.

And then the other thing that reading a book does is it builds sustained concentration and sustained focus. So if you haven’t read a book in a long time, you sit down to read, and just making it through like two pages is going to be really challenging, right? You’re going to feel the urge to check your phone, to put down the book, to entertain whatever thoughts you’re having.

And then the next day, maybe you make it three pages and then four pages, and then you get stuck on four pages for a week, but much like a muscle, you keep going back to the gym, eventually you get to eight pages. And then before you knew it, you can actually groove in and you can read 40 pages without being distracted.

That kind of progressive overload is what it’s called an exercise, but the ability to slowly build the muscle to concentrate and focus, a book is just the perfect mechanism for that because you’re literally turning pages and adding more and more focus each time you sit down to read.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Brad, tell me, any final things you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Brad Stulberg
I think this was a really good conversation. We got to touch on, I think, some of the interesting ideas in the book. We scratched the surface. So if you all found this interesting and valuable, I highly recommend you go get the book for more. But as always, Pete, you do a great job teasing out some of my favorite things. Well, now I guess we’ll actually get into my favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, we can start with me, of course, flattery accepted. How about a favorite quote?

Brad Stulberg
Favorite quote comes from Robert Pirsig who says that “The only Zen on the tops of mountains is the Zen that you bring up there with you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Brad Stulberg
My favorite book is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, written in 1974 by Robert Pirsig.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget that folks really love and quote back to you often, a Brad original?

Brad Stulberg
Yeah, I think there are a few, but one is this notion that consistency is more important than intensity. So instead of trying to hit home runs, you just have to put the ball in play over and over and over again, and then eventually the home runs start hitting themselves.

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

Brad Stulberg
The best place is the book, The Way of Excellence: A Guide to True Greatness and Deep Satisfaction in a Chaotic World. You can get it from Amazon, Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, pretty much wherever you get books.

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

Brad Stulberg
I think, identify what is worth caring deeply about and give a damn. Don’t be too cool to care. There’s actually no such thing. Caring is cool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Brad, thank you.

Brad Stulberg
It’s always a pleasure.

Feb 23
0

1131: How to Stop Playing Small at Work with Kelli Thompson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Kelli Thompson shows you how to break free from intimidation, hierarchy, and self-doubt.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why over-admiring your coworkers could be undermining your progress
  2. The key to sustainable confidence
  3. How to identify and trust your “genius zone”

About Kelli 

Kelli Thompson is an award-winning leadership and executive coach, keynote speaker, and the critically-acclaimed author of Closing The Confidence Gap: Boost Your Peace, Your Potential & Your Paycheck. In Kelli’s two-decade career leading teams, she received industry awards for her ability to build programs that cultivated the pipeline of future leaders.

Kelli has coached and trained thousands of leaders to lead with more clarity and confidence through her no BS, yet highly compassionate approach. Her corporate clients rave about the insightful, engaging and practical application of her training and speaking programs.

Resources Mentioned

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Kelli Thompson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kelli, welcome!

Kelli Thompson
Good to see you again.

Pete Mockaitis
You, too. You, too. Well, you’ve been up to a lot of fun, including a TEDx Talk that has a very impressive like ratio. I’m such a dork, I notice these things, “How idolizing coworkers can hold you back.” Tell us, how did this even come up as a thing to talk about?

Kelli Thompson
You know, it’s interesting, this and it has a fun fact for all of you wanting to do TEDx Talks. They renamed it that, okay? But we’ll come full circle. So, here’s how it came up, is I was writing my book Closing the Confidence Gap, and so I was just thinking about times in my life that stood out to me in corporate where I just really lacked confidence.

And so I went kind of back to this scene when I had worked at this company for 10 years. I had been kind of promoted. I was a middle-level leader. I was a director level. And I remember sitting in one of these, like, all-day strategy meetings you get stuck in, and it was after lunch and, like, the conversation was going round and round. I was so annoyed. We were hearing from the same voices over and over again.

And I just remember, you know, getting a bathroom break and thinking to myself, I’m like, “Ugh, why am I so annoyed?” And thinking to myself, “Oh, it’s because we’re just literally hearing from the same people over and over again.” And their male voices, because I worked in the male-dominated field of financial services.

So I remember thinking to myself, I’m like, “Well, these women should speak up, you know,” because the room was split 50-50. And it’s almost as if I heard this voice that’s like, “Well, you could be the one to speak up,” because I hadn’t said anything all day.

And it just occurred to me, I was like, “Well, I can’t speak up because what if I speak up and I sound silly? I can’t speak up because what if I don’t have enough experience? I can’t speak up because I need to go back and make sure that I know exactly what I’m talking about,” you know, but first, but first, but first.

And what I realized was, is the reason I wasn’t speaking up is because I was really intimidated by some of the more senior leaders in the room. I called them the hippos, the highest paid person’s opinion. And looking back now, I didn’t have a name for it then, but I had these folks on a pedestal, thinking that because they had a higher title than me, or more charisma than me, or maybe more experience than me, then they must know best.

And so, all these things that they’re saying, they must be right. There’s no room for my expertise or opinion. That example got maybe, like, a paragraph in my book. But as I would go out and people would read my book, or we would talk about this concept, people were like, “Oh, my gosh. Me, too.”

And so then, over the course of the years, when I thought about what would my TED Talk be on, that’s how this pedestal problem came to life. It’s just was this recurring problem that I didn’t think a lot of because it was just an example of my life that ended up being, “Oh, wow, I shared this problem, too, where I’m giving and defaulting to other people instead of trusting my own ideas, my own instincts, my own intuition.”

And now I see people even do it with ChatGPT. They’re trusting AI over their own ideas, own insights, or their own insights, and so think there’s no room for them. So that’s how this whole idea came full circle. I call it the pedestal problem. TEDx said, “Idolizing your coworkers.” It’s all kind of the same thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny because, I mean, ChatGPT is far worse than someone you admire in terms of the quality of its opinions in most domains, I mean, yeah.

Kelli Thompson
In most domains, but, you know what? It sounds so right, though. It sounds so sure of itself.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds very convincing. But I don’t know how many times it’s told me the direct opposite of the truth. My favorite story here is, I remember I was Google-searching, you know, because our kids were at school and I was wondering, “Oh, do we have school today on…?” Oh, was it Veterans Day or President’s Day? It was one of those Monday holidays.

And it was ambiguous, and I don’t know where the heck our calendar went. It fell off the fridge. A three-year-old probably has it under the fridge at this point, so I just Googled it. And I thought, “Okay, well, surely…” and it gave me the Google AI summary.

And I thought, “Okay, well, you’re just scraping the top results anyway so I could probably trust this.” And it said, “Yeah, school is canceled today for the holidays.” I was like, “Okay, that’s kind of what I was thinking.” And it was dead wrong.

And I was like, “Oh, this isn’t even a difficult one.” Like, the answer is I could have clicked the first result. And there have been many little instances of being told the direct wrong thing by AI, and just like manufacturing nonsense, like, “Oh, yeah, that restaurant has been closed since June 2024.” It’s like, “No, it never existed in the first place, dude. Come on. And you’re Gemini, according to El Marina, you’re supposed to be the best right now.”

So, rant complete. Don’t put AI on a pedestal, for sure. And even putting human beings on a pedestal has its problems. Point taken. So, tell us, is it so wrong to admire and appreciate and elevate the opinions of those who are excellent in their fields, Kelli?

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, that is the underlying question, right? I think it’s, “When is it okay to admire people, to take their advice, to follow their advice? And at what point should you notice, ‘Am I overrotating on listening to everything Pete says, right, and following all of his advice and I’ve stopped trusting myself?’”

And I think that there’s some really good questions you can ask yourself to help you discern, “Am I just blindly following someone? Or am I a novice in something and I should be taking helpful advice?” And I think that that is actually the first question that you can ask yourself is, “How much do I know about this topic? You know, I’m listening to someone, I’m learning, this person has advice for me.”

So when we think about when we’re young in our careers, let’s just talk about being in our early 20s. It’s not uncommon to take a lot of advice about your career. I know I did. And sometimes that advice was good. Sometimes that advice was, you know, “I should talk to this person this way,” or, “Maybe I should try this career,” or, “I should try this job.”

When I was early in my career and I was new, I think it was helpful at some point to take their advice. Did I do some things that maybe I shouldn’t have done because I admired the person? Yeah, I did. And also, isn’t that part of being 26 years old and being brand new in your career? Sometimes you just have to try some things, right?

But at some point, I think that there’s a turning point where you start to realize, “Oh, you know what? They’re just guessing, too. They’re just figuring it out, too. And even though they might be in the corner office with a nice title and probably a pretty nice salary, it doesn’t always mean they know what’s right for me.”

And so, some of the things that I had to learn early on was to ask more discerning questions, like, “Is the career advice they’re giving me aligned with my values? Is this advice going to move me closer to the person that I want to become, right? Or does it just have like some sort of shiny title on it? Does their recommendations, does it give me energy? Is it aligned with my best skills and talents?”

And so, those are some of those discerning questions you can start to ask yourself to say, “Hey, I know they have an opinion, but is that right for me?” And then we can turn and say, “What do I want to do? What’s aligned with my skills? What gets me excited? What aligns with my values? What do I want to learn?” And it’s not about right or wrong, or their advice and my advice. There’s no magic ratio.

I think it’s all about, “Am I just slowing down enough to check in with myself, and ask me, ‘Is this what I want to do? And what do I think I should do?’” Maybe it’s a blend of the two, maybe it’s one or the other, but slowing down and checking in first, I think, becomes really important before we just, you know, “My leader said I should do this, and that’s where I should go.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think it’s an interesting natural tendency, or at least I’m guilty of it, is that I assume, because someone has produced an impressive result, has a great title, or has achieved tremendous success in any domain, I think, “Well, they must be a genius,” or, “They must have all the answers. Clearly, they know what they’re doing.”

And so often, the particulars of how they got somewhere, they involve a healthy bit of luck. And I think, specifically, in entrepreneurial spaces, it seems like the magic of product market fit is just so huge. And so, if you happen to have the thing that it turns, “Hey, it turns out everybody wanted this thing, and we didn’t know it till I made it. Lucky me.”

It’s often not a super repeatable process by which you create any tremendous result in terms of, “Hey, a couple of things lined up, and I was right there.” And yet we can say, “Okay, well, whatever they say about this matter must be gospel truth, and I should internalize it because what do I know?”

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, that’s actually a really wonderful example. I often joke that entrepreneurs giving advice about helping other entrepreneurs build their business is like sharing my winning lottery numbers, “It worked for me, so you should all play these numbers.”

And I think we see that a lot. It’s like, “Hey, I built this six-figure community. You should, too.” “I built this podcast system. You should, too.” “I built this business. Here’s how you should do it.” And I think that there’s nuggets of wisdom in there that I have followed, I’m like, “Ooh, that’s an interesting idea. That’s an interesting approach. I never would have thought about that. Oh, that’s how you do that,” right?

And so, I think that there’s a both/and here. I think it is good to follow people that went before you. And also, I will tell you, Pete, that I have made some not-so-great business decisions by doing things that other entrepreneurial coaches say I should do.

Like, for instance, like, “Oh, you should offer this type of product,” or, “You should offer this type of service because it was making that person money.” And I’m like, “Okay, well, I think it could be okay. It could be fun. I’ll try it.” And you know what, it didn’t work.

And I think that that’s also part of being an entrepreneur and even a leader is you try things. But I think I was also quick enough to say, “You know what, that might have worked for them, but this doesn’t work for me. I’m glad I tried it. I’m glad I went out into the world. I’m glad I did it.”

But that’s why it’s also so discerning to say, “I see.” In fact, let me give you a really clear cut example. I coach a lot of leaders in corporate, and a lot of leaders are working up the ranks and they might get promoted into a new position. And it can be really tempting for them to almost kind of copy the style of the leader before them, especially if that leader was successful, likable.

In fact, a lot of times on our first conversation, they’re like, “Well, I feel like I need to develop X, Y, and Z skill because the leader before me did that and they were really likable.” And so, it can be tempting to just go in and kind of do what the previous leader did, but that can also cause a real crisis of confidence because you never show up authentically you.

And so instead, one of the things that we’re working on in the beginning is, “No, what are your values? What are your unique leadership tendencies and approaches and skills? And how can you use that so you can show up and feel more aligned with yourself every day instead of constantly thinking to yourself, ‘Well, what would Pete have done here? Or what do I need to do here? How to be more like that other person?’”

And so, it can be really sneaky how, sometimes, you know, we can kind of just tend to copy what went before us instead of asking ourselves, “What am I meant to do? How am I meant to think about this? What still small voice do I have that I need to listen to? What ideas do I need to bring forth that the world needs?”

Pete Mockaitis
And, oftentimes, in a leadership situation, the predecessor had a different context, business maturity situation, and something new is absolutely needed. It’s like, “Well, hey, back in the day, we were growing like crazy and we had to do X, Y, Z. Well, now we are in a steady state situation and we would actually do well to iron out some details associated with systems and processes and compliance and very grownup-y organizational matters, which were kind of superfluous in the early days when there wasn’t a whole lot to systematize or operationalize in those ways.”

Kelli Thompson
Absolutely. Yeah, I often say that the pedestal problem leaves status quo unchanged. They leave products undeveloped. They leave ideas unshared because lots of times we just go along to get along and think the people above us know best. And so, we silence all these little innovative things that can make our work and our world a better place.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I think, you know, your book is called Closing the Confidence Gap, and we love talking about confidence and boosting confidence here is a common thing folks want more of. And I think what’s interesting in terms of, I’ve made a mistake a number of times.

If someone says something really confidently and it goes against my own intuitions, I go, “Well, I mean, I don’t really know, but, wow, that guy seems utterly convicted that this is going to be the case.” So, maybe, I almost feel like confidence alone makes me believe I should not totally discount what they’re saying. But sometimes it is the right answer.

Kelli Thompson
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s to totally ignore that thing. I’m thinking about, what comes to mind for me, I don’t know why, is Mark Zuckerberg, back in the day, when they renamed Facebook to Meta, and he said that we’re all going to be living and interacting in the metaverse, and having these headsets strapped. And I was like, “Boy, that sounds so wrong to me.”

“I mean, Second Life has been around for a while. That’s kind of sort of died out. People don’t find big old headsets comfortable to have strapped on them. There’s already been a backlash associated with social media and its problems. But, I mean, hey, man, you’re Mark Zuckerberg and you would know the industry and you probably have some insight.”

But, no, sure enough, the metaverse did not come to pass as he predicted. And you could say the same for humanoid robots, self-driving cars, AI. People are so darn confident about how the future is going to unfold, it’s like, “Well, I guess you would know.” But I think I’m finally starting to wise up and say, “You don’t know and really can’t predict the future. You’ve got a guess and you’ve got a lot of money riding on that guess working out the way you say it will.”

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, there was actually research, and I can’t find the source, but the person who shared it was Adam Grant. So you can backtrack it that way for our listeners. But they said that there was a study done that people actually believe people who appear to be confident, even though they are not competent.

Pete Mockaitis
Guilty.

Kelli Thompson
And so then, we end up blindly following everybody from people on the political stage to friends in our lives who are very convincing to tell us to do things, to even the people at work. And so I think that’s where a shift really has to happen in corporate America.

Because one of the things I talk about in the TEDx Talk is that there are leaders who appear very confident. And so, what we do is we blindly follow them, and sometimes we put them in that pedestal. But what can happen is those leaders can turn into brilliant jerks who never get good feedback. People are too scared to share ideas or feedback or insights with them, so those leaders are going along thinking everything’s working when it’s not.

And lots of times that is the recipe for the corporate scandals that we see that shatter organizations. Uber is a great example of their first leader, Travis. People were too scared to share feedback with him because he was so confident, and people just went along, right? But it caused a lot of problems in the system.

And so, the pedestal problem isn’t just bad for our own confidence, right, because we’re silencing our own ideas and intuitions to go along to get along. But it’s bad for leaders, too, who are pedestal because they don’t get the feedback that they need to make changes, to humble themselves, to make sure that they’re staying curious and connected to the teams that they lead.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think this gets to just a fundamental tension associated with, “How do we properly evaluate our opinion relative to other people’s opinions?” And this brings me back to, what a weirdly stressful time for me was we had to get a roof repair situation.

And so, I knew that it was hard to get ahold of folks to do anything on my house, from experience. And so, I said, “I’m just going to call 12 roofing companies and see how many people show up.” Sure enough, we had about five, so not a bad ratio in my experience. But then they’re all conflicting information. Some people said they got to tear off the whole roof. It’s like, “No, you can just put another layer on. It’s just fine.”

And it was so tricky for me, it’s like, “Man, I was hoping to get the expert opinion on my roof, but you’re the experts and you’re contradicting each other. And somehow, I, who is not a roof expert, need to make the call, ‘You are the correct roof expert. You are the incorrect roof expert.’ What an uncomfortable spot to be in.”

And I think, really, in terms of senior leaders of all stripes, if they have healthy teams where they aired disagreeing viewpoints, I mean, this is their daily existence. So how do we play that game, thinking about who’s right, who’s wrong, and me versus them, and them versus the other party? It could be a pretty tricky, exhausting mental process of sorting through that.

Kelli Thompson
And it can cause a lot of anxiety, too. So let’s just look at it from both sides. Let’s look at it from the individual’s point of view. Maybe you’re trying to make a decision. And if you’re anything like me, sometimes you have a habit of reading the entire internet, pulling all of your friends, putting it all in a pros/cons, Excel spreadsheet, right, and you have all of this data.

And I think, at some point, and we’ve gone through that roofing issue, too, so I giggled a little bit. At some point, it’s like, “I have all the data points. And now, based on all the data points that I have, what do I believe is the right decision to go with?” Because at some point, you’re going to have enough data. If you keep trying to gather data, well, then you’re an analysis paralysis and you’re just spinning your wheels.

And so, as you know, an individual, even myself running a business or choosing a roof, it was, “What are all the data points we’ve collected? Where do things seem to err? And then also, what do I know about this issue? What do my values say about this issue? Is there a decision that moves forward in alignment with where I want to go, and that honors my skills and talents, etc. at work?”

And so, I think from the individual’s perspective, there has to be an enough point of, like, “This is the data. Now I got to go check in with myself. What aligns? Okay, I move forward.” When it comes to the leadership point of view, in terms of them getting a lot of feedback about all the things that they should do, I think it’s helpful, especially, it was helpful for me as a leader to actually get in on the ground with people because it helps you actually see things from their eyes, participate and see what they’re seeing.

But I think the same rules apply is, “I’m going to get a lot of data from my teams. How can I get in on the ground and verify that data and not just take all of that at face value, but then make the leadership decision that I think moves us forward in the direction that we’re meant to go?”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, getting on the ground and verifying. So we’re going a layer deeper in terms of, so, one, let’s stay with the roof thing, still. One person says, “Oh, another layer is fine.” Another person says, “Oh, you got to tear it all off and do…” It’s sort of just asking those questions that gets the confidence as well, it’s like, “Who am I to defy or question the great roof master?”

But to ask those questions, like, “How do you make that determination? Like, can you show me what you’re seeing that leads you to say this?” And that can tell you something right there in terms of like, “Look, we know roofs, we’ve been doing this for 30 years.” Like, “Okay, that’s not actually an answer.”

As opposed to, “Well, take a look at this. According to Chicago building codes, the depth is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just measure this right now.” Okay, that’s something real.

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, I love the phrase, “Can you show me what you’re seeing?” Because one of the things that I think really makes good leaders, and a lot of people are like, “Well, what’s the difference between confidence and cockiness?”

Well, I think that cockiness is confidence without any curiosity. And so when you’re saying, “Can you show me what you’re seeing?” like, that in itself is just using curiosity, right? It’s getting up there with the roofer, and saying, “Here, see, look at your layers. Look how this is parsing apart.”

In my own personal example, I remember going through a merger, and I was leading training teams in a bank, and the banks had merged together, and so was leading the combined training team. And I was maybe putting myself on a pedestal a little bit, and saying, “Well, since we are the acquiring bank, certainly our ways are probably the ways we should do things.”

And I had one of the recently acquired teams trying to give me some feedback and some ideas. And, finally, bless her heart, she goes, “You know what, why don’t you come out to our location and just observe some of these things in action?” And I was like, “Okay, that sounds good. Well, can I see what you’re seeing?”

When I got my feet on the ground, I was like, “Oh, they do that better than us. Oh, that went better than how we do it,” right? And so, it’s like by humbling yourself and getting curious as a leader, not only do you pull yourself off the pedestal, but it really invokes that curiosity that builds genuine confidence.

And, like you said, “When I see what you’re seeing, now I have better data. Now I can get in and make the right decisions for everyone.”

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot in terms of humble yourself, not in a way like, “Oh, I’m just a lowly whatever. I don’t know anything,” but rather humble yourself in a position of, “Yes, I do have something to learn here. And so, let’s go ahead and see what can be learned.”

Kelli Thompson
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okie-dokie. Well, so I would love it if, are there any particular questions you suggest we dig into as we navigate this stuff?

Kelli Thompson
Yes. So if you listen to the talk, my talk might be a little different than other talks out there in that some talks give you advice. But I joke in my TED Talk that my talk, I don’t want to give you advice because I didn’t want you to take the advice I would give you and put it on a pedestal thinking that I know better than you do about how to be a clearer, confident leader. So instead, I leave the watcher or the listener with three questions.

And we’ve kind of gone through these questions already. So let’s just say you are getting some well-meaning advice. Let’s just say there is somebody that’s saying, “This is the way that we should do things.” Like, question number one is it’s all about reconnection. All of these questions are about reconnection. So question number one is to reconnect with yourself, “Does this advice, do these values, does this thing align with my values and who I am meant to become? Like, does it align with these things that I’m working towards?”

Question number two is really about, okay, you know, the pedestal problem is not like I’m one up or you’re one up. It’s like, “How are we coming together to the table as equals?” That’s the big thing. How are we coming together to the table as equals? And so, when I can own the unique talents that only I can bring to a situation, it helps me come together to the table as an equal because I can see the talents in someone else without compare and despair.

And so, that is the second question to kind of come back and reconnect as equals is, “What is the unique perspective that only I can bring to this situation? Yeah, the leaders might be really confident about knowing about this strategy thing, but you know what, maybe I’m the only person that talks to the customer. So how can I bring that perspective?”

And then the last question I really encourage folks to think about is, like, “What am I meant to create in the world? So, like, when I’m 80 and in my dream retirement, like what is this thing that I’ve created? And how can I use my skills and my talents to contribute to what I am meant to create in the world?”

So, just to recap three questions for reconnection at a more helpful level is, “Does this align with my best skills and talents? What is that unique perspective that only I can bring to this conversation so I can come to the table as an equal? And then what am I meant to create in the world?”

Because at the end of the day, somebody is waiting on that unique thing that only you can bring to the world, so how are you going to put it into the world?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love some more stories and examples of putting this into practice. So, we’ve heard about roofs and mergers and Mark Zuckerberg. Can you tell us about some clients who were doing some of this idolizing, some of this pedestalizing, and what they were doing and how they made a shift and what resulted on the other side?

Kelli Thompson
Yeah. Okay, so just at a basic level, here’s something I hear a lot with my clients, and I’ll use a very personal example of me well, because I don’t want people to think that I have got this figured out. Like, I talk about it because I have the problem.

So, a lot of my clients, when they come to coaching, they will say, “Kelli, I’m struggling with this project, this, that and the other thing. And here’s what really needs to be fixed.” And I’m like, “Okay.” Well, I’m like, “Well, so what happened when you told your leaders that this is actually the root cause and it needs to be fixed?” “Well, I haven’t told them because, you know what, I mean, they are just so certain that this is what we have to do or this is the deadline that we have to meet.” And so it’s kind of like putting that leader on a pedestal.

And so then, my client is withholding really valuable information, either about the system or a root cause or a client that they feel scared. And so, one of the things then we’re working on in coaching is, “How do you go in and advocate to your leader respectfully, saying, ‘Hey, I know that this is what you want to do and this is the deadline you’re on, but I have really valuable information after I’ve gotten in and I’ve worked with the thing. And I think we actually need to zig instead of zag.’”

And so, I see that happen a lot, where it’s like, “Hey, you need to pull your leader and all of their confidence off a pedestal because you have real information.” The other way I see it, too, is, you know, when people are accelerating their career and they get a lot of well-meaning advice about what next career step they should take.

So I have a client who would have a leader come to her and say, “Hey, we want to put you in this role. I think you’d be great in this role.” And while that feels really flattering, my client was just like, “I don’t think I want that. I I think that they want to put me there.” And maybe the title would be really cool and the salary, but they’re like, “I think I would hate the work, but I don’t know if I can say no, because this is the CFO or blah, blah, blah, blah.”

And so then, we’re working then a lot on, “Well, what do you want in your career? What do you want your next step to be?” Instead of just defaulting to their advice, like, “What skills and talents do you think you need to bring?” And so then, we’re working on, “How do I craft that conversation with my leader about what I want to bring to the workplace and where I think I might be a good fit?”

And I will just say that the last thing, and going back, let’s circle this back around with AI is, I’ll use my own personal example, is earlier in the year, I was working on a book. I, obviously, run my own leadership coaching and speaking practice. It mostly focuses on helping women advance to the rooms where decisions are made. And with the ushering in of the new administration, DEI is not as popular as it used to be.

And while I don’t specifically work on DEI, a lot of women’s leadership budgets are just in that DEI lump of money, okay? And a lot of companies removed that section of money, so that impacted my business. So, I did what a lot of people did and I went out to ChatGPT, and said, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. Here’s what’s my mission. Here’s what I’m focusing on. Here’s the current political and sociocultural environment, blah, blah, blah. What ideas do you have?”

And you know what, Pete, it gave me some really good ideas. And I’m like, “Well, that’s genius. Of course. Why didn’t I think of that, right? I could tweak this here, tweak this here.” And so I started to do that. I started to really focus on a section of my content called “Advanced from Doer to Leader.” It was a chapter of my book, my Closing the Confidence Gap, lead more by doing less.

I had fun. It was a little more gender agnostic, but you know what? I started to get kind of burnt out. And one of the things I realized was I took ChatGPT’s advice without stopping and checking in, and saying, “Wait, do I even want this?” I never even thought to ask it, “Well, what would happen if I just stayed the course?”

And through a lot of burnout, I started to realize that I had put AI on a pedestal. And I then made the shift at the end of last year to just say, “You know what, yes, that stuff is fun and cool, and I’ll still do it, but I’ve lost focus of what my core mission is, and I need to go back and reinvigorate that.”

And so, at the end of last year, I created a brand new program for women, leaders in corporate America called the “Clarity and Confidence Collective.” And ever since I’ve kind of re-shifted just one degree, I feel so much better because I’m following what I am meant to create in the world and not what AI said I should do in response to a trend that happened, so.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super. And I think that that is a bit of context that tends to be missing, as you mentioned earlier, in just about every piece of advice, is we’re hearing not so much, “This would be perfect for you,” so much as, “Well, this is a thing that worked for me.” And so, it was like, “Well, okay, that’s good input, maybe, but it’s certainly not the end of the story.”

Lovely. Well, I’d also love your perspective when it comes to, I think sometimes when we are putting others on a pedestal or we’re idolizing them, we’re kind of undervaluing our own strengths. And that’s the funny thing about strengths is, well, they’re strengths, so we do a thing and it’s easy. And then it seems like, “Well, it’s no big deal. It was easy.” Well, it’s no big deal. It was easy because it’s a strength for you, but it’s not the case for other people.

So I think this is a trap. It’s easy to fall into. Do you have any pro tips on how to not fall into that trap?

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, in fact, one of the main pieces of things I talk about with my clients is one way to pull someone off the pedestal is to stop overestimating others’ intelligence and underestimating your own. And that is the tricky thing about our unique talents, our genius zone, whatever you want to call it, is it’s easy for us. Like, we can do it in our sleep. We think it’s not a big deal.

And so, that is one of the assignments I usually give my clients is, we have to remember that these things that come easy for us are usually really hard for other people. So, for example, like I kind of grew up in the corporate training route. If somebody says I need to teach somebody something, I can pull together a day-long training course in about a few hours. And other people are like, “Oh, my gosh.”

So I always had to remember exactly, like even in my own corporate leadership, when I was like sitting at the table with executives, and they would be talking about things and half I didn’t know about, or I was pretending like I knew what it was about, or, you know, really intimidated to share, I would always have to come back and remember, “But wait a minute, these folks are not experts on training. They’re not experts on communicating change management to people. They’re not experts on just how people react to certain things, the human behavior side of all of it.”

“And so, if I am the person that leaves those things unsaid at that executive meeting, then other people are going to suffer, other people are not going to enjoy this experience as much as they should.” And so, I think one of the things that helped me was, number one, not only identifying, “What is my genius zone? What is that thing that only I can bring to the conversation? But who else will this benefit?”

And I think, sometimes when we start to recognize that, in our speaking up and advocacy, we’re also doing it on behalf of someone else. At least for me, it makes it feel a little bit easier that, “Hey, this isn’t just about me,” as I’m meant to use some of these skills and talents for the benefit of other people as well.

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

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, go out and check my TED Talk. I’m sure it’ll be in the show notes. The other thing, like I said, I’m really excited about is the “Clarity and Confidence Collective.” It is a community for corporate women leaders who never want to lead alone.

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

Kelli Thompson
It’s an RBG quote, it’s, “Fight for the things you care about, but do it in a way that others will join you.”

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

Kelli Thompson
I really love the one that I quoted earlier that came, I know Adam Grant cited it where he just said, “We tend to follow people who just appear to be confident.” And I think that this is really fascinating for me right now because of what’s playing out on the political stages a little bit, and even with some of the technology leaders in the world right now that are leading. You gave Zuck as an example or AI. I mean, I think a lot of people are really listening to the confident voices right now, but they may not always be right.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Kelli Thompson
My favorite book that I have read recently is Know My Name by Chanel Miller.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Kelli Thompson
I’m teaching myself to play the piano. So my favorite tool is free YouTube videos on how to play the piano.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Kelli Thompson
Working out. I work out every morning. I have to. It makes me fit for human consumption.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that folks really dig and quote back often to you?

Kelli Thompson
“Success loves clarity.”

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

Kelli Thompson
You can come to my website, KelliRaeThompson.com. I’m Kelli with an I. Otherwise, I mostly hang out on LinkedIn, and you can find me at /KelliRaeThompson.

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

Kelli Thompson
Yeah, my final call to action for you is I want you to stop this week and notice where you might be pulling someone else for an opinion or data, or maybe Googling, or asking ChatGPT for what you should do. And I want you just to stop, and I want you to ask yourself, “What is mine to do?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kelli, thank you.

Kelli Thompson
Thanks for having me.

Feb 19
0

1130: Building the Confidence to Push Past Procrastination, Overthinking, and Perfectionism with Krista Stepney

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Krista Stepney shares powerful tactics for moving forward when fear has you feeling stuck.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to identify and address the root causes of inaction
  2. How to take your power back from comparisons and self-doubt
  3. Two powerful scripts for when you’re stuck

About Krista 

Krista D. Stepney is a leadership and business strategist, keynote speaker, and transformation advisor who helps leaders and everyday changemakers turn hesitation into momentum. With over 15 years of experience in operations, organizational leadership, and culture transformation, Krista blends research, faith, and lived experience to help others build a purposeful life and legacy.

As the creator of The BOLDprint Method and the W.A.N.D. Methodology, she has coached executives, entrepreneurs, and everyday dreamers on overcoming fear, resisting comparison, and designing a personalized roadmap forward, even when the next step feels unclear.

Her mission is simple: to help people get unstuck and move anyway, especially when it feels like the hardest thing to do.

Resources Mentioned

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Krista Stepney Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Krista, welcome!

Krista Stepney
Thank you so much, Pete. I’m honored to be here today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your insights for overthinkers, perfectionists, and almost-starters. I’ve seen myself in those roles numerous times. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made while working with these folks?

Krista Stepney
I’m happy to share. So a lot of times when people think about these different categories of overthinking, perfectionism, or almost-starting, you start to identify as one of those personas. In actuality, there’s a recent study that came out last year from the University of Northern Colorado’s social research lab that says that within the workforce, 93% of respondents identify in some way of perfectionism that shows up at work.

So when we think about the fact that we spend the majority of our time usually at work, that’s usually the biggest place that we see overthinking and perfectionism showing up and impacting the way we think, act, and even perform in our everyday jobs.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you help us get our arms around what is overthinking and what is just good, thorough thinking? And what is perfectionism versus just having a good high standard?

Krista Stepney
I get asked this question a lot, Pete, so let’s unpack overthinking first. Overthinking is when you are in decision paralysis, where you have recreated that presentation deck or you’ve prepared that pitch for that client over and over again, and you thought about every possible scenario before you actually do something about it. You’re questioning what might go wrong, and not in a way that helps you to prepare to launch, but to just continue to circle.

The same is true in a different way with perfectionism. It’s almost this idea of overplanning. It’s this idea of polishing until it gets to be perfect, and, in the same way, we never start. We over-critique. We wait for things to be just right, but there’s usually no such thing. And when you think about that, you’re really creating this facade or this false narrative of what it looks like to actually get started.

And so overthinking might look like coming up with different perspectives that haven’t really been addressed before, whereas, perfectionism could look like not wanting to launch something new because you’re worried that people might critique it if it’s not ready yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, perfectionism and concern for critique, boy, those things seem to have a nice relationship there because just about everything, even the most excellently wondrous, are subject to valid critique.

Krista Stepney
True, but it’s when that critique keeps us from moving forward. So, sometimes, I tell people, just start with what you have, and then you can edit and critique from there, but at least you’ve launched something. And a lot of times, Pete, perfectionism comes from this idea of comparison. We’re usually looking at somebody else’s path or how someone else has maybe done something similar, and we are comparing what we’re trying to do to what they’ve done.

And because of that, it causes us to withhold launching our brand new idea or doing something different in the workplace because we are wanting it to be as good as what we see for someone else. When, really, if you put your thing out there, it can be a different variation or iteration without it having to be perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a fun story of someone who was finding himself doing some overthinking, some perfectionizing, some almost-starting, and then saw a nice transformation?

Krista Stepney
Sure, I’ll give you an example of a recent leader that I worked with, one of my former clients. He was concerned that a new project that he had to present to his boss was not ready for prime time. And what that meant was he was delaying the deadline of when he was supposed to give his presentation. He wanted to pull in more research articles, more statistics to really kind of add to credibility in an area that he didn’t feel as confident in.

Well, with him pushing that deadline, Pete, his boss, without communicating the reason why, his boss was concerned that he wasn’t really up for the job, that he wasn’t managing his time well. And what we had to do was actually pause and walk through some of the steps in the framework that I call bold.

The first is to block out comparison. I had to explain to my client, “I want you to block out any noise of how others have done this in the past, this presentation.” And then the O is to outline your past wins, “Where have you been successful related to this topic before? How can you draw from that energy of a win to use that as momentum now?”

And then the L is for list your next two steps. And we identified, “What are two things that you can do that readily get you closer to the finish line for this project?” And D is the most important part, is to decide to act. And so recognizing that what he had for that presentation was good enough to actually share with his boss.

What we did was reframe his thinking about how overthinking was keeping him stuck, if you would, and not being able to perform. But walking through those four steps of my framework, we were able to not only rebuild his confidence, but to help him to see where decision paralysis was showing up.

The success from that was he was able to have a strong showing in his presentation with his boss, get some valuable insight and feedback to make it better, but to add back that credibility with his boss that he was aware of the assignment and what he needed to do. And it wasn’t a time management thing, but it was a confidence and overthinking issue that he had to be transparent and open about.

So that’s just one example of where I see that show up sometimes in the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So let’s just go through this B-O-L-D again. So, first, we block out…

Krista Stepney
Comparison. So that shuts out all the noise of how it’s been done before so that you’re not using different paths from other people to try to create what you’re doing. The O is for outline your past wins or successes so it gives people a reminder, Pete, of how to remember that feeling of victory again, to think about some of those past wins no matter how small and to teach your brain that you’ve done it before, “Let’s pull from that same energy and momentum to do it now, to do it again.” It’s a confidence boost.

And then the L is for list your next two steps. And I intentionally encourage people to focus on two steps because sometimes we think that there are so many tasks that we have to complete before we get started. But if you focus on two, it’s more palatable. And I tell people one step is a choice, two steps, that’s chosen movement, right? And so you actually change the position of where you started in the beginning.

And the D is to decide to act. That means you actually have to do something from all the preparation and work that you’ve done in the first three steps of the framework.

Pete Mockaitis
Now what I like a lot about listing the next two steps is that, I’m thinking about David Allen, Getting Things Done. He’s been a guest on the show. It’s all about the next action, the next action, the next action. And so he’s fine with one and, yeah, that’ll get you in motion. But what’s fun about two is that they can really connect with each other and you can be a little bit choosy, what you feel like doing first versus second.

And I like what you’re having to say there in terms of like the two steps, it really is like you’re in a different place, like, literally, if I’m a human being, a bipedal two legged organism, right?

Krista Stepney
Exactly that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I take one step, I guess in basketball, they call that a pivot, right? You haven’t even moved, yeah, one step, one foot still in there, but you do two things. You really do feel like you have some momentum. And I think those two things can really be pretty tiny in terms of, “I’m going to email a guy and ask him when we can have a meeting. And then I’m going to see if there’s someone who’s done this before on YouTube and see what pro tips they got for me.” One, two, and we’re off to the races.

Krista Stepney
Exactly. And, Pete, the great thing about that is there’s neuroscience research that actually talks about how changing your position with those two steps teaches your brain that you actually can accomplish something. And imagine what type of confidence boost that has for someone who’s been stuck for a long time and trying to figure out how to get moving. And I tell people, just focus on two steps, two steps at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now the blocking out comparison point seems like it might be easier said than done when it comes to this emotionally fraught territory. Any pro tips here?

Krista Stepney
There’s something that I call a five-day social detox. And it’s literally disconnecting and detaching from areas where you’re consuming the things that are feeding and fueling that comparison. So, for some people, it might be detaching from social media for about five days. It might be disconnecting from that person that you always go to for advice because you are so enamored with how they’ve done it versus listening to your own voice and coming up with your own insights.

So I give people a prompt of different things they can walk through within those five days of a detox to get more in tune with their inner voice and thoughts versus looking for external opinions and insights that are fueling comparison.

The second pro tip that I would give, Pete, is one that’s tied to an activity that I call Mirror Mirror. And it’s really this activity where I encourage people to either do like a selfie style with their phone or to actually stand in front of an actual mirror and to ask questions about where they’ve actually allowed the opinions or path of others to impact how they think about themselves or the thing that they’re working on.

And it might sound goofy at first to stand in front of a mirror or to talk it to yourself in a selfie style, but you’re literally bringing those ideas that might be swirling in your head out in the open, and getting that out so that you can identify where that comparison is showing up.

And then the second part of that activity is speaking back affirmations into yourself. So identifying that you are enough, that you do have what it takes to get this done, that you are capable of the work that you want to produce. And that’s the lasting image and thought that that person has as they begin to do that work and start to block out comparisons in real time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And the mirror stuff, there’s some wild research about the impact of looking at yourself in the mirror in different contexts. Like, we eat less food or more healthfully, I believe, study shows, if we’re looking at a mirror while we’re eating a meal, like who’d have guessed?

Krista Stepney
There’s so much. Because you can’t deny it. It’s right in front of you at that point.

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Okay. Well, now you’ve got a concept called micro boldness. What’s that all about?

Krista Stepney
So a lot of times people misconstrue that boldness is a personality trait. But I believe, and tied to research that I’ve done, that boldness actually starts in your brain first. And boldness is a neurological skill that can be trained, developed, and evolved.

That means it’s accessible to everyone. So it doesn’t mean that only the extroverts get to be bold, right? It means that anyone that has a brain and believes that neurological skills can be trained can actually do this work.

And so instead of thinking about traditional boldness where it’s big and flashy and these giant leaps, right, that sometimes feel a little bit scary, I encourage people to prescribe to an idea around micro-boldness. And that goes back to what I shared about the two steps.

It’s the iterative, continuous, smaller steps that happen over time that retrain your brain that there’s safety even in uncertainty. And it creates muscle memory that, “Okay, if I took two steps before, I can do two more steps.”

And what it does is, over time, you’re building that neurological skill of boldness. You’re creating an atmosphere where boldness doesn’t have to be lofty or uncertain or scary, but it could be a part of your daily practice.

So micro boldness is the concept that I really try to lean into and practice and teach to help people to understand that these continuous movements and steps can show up in your everyday activities.

Pete Mockaitis
So when you say it’s a neurological skill, I’m curious, if we zoom right into the moment of, “Huh, I kind of want to do this, but I’m kind of scared,” what do you recommend we do right away? Because, tell me if I’m thinking about this right when you say neurological skill. I’m thinking almost like Pavlov’s dogs, like we got these associations and these patterns and these grooves and we just kind of roll with them.

And so if you have a neurological skill, pattern, groove, pathway, such that when you are scared and imagining uncertain spooky scenarios, you freeze up and do nothing, then that can get reinforced. So, I’m curious, with the two steps or micro boldness, what does that look like immediately in terms of, “Here I am, I’m at my desk. I’m feeling the things. What now?”

Krista Stepney
Yeah, Pete, you’re spot on. It is exactly that image you just mentioned about research. There’s associations and loops. I mean, there’s literally research that I did with a neurologist that talks about how people struggle with quitting smoking based on the associations of when they smoke and the patterns that they have, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Krista Stepney
And so the same can be true when you think about fear or uncertainty. So part of it is you have to first unpack why or what’s been associated with that fear. Has something happened in the past, right? Write that down. Get that out. But to your point of, like, “How do you address getting unstuck right in the moment?” there’s a psychological study that talks about the start-anyway script.

And there’s literally a psychologist that says, “If you use this script and literally talk about how you can break this cycle of the associations that you’ve had in the past, it gets your brain thinking that it’s safe to move forward.”

So, for example, the start-anyway script could say, “Even though this makes me nervous, on Tuesday, at three o’clock, when I sit down to check my emails, I’m going to write the email that I’ve been putting off for a week.” And what you’ve done is you’ve associated where you’re going to do it, when you’re going to do it, and what the action will be.

And so, literally, that type of start-anyway script gives your brain a chance to say, “Even if fear, uncertainty, or doubt are present, I am giving myself an action to push forward.” Right? And so then, you set that alarm for three o’clock, and when you sit down at the computer to check your email, you go ahead and send the other email.

Now, this does not mean that it’s a bait-and-switch and automatically it will happen that day, but you’re creating those different changes and association pathways within your brain that allow you to say it’s safe to move forward. There are so many studies tied to the start-anyway script where people have seen so much progress and being able to push past some of that decision paralysis.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s really fun about that start-anyway script, it reminds me a little bit of the social psychology research about implementation intentions, which we think is the term. And it’s sort of, like, “I plan to work out and, therefore, I’m going to put my shoes here and my clothes there. I’m going to go to the gym at this time. If something comes up, this is my backup time.”

And so we’ve just sort of taken a little bit of time to think through some of the particulars, the specifics, the when, where, how of the matter. And then they got some good data, which suggests, “Hey, sure enough, people go to the gym more when they do that.”

What’s fun about what you’re saying here is you’re acknowledging the emotional tricky bit way early and upfront and in advance. And so it’s almost like when you get there, it’s like, “Ooh, I feel kind of scared.” It’s like, “Yes, we’ve already discussed this.” You know?

Krista Stepney
Right? Calling it right out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And it could be things like, “I don’t feel like it because this is really boring,” or, “This is tricky because I’m going to get really mad about this thing.” It’s, like, you can sort of address, I imagine, any underlying tricky emotion associated with doing the thing.

Krista Stepney
Correct. And think about it, Pete, how many times when we actually face that scary thing where we say, “Oh, that wasn’t so bad,” or, “That wasn’t as… what I thought it would be.” It’s the same thing. The start-anyway script helps us to push past that so that we can get on the other side of it and realize, “Oh, okay, I was scared and I was nervous, and I acknowledged it, but here are some other things that helped me to push past it and realize there’s still a safety on the other side.”

Your brain is really rewiring itself to know that the next time you face that same type of uncertainty, you can push forward again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot. And so we’re talking a bit about starting. What about maintaining and persisting and finishing? Any pro tips there?

Krista Stepney
Yeah, I think the biggest piece is going back to the concept of micro boldness being a constant and consistent practice, right? There is no finish line to getting to it. Recognizing that it’s important to always go back to where you are starting to see yourself erode or maybe move a lot slower around things.

There’s a practice that I have called the wall of wins. And I talk about this in my book where I encourage people to actually use sticky notes to post on a wall somewhere all of the different triumphs or success that they’ve had in addressing that, because that’s the way that you maintain this sense of microboldness, this sense of pushing past staying stuck, because you, literally, can come back to a memorial of where you’ve done it before.

I tell people, whether it’s personal or professional, we’re going to always have a measure of fear or doubt, especially as we evolve and have new experiences, so going back to the things that you know work. Sometimes we look for something new and novel and the next flashy thing when, go back to the thing that was working and that gave you the progress before as ways to show that this can be an iterative practice that can still serve you on day 31 as it did on day one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, that notion of collecting the evidence and, even more so, you’re suggesting putting it front and center with the Post-it notes. I’ve done this before in a notebook, but then, you know, it’s buried and you look at it maybe four times a year when you really desperately need all the help you can get, so why let it get to that part? Go ahead and post that for you front and center. Super.

Krista Stepney
I have some teams, Pete, where they have done this collectively as a team in the workplace. And it was interesting to see so many of them with their individual wall of wins because, as you’re starting to write out certain Post-it notes, you think of more things and other things.

And, literally, it became the place where they had some of their most innovative and creative team meetings afterwards because they could come back to this place of saying, “We created things before. We’ve done hard work before.” And so to know that it wasn’t just about their individual success, but the collective success that they could all stand in front of.

And I love that that was just a way for them to honor not only their past success, but a way for them to honor that this was where they would think about creativity and innovation as a team moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Krista, we had a nice chat right at the beginning about how do we distinguish between, “Hey, I’m being thorough. I’m being high standard,” versus, “I’m overthinking. I’m being perfectionistic.”

I’m thinking about a guest and friend of the show, Kwame Christian, who said, it really stuck with me. He said, “Fear masquerades in many forms.” And that struck me because I think we can do some things and we don’t even realize that it’s fear-driven. And you highlighted it a couple at the beginning.

I’m curious, are there any other sneaky ways we might think we’re being sensible but we’re actually being run by fears you can shine a light on?

Krista Stepney
Happy to, Pete. So, each of the three personas that we talked about, overthinking, perfectionism, and almost-starting are all what I would say are iterations of fear in some form. So this idea of, “Well, I’ll just wait on this side and the familiar,” versus recognizing that if we actually launch something, that’s new territory.

And so the fear of, “What do I do with new? What if I’m not ready for new?” This idea with perfectionism is really this idea of we think we’re waiting to polish something and waiting for the perfect moment when, really, we’re just protecting ourselves from the opinions and perspectives of others once we launch and put something out there.

The same is true for almost-starting. We will lean on this idea that procrastination just means that we’re not motivated, when, really, there’s a fear of what type of time and energy and responsibility comes with actually doing something and making an effort.

And so all of those personas are just different iterations of fear. The word fear can just feel so provocative and toxic for so many people. So we love ideas of like, “Well, I’m just a perfectionist.” That’s an iteration of fear and doubt.

And so the things that I just shared with you, Pete, are how I know that these are things that I think are the tentacles of fear. And as someone who has lived through almost each of one of these personas, I recognize that fear does not stay in one place. And if you do not address it, it grows and shows up in almost every area of your life if you’re not willing to do something about it soon.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and that really gets me thinking. With that specific concern you mentioned, it’s like, “Oh, this is going to be a lot of time and effort and commitment to do the thing, so I don’t want to start,” I’ve absolutely been there. I think this very podcast would have launched maybe two years earlier had I addressed that concern more head on and more quickly.

In a way, there are some validity there. It’s like, “Yeah, this is substantial.” Some things really are a substantial ongoing commitment. And it’s probably good to go in eyes wide open as opposed to, like, “Sure, I’ll run that marathon. No big deal. Let’s buy the flights. Let’s buy the shoes. Let’s sign up for the race.” It’s like, “Oh, shoot, perhaps I should have counted the cost before I went here.”

But I think that’s a really strong one in terms of, “Ugh, all the activity associated with this thing just seems so big that it’s overwhelming and exhausting.”

Krista Stepney
And, Pete, when people are saying that, they’re essentially talking about the cost of the new thing, right? And so, whether it’s the cost of time, the cost of energy, the cost of new attention, I counter with, “What’s the cost of the inaction?” Right?

So if you’re counting up the cost of what it will take to do this new thing, what’s the cost of the inaction? What is it costing you not to do anything? What is that inner tension that you know you still sit with that’s costing you on this side? And then when you look at the cost of inaction versus the cost of what it would take to move forward, I tell people sometimes that decision becomes a lot clearer on moving forward versus staying stuck.

And a lot of times we’re not willing to count up the cost of inaction because we’re so focused on what it will cost us to do something new and different and to actually get started.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really great perspective, the cost of inaction. We might assume that because we’re living it, it’s free, but it ain’t.

Krista Stepney
Nope.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you share with us a fun story of someone you worked with in considering these things and how that resulted in some cool breakthrough insights? No pressure.

Krista Stepney
So… I love it. I love it because, actually, each of the personas that I wrote about are either a compilation of different people that I know or just everyday conversations. But Alex is actually a person that I used to work with.

And this is a person that I managed who was probably the most creative and innovative person you would meet. I mean, literally the ideas and the talent that this person had was just unmatched, but they were an almost-starter. Great ideas, but then they would falter, not really get started and move forward.

And so when we had to have the conversation of the cost of inaction, there was a direct correlation to what that meant about performance review, what that meant for the opportunity of advancement for her, but more importantly, what it meant for her being able to evolve and to just really rise to her potential beyond even the workplace.

And so there was a lot of tough conversations around building a performance improvement plan that helped her to actually figure out how to get started. We actually walked through a lot of the different strategies to put a plan in place that didn’t require her to circle the drain of overthinking or waiting for things to be polished.

And here’s the thing, talking to her, maybe a year after we went through a really tough season of her having to address why she was an almost starter, the success now means that her benefits, not the costs, were tied to not only seeing her move forward in the organization, but to actually start her own company.

That gave her the momentum to be able to see that her creativity was really just being boxed in in the organization, where now she had a greater platform within her own company to do far greater things. But now she had the discipline not to just have ideas that swirled, but to actually have tangible results, new clients, new customers, new products that she could actually bring to the market. And the biggest piece is the new joy of knowing that she was able to master and overcoming what perfectionism and procrastination had been her stalemates for so many times.

And so I give you that example, Pete, because, again, going back to that cost of inaction, she would have never even realized additional revenue or opportunities to just work in her expertise, or zone of genius, had we not gone through that tough season of actually talking through what not starting was costing her personally and professionally.

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

Krista Stepney
I encourage people to think about the fact that overthinking and perfectionism and almost-starting can be big lofty personas. But the more we actually look at where we are today and see where we sit in those personas, Pete, it gives us an understanding on where we’re actually holding ourselves back within our jobs.

Like, if it’s holding you back from that stretch assignment that you know you should take on or going after that promotion even if you don’t feel qualified yet. And I share this because I have these conversations in everyday discussions, even with family and friends, and this is the piece that I feel so indebted to work through, Pete, it’s like, “How do we get unstuck?”

There’s so much waiting on the other side for us to move forward. And so I encourage people to do that self-inventory and to see where they might be sitting, and to think about how they might use some of those strategies that we’ve been talking about today to move forward and get out of their own way.

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

Krista Stepney
So Mark Cuban would be one person that I usually pull a lot of great quotes from. I love his sense of perspective around business, but also entrepreneurship. And he has a quote that basically says, “When you’ve got 10,000 people trying to do the same thing, why would you be number 10,001?”

So when I think about doing something different, whether it’s starting a podcast or a new business or a new idea within your company, don’t be the 10,001 person doing the same thing. Step outside the grain of how we’ve always done it and do something different.

And then the second thing I would say is any quote or paragraph in the book by Luvvie Ajayi Jones, she wrote a book called the Professional Troublemaker, one of my absolute favorite books. And she has so many great insights about how you really address doubt, fear, and uncertainty in the workplace, and how being a professional troublemaker really helps you to align with your passion and really thinking about not only the change that you want to see, but the change that we know that this world needs.

So any quote from that book would probably be one of my favorites, too.

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

Krista Stepney
There’s something that I call a stretch space. And it’s, literally, picking a day out of the week, 30 minutes only, to do something that feels uncomfortable. So it could be like drawing with your non-dominant writing hand. It could be like singing a song in public.

And this sounds a little funny, but I use this as a way to, like, remind myself to do things that feel uncomfortable. And it’s a way for me to actually lean in when there’s not as many consequences of failure, but I use this stretch space as a reminder to say, “Krista, like, where are you pushing the needle on things that make you uncomfortable in your job? And how are you using that opportunity to be more innovative or creative in ways that you haven’t been in the past?”

So the stretch space is probably one of my favorite tools that I lean on a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Krista Stepney
Starting the day with affirmations. So this is something that I do with friends, with family, with my partner. We will usually share affirmations that we want to set the intention for the day and just to remind ourselves of who we are despite what might be waiting for us throughout the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Any key affirmations that are doing a lot of the good lifting there?

Krista Stepney
One of my favorites right now is, “I am enough,” and recognizing that there are so many people in circumstances right now that try to contradict that statement, but I am enough. I am enough.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that folks really love and quote back to you often?

Krista Stepney
“Move Anyway,” the title of my book. Literally, I have so many people who will say that back to me, like, “I was really scared, but I told myself, ‘I’ve just got to move anyway.’”

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

Krista Stepney
So on my social media channels, with your TikTok and Instagram and YouTube, you can follow me at Krista D Stepney. And then my website is my first and last name, KristaStepney.com.

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

Krista Stepney
Move anyway. In the moments where it feels comfortable to be stuck, I want you to consider the cost of inaction. I want you to use two steps to map up things that you can do right now to get out of your own way and to start moving forward for the progress that you know that you’re entitled to have.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Krista, thank you.

Krista Stepney
My pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation, Pete. Excited to be here with you.

Jan 29
0

1124: How to Build Hope and Combat Burnout at Work with Jen Fisher

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Jen Fisher discusses the strategic value of hope—and how leaders can harness it to improve wellbeing and transform the workplace.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why hope is a valid strategy in the workplace
  2. How a few words can kill or build hope
  3. How to counter your brain’s tendency to be overly critical

About Jen 

Jen Fisher is a global authority on workplace wellbeing, the bestselling author of Work Better Together, and the founder and CEO of The Wellbeing Team.

As Deloitte US’s first chief wellbeing officer, she pioneered a groundbreaking, human-centered approach to work that gained international recognition and reshaped how organizations view wellbeing. 

Jen is also the creator and host of The WorkWell Podcast, a TEDx speaker, and a sought-after voice at events like Workhuman, SXSW, Milken Global Conference, and Happiness Camp. 

At the heart of Jen’s work is the knowledge that hope is not just a feeling—it’s a strategic imperative. She helps leaders harness hope as a catalyst for cultural transformation, guiding them to reimagine work as a force for human flourishing. She lives in Miami with her husband, Albert, and their dog, Fiona.

Resources Mentioned

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Jen Fisher Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jen, welcome!

Jen Fisher
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom and to hear about hope. Could you share with us, for starters, an extra surprising and fascinating discovery you’ve made about hope as you’ve researched it?

Jen Fisher
I would say that hope is not an emotion, which most people think that it is. It’s a cognitive process. It’s not whimsical. It’s not wishful thinking. It’s not positive vibes only. As a matter of fact, many, many times hope is hard. And I would also say that hope is a daily practice and, obviously, I believe that hope is a strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so it’s not an emotion, it’s not positive vibes only, you said it’s a cognitive. Well, what is it exactly?

Jen Fisher
So, what the research shows, so C.R. Snyder is kind of the original, if you will, godfather of hope research, and what he and so many others have found about hope and why many of us say that it is a cognitive process and that hope is a strategy, is because real and realistic hope actually requires action. It requires three things from you.

It requires you to identify and set a goal, so to know where you want to go or know where you want to be. It requires, and this is perhaps the most important, that you identify multiple ways or pathways in which you can reach that goal. And so it’s not just one, it’s multiple ways. And then the final thing is that it requires you to understand and to know what your agency is in reaching that goal. And so, what is your ability to actually do something to get from here to there?

And so that’s why it requires action and what makes it a cognitive process and what makes it a strategy is because you actually have to not just think about it, not just put good vibes only out into the world, or say, “I’m going to win the lottery,” but you actually have to do something about it and you have to have the ability to do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so it requires setting a goal, identifying multiple pathways, understanding our capabilities and how this is viable. And so, if I’ve done those things, I’m having an experience as a result of having done so. Is that what we’re calling hope?

Jen Fisher
That’s what we’re calling hope. That is what hope theory says. And I will tell you what hope theory also says. Hope theory and hope does not guarantee success. And that’s why I say hope is hard, right? Because sometimes you do all these things, you have all of this hope, and then things don’t work out the way that you want them to.

But I think what’s really great about hope is, you know those multiple pathways that you identified? If you start down one path and it doesn’t work, well, you’ve already identified other ways in which you can reach your goal so you don’t get stuck.

You kind of say, “Okay, well, that was interesting. It didn’t work. But, look, I have these other ways in which I can potentially reach this goal.” But hope does not guarantee success. Hope will let you down but it is still critically important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if I do those things, I’m having an experience that you call hope, but it’s not an emotion. So I don’t know if you want to get all dictionary or textbook-y, but so then what precisely is hope?

Jen Fisher
Hope is a strategy. It’s a cognitive process. It requires that process in order for it to be hope. When it comes to emotions, hope can spur positive emotions. It can create positive emotions. It can also potentially create negative emotions, but hope itself is not an emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I set a goal, I’d identified multiple pathways, I understand I’ve got capabilities that could get her done, but if I still have a lot of doubt and pessimism and think, “This probably won’t work,” do I have hope?

Jen Fisher
You could, yes. I mean, look, I think those things can coexist. I would say, what makes hope unique is that it requires you to take action. So you could be pessimistic or you could believe that it’s not going to work, but if you’re still taking action towards the goal on the off chance that it could work, then, yeah, you do have hope.

But, look, I think hope can coexist with doubt. Hope can coexist with hopelessness. Hope can coexist with despair. It can coexist with other things that are seemingly its opposite, just like many things. Most things in our life can coexist with other things that are seemingly its opposite, but what hope requires is action.

And so, if you were moving towards that goal, regardless of whether or not you think it’s going to work, you do have some hope that it’s going to work. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be moving, continuing to move towards that goal because what’s the point?

Pete Mockaitis
And so, can you tell us, maybe, what’s the opposite of hope or how prevalent is hope at work?

Jen Fisher
Well, I don’t think that hope at work is very prevalent, and that was the reasoning and the rationale behind my book. I proffer in my book that I actually believe a lot of what we are seeing and talking about and experiencing in the workplace, when it comes to workplace burnout, is actually an epidemic of hopelessness.

And so, hopelessness exists when you don’t believe that tomorrow can be better than today, when you don’t believe that your actions or what you’re doing matters, or when you don’t believe that you are valued in the workplace. And I think that those are experiences that, unfortunately, a lot of people have, which drive workplace hopelessness.

And I think we often look at that as disengagement, we look at that as burnout, but I actually think that it’s hopelessness. It’s people kind of throwing their hands up, and saying, “Well, nothing I do matters,” or, “Nothing here is ever going to change, so why even try?” And in my experience and my conversations with many, many people, that seems to be the sentiment of what is happening.

And so, I think kind of this opposite, if you will, of hope or hopeful workplaces is workplaces that are hopeless or disengaged or there’s just a lot of people, you know, quiet quitting, pick your favorite buzzword about what’s going on in the workplace today, and I think you can link a lot of that back to people are just kind of feeling hopeless.

And that ties to why I say hope is a strategy because, when I talk to leaders, when I talk to anybody who is trying to effect big change or change at all in the workplace through workplace transformations, leadership changes, strategy changes, all of this constant change that’s going on in the workplace, and they say, “Really, Jen? Like, really, you want me to create a hopeful workplace? You think that hope is a strategy?”

And I say, “Yeah, I do, because good luck with your strategy if nobody believes in it, if nobody gets on board, if nobody thinks that your strategy is going to make tomorrow better than today, then you’re not going to achieve your strategy, because you have to be able to bring people along with you.”

And that’s why I’m not saying hope is the only strategy, but I’m saying that hope is a strategy because people need to feel hopeful about where they are and where they’re going in order to really show up and be engaged and innovate and do all the great things that we want people to do in the workplace, but they’re just not feeling it right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if we think about hopelessness then, it sort of sounds like, from that angle or facet, hope seems to be sort of like a set of beliefs. Is that fair to say?

Jen Fisher
Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so in that sense, then if hope is a set of beliefs, then that set of beliefs would certainly be bolstered by doing just those things – set the goal, identifying multiple pathways and understanding your capabilities and how those can flow into making that unfold. Very cool. Well, maybe could you give us a story perhaps of someone who wasn’t feeling so hopeful, but they adopted some of these approaches and saw a turnaround?

Jen Fisher
Well, I think that probably the easiest story would be my own story and why hope has become so important to me, part of my leadership ethos, how I lead, but, quite frankly, how I live my life. And so, if you rewind where I was 10, 11 years ago, I was in a state of complete burnout. And this is before we were talking about burnout and well-being in the workplace in the ways that we are now.

And so, I didn’t know what I was experiencing. I knew I was struggling. I worked in a high-performing organization. I looked around, everyone around me seemed to be doing just fine. So I just kept telling myself, “I’m going to push through. This will eventually go away if I just keep pushing harder, pushing harder, pushing harder.”

Well, that never works. It might work for a period of time, but that never works. And so, ultimately, I ended up completely burnt out to the point where I had to take a leave of absence from work. I had to really focus on getting healthy and well, both mentally and physically. And part of that recovery for me, actually, was seeking out professional help, going to therapy.

And through therapy, that is actually where I was first introduced to hope and hope theory and kind of the processes of generating hope in your life.

And so, the therapist had me do hope theory exercises, many of which I now lay out in one of the chapters, I think it’s chapter 10 in my book. And I spent a lot of time doing that and it was really, you know, kind of, “What’s the next step? What’s the next step?”

And I think that’s also kind of the thing about hope is we tend to think that hope is this big thing that, “Oh, if I just have hope, it’s going to change everything.” Well, hope, it’s not really a fireworks-show moment. It happens in those quiet hours, in those quiet moments, by taking one step forward, and then the next step forward, and then the next step forward.

And that’s what I did, you know? It was kind of each of those little steps that built me back from burnout recovery. And then I learned how to really apply those types of strategies not only into my life, but into my leadership and into my work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I would love it if you could really paint a picture for us, in terms of a scene that’s memorable for you, so we can sort of get a sense for, “Boy, what’s that hopeless Jen look, sound, feel like?” in terms of what you’re doing, what you’re saying to yourself, what you’re experiencing, as opposed to the hope has been restored Jen looking like?

Jen Fisher
So, one of the stories that I tell in the book was really when I was burnt out and kind of the conversation, I talk about it as the conversation that changed everything. And it was a regular check-in conversation with my boss, and I was going down my list, you know, checking things off, giving her all of the updates.

And she put down her pen and paper and looked me straight in the eye and, basically, said to me, “Jen, you’re not okay. And what’s worse is that you’re trying to convince everyone else and yourself that this is what okay looks like.”

And, of course, in that moment, my natural reaction was, “What are you talking about?” you know, the kind of defensiveness, right? And she looked at me and she said, “When was the last time you spent real time with your family without thinking about work?” And I couldn’t give her a good answer.

And then she asked me, “When was the last time you felt joy in your work?” And I couldn’t give her a good answer. And she went on to ask me a handful of additional questions, and I really couldn’t answer any of her questions in that moment or in a way that made me feel good about myself.

And what I will say is she wasn’t judging me. She wasn’t calling me out. She was coming from a place of concern to say, “You’re not okay, and you need to take some time for yourself to get okay.” And as hard as that moment was, perhaps that was the first moment of truth for me. That was the first time that I ever admitted to myself or anyone else that I wasn’t okay, that I was struggling, and that I did need help.

And so, I talk about that as the first moment of hope, because hope requires you to be truthful. It requires you to be honest and to recognize things as they really are. I think a lot of times, when people think about hope being whimsical or wishful thinking, they get that wrong because hope requires you to say like, “Hey, things suck. I’m not okay. I’m in a bad place. What’s going on is horrible.”

Like, recognizing truth and reality of where we really are and then building from there and starting to make that plan, set that goal of, like, “What’s the next step? And what’s the next step?” and create those pathways for yourself.

And so, I would say a hopeful Jen, I mean, there’s tons of stories in the book of just my journey of hope. And I don’t get it always right. I am a person that kind of tends to catastrophize things, and I live with a lot of anxiety.

And one of the things that I talk about in the book, which was really insightful, was a conversation with a friend of mine who knows that I have a lot of anxiety, that I live with anxiety. And she said to me, “This whole hope thing…” she’s like, “…doesn’t that make you more anxious to, like, have so many options, to have multiple pathways?”

And I thought that that was such an insightful question because, typically, people who have a lot of anxiety like concrete things. We like to know the way that it’s going to be so we can stop catastrophizing about all the things that could be. And as I thought about that, I was like, “You know, I think that hope and anxiety are kind of great partners for each other.”

Because what happens to me when I feel stuck or when I’m catastrophizing, I can step back and say kind of like, “What would hope tell me to do?” Well, hope would tell me to understand where I am now, understand how I want to get out of this place, and create those pathways for myself.

And so, instead of staying stuck and staying anxious in a really stuck place, I can identify multiple pathways in which I can get unstuck. And that actually helps my anxiety because it says, “Oh, wait, there’s not just one way and you’re not just stuck here forever. There’s all these other ways in which you can move forward.” So, hopefully, those are kind of helpful illustrations or stories to answer your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s great. Thank you. Yes, and, boy, what a blessing to have had that conversation, to have that leader, because I think the vast majority of professionals and humans would not be so direct in terms of, “Oh, you know, I don’t want to be invasive. It’s not really my place. I don’t want to be, you know?” And so, they, “Hey, Jen, you doing okay?” “Yeah.” “Okay. Just checking.” “Well, no, no, no, no, no.” Moving on as opposed to, “Hmm. Well…”

Jen Fisher
Yeah, because it’s uncomfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. So, I’m curious then in the before times, what do you think are some of the indicators she was picking up on that you were not as consciously aware of?

Jen Fisher
I think one of the things that you just pointed out, right, is that this idea of fine, right? Especially in the workplace when they have conversations with you, “How are you doing?” “Fine.” “How’s your workload?” “Fine.” “How are things at, you know, whatever, home?” “Fine.” So, we kind of build this fortress of fine, and that has become acceptable.

And so why is fine acceptable? When somebody says fine to me, and I probably learned this from her in many unspoken ways, but when I get too many fines right in a row from somebody, that is a signal to dig deeper and be like, “Okay, enough with the fine. Like, how are you, really?” And then it kind of shifts to like, “I’m good. I’m good.” “No, no. Like, I want more than one word. Can you give me six words on like how you’re doing?”

So, I think that that’s kind of what she was picking up on, but certainly, if I reflect back, my emotions were all over the place. I was either really, really high and really happy if things were going really well. If I had a bad conversation or a bad experience or a bad interaction with something, with somebody, my emotions were, like, in the toilet, all the way down.

And so, I was very high or I was very low. There was not really kind of in between, if you will. Certainly, my work product suffered, even though I was working longer hours than ever. The problem is that I was working longer hours than ever and that really affected my work product. I was very reactive. I was also very transactional and task-oriented.

I wasn’t interested in building relationships with my colleagues. I was interested in getting the work done and the metrics associated with those, with getting that work done. And that was uncharacteristic of me. And so, I think, she kind of saw a combination of things. But to your point, there’s not a lot of leaders like that, and so I credit so much of who I am today with her ability to really see me and have the compassion to reach out.

And, of course, at the time, you process that in a whole bunch of different ways. You process it as failure, but I look back on it now and it was one of the greatest gifts anyone has ever given to me. And so, I think I tried to emulate and be that leader and be that person for others now.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, yes. Thank you. Well, let’s dig into some of this hope theory strategy tactic stuff. What do you recommend if folks are listening and they say, “Hmm, I’d like some more hope. That sounds nice”? What are some of the top first things to do?

Jen Fisher
I think the first thing that I recommend people do is do a hope audit, kind of understand where you are when it comes to your own hope. Are you struggling with hope? Are you doing great with hope? How’s your team doing? You can do it at an individual level, a team level, an organizational level.

But I think some of the most, kind of powerful, when I talk to people about hope, ways to assess your own hope, but also what I call hope-killers and hope-builders. And this is really in the language that we use in our lives, but especially in our workplaces and especially as managers of other human beings.

The lessons that I’ve learned is hope-killers are when we say things like, “We want you to bring your ideas. We value innovation. We want to do things differently.” And then somebody brings you an idea and you say something like, “No, that’s not how we do that here. That’s not how we do those things here. We don’t do that.” Or, “We tried that before and it didn’t work.” That’s an automatic.

Those types of things, where you’re shutting someone down, is an automatic hope-killer. What I will say about that is, because my goal is to never make anyone feel bad, that I learned these things the hard way and which is why I’m trying to teach others about it. We say these things as leaders and as managers because we believe that we’re being responsible.

We believe that if we tell somebody, “That’s not how we do it here,” or, “We’ve tried that before and it didn’t work,” that we’re being responsible. We’re being helpful. We’re basically telling them, “Don’t waste your time on that. Like, move on to the next thing, or just do it this way, because we know that it’s going to work and we know it’s acceptable.” You think those are time savers.

That’s kind of the path of least resistance, but it’s really a hope-killer for people because people want to come to work and be creative and come up with new solutions. And most organizations tell them that that’s what they value, but when they do it, then they shut it down.

And so instead, say things like, “Well, we’ve never done it that way. What intrigues you, what interests you, or what excites you about doing it that way?” I think about Ted Lasso, you know, “Be curious, not judgmental,” right?

So have your line of questioning when somebody brings you an idea. Instead of shutting it down, get curious about it, ask them questions. You might still say no, but at least you engaged in the conversation with somebody to understand where they’re coming from.

And that’s what helps us feel like we matter and that we are valued by somebody, not that we execute on every single idea that somebody has, but that we listen to them and that we see them. And that’s what actually creates and builds hope in the workplace.

And that kind of behavior, through the language and the way that we communicate with each other, is incredibly contagious when it comes to workplace culture.

Pete Mockaitis
The language, it is contagious in both directions.

Jen Fisher
In both directions, very negative and positive. Absolutely. Probably negative is more contagious, which is why it’s so dangerous, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s a top tip right there, say, “Don’t use hope-killing language.” Do you have some superior alternatives for if someone is mentioning something and you really do have some insight that was tried before and it didn’t go well? I imagine you want to share that information and not withhold it, but you also don’t want to kill the enthusiasm. So, any pro tips for communicating that?

Jen Fisher
There’s nothing wrong with saying, “Hey, we tried something similar and it didn’t work out, but I want to hear from you. Like, what’s your approach? What do you think is different this time? What, in your mind, would make this work?”

And so, that opens up the dialogue for them to share with you what they’re thinking. And then you can have a conversation about it, right? Then you can share your own insight of, “When we did do this before and it didn’t work.” And then you might learn something from them. Maybe they aren’t proposing that you do it the exact same way that you did it before. Maybe it just looks like that on the surface.

And if you immediately shut it down and say, “Oh, we’ve done that before,” and move on, then you miss the opportunity to dig a little bit deeper. And I’m not talking about spending four hours, right? This is a 10-, 12-, 15-minute conversation with somebody that just is like, “Tell me a little bit more about why you think that that’s going to work,” or, “What excites you about this idea?” or, “Let’s dig a little bit deeper,” so that you can understand where they’re coming from.

And you can also share insight of like, “Hey, we did something similar. This is how we went about it. This is why it didn’t work, and this is why it didn’t work. What do you think? Why do you think that your approach is different?”

And so, it’s not about, like I said, it’s not about letting everybody come up with all kinds of ideas and just start running with all of them. But it’s more about, “How do you make somebody feel seen and valued in the workplace?” Because those are the top things, you know, feeling like you don’t matter in the workplace or in life, that is the biggest hope-killer of all, right?

Like, not mattering to somebody or not mattering to where you work, people start to disengage. And so, it’s really about seeing somebody and just having a quick conversation to understand where they’re coming from. It’s not always about, “Oh, we’re going to move forward with this idea even though I think it’s a bad one.”

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay. Well, I’d also love to hear some of the other winning bits from this toolkit.

Jen Fisher
I think, something that I like to do, I call hope spotting, right? And so, there’s a lot of negativity in our world. There’s a lot of negativity in our workplaces.

And so, opening up team meetings or starting your own day as an individual, or ending your day as an individual, and actually spotting and calling out and acknowledging instances of hope-building, you know, talking about something that you thought wasn’t going to go well, but it actually went better than you thought.

Like, really identifying the times in your day or in your week where things went well, because we don’t do that. We tend to dwell on what went wrong, who pissed us off, what we didn’t do right, what we didn’t get done. And I’m not saying that you shouldn’t, you know, like there are lessons to be learned by mistakes that we’ve made or interactions that we’ve had that didn’t go as well as we wanted it to.

But we spend a lot more time on those things and we beat ourselves up. And so, really carving out a couple of minutes at the end of each day or in the morning, reflecting on the day before, or as you open a meeting, and allow people to spot hope, to say like, “Hey, this happened, and I thought it was great,” or, “I saw Bob showing the new person how to do X, Y, and Z, and that made me feel really good.”

We tend to kind of gloss over those things and we don’t call them out and we don’t acknowledge them. And so, I think that that’s a really important practice that can help people feel hopeful and have positive emotions in the workplace and feel like they’re valued.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I like that a lot in terms of, and that feels distinctly different than, say, a gratitude practice, counting your blessings, like, “Oh, I’ve got a great family. I’ve got a house, you know. I’ve got heat. I’ve got a cozy bed. I’ve got socks that feel great.” Sure. I mean, because we can do those things and those are good and special and shifting the spotlight onto them can be beneficial.

But when you really zero in on, “It went better than you thought it would,” it highlights that same zone of risk and uncertainty where so much of our lives are in these days. It highlights that. And it’s a powerful reminder that, “Yeah, it happens frequently that things work out better than you thought they would.”

So, thusly, perhaps as we’re assessing the probabilities or what’s likely to go down with the next thing, we may just be a bit more balanced in assessing the prognosis of stuff.

Jen Fisher
I love how you summarize that. I think that that was perfect. And that’s why I think hope is a practice, too, right? Because once you start to practice that, that becomes, I wouldn’t say your natural default. Maybe for some people. It’s still not my natural default, but it’s easier for me, right?

Like, I will catch myself going down the path of being like, “Oh, man, I can’t believe I said that,” or, “Oh, that was a really dumb answer.” And when I start to have that negative talk for myself, I’m like, “Wait a minute, what about all the things in the meeting, or the presentation, or the keynote, or the whatever, that went right?”

And so, I start to catch myself more quickly and I don’t follow the negative. And that’s not to say that we don’t screw up. We all screw up, right? Like, yeah, you’re going to say something stupid, you’re going to forget a line, you’re going to make a mistake, whatever it is that your role is, right?

It’s not to say, like those things don’t happen and those things don’t exist. But how do you balance the learning from making mistakes with also recognizing that there’s a lot right that you and others do in the world and calling that out?

Another thing that I really like to do, especially when I’m feeling stuck or, like, when my team is feeling stuck, is talk about possibilities, you know, and kind of do exercises around possibility thinking, right? And so, if I feel really stuck, if I have a problem and I can’t get out of it, or I’m just ruminating on it, asking myself the question of like, “Well, what’s possible here?”

Like, you know, this is kind of that pathways thinking of like, “Where could I go from here? I’m feeling stuck. I don’t want to stay stuck here. So, what are the possibilities here? Like, is this a dead end?” And if it is, kind of accepting that and moving on.

“But if I’m not truly stuck, what are the possibilities and what are the ways in which I can move forward?” And so, that’s kind of a question that I ask myself of like, “Okay, I’m feeling stuck. What are the possibilities here?” And that is a way to generate hope.

Another way, the best way perhaps to cultivate hope is with other people. Hope grows in community. Like many things, hope definitely grows in community, and surrounding yourself with people that support you, and also will hold you accountable when you need to be held accountable is one of the best ways that hope can grow.

And so, when I think about that inside of organizational life, obviously, the best place for that is on your team. But if there’s not people on your team, do you have a friend or two in the organization that you can connect regularly with, because connection is incredibly important for hope?

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

Jen Fisher
No, let’s do it. Like, I’ve talked a lot, but that’s the point, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Indeed, yeah. Can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jen Fisher
So, the cover of my book is a butterfly, and that’s a special symbolism to me, but it’s the perfect symbolism for hope. And so, one of my favorite quotes, “If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jen Fisher
I would say Dr. Edith Egers’ book called The Choice.

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

Jen Fisher
I think one that’s coming up lately is a nugget of we would never put somebody in charge of operations or technology or finance that didn’t have operations, technology, or finance experience, but we continue to put people in charge of humans without any intelligence or knowledge or skill on wellbeing and hope.

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

Jen Fisher
The best place to connect with me is on LinkedIn, but my website is www.Jen-Fisher.com. I also have a Substack newsletter called “Thoughts on Being Well.”

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

Jen Fisher
Make hope your strategy or, at least, make hope part of your strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jen, thank you.

Jen Fisher
Thank you.