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Jul 15
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978: Crafting Your Personal Resilience Plan for Beating Burnout with Marie-Hélène Pelletier

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Marie-Hélène Pelletier argues that resilience isn’t a trait and provides a customizable path to develop yours.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why no one should assume they’re resilient
  2. How to design your Resilience Plan
  3. The tiny actions that build big resilience

About Marie-Hélène

Throughout her career in business management and psychology, Dr. Pelletier has spearheaded the dialogue on the crucial issues of leadership resilience and work performance. Drawing on her extensive background in corporate, insurance, governance and public sectors, she brings an international perspective and unique expertise on leadership. She is a practicing leadership psychologist and executive coach with over 20 years of experience and holds a Ph.D. and an MBA from the University of British Columbia. 

Marie-Hélène is a Member of the Global Clinical Practice Network of the World Health Organization, and past Director on the boards of the Canadian Psychological Association and the International Association of Applied Psychology. She has presented and authored and co-authored a number of industry and academic publications and has won numerous academic and industry awards. In 2024, Dr. Pelletier published her award-winning book, The Resilience Plan: A Strategic Approach to Optimizing Your Work Performance and Mental Health.

Resources Mentioned

Marie-Hélène Pelletier Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marie-Hélène, welcome.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Pete, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about your wisdom. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly striking, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and our resilience and mental health while putting together your book The Resilience Plan here.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
You know, something I’ve loved in my studies, in general, and in my work was always interdisciplinary. I always found the creativity of bringing ideas together was great. So, I’m going to say the immense benefits of bringing psychology and strategy together, just amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example or elaborate on that?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I can, absolutely. I came to this because I work a lot with professionals, leaders, business owners, high achievers of any kind, and they came to me, and they would say things like, “MH, I don’t know what my problem is. I’ve dealt with much harder things before. What’s wrong with me?” And if I had only spoken to them as a psychologist on the resilience side of things, they probably would have dismissed it. But because I brought analogies from the strategy side of things, because we took their context into account to better understand the actual reality that they’re in, that’s what changed everything. And when we do this, small shift, big change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Could you give us a story or example there?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yes. When I was writing the book, one of the things that sometimes people do is they do a focus group. So, it’s my first and only book, so I’m learning as I go. I do a focus group. In the group, there’s this woman, senior leader, who proceeds and does her strategic plan with us and the book. And then, shortly after, she sends me an email and says, “Okay, I need this for my entire team of leaders. Can you travel, do this as a workshop?” Yes.

So, I travel. She comes and says, “Hello.” She says, “I’m going to sit at the back because, you know, I’ve done this before.” Great. So, I proceed with the workshop with her team, and at the end she comes back and says, “Okay, I started sitting here thinking I’ve done my plan already, there’s nothing for me to gain in addition. I’m doing this for my team.” And she said, “But I realized I had implemented successfully for the first time all the actions I wanted to implement as it relates to my resilience, and I’m now ready for the next iteration of the plan.”

And so, that’s an example of how, given these particular tools, you can actually get to a plan that you can implement, that makes a difference, and just like in business, can evolve after a period of time. So, we can dive into the details of how do you get there but that’s an example of how practical this can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe let’s return to that notion of people say, “I don’t know what my problem is. I’ve dealt with stuff that’s way harder than this before and yet I’m wiped out. I’m burnt out. I’m tired. I’m exhausted. I’m overwhelmed.” And so, they are puzzled, and then you say when you bring the strategic elements in there, it becomes demystified. Can you elaborate or give us an example of what that might look like?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yes. Well, the analogy that sometimes I would give, and that’s in part what led to writing it in the book, was how, if we were in a business situation and we had a great idea for a new service or a new product, would we just have the great idea and launch? Or, would we have the great idea, and then look at who else is offering this? How much or something like this, how much are they charging for it? Who is willing to pay for it? Which forces might impact the launch? We would do all this, right? We would look at the context around this idea and then design a launch strategy that would be successful.

So, same thing here. Yes, we want to be more resilient, and initially we don’t understand it, but if we, actually, use the same tools we would use in business strategy to understand with more clarity the context, then we can actually create a plan that works. And that’s what changes everything. It’s as if initially we disregard many elements of the context. We are not realistic about the amount of demands we’re facing, the quantity, the importance of the demands we’re facing, that’s one example, and other aspects of the context, which makes any intention not that easy to implement and, frankly, not successful.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in other words, we don’t want to simply do a one-size-fits-all resilience plan in terms of what you got to do is you got to do your deep breathing, you got to do your exercising, and you got to sleep well, and you’re done! But rather, you’re going to go into the depths of the particular context in order to customize it to be just right.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. And it may include any of the things you just mentioned, or it may include other things. It depends on your current context, as well as other things, like your values, the type of demands you’re facing, the type of supply of energy that you have right now. And so, when we take all this into account, then we can design something that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then maybe, as we’re deconstructing myths or misconceptions about resilience, like it’s not one-size-fits-all, any other top things you want to clarify for us in that domain?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It’s not a one-size-fits-all, absolutely, which means the plan you designed for yourself, Pete, in this moment in time will be different from mine, and even yours will be different from yours maybe six months from now. So, there’s that. I think even before this, one of the misconceptions we need to clarify is that often people will tend to think that they are resilient as an individual. That’s who they are as a person. They own it. That’s like a personality trait.

And people get to thinking this for logical reason. They’ve gone through very demanding things before successfully. Sometimes people around them have said, “Pete, you are the rock of the team. You’re the rock of the family. You’re so resilient.” And you get to a point where you believe that it’s who you are. And the challenge with this, number one, it is not a personality trait. It’s our ability to go through adversity and come out even stronger, which will fluctuate over time, therefore we can influence it.

So, it’s not a personality trait, and so it is something you want to invest in because there will be more demands coming forward. We can be proactive about this, and I will argue we really want to so that we can prepare for those demands moving forward. So, this notion that it’s who we are, “And, therefore, it will always be there for me. I don’t need to do anything about it, and I will respond in however way I do,” that sort of very, in a way, passive response is not helpful. So that’s one of the key things we need to change.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if it’s not a personality trait, I mean what is it? What would we liken it to? Is it an asset?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
A state.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s a state, like an emotion?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yeah, an experience. So, including, yeah, your emotions, the way you’re thinking, the way you’re responding to the situation. So, it’s all of these. And so, therefore, the more you’ve prepared, invested, planned, the more you can, in some ways, increase that baseline, if you will, such that when additional unexpected larger demands come, many of which we actually want because they’re interesting challenges, things we are happy to solve for, then you’ll be able to bring your best.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you maybe give us an example of a professional who was encountering a state of low resilience repeatedly, and then figured out a plan, did some things, and saw a transformation?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It’s something that I can say, you know, I’ve gone through similar situations, you may have as well, but one person I worked with came to me and really felt like their schedule was completely out of control. They were running after the most screaming demands at all times. It just felt like they were not leading this ship. It’s as if they were on a downhill bike and the bike was going faster than what they could control in some ways, and they happened to be working with me at that moment.

And so, what we did, and that’s what I’ve done in the book, I’ve extracted some of the tools we use in business strategy but using them for our resilience. So, first, we looked at this person’s values, what’s most important for them in this moment in life. And that includes both personal and professional. For this person, some of their values, just from memory, included things like health, family, relationship. They valued physical activity. That’s something that had been important for them before, and they had some others.

Then we did this exercise where I get the person to draft on one piece of paper, two columns, their sources of demands and their sources of supply. And for this individual, they realized how they had an immense amount of demand, both from work and personal life, which they initially did not really account for in some ways. So, yes, they knew they were busy at work, for example, but then they realized, as we were looking at their personal life, that they also had a friend who was leaving a key relationship.

One of their parents was dealing with health issues. Of course, people we want to support in our professional lives, and personal in this case, but the reality is that they do represent demands and we want to be realistic about that. Now, this person realized they had not invested much in anything that gives them energy, so the supply list was very short. And we did all the work looking at the equivalent of their SWOT analysis, looking at their context.

And so, for them, it led to creating their strategic plan, which usually I’ll go with three main pillars, and one of them for her was to invest in managing her time better. She realized that she was not good at estimating the amount of time it takes to do things. She tended to underestimate how long anything took, most things, and so for her one of the pillars was “Better managing my time.”

And under this strategic pillar one of her concrete actions, a tactic, if you will, was, and we always focus on tactics that are very simple, for her it was to challenge herself once a week to guess how long something’s going to take, and then actually measure how long it takes her to do that particular task, just to help shift how she was assessing her time. And there were other pillars on her on her strategy, but that’s an example.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. Let’s hear it. So, what are some other pillars there and tactics that go with them?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It will depend, of course, on each individual. Sometimes I work with people who will realize that in their values, the value particular relationships that they have, whether it’s family, friendships, people they live with, people in their lives, one way or the other. And I’m thinking of one individual in particular who at times worked from home, and sometimes when he was working from home, if he was not in a meeting, he would open the door of his office, and he had a young child, who at times would come in the office, the door was open.

And he realized how, more often than not, of course he was doing something when the child would come in, so he would say “Oh, wait a second” or would just finish typing whatever he was doing. His next action in his plan, one pillar was relationships, and his action was, “Whenever someone from my family, who I love and value, because now I have even more clarity on that value, whenever an individual comes in, I will actually stand from my desk, stop what I’m doing entirely, mid-word, mid-email, not finishing the thing, turn around, step out of the office, and be with them.”

So, it was just connecting. And you see how one of the things that is so important in this type of work, and just the same way in a business type of strategic plan, you want actions that are implementable, that you can do. And here, in this particular strategic resilience plan, we very much need these actions to be so small that we are highly likely to do them. So, they cannot take an immense amount of time, which no one has, because then you’re building self-efficacy.

You’re building that sense that you can do this, and from there, you can grow it if you want, but we have to start really small. Otherwise, most people’s schedules are full, overflowing even, and therefore no change is going to happen.

Pete Mockaitis
MH, I really love that notion of it’s super small. And I’m reminded of a conversation we had with BJ Fogg about tiny habits and how those really can be quite transformational. And so, we talked about the demands and supplies, so an economist thinks of supply and demand in terms of price versus quantity and what is the price point at which I’m willing to supply so many units of yada, yada. And you’re suggesting the units here, it sounds like, is not so much price, but energy. Is that accurate?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. Yes, I’m using the term because we are used to using these terms in a different context, and it just seems to resonate with people I’ve worked with. So, I’ve used them in different ways before, and it seems to resonate. So, yes, here I’m looking at, “Where is your energy going? That’s your sources of demands. And sources of supply, is what is bringing energy to you?”

Pete Mockaitis
Now, in a way, this can be tricky in terms of distinguishing the finer points here. Like, my precious children, of course, I love them, being with them is delightful. And other times, they’re driving me nuts. They are feeling like a demand. They’re sucking me dry. So how do you think about any acid tests or key indicators or guidelines you use when you’re categorizing stuff?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
No, go with the flow. Go with what’s easiest because, very much for any of the worksheets that I’ve developed and the ideas in the book, it very much is going with the done is better than perfect, Pete. And, yes, others have said golf also tends to fit on both the demand and the supply. So, yes, I would say keep going.

Put it in both columns if it fits there. For right now, the most important thing is we’re getting this done, and any of the exercises I’ve suggested there can usually be done in 5-10 minutes so that, I sometimes say if you’ve got a flight that makes you cross the continent, you can get out of your flight if you started at the beginning with your plan. So very doable, we’re not getting bogged down by details. I hear you. Some things will fit on both but most things will actually find their way in one, more clearly than the other.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think, with some careful reflection, discernment, you can, I think, distinguish some of the nuances. Like, working out or golf could be the same way as like, “Oh, golf is energizing when I’m connecting with really great people. And it’s not energizing when I’m stressing, trying to beat my best score ever,” for instance.

Or I can say that with weightlifting, “It’s energizing when I do a modest number of sets and I’m trying to beat my previous record. And it’s debilitating when I’m just doing tons of volume, and then it feels like more of a demand.” And I love that notion, specifically of the personalization with that example of the working from home, “I’m going to stop what I’m doing. I’m going to attend to the person.”

Because someone else may very well really love the flow states, and that’s more of a supply, like, “Man, when I get into an uninterrupted groove of 90 minutes of just creating something, that’s really a big supply,” and it would maybe, for that individual, be the opposite, “Oh, let me stop mid-word and address somebody.” That could be the opposite of a resilience-boosting approach for them.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
It could. But you see, I love where you’re going with this, because it does. It’s a great way to demonstrate how it will depend from one person to the other. Because, let’s say, I mean, it could actually, in fact, be in the same person, that you value your wonderful relationships, you want to honor them. If someone comes in, you want to really acknowledge them, and you also value when you’re in the flow of something and you want to maintain that creative path that you’re on.

So maybe what we’re saying is right now there’s a bit of a disconnect, because you do realize you want to keep going but someone interrupts you who you love and you want to honor. Maybe one of the pillars is called boundaries, and in those boundaries, when action will be to be a bit more deliberate about when you need to not be interrupted and make sure the door stays closed, not just for the Zoom meeting or the podcast recording, but also for the moments where you need that uninterrupted time.

So that way, you can still have the other action related to family members that you will interrupt yourself. If the door is open, that means you’re willing to interrupt whatever you’re doing, and you do. But if you’re in the flow, maybe you create the structures to protect that too.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, M.H., maybe, I know, in a way, this is an impossible request, but I’m going for it. Could we perhaps do a 10-minute rapid accelerated, like fast motion demo of, let’s say, you and I were creating a resilience plan, what would be step one? And I’ll give you just like a quick answer example.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I love it. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we’ll charge through.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
So, you’re willing to, you’re the person, you’re doing this. We’re doing this on you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. And I know we won’t get all the way done, but if we could just get a sense for, “Oh, I see what step one is and some of the outputs that might emerge from step one. And I see what step two is and some of the outputs,” you know, we’ll just get a sense.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Let’s do it. First, Pete, tell us some of the most important things for you in life. That’s your values. Don’t get bogged down on, “Is this a value or not?” Just tell me what comes to mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. God, integrity, service, growth, optimization, family.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. I’m making some notes so that I can help and remember. Okay, keep going. Next, tell us about, if we were to do a supply and demand table right now, we’re not doing a full table, but give us maybe top few, two or three demands you have on the work front these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, producing podcasts regularly; working with the production company and getting that squared away nicely; integrating two of those companies to serve people well; and not having anybody abandon us, either employees or customers in the shakeup.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Retention?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, give us some things on the personal side, things you’re willing to share with the entire planet?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Well, I mean, just kids, and they’re young, and their associated needs, just kind whatever we’re working through, like learning, and just making sure they’re healthy and safe and loved, and responding to their needs as they emerge.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Fantastic. Okay, let’s jump. If we were doing this fully, we would go in more details, but let’s keep going. On the supply side, what kinds of things on the work front give you energy?

Pete Mockaitis
On the work front? Well, I mean, I’m discovering really cool stuff from guests who say something that blow my mind, like, “Whoa, I’ve never heard that. That’s really interesting.” Maybe discovering new tools or approaches for getting things done and making things happen. Entering new domains, we’re getting some YouTube and some video stuff happening. So, I guess discovery exploration as a general theme, yeah.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
And give us maybe one on the personal side, sources of supply.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say exercise.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. Let’s go with this one for right now. Now, we’re probably going to skip doing the full SWOT analysis because that would be a bit longer than the 10-minute that we’re trying to reach here, unless you’re willing to give a shot at one thing in each quadrant. How do you feel, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
In general, like a strength, a weakness, an opportunity, and a threat in the domain of resilience?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I’ll guide you. Okay, let’s do it. You look like you’re going to do this. All right. On the individual side, so just looking at you as a person, what is one thing that makes building resilience naturally easy for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m reminded of BJ Fogg who told me, “Pete, you are a natural celebrator.” And it’s true.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, perfect. Okay, love it. It’s perfect. Now tell us something about you, same thing, you personally, that actually makes resilience building a bit challenging?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, probably like self-criticism or like the need to perform, like, “Oh, I’m so bad,” you know, if I screw something up.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Perfect. Yeah, you’re good. Great example. Okay. External, so in your context, around you, personal or work, something that makes resilience a bit easier for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Just like a general contextual, environmental, external thing that makes it easier?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
I would say, well, when family’s happy, that’s easier. Like, if they’re in a playful, “Ah, da-da, let’s do this fun thing!” mood, that’s easier as opposed to like, “Wah!” you know, they’re like bickering and arguing amongst themselves, like, “Oh, come on, man.”

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, okay, perfect. Great example. And last quadrant, you’re doing this, still on the external side, tell us an example of something that, in your overall context, makes resilience challenging?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe sleep interruptions, someone crawl into bed, waking me up too early.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, good. So now that we have this, we would design a strategic plan, and I often start with, say, three strategic pillars. Now, by strategic pillars, we’re talking about three directions that you would want to invest in. And within each of them, we’re going to find one action or a tactic that potentially you will consider.

So now that you’re looking at the values we’ve talked about, sources of supply and demand, and your overall context, I’m going to ask you first, otherwise I’ll provide ideas, but if something emerged for you, that’s usually a good place to start. Is there something that you’re already thinking, “Yeah, this looks like I could invest a bit more here,” and that may be a good idea?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess I’m thinking about on the work front, it’s like, at times, there are new cool fun interesting things I like to explore and try. And other times, I just sort of forget about that, sort of crank it out, like, “All right, next episode, let’s do that.” Like, “Oh, email process, go.” So, I mean, I have a giant list in OmniFocus of all these potential ideas or initiatives, and it would probably be really swell if I just had a short list I could refer to make sure that there’s usually something fun, cool, interesting, novel to explore and grow into there.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. So, pillar number one could be exploration focus, let’s say, and potentially one of your tactics there could be, I mean, one option is what you just described, creating a short list. Sometimes a short list can take a longer amount of time. If we wanted to scale this down even more, you could say pick one, one a month, just pick one.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Pick. It’s a good list. You’ve liked all these ideas anyway at some point. If you spend the time to rank and create the shortlist, that may take you too long and you may not do it. So, yeah, it could be either a shortlist or pick one a month and explore, for example. Okay, so we’ve got one pillar. Another pillar, do you have another one that came to mind or you want me to throw in one?

Pete Mockaitis
What you got?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay. Another one could be to be proactive on the family front. Now this is, I have little information, so I’m not saying you are or are not right now, but family is a value. It’s something that occupies an important part of your life. Potentially, there’s a part, there’s an opportunity to do one more thing even more proactive. Either you’re talking about the sleeping, kids are coming in, or sometimes, you also said it’s a strength when the family is happy, when everyone is in good moods and that kind of thing.

Do we have an opportunity to, I don’t know, once a week do a family check-in? Again, you may already be doing this. Or is this an opportunity to look at, “Who of the kids is now transitioning to an older age where we could look at helping shape their sleep patterns, for example, so something works a bit better?” So, I don’t want to dive too far, it’s personal life and all this. But that could be an example of another pillar that would combine some of the things you’ve observed and how things are going, as well as your values.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And what’s funny, what’s coming to mind is I’m just thinking about food.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Okay, tell me about this one.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like young kids get cranky when they don’t eat. And yet they might not eat because they don’t want whatever foods. And so, if I could get laser-focused on, “Okay, what are healthy foods you like to make sure they’re always in supply, that we could cut down on some of the crankiness because they don’t want to eat whatever we got, even though it’s perfectly good, and maybe they need to learn, whatever, in the short term, make sure? Okay, blueberries are the thing,” for example. “Let’s just make sure we always got ample blueberries in the refrigerator.”

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. So, you could literally have a pillar called food for kids with actions, like you said, it’s in supply. And maybe number two, you’re prompting the eating because sometimes it’s there, but no one’s touching it or whatever. And then they realize too far, or you realize far further on the road, that it’s impacting how they’re reacting. So, there you go. You can have your three pillars just like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, thank you. That’s fun. So, I know we just spent a lot of time talking about how it’s all custom, and context-specific, and everybody’s different. But now, M.H., I’m going to put you on the spot and tell us, what are some top pillars and tactics that you’ve just noticed seem to come up again and again and again, and be super helpful when people embark upon, knowing they may well not be applicable for all persons?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. Well, I mean, there are areas that we know from research if we, all of us, it’s just the implementation needs to be very personalized. But the reality is that humans, in general, and we know this from body of research, decades of research, we will be more resilient if we are doing more on the exercise front three types of things: cardio, strength training, and meditative type activity. So, that’s one.

We will be more resilient if our nutrition is better, so it connects with the pillar, your food pillar here. And we have solid research, literally showing a difference if we’re having this meal healthier, it will have an impact. It’s not just long term, 20 years from now. It’s having an impact. Our sleep will have an impact on our resilience.

Spending time with people we enjoy spending time with, and then there are additional ones, like time in nature, doing pleasurable activities, things you enjoy doing, which is critical for recovery from work so that we can then bring our best to what we do. Other themes that fairly often will emerge for individuals I work with, there usually is some version of better boundaries, however it gets defined, that’s often there.

Fairly often, there is this element of managing my time differently, connects a bit with boundaries, but sometimes it’s also very time-specific, again with that tendency to underestimate how long something is going to take. Yeah, so some of these are examples.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And then perhaps within a couple of these, could you share some top do’s and don’ts, like some things that people might get wrong? For example, with exercise, perhaps folks overdo it and it’s counterproductive. I’ve been there. Or they neglect one side of things, like maybe, “Strength is not my thing. I don’t want to get too big, bulky muscles.” That’s a whole another conversation. But tell us, are there any top do’s or don’ts that you find within these domains?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Yes. On the exercise front, more people, if they do anything in this area, they’ll be on the sort of active recovery, and will see meditation as something that is not for them, either because they’re like, “Ah, I’m not that person,” or they’ll say, “I’ve tried it, MH, and I can’t calm my brain down. It’s just not for me.” Well, hello, the reality is that research is crystal clear. It is critical for all of us. It makes a huge difference. So that’s probably one of the next frontiers. If you’re wondering what to do next, that probably would be the one.

Now, here’s the key thing. If you’ve tried it and you’re in that camp saying, “My brain just doesn’t slow down. It’s not for me,” all that, change your success criterion. It’s not about, “Did I calm my brain down and leave these feelings out?” No, success criterion, “Did you press play on the thing? And did you sit down trying to do it, and doing your best to bring your focus back on your breathing?” for example, whatever the guideline was. And that’s it.

If you’ve pressed play, you’ve done it, two minutes, four minutes, whatever the duration is, start small, full points for this, even if your brain was going the whole time. So that’s an example. Meditation would be one. Another area to really consider is the sleep. People will tend to bring their electronics in the bedroom, which then becomes tricky, because if we don’t sleep in the middle of the night, it’s very easy to reach for the electronic, which then is engaging the brain as opposed to giving the brain the message that, “No, no, no, it’s time to sleep.”

So, the “don’t” would be don’t bring the electronics in the bedroom. If your phone is your alarm, buy a small travel alarm, and that will be smaller than your phone probably and will ensure that you actually create the boundary there as well. So, these are some examples. Sometimes people are skipping meals on the nutrition front, so making sure there are easy things. You were talking about kids earlier, but it’s true for us too. Sometimes the day will go so fast, we’ll just reach for what’s easy, and that may not be what’s going to help the brain best sustain for all the next hours. So proactively planning for this, that is another example.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And with the research on meditation, you mentioned two minutes, four minutes, does the research suggest that such small doses are actually effective and useful for us?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Anything’s better than nothing, but in eventually, yes, longer will have more benefits. But again, here we are about starting small. Even smaller than this. You could start with just committing to doing five deep breaths while you’re washing your hands. We wash our hands many times a day. It does not require more time for you because you’re still doing this. Might as well use the moment to slow the breath down completely, all the air out, and slowly breathe in. It’s there and it’s a start. And what happens when we start in these smaller ways, we build that sense of self-efficacy, that we can influence this and that builds. Once we start building this, we will be able to extend over time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, MH, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I would say stay curious for the small actions. And I know how everybody, how so busy, so full everyone’s schedule is. If it feels like you can actually step away and create, invest in creating that plan for yourself, fantastic. If it feels like even that is too much for right now, then start with something very, very small.

But the reality is you will need to invest in yourself so you can bring your best to what you do in your personal and your professional life. It will serve as a protective factor from burnout. It will serve as a model for others, whether it’s your kids or people you work with. And so, staying curious about your next action and implementing is key.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I’m going to go, and that’s very much the spirit of this book, with, “Done is better than perfect.”

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Recent research on priming, so the non-conscious ways in which we can support our brain in attaining our goals. And there’s been fascinating research there, I could give you an example, but the short point of this is, if we expose our brain in advance to an image or words that represent our goal, and we know images are actually even more powerful, we’re increasing our chances of reaching this goal. Still need all the conscious planning, the smart goals, the planning for it, the small initially, the whole thing, we need all this, and priming can help. Fascinating research there.

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you say priming, just like, if I want to be in shape, I could get a picture of an underwear model and post that somewhere that I’ll see you regularly, and that in and of itself will increase the odds of me achieving the goal?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right. And it could be that, it could be weights, it could be whatever for you represents that goal, yes. And it just needs to be at a place where your eyes see it so you don’t need to think about it, meditate, visualize. These are other processes that are also positive, but priming, it truly is just about your eyes seeing it.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular researcher or journal article we should link to there?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
There are. Two key researchers would be Latham and Locke. So, if you search Latham and Locke and you look for priming, you’re going to get to their research and then many others.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I’m going to go with Mind Over Mood written by Greenberger and Padesky, over a million copies sold, 20 plus languages translated. It’s a very practical workbook, so it has theories that come from psychology, as well as exercises, always, to implement. And it’s a book that I think everyone should have in their homes, at work. It just provides great tools to deal with normal parts of life, some that are easier to manage, some that may be more challenging, but just research-based, very practical.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Well, I want to say, I’m going to say, actually, doing a strategic resilience plan, because I’ve used it. I’ve used it in various phases of various demands I’ve gone through personally. I’ve seen others, obviously, but I’m using this tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Walk outside.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
“Anything’s better than nothing.”

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
TheResiliencePlan.com will get you to everything I do. Always happy to connect on LinkedIn as well, and love to see what others are thinking and doing and all that. So that’s another great way.

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Step back and be strategic about your resilience the same way you’re strategic in what you do at work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. MH, this has been fun. I wish you much resilience and adventure.

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Thank you. Love that, resilience and adventure. And same to you, Pete, and to your audience.

Jun 27
0

974: The Eight Inner Skills to Career Happiness with Stella Grizont

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Stella Grizont shares the simple things everyone can do to feel happier and more fulfilled every day.

You’ll Learn

  1. The master key for overcoming toxic situations
  2. The key response that builds quality relationships
  3. How to set healthy boundaries without feeling guilty 

About Stella

Time Magazine named Stella a leading happiness expert. As a speaker and executive coach, Stella works with leaders who are seeking deeper career fulfillment and with organizations that are dedicated to elevating the well-being and engagement of their employees. Her debut book based on her signature coaching program, The Work Happiness Method: Master the 8 Skills to Career Fulfillment, was an instant USA Today Bestseller.

In the last 17 years, Stella has coached over 1,800 individuals in over 30 countries. Stella was one of the first 150 people in the world to earn a master’s in Applied Positive Psychology (aka the science of happiness) from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, daughter, and son, who continue to teach her what life is all about.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Stella Grizont Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Stella, welcome.

Stella Grizont
Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom associated with work happiness. Could you tell us any particularly extra surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about work happiness with all of your coaching and putting together your book here?

Stella Grizont
Well, in the book, I did a lot of research, and one of the things that’s really just stuck with me was around how much social support matters. And when we’re in a state of fight or flight, and we’re feeling stressed, just having a friend or someone we know who cares about us by our side can literally change our perception of reality. It can change how we feel about the challenge ahead. It transforms how we estimate how hard something is.

There was a study done where researchers took two groups of participants at the base of a hill, and one group got to stand with a friend by their side and another group was standing on their own. And they were asked, “How steep is this hill? How steep is the slant of this hill?” And those with a friend by their side estimated the steepness to be less.

So, when you’re asking about how we perceive the challenge ahead, or what do we think about a really difficult situation, the presence of a friend can actually change how we perceive what’s up ahead. And so, that’s just really oriented me to, especially as an introvert, to make sure that I’m supplementing. We supplement with vitamins but we have to make sure we’re really supplementing with people that we care about and feel connected to.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s really intriguing, the notion of how difficult we estimate a thing to be is variable. And I’ve seen that in my own world in terms of if I’m feeling kind of stressed about a thing, it’s like, “Oh, this is probably going to take two hours.” It’s like, “Okay, no, it took half an hour, but I was just freaking out.”

Stella Grizont
Our emotions really determine the reality that we experience. They can influence the reality that we experience. They’re both like information about what’s happening, but then they also influence how we perceive what’s happening, so it’s a two-way street. And if we know that, we can actually, and one of the skills I teach in my book, is, “How do you manage your mind and mood so that you can see more, so that you can be more, so that you can be more in control?”

And if we know this about ourselves, we can make more conscious choices about what moods we’re cultivating and how we respond to our own emotions so that we can set ourselves up to flourish and have more ease and think more clearly.

Pete Mockaitis
I definitely want to talk about managing moods. And maybe, first of all, if there’s anyone who’s perhaps skeptical about that that’s even possible, like, “Moods just kind of fall upon us. Can one even manage them?” could you maybe give us an inspiring story of someone who managed their mood and used some of these other skills to really see a cool transformation?

Stella Grizont
Whenever I give a talk we go through some evidence-based techniques, and within 30 seconds, participants are like, “Oh, my shoulders are relaxing,” or “I feel lighter,” or “I feel more relaxed,” and it doesn’t take much for us to change our minds and moods. Our emotions are in motion, and that’s a good thing, that they’re never constant, because they’re datapoints about our surroundings. And sometimes we can’t control our initial response, even though we’d really love to, but we can control our response to our response once we notice that emotion.

So, I had a client who was dealing with a manager who was a bully. I mean, he would yell inappropriately, use inappropriate language. It was very inappropriate, and she found herself crying all the time, and she had never been in that position before. She was a people manager, very successful, but this guy was not only inappropriate, but really getting to her, and she felt like she couldn’t hold it together in his presence.

And so, we practiced, she went through “The Work Happiness Method,” which is now a book, but it’s also a coaching program, and we really worked on some techniques to help her attune to who she wanted to show up as, and just simple techniques, practicing breath work, getting clear on her vision of who she wanted to be, remembering her sense of control, preparing for that difficult conversation. So, there are so many things that we can do that are simple and instant. I mean, if you want, we can get through some, we can do some right now for folks.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess what I’m curious to hear is, so she did those things and then what happened on the other side?

Stella Grizont
So, we prepared for a difficult conversation, and the most difficult part of a difficult conversation is your preparation beforehand. That’s what I call your approach, that’s another skill that we cover in the book, because your energy is everything in a difficult conversation. Our moods are contagious. Our emotions are contagious for a number of reasons. We have mirror neurons, so when a baby’s smiling, we can’t help but smile. But when someone’s also really angry and frustrated, we find ourselves clenching up and feeling like something’s off.

And so, we’re just able to catch each other’s moods. So, if you’re going to go into a difficult conversation, the number one thing you can control is your energy beforehand. And so, we made sure that she was in a good place, that she felt confident going in, that she felt neutral, that she even had empathy for this really horrible leader, and she was able to actually express that she would no longer be able to work in these conditions.

If they were going to be able to work together and have a positive working relationship, they needed to re-examine how they communicated. And she ended up staying at that organization and actually getting a lot of the things that she needed, including additional support and headcount, including more travel that she wanted. So, it really was transformational for her.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really beautiful. I think a lot of times, if we are encountering someone who’s toxic and very problematic, we can conclude, “Well, that person is just a jerk and this is a hopeless situation. There’s nothing I can do. I just got to look for the exit.” And yet, here you are when you share, in some cases, very clearly, “These conditions are not working for me and they’ll need to change or I’ll need to exit,” then good things can happen. Folks can have a transformation.

I’m curious, on the receiving end there, how was the manager responding to that information? Like, “Oh, my gosh, I’m so sorry. I had no idea,” or was it like, “Yeah, I have some problems, I’ve been working on them. Thank you for being clear with me. This is a wake-up call.” How does one receive that without just flipping out and making it worse?

Stella Grizont
I don’t think there was an apology, but there was, the things that she had requested, he responded to. So, she had asked for, if he was feeling frustrated, for him to talk about it sooner rather than later, for him to be able to write things out, for him to give her additional support, for them to do more planning together so he wasn’t so surprised. So, he actually changed his behavior.

But in this case, what was more important for her was actually her demonstrating to herself that she could have this conversation. That was the growth for her. And so, there’s always growth opportunities in really challenging moments. And for her, it was witnessing herself be powerful in a very, very challenging moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Stella, this is inspiring stuff. So, we are not victims to our moods. We are not even victims to terrible bosses or toxic environments. There’s a lot of power that we could summon and make happen. So, I want to dig into some of these particular tools in a moment. But first could you give us, from all your research, what’s kind of the state of work happiness these days? 

Stella Grizont
So, generally, we know that about three-quarters of employees are not engaged.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah, the Gallup stuff.

Stella Grizont
The Gallup stuff, right. So, we all know that we’re very disengaged, but just as a background, the U.S. has dropped in terms of happiness levels. According to the 2024 World Happiness Report, the U.S. fell eight places from 15th place to 23rd place.

Pete Mockaitis
In one year?

Stella Grizont
In one year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, bummer.

Stella Grizont
But you know what? To be honest, 15th isn’t that great either for being one of the most wealthy nations, a democracy. And it’s been pretty flat. And I think the reason why the U.S. has not been in a great place, and it’s gotten even worse, is because we’re lonely and we’re isolated. Not just because, you know, we started off our conversation about how much social support matters. Well, relationships are the number one predictor of our happiness, the number one predictor of our happiness, above and beyond how healthy we are, how much money we earn, how successful we are, how confident we are.

And so, in the United States, we tend to prioritize our work over our connections. We move cross-country for our jobs and so we end up dislodging our social connections, our familial connections, and then we’re also working from home now, and we’re not getting just interaction. And what researchers have found is that, just like we need a diverse diet of, like, veggies and proteins and grains, we also need a diverse social diet.

So, it’s not just about staying connected to people who we have strong social ties with, we also need a lot of weak social ties, like saying hello to the postal worker, saying hello to the security guard, having a nice chit-chat with the person who’s making you coffee, or the Uber driver. We need interactions because they signal to our nervous system that we’re safe.

And, again, that’s what also signals what we’re up against, and that can create a veil over how we perceive anything, whether it’s if someone says, “Hey, can we talk about X, Y, and Z?” and you perceive that as a threat, or as, “Oh, let’s just explore.” So, our nervous system is constantly on patrol for threat, and if we feel lonely, then our body is in a stressed-out state and we’re more likely to perceive everything as a threat and feel quite unhappy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so social stuff is big. That’s come up a couple times already. Within your work, The Work Happiness Method, any pro tips on dealing with that in the context of work careers?

Stella Grizont
Well, one, this actually wasn’t in the book, but this is one of my favorite tools to share, just a very practical tool. When someone comes to you with good news, it’s so important for us to respond with celebration. So, this is the easiest hack for building quality relationships. So, researchers found that there’s four main ways that we respond to good news. One response is active-destructive.

So, let’s say my husband tells me he got a promotion, I could say, “Oh, you got a promotion. This means you’re going to be working late. You’re never going to be home. I’m going to have to do more bedtime with the kids.” So, I’m actively destroying his high. That’s the worst way we can respond is when we just like pummel the goodness.

Then a little bit better but still horrible is passive-destructive, and that’s where someone says, my husband says he had a raise or a promotion, and I would say, “What do you want for dinner?” So, I just ignore his good news and I jump into something else. Slightly better is passive-constructive, and that’s where he says, “Oh, my God, I got a promotion, I got a raise,” and then I would say, “That’s nice. So, what should we eat?” So, I acknowledged it but not really.

And the most optimal way we want to respond to someone else’s good news is with our presence, our attention, our curiosity. We want to actively build up and savor the good news. And so, that would sound like, “Oh, my God, tell me all about it. That’s so exciting. I know you worked so hard. How are you feeling about it? Tell me all the details.” So, we’re having them reconstruct the event, re-savor the event. We’re adding to it.

And so, the reason why we want to do this is because it signals to the other person that we are a safe person for them to go to when they are ready to celebrate. We all have had good news in our life and have all made conscious decisions about, “Ooh, I don’t want to tell this person because they’re just going to make me feel like crap afterwards. They’re not a safe person for me to go to.”

And so, what researchers have found is that the relationships we go to when we have good news actually matter more than when we have bad news. So how we respond to people in good times actually matters more than how we respond in bad times when it comes to cultivating a strong relationship. So, just celebrate. Be a better celebrator.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. I love it. And I’m reminded we had a conversation with B.J. Fogg, and we were talking more about habits. But he said that celebration is absolutely such a top important thing associated with creation of habits, and now also for relationships. So, good stuff. And I think, is this the Gottman Research, these four response approaches? It sounds a little familiar.

Stella Grizont
This is actually from Shelly Gable, and she discovered these four responses to good news.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I’m wondering, I don’t know if it was Shelly Gable or John Gottman or whom, but I think that the data was pretty striking that having a minimal acknowledgement was like almost as bad as being actively destructive, like it was pretty shocking how, “Hey, great job,” and a quick move on is nearly as devastating as just being totally mean.

Stella Grizont
Yeah, I mean, if you think about it, as humans, we crave a sense of meaning and purpose. And we don’t have to climb a mountaintop to feel on purpose. We don’t have to do grand gestures to be on purpose. We want to contribute to something bigger. And why do we want to contribute to something bigger? Because we want to matter somehow, and mattering can be experienced by just feeling someone else’s presence and care, and giving that presence and care.

And so, we’re just beautifully interlocked to matter to each other. It’s the bedrock of our wellbeing and of our success. So, if we just help someone else matter, and also feel that we matter to someone else, it can catapult our success. It can catapult our wellbeing and our happiness.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Stella, we’ve got some good stuff on relationships. You have, in fact, eight essential skills in your Work Happiness Method. Could you give us maybe the quick four-minute bird’s-eye overview of what are these eight essential skills?

Stella Grizont
Sure. So, the first one is resilience, and that’s how to manage your mind and mood because we have to start there. The second is having a clear vision of what success means to you, so it’s clarity, and knowing who you want to be, who are you when you are most alive. Most of us define success backwards. We, first, pick really sexy goals, and we think of all the things we want to achieve.

The problem with that is that, and I’m sure many of your listeners have experienced this, you can achieve all the things and still be left feeling empty, burnt out, lonely, or completely confused about who you are. And so, what we want to do is reverse engineer and first identify, “How do I want to feel and be at work?” and then choose goals that support that. And so, the second chapter and the second skill is all about figuring out who you want to be.

After we figure that out and we develop your vision, then we build the skill around purpose, and that’s about making decisions that support your being, the person you defined in your vision. It’s about knowing how to make decisions with confidence so that you can feel on purpose every day. Now, once we know how to manage your mind and mood, we have your vision, we have your values, now it’s time for you to set your boundaries, and that’s what the next chapter is about, and that’s the next important inner skill.

And boundaries are less about saying no, but they’re actually more about saying yes to what matters, yes to your vision, yes to your values. So, I walk people through, very practically, “Where do you set boundaries? How do you set them? And also, how do you have compassion for yourself if it’s really freaking hard for you to do it?” Because I am a recovering people-pleaser, and I think folks who are people-pleasers are the ones who really have a hard time with boundaries.

And it’s important to understand that people, we talk about people-pleasing so casually, but actually for many folks, it’s actually a trauma response. And so, it’s very important to understand the psychology behind why we struggle with boundaries because it will help set you free. So, once we know what our boundaries are, and we create greater ease for us to be who we want to be, then we talk about, “Well, how do you be who you want to be in times of uncertainty?” And that’s through the inner skill of play.

Playfulness is an inherent capability that we have as humans, and it helps us navigate uncertainty and flourish through it so we don’t stay stuck. And then once we learn how to be more playful, especially in hard and uncertain times, the next inner skill is about discovery, and that’s about exploring. Now that we can have a play mindset in the face of uncertainty, how do we figure out what’s next?

So, whether you’re just, you know, doing okay and you just don’t know what’s next, whether or not there’s lots of uncertainty and change in your organization, maybe there’s some kind of health scare or change within your family, like, “How do you explore what’s next in a way that will set you up to flourish?”

And then it’s inevitable that we have to talk to people when it comes to just navigating the world, and so I have a chapter on approach, which is about, “How do you have those difficult conversations? And how do you set yourself up for transformation instead of confrontation?” And then the final inner skill that I cover is called refocus, and that’s about, “How do you return to yourself when things get off track? When things don’t go your way, how do you settle with the universe? And how do you make sense out of hard times?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. So, we’ve had some good chats about relationship bits. When it comes to managing mood, are there any top tactics that are really just transformational here?

Stella Grizont
One of my favorite tools to give my clients is called the complaint vacation. So, we often find ourselves complaining aloud or even in our heads, and complaining is not just noticing what’s wrong, it’s the additional suffering about what’s wrong. So, it’s not just saying, “It’s really hot outside today.” It’s, “Oh, it’s so hot. Oh, my God, I’m so tired of this weather.” So, it’s the grievance, it’s the suffering. That’s a choice.

And so, if there’s something that you find yourself complaining about pretty regularly, just give yourself permission for the next week to take a vacation from that because I think we all are tired of our own complaining. I like to couple a complaint vacation with gratitude. So, it’s not just noticing what’s wrong but it’s paying extra special attention to what is right. And it’s not just listing off what’s right, but it’s what’s uniquely right today.

So, it’s not just that I’m grateful for my family, but I’m so grateful for the snuggles I had with my three-year-old before he went to daycare. So it’s getting really, really specific. And then, finally, you know, I think one of the things when it comes to managing our mind and mood is people think that being happy is just about like noticing what’s good, but actually I think one of the keys and skills to being happy is knowing how to be unhappy, and how to actually be with your negative emotions.

And so, one of the simplest things you can do when you notice you’re feeling off and you’re not in the mood that you’d like to be is just to be curious about that mood, and first just label that emotion. Like, if you’re feeling off, take a moment and be like, “Okay, what’s this about?” Get curious, “What is this? Is this frustration? Is this disappointment? Is this anger? Is this loneliness?” Give it a name.

Because when we give it a name, we’re actually shifting the brain activity from our amygdala, the fight-or-flight center, to our prefrontal cortex, which is the big-picture thinking, that’s the planning, that’s the executive function, and so we’re able to actually help ourselves. Because once we label, then we’re like, “Oh, I’m just feeling really frustrated that that report didn’t go out on time. Maybe I should talk about processes with my team so that we can prevent that moving forward.”

So, we start to help ourselves. Metabolize the emotion faster. So just by labeling the emotion and being with it and being curious about it, not trying to push it away, you can actually help yourself be happier in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. I like that notion of what’s uniquely good about this today in terms of getting that brain kind of tuned into that stuff and noticing what’s really special about that. That’s really cool. When one does a complaint vacation, I can see how we can catch ourselves in not verbalizing complaints, yet still, quite possibly internally in our own mind’s ear, rattle off plenty of complaints. How do you think about approaching that?

Stella Grizont
Yeah, I love that question. And this is the thing with when we complain, this is just something I’ve noticed, is that we’ve usually skipped over the step of acknowledging our emotion. We’ve actually bypassed our own emotion, and now we’re in an instant place of suffering. So, there’s probably a space before that, before we get really like annoyed or flustered, or we’re suffering or we’re complaining, that we skipped over.

And so, just acknowledging your emotions can actually help you be with the event without having extra layers of suffering about it.

So, if you find yourself in a complaining loop, you want to pause and, again, be curious, and be like, “What’s really going on for me here?” Because it’s probably not the thing. There’s some emotion that wants attention. And if we just get quiet enough to notice it, that’s actually the first step of having some self-compassion, and then we might say to ourselves, “Wow, of course I’m feeling really upset. It’s hot and it’s uncomfortable and I can’t do my work. And that makes it really hard.”

And then the next step of self-compassion is just being gentle with yourself like you would a friend. Like, “Yeah, of course, Stella.” Like validating your emotions. And then you want to remind yourself that you’re human, just like everyone else, and, yeah, being really sweaty is going to make anyone grumpy, and just be kind and compassionate. And that can actually transform the complaining, and that can really slow down the volume of that complaining and then to notice what’s good if you can. And that’s what I hope for everyone who reads the book or whoever I work with, is to realize their power over their experience. And the power is first realizing, “I am complaining,” or, “I’m noticing myself complaining,” and then to notice that you have choices. That’s the power. So, if you are noticing you’re complaining, you’re already in a good place. You’re already winning because you’re at least observing it.

Pete Mockaitis
To note, the particular emotion, and not jump through it. I’m reminded of Dr. Trevor Kashey. We’ve got to get him on the show. He has a framework that is STFU, which is sort of a joke in and of itself, which is like stimulus, thought, feeling, urge. And these are four separate things. Like, what you want to run and go do, the urge is different than the thought that you’re having, or the feeling you’re having, or the thing itself that’s present.

And I find that’s kind of helpful to you stop and march through that, and say, “Oh, okay,” we’re going to have a moment where we could just go ahead and feel that thing and let that flow through for a moment, and that’s all right, and maybe even helpful in just letting it pass instead of just telling a big old story and perpetuating it.

Stella Grizont
Yes. If we could slow down just a little bit, like in general as humans, and touch base with ourselves, we realize our power, we metabolize our emotions better, and we make better choices. So, I think a lot, we could all benefit with slowing down.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m curious now with regard to the boundaries. Any favorite words, phrases, scripts you might suggest, because we could feel maybe uncomfortable in establishing a boundary? It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want to upset them,” or “I make them think I’m unmotivated or lazy or not a team player,” etc. Any magical turns of phrase you might suggest for folks?

Stella Grizont
Absolutely. So, as I shared before, I’m a recovering people-pleaser, and this is a lifelong practice. All of these tools, they’re all part of building a skillset, and you have to keep at it, or we just get stronger and better. And so, if you’re an auto-yes kind of person and someone’s like, “Hey, can you join this committee?” or “Hey, can you do this by 5:00?” or “Hey, we’d love your help,” if you find yourself automatically saying yes right away, one thing you can do is just delay.

So, you would say, “Hey, thanks so much for considering me for this. Can I get back to you in an hour, in a day, next week? Can I get back to you? Thanks so much. Can I get back to you?” This will buy you time to make a more conscious decision and decide, “Is this a yes for me? Is this a no?” Or, “Do I have questions? What’s driving the timing? Why me? Why are we doing this?”

So, oftentimes, again, it’s about slowing things down so that you can make more conscious decisions. So, I would just ask for some time, “Let me look at my schedule. I want to give you my best. I haven’t had a chance to assess what I have going on this week.” And people are happy to give you time.

When it comes to boundaries, it’s really about microdosing. I call it microdosing. So baby, baby, baby, baby steps. Because what you’re doing is you’re retraining your nervous system to feel safe even when maybe people aren’t totally pleased. So, we need to train ourselves to feel safe. And so, one microdose, one little baby step you can take is just to say, “Let me get back to you.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, tell me, Stella, anything you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Stella Grizont
Writing this book took me over nine years, and it was something I really wrestled with. And there were many times where it felt like I was pushing and I wasn’t going anywhere. And I talk about this inner skill of refocusing, which sometimes requires us to stay down when we’re down. It sometimes requires us to listen and learn from when things don’t go our way.

And I just want to offer some words of encouragement for folks who feel like they’re hitting a wall. And in the book, I talk about, well, maybe it’s not so much of a setback, but a setup for something better, and to really question, “How is this serving me? What growth is this setting me up for? What is this signaling?”

Really asking some bigger questions so that you can get to transform through that really hard time. Because I truly believe it’s all of service, just like that client who was dealing with the bully, like she got to step up and really regain her power, and that was a gift that her boss gave her even though he was an a-hole.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Yeah, well it’s done, a setup, instead of a setback. Cool. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Stella Grizont
So the founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, I hope I’m saying that right, he said, “It’s not that I don’t get off-center, it’s that I return to center so quickly no one ever notices.” And so that’s the thing with all these inner skills, we’re going to mess up. The work is not to be perfect. The work is in returning to ourselves a little faster, a little bit more gracefully each time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And favorite study or piece of research?

Stella Grizont
So, in 2006, there was this eye-tracking study done by Wadlinger and Isaacowitz, where they took two groups of participants, and they induced one group of participants into a positive mood by just showing them pictures, puppies, babies. And then another, they took another group and induced them into a negative mood, and then they put eye-tracking goggles on them, and they asked them to look at an image on a screen.

And the people who were in a negative mood, their eyes tended to stay on one particular area of the screen and just hover there, focus. And then those who were in a positive mood, their eyes tended to go around the periphery of the screen and then scatter within. So, they literally took in the big picture. They saw more. The people who are in a negative mood kind of had tunnel vision. So, again, it just shows the impact of our emotions on how we see the world, and how important it is for us to manage our minds and moods so that we can see more.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Stella Grizont
This is a book by Mark Nepo, and it’s Seven Thousand Ways to Listen: Staying Close to What Is Sacred.

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

Stella Grizont
At the end of the day, and this is a tool I share in my book, I ask myself what I call accountability questions, which are questions to reflect on three values I’m looking to amplify in my life. So, they’re open-ended and they’re “How did I support my well-being today, because my vitality is important?” “How did I express love to the people I care about?” And the third one I move around a lot, but it’s actually now it’s going to be about play, but it’s, “How did I have fun today?”

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

Stella Grizont
Well, people really love this exercise that I have that’s called the Vision Generator, and that’s what you do in Chapter 2. People can, if they don’t want to buy the book, which I’d love them to, or do the course, you can get it for free at VisionGenerator.com. And what people often love is the ease and the hand-holding to really go deep and reflect on what one really, really, really wants, and so they really love that exercise because that really sets them free. And to realize that there’s infinite ways to feel more satisfied at work and in your life, even if the circumstances are what they are and they’re not perfect.

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

Stella Grizont
They can go to my website, StellaGrizont.com. And I’m also on Instagram and LinkedIn.

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

Stella Grizont
I would start with the Vision Generator. So, if you want to be awesome at your job, you have to know what’s important, how you want to show up, and knowing your vision is so critical because it organizes your values, the steps that you take, and the behaviors you engage in. And so, that’s vision generator, and they can get that at VisionGenerator.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Stella, this has been a treat. I wish you much work happiness.

Stella Grizont
Thank you so much, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Jun 06
0

968: How to Experience More Purpose and Passion Each Day with John R. Miles

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

John R. Miles shares powerful insight into what it takes to live an intentional and purposeful life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to feel impervious in the face of adversity and failure
  2. How anxiety makes you 400% more effective 
  3. How to visualize effectively 

About John

John R. Miles is a worldwide expert on intentional behavior change, leadership, and personal mastery. He is a keynote speaker, top-rated show host, and is the founder and CEO of Passion Struck®. Miles is devoted to promoting personal mastery, fostering an intentional mindset, enhancing health and wellness, and building meaningful relationships. His globally renowned podcast, Passion Struck with John R. Miles, has garnered tens of millions of downloads and consistently tops the charts as the number one alternative health podcast on iTunes. Miles is committed to inspiring people worldwide to believe in their ability to push beyond limits and achieve their aspirations. He is a graduate of the Naval Academy, where he excelled as a varsity athlete. Learn more by visiting johnrmiles.com or passionstruck.com.

Resources Mentioned

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John R. Miles Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis 

John, welcome. 

John Miles 

Pete, it is so fantastic to be here. Thank you for the honor of having me on. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Well, yeah, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom, and I’d love it if you could kick us off with any particularly striking, or surprising, or extra fascinating discoveries you’ve made while doing your interviews and putting together your book, Passion Struck. 

John Miles 

A person I love to quote, because I love her work, is Sharon Salzberg, and she has a quote that I just love, that “There’s no commodity that we can take with us. There’s only our lives. And whether we live them wisely or whether we live them in ignorance, and this is everything.” 

Pete Mockaitis 

Okay. And tell me more about how that really grabs you. 

John Miles 

It grabs me because I think so many of us live in the subconscious. We’re not really active and being intentional in creating and crafting the life that we want, and so we end up living it in a way that isn’t as authentic as it could be to what we could accomplish if we were aligning our actions with our ambitions and our long-term aspirations. And I think that’s really what she’s getting at is the well-lived life versus a life of just going throughout our days as if we’re a pinball, actively engaging with everything around us but doing it in an unintentional way.  

Pete Mockaitis 

That’s a cool visual, or should I say a haunting, shocking visual, thinking about a pinball just bouncing around and actively engaging with everything, when some things are better to not be engaged with at times. Could you make this all the more real for us with a cool story of someone who found themselves kind of in pinball mode and then made some changes and unlocks some really cool stuff?  

John Miles 

Yes. So, a great person to highlight would be Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who I highlight in the book. 

And I think his story is a great one to illustrate this point, because if you look back upon it, we see the person today who’s the megastar, one of the highest paid actors in Hollywood, but at the beginning of his career he actually spent a pretty considerable amount of time without any money, basically living almost homeless before he found his way to going into the WWE, but at that time he was going by his real name, and it wasn’t until sometime after that that he took on The Rock, which was actually his father’s name, and started to build his career. 

But what really differentiates Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is that he is a constant reinventor. There are so many times in his life that he could have plateaued and stood where he was, but he continuously strove to take those steps that would take him to the next place. And so that led him next into acting and then, even when he was an actor, he envisioned himself becoming even a greater actor in the pinnacle of male actors of his time. And it was through this constant manifesting that he took himself from this point where his life was completely at a point of desperation to what we see today. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Yeah, that is powerful. I understand, in his story, that he pretty much just declared, “I’m going to be a superstar,” and he took inventory of what’s up, he’s like, “Well, I’m pretty good at building muscles so that’s going to be part of the differentiator, and I’m going to hit the gym like mad in order to really become jacked, huge, shredded, etc.” so as to facilitate his journey to superstardom. 

John Miles 

No, I think that’s absolutely the case, and I think you bring up something that’s really important is, he had already started having this long-term aspiration that he wanted to manifest. And then I think what he did, and so many failed to do, is he started to take those daily actions that were getting him closer, and he aligned those actions with the short-term ambitions that he had along the path to reaching the long-term aspirations that he wanted. And that’s really the core of a lot about what I talk about through the lens of Passion Struck and creating a passion-struck life is aligning those three very things.  

Pete Mockaitis 

Well, it sounds like is that how you would articulate the big idea or core message of Passion Struck to make the shift from just existing and reacting and bouncing around like a pinball to getting in the proactive driver’s seat and making it happen? Or how would you articulate the key thesis? 

John Miles 

Yeah, well, the core thesis is it is a state of alignment, like I talked about, where actions, intentions, ambitions, and aspirations are in perfect harmony, but it’s more than that. It really represents a transformative mindset and behavior shift that’s essential for what I think is rewiring the patterns of default that so many of us end up dictating our entire lives to attaining. 

And it really emphasizes the importance of synchronizing what we do, why we do it, what do we hope to achieve, ensuring that every step that we take is infused with purpose and passion. And so that’s what Passion Struck really is, is it’s this never-ending pursuit of becoming your ideal self the best that you could possibly be. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Oh, that’s great. Well, you’ve got six mindset shifts and six behavior changes, and I’m going to rattle off the quick one-sentence version or teaser of what those are in a moment, but first I want to give you first crack at it. I love that turn-of-phrase you had, “rewiring our default setting.” So, answer me this, John, if there were a single setting within us, a toggle switch where we could shift the default from A to B, what do you think is the most leveraged impactful shift we could make? What’s our default setting? What’s the optimal setting? And how do we make that transition? 

John Miles 

I think for me, what’s top of mind today is motivation and what motivates us. So, I think in default, we tend to be motivated by the extrinsic things in life, the things that we’re led to believe will bring us happiness and success, which comes down to the money we make, the way we present ourselves to the world, the houses that we own, the neighborhoods we live in, the cars we drive, the titles we hold. 

And I think the shift that we really need to make is a shift towards intrinsic motivation acting as the cohesive glue that links our mindset, our behavior, and our deliberate action. That doesn’t mean that you can live without extrinsic motivation. It just means that the default should be more leaning in on the internal drive that fuels our journey towards a life of passion and purpose.  

Pete Mockaitis 

That does seem like a superior setting to be rolling with. John, tell us, how do we go about flipping that switch? 

John Miles 

So, I think right now, there is a profound sense of what I call un-mattering in the world. And before I started this journey of creating Passion Struck, I was given this vision over a decade ago that I was being called to serve, at the time, the words that were coming to me were the lonely, hopeless, broken, beaten, bored, battered of the world. And I had no idea what to do with it because my back story at that time was, I was a successful business executive. I was a C-suite exec in a Fortune 50 company. 

And so, when I started hearing these things, I had no idea what it was calling me to do, why or what even I was supposed to be doing to serve these people. But I started to examine my own life and what was going on in it, and I find that we are often best positioned to serve the people that we once were. And that’s absolutely what I talk about because I was living a life where I was consumed with the extrinsic motivations, and on the outside it looked perfect. 

But inside I felt completely numb and detached from the authentic self that I wanted to be. And I felt this profound sense of feeling that I didn’t matter, that I didn’t feel like what I was doing was fulfilling. 

And so, what I really then went on with this was this journey of me-search, of really doing core introspection into what was driving that state and how do I pivot to really having a different set of goals that were guiding me, and reformulating how I was thinking, how I was perceiving what I wanted in life, but more importantly, how I could teach others to really understand that they did matter, and that this feeling of being significant and valued is really anchored in our intrinsic motivation, energizing our pursuit of goals with relentless determination, and the inner spark that not only influences how we persevere through challenges that we face, but also guides and defines our actions towards the objectives that we want in life. So that’s the path that I ended up taking. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Oh, awesome. Well, I’d love to take just a couple minutes to dig into that journey a bit. When you said given this vision and hearing these things, what is the source, the message, the messenger? How did that land in you? 

John Miles 

So, it started to hit me at a point where my life was really consumed with the constant grind, and I have always been religious. And I decided to take courses that are offered in the Methodist religion called Discipleship, where for 36 weeks I went through an intense two-times a week class where we went through the entire Bible. 

And while I was going through that, it also awakened in me, and I think that this is something, whether you’re religious or not, I think sometimes we go about taking on a new challenge, and by doing that challenge, it opens us up to introspection, and that’s absolutely what it did for me, and I started to question the whys behind how I was living my life.  

Pete Mockaitis 

And that is a theme we’ve heard before. It’s like when folks engage, whether it’s a faith, or wisdom tradition, or intense introspective situation, yes, insights pop up and it can be a sort of an epiphany, a transformation, a life changer, a redirector of great consequence. So, we’ve heard that kind of a story before, so we’ll call it a theme, John. We’ll call it a theme. 

So, let’s dig in a little bit. We’ve got six mindset shifts, six behavior changes. And inside your mindset shifts, we’ve got the mission angler, muster the power to do something great; the brand reinventor, never being afraid to reinvent yourself; the mosquito auditor, avoid the most dangerous animal on the planet; the fear confronter, realizing that you are your greatest competitor; the perspective harnesser, zoom out and tap into its power; and the action creator, permit yourself to dream the dream. 

I’m most intrigued by talking about harnessing perspective, zooming out and tapping into the power. Lately, I’ve just been seeing that as a theme in terms of, like, I’m going about my life and I see my iPad, my iPad shows me an image, like Apple Photos does of, “Oh, here’s what was going on three years ago!” You’re like, “Whoa!” Or just looking at photos in general is like, “Wow, that’s a totally different time and place and an experience and perspective, and wow!” because it feels like, for me, at times, what you’re up in in this moment is, all there ever was, all there ever will be. 

And Daniel Kahneman has got a great quote, “Nothing is as important as you think it is while you’re thinking about it.” And I think that is so on the money. So, help us out here, if we want to harness some perspectives, how do we in fact zoom out and tap into some good power of broader, wiser perspective?

John Miles 

Yeah, so I think the first thing for the audience to understand is, in the Western mindset, that most of us who are listening to this likely have been brought up in, it’s deeply rooted in Greek philosophy which excels in linear learning. So, this whole concept of both/and thinking, which is really an Eastern concept doesn’t get really bestowed on us, so we really enter the world by thinking and viewing it as either/or instead of through the paradoxes that amplify the way we think. 

So, to think about this, and this both/and paradigm, it’s really thinking that our life has the possibilities where we can do things such as balance hard work with rest, merge self-discipline with self-compassion, finding harmony between solitude while also having community, integrating mind and body and so on and so forth. But the way I try to break it down in this chapter is I go into the behavior science behind it by looking at the works of Marianne Lewis and Wendy Smith who wrote a great book called Both/And Thinking, and then I use the example of a good friend of mine, astronaut Chris Cassidy. 

And I think Chris’s journey really highlights this difference in perspective and how it reshaped how he viewed challenges, how he viewed the world around him, and I’ll just give a couple examples of that. So, one of the core stories that I remember Chris talking to me about was his time going through basic underwater demolition school training to become a SEAL. 

And as he was going through Hell Week, everyone who’s there is miserable. But I remember him telling me that, in this point of misery, as he was colder than he’s ever been in his entire life, he looked down the line of people who were next to him, and he saw a Thai exchange student who was very thin, used to a completely different climate, and was so uncomfortable that he was actually buckling two and fours, he was looking at Chris, and Chris was looking back at him. And he realized that no matter how bad he had it, someone else had it worse. 

And it kind of gave him this courage to view life differently. Instead of looking at this as a never-ending trial, he looked at it as an opportunity, one, to see how far he could push his body and to view it as if it was a rubber band where he could expand or detract these trying moments in life. And he found through that, he could reshape his perspective to seeing that this was going to have a finite end. 

And all he needed to do was to concentrate on taking the conscious actions to let go of the things that were impacting him from achieving that goal. And that ended up leading him then throughout the remaining training and time in the SEALs as viewing these things that he would find himself encountering as finite periods of stress or trauma or action, and then training his mind to get through them. So, I think that’s just one powerful example of how you can implement it. 

Pete Mockaitis 

That is cool. And, boy, that feels like we need to have a movie scene of this eureka epiphany moment of enlightenment there. And I think that’s often the thing about perspective, is these things are objectively true, “Yes, this is temporary. The training will conclude.” And, yes, it is true, someone else has it tougher than you. 

And it seems like where I run into trouble, and I think many do, is those perspectives, while true, don’t get the focus, the attention. Like, your mind is consumed, like, “Oh, my gosh, this hurts a lot. I don’t know if I can handle much more of this.” And that is the dominant perspective and narrative that is running the show in your brain. Any pro tips, John, on when you’re in the midst of a small perspective dominating the scene, how to return to the broader perspective? 

 John Miles 

Yeah, to me, this is something that I refer to as the growth paradox, and I think real growth is like farming. It’s not instant gratification. It requires consistent effort and practice. And what that ends up doing is it leads to exponential returns over time. So, a core thing for the audience to think about is lulls and plateaus in our life shouldn’t be viewed as times of failure or not making progress, but as stages for future growth, and that’s something that this growth paradox teaches us about. 

Another one would be the failure paradox, which is looking at failure as a valuable teacher, which I’m sure many people have explored on this show, but each failure provides insights and learning opportunities just as James Dyson’s many inventions failed as he was creating prototypes before he successfully created the vacuum cleaner and then many of the other inventions that have come from Dyson’s products since then. So those would be two examples. 

 Pete Mockaitis 

Okay. Well, now, when it comes to, you listed six intentional behavior changes, and I’m going to give a little quick overview here. We got the anxiety optimizer, how to be on edge without going off the edge; originality embracer, realize that originality necessitates adaptability; the boundary magnifier, understand that sometimes being right means being alone; the outward inspirer, speak or act with your feet; the gardener leader, practice eyes-on, hands-off leadership; and the conscious engager, keep the main thing the main thing. 

I want to dig into the anxiety optimizer. We’ve had Morra Aarons-Mele, who’s great, talking about making anxiety your friend when you are trying to achieve stuff and to not let it consume you. So, let us know, what are your best practices you’ve discovered in terms of how do we make the most of the power, the fuel that anxiety can give us without just freaking out and losing it? 

John Miles 

So, I think it’s important, before we even go into that, to define why this is so important for us to master. McKinsey did some groundbreaking research on this zone of optimal anxiety, and what they found was that leaders who were able to perform in this state, outperformed their peer group by over 400%. Another way to think about that is they were able to accomplish, in two hours, what their peer group was doing, in eight to ten hours. 

So, in Passion Struck, why this is so important is I talk about, later in the book, the psychology of progress, and a core theme of that is that time is malleable. Well, in order to find more time, to take more action to move your life forward, you have to be better at utilizing it. And that’s, where getting into this optimal state of anxiety, is extremely important because in those two hours, if you learn how to do this, you can do what others are doing in eight to ten, which also opens up your life to have more balance in it and to develop and cultivate more relationships. 

So, at the core of this, it’s really thinking about your life as if you’re walking a tightrope. And on one side of the tightrope is overwhelming fear, and on the other is an indifference, and the state in between is what we talk about with finding the state of optimal anxiety. Anxiety is like a boon and a bane. A certain level gets you fired up, ready to take on challenges, but too much, it’s like you’re crashing a party like an unwelcome guest who doesn’t know when to leave. 

So, this is really science-backed strategy that’s crucial for achieving anything that you want in life. So, I talk about two different ways of doing it, there are more than these, but I really focus this chapter on another SEAL named Mark Devine, who many people have probably heard of, and also a race car driver named Jesse Iwuji. 

And Mark, when he was going through BUD/S himself, similar to Chris, was the first SEAL leader where his entire boat crew actually graduated from BUD/S. And the reason that that whole crew was able to do it was because he taught them four critical things that allowed them to exist in the state of optimal anxiety. The first was breath control. 

He, at first, started teaching them the simple practice of box breathing, which, if someone wants to experiment with this, just think of yourself doing a box, and breathe in for four seconds, breathe out for four seconds, etc. But this breath control is a dynamic way for you to control the energy that’s flowing through you and to really target it in a different way by quieting down your emotions. 

The second thing he really taught these folks was to have a positive internal dialogue, in that, similar to the way Chris, as I talked about, shifted his perspective, they too could shift that positive internal dialogue and how they were approaching their days and the activities that they were going through. The next thing he taught them was the power of imagery and how, having that imagery of them graduating BUD/S, of them becoming a SEAL, and seeing that optimism and success would change the way that they were viewing the longevity of the task that was ahead of them. 

And, lastly, and I think one of the most important things he taught them was the importance of targeted focus, of being present in the moment and getting through the activities that we were doing. So those four things – breath control, positive internal dialogue, imagery and targeted focus – are the things that I highlight in the book. But a way that a person could think about this is we often end up spiraling. And one of the initial things that we can do, is if you practice that breath work, it allows you to have awareness. 

And, to me, awareness is half the battle won, because if we have awareness, we catch ourselves before we even start spiraling because we notice when unease starts creeping in, and that perhaps prickly feeling or that thing where your hair is rising, and that’s your cue to understanding that you need to start taking some deep breaths and slowing everything down to allow yourself to get clarity. So that would be one starting point that I would talk about. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Yeah, that’s really cool, and you’re making me think I really need to finish that book by Mark Devine, the Unbeatable Mind, I think it’s called. I’ve started it, and too many books crowded it out, but there’s a lot of goodness there. So, I’m intrigued by this notion of optimizing anxiety. It seems like there are some interconnected ideas here, whether it’s Stephen Covey talking about the growth zone is in the middle of the panic zone and I think the complacent zone, or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says your flow state is when the task is not so easy that it’s boring, and not so hard that you’re overwhelmed, freaking out. 

So, it seems like all three of these conceptualizations have some overlap, but I like the way that you’ve zoomed it in on anxiety as an emotion, a signal, a trigger for you to tune in to these dynamics that are going on. Is optimizing your anxiety level just the same as Covey style being in the growth zone, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi style being in the flow state? Or are there some nuances, distinctions that you would highlight within this framework? 

John Miles 

No, you’re right, it is similar to both of those things, and that flow state is a critical and core component of it. To me, I think the phrase that really captures this the best is to learn to be on the edge without going over the edge. And the best vision that I heard to capture this was talking to NASCAR driver, Jesse Iwuji, who told me, when he’s driving the car, when he was too cautious, it would cause him to wreck because the other drivers were expecting him to do things that were more aggressive in his driving style. But when he tried to take it too far to the edge, he also would wreck out because he was trying to push things too much. 

So, it was really finding that balance in between those two where he learned how to position himself to be on the edge without going over the edge. And to me, that’s what makes this a little bit different. It’s like riding the wave without wiping out because we’ve all heard of athletes who are in the zones, artists losing themselves in creation, coders crunching lines of code until time blurs. But what I’m talking about here is the underlying, really, emotion that lies underneath it, and how do you calm that as your entry point into going into this state. 

Pete Mockaitis 

And to flip it, what if we don’t have enough anxiety, like we’re too we’re too passive, chill about a matter, and we would do better to crank it up? I guess what’s resonating for me is I’m thinking about there’s a time where I was hosting leadership conferences. I remember the first time I did it, I was kind of anxious, like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve never done this before. This is a big role, a big deal. Got to really make sure everything is done well,” and things went rather well. 

And then the second time, I was like, “I got this. I know how this is done. Been there, done that,” and it went not as well. I was too passive and it would have behooved me and the attendees had I been more anxious the second time around. Any pro tips when what’s necessary is to crank it up a bit? 

John Miles 

Yeah, I think I have a tendency probably, as people are hearing me talk, to be more like what you were describing. And so, for me, if I’m giving a talk in that example, I really do my best to amp myself up, because if you’re too subdued, like you were talking about in that situation, people aren’t going to feel the energy reverberating from you that you want them to feel. 

So, I think it’s really having that self-awareness, which I talked about earlier, of understanding where your emotional state is, and the task that you’re trying to complete and readjusting it based on the situation that you’re faced with. So, in that same situation, if I’m behind stage, getting ready to go out there and give my best, I’m really pumping myself up. 

And something that I actually do is I visualize myself being someone other than myself at times. I often, going back to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, picture myself as him coming on the stage, and how would he present himself to the audience, what emotion would he give. And when I do that, and I think about portraying him and the emotions on the stage, it completely changes how I myself am showing up and transforming it into a more profound version of myself. 

So, I would encourage the audience, if they’re facing the same situation, that’s something that I like to do, I was taught that by a speaking coach, is imagine someone else that you want to emulate and picture yourself being them as you’re going throughout that activity.  

Pete Mockaitis 

Oh, totally. We had a guest who used the term psychological Halloween-ism. It’s like you’re donning the costume of the superhero or whomever that you want to be, and, sure enough, somehow that just kind of influences your thoughts and attitudes and behaviors and results. Go figure. Really cool. Now, to that point about Mark Devine with those four things, with the visualization imagery, any pro tips or do’s and don’ts on visualizing well? 

I think sometimes, for example, in a tough spot, if you’re visualizing, “Oh, just a few more minutes till we get a meal,” or a donut, or a smoke, or whatever you’re craving and feel deprived of, that sometimes that could be a counterproductive strategy in terms of getting the best from yourself over the long term. What are your perspectives on best and worst practices for visualizing and using imagery well? 

John Miles 

Yeah, to me, what I think is most important about it is being consistent in your application of it. And for me, there are three different ways that I like to do visualizations. The first is I like to do activations. So, in the morning, I get up really early, 5:00 a.m., I go on this walk with my dog, and I use activations, which is a little bit different than a meditation. I’m activating the way I want my life to unfold. I’m activating how I want my day to go. 

And so, I picture for myself what I want the day to look like when it’s complete, and I kind of walk through what I want my morning to look like, what I want to get accomplished, what I need to do in the middle of the day, what I need to do in the late afternoon, but then also visualize how I want to show up for my loved ones. So that’s one way that I think you can do it is through those activations. 

Another way that I like to do it is through journaling, and really just going into a free flow of thought about, “How am I showing up today? What am I feeling?” and getting those raw emotions out on paper. And then, really then, if there’s a gap between the ideal state that I want to live that day in, then really visualizing, “What actions do I need to take in my energy, in my focus, in how I want to change the very aspects of how I’m going to lead my life for the next few hours of the day?” 

And so, those are two things that I found helpful for me where I use activations or journaling to help me get into that state of internal dialogue, and really that imagery that I want to see for myself and how it’s shaping the immediacy of, for me, the day and the transition points between it. 

Pete Mockaitis 

And so, when you’re visualizing that optimal day outcome, are you sort of imagining yourself in the process of, “Okay, and I’m going to write some stuff. I see myself – third person, first person – at the keyboard, clacking away, or I am admiring the written words with a beaming grin of pride”? Like, what are some of the details of a visualized scene that you construct? 

John Miles 

So, for me, I’m more visualizing the outcomes. Like, this time that I have, what are the outcomes that I want to achieve and in what time frames do I want to achieve them? So, it could be envisioning myself preparing for an interview that I’m doing on a podcast. It could be, as you were saying, visualizing myself writing chapters of a book or a blog that I’m working on. It could be me visualizing a phone call that I’m going to have and how I want that phone call to go to produce the outcome that I want. 

So, I’m really outcome focused and how I’m trying to use this imagery to think through the day and the positive outcome that I want to achieve through the actions that I’m doing. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Awesome. Well, John, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about a few of your favorite things? 

John Miles 

No, I’ve really enjoyed this. Thank you. 

Pete Mockaitis 

All right. Well, now could you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?  

John Miles 

This one is from Henry David Thoreau, and he says that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And I also love the quote by Mark Twain, that 20 years from now, you can look back upon your life, and you can either choose to live it by stepping out into the unknown, or you can choose to live it, as Sharon Salzberg said, in constant anticipation of what if or could be.  

Pete Mockaitis 

All right. And could you now share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research? 

John Miles 

So, some research that I really like is that of Dr. Benjamin Hardy and some of the work that he’s done with Dan Sullivan. Top of mind to me is some of the work that he’s done on future self where he’s looked at the difference between the gap versus the gain, where so many of us live in this comparison trap where we’re constantly living our lives in the gap because we’re trying to compare who we are to some ideal that is just almost impossible for us to achieve. 

It would be like me trying to compare myself as a speaker to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, or to Ed Mylett, or someone who’s been doing this to an extremely professional level. Whereas, I could be looking at my life in the gains that I’m making where I’m comparing my current self to my past self, and looking at the incremental progress that I’ve made. And I think that’s really important when we think about the life that we want to craft, is, “How do we develop the mindset shift from going from the comparison trap of living in the gap to living our lives more in the gains?” 

 Pete Mockaitis 

And a favorite book? 

John Miles 

I think one of the most profound books I’ve ever read that’s influenced me personally was Quiet by Susan Cain.  

Pete Mockaitis 

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

John Miles 

At first, I was fearing what AI would do, and so I was trying to not use it, but I’ve really figured that it’s not going away. So, if AI is going to be around for a long time, I better become an expert at using it. So, I have really been going further and further down the rabbit hole of what are different ways that you can use AI to make not only your career better, but your life better. 

Pete Mockaitis 

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

John Miles 

True success really comes down to winning the battle with yourself. Those, I believe, who persist in the pursuit of their dreams, no matter what the hurdles, are the winners in life because they’ve won over their weaknesses. And to me, that is really a profound thing that I want people to take away, is that we all have our different definitions of success. 

But to me, the biggest battle that any of us have is with the inner critic that presents itself to us at each and every day, and learning how to win over that critic, and to overcome the self-limiting beliefs that hold so many of us back, to me is the key to what Sharon Salzberg was talking about in how we choose to live our life, whether we choose to live it in excellence or with ignorance. 

Pete Mockaitis 

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

John Miles 

So, the two best places would be my two websites. If you want to learn more about me personally, you can go to JohnRMiles.com. If you want to learn more about the Passion Struck Movement, my podcast, things like that, you can go to PassionStruck.com. And a really great thing that people can do, if they want to try it out, is I created a quiz when I launched the book that will help people understand where they sit on the Passion Struck continuum. It’s about 20 questions, it takes about 10 minutes, and they can find that on PassionStruck.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? 

John Miles 

Yes. Often our choice of career is dictated more by the allure of stability and safety than by passion and fulfillment. And I ended up being about 20 years into my career when I came to the profound realization that I had become an absolute expert at making money for others and making others dreams come true, but I wasn’t making my own dreams come true. 

So, really, it’s confronting this fear of uncertainty that pushes many of us towards professions that we feel less connection to, resulting in what I think is so many people feeling unfulfilled or disengaged in the workplace. So, what I would encourage people to do is to take that other path, the path to start making your own dreams come true, and finding something that you feel is fulfilling at your heart, and that you wake up just with this unending desire and passion and ignition within that it’s propelling you to just want to do that with your life. And that really gets down to exploiting your uniqueness, your unique gifts, to find a problem that’s worth solving in the service of others. 

 Pete Mockaitis 

Beautiful. Well, John, thank you. I wish you many more adventures and days of passion. 

John Miles 

Well, thank you so much, Pete, for having me on your show. That was an absolute phenomenal interview, and I can see why your show is so popular. 

Pete Mockaitis 

Well, thank you. Appreciate that. 

Jun 03
0

967: How to Overcome the Fixed Mindset and Create Cultures of Growth with Dr. Mary C. Murphy

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

 

Dr. Mary C. Murphy explains the downsides to the culture of genius—and shares an alternative path for transforming individuals, teams, and organizations.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The biggest misconceptions about the growth mindset 
  2. The optimal number of mistakes to make 
  3. How to deal with the four situations that trigger a fixed mindset 

About Mary

Mary C. Murphy is the Herman B Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, Founding Director of the Summer Institute on Diversity at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and Founder and CEO of the Equity Accelerator, a research and consulting organization that works with schools and companies to create more equitable learning and working environments through social and behavioral science.  

Murphy is the author of more than 100 publications and in 2019, was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. government. She is also an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her research has been profiled in The New York Times, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, Scientific American, and NPR, among other outlets.  

Originally from San Antonio, Texas, she earned her BA from the University of Texas at Austin and her PhD in social psychology from Stanford University in 2007, mentored by Claude Steele and Carol Dweck. She splits her time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Palo Alto, California.  

Mary’s new book on organizational mindset, Cultures of Growth: How the New Science of Mindset Can Transform Individuals, Teams, and Organizations is available now. 

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Mary C. Murphy Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mary, welcome.

Mary Murphy

Thank you, Pete. It’s so good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m excited to dig into your wisdom when it comes to talking cultures of growth and mindset, transforming individuals, teams, and organizations. Could you kick us off with a fun story that really shows what’s possible or what’s at stake with this kind of stuff?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, I can tell you the mindset culture origin story, where it came from.

Pete Mockaitis

Let’s do it.

Mary Murphy

And I think it will help share for your listeners, their experiences of the cultures of growth and cultures of genius. So, at Stanford, where I was getting my PhD, it is tradition that all graduate students present to their faculty. So, I was in one of these seminars, we’ve all been in one of these seminars, where a friend was presenting his work from the year. And, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, didn’t raise their hand, just blurted out, this professor blurts out, “Well, it’s clear the fatal flaw in this work is XYZ.”

And then another professor on the other side blurts out, “No, the fatal flaw isn’t XYZ. It’s ABC.” And they start fighting amongst each other to show who’s smarter than whom, right? Who’s the smartest in the room? How can they take down this idea, the most devastating comment, right? How quickly they could do it. And it was very much this culture of genius idea, relying primarily on star performers. Can you cut it, or can’t you? Do you have it or don’t you? Who’s the smartest in the room?

Two weeks later, I’m in a different seminar, and the faculty there have a totally different way of engaging with the students as they’re presenting their research. And, yes, they are identifying what are the challenges, what are the problems with the work, but what they’re competing on is not how smart you are. They’re competing on who can find the solution, the most elegant solution to the problem. Maybe this student needs to include a different survey, work with a different population, do their work slightly differently.

And what I saw in those moments was both of these are characterized by mindset, a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. And what they did to people in those seminar series was very different as well. In the first one, the student didn’t want to touch his work for weeks later because it was so painful the way that it had been treated in this fixed mindset culture of genius. In the other seminar series, we saw students so ready to hit the ground running, and they had ideas and strategies to actually engage their work differently because that was the focus of the culture of growth there, the growth mindset sort of embedded in that environment.

And so, this is the beginning of mindset culture where I saw mindset doesn’t just exist in our minds. What’s your mindset? How does it affect you? What my mindset is and how does it affect me? It’s really in our interactions, in our teams, in these groups, what we say and do, how we interact with each other. That’s where mindsets are made. And that mindset culture shapes almost everything, our thoughts, our feelings, our behavior, and our performance.

Pete Mockaitis

Ooh, I love it. So, we’ve got cultures of growth, cultures of genius. And it’s funny, genius sounds like a good thing that we want to do.

Mary Murphy

It does, doesn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis

But here, it is not the preferable option of the two.

Mary Murphy

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you unpack a little bit these terms and the cultures, what they look, sound, feel like in some depth?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, absolutely. So, the culture of genius really has at its core this fixed mindset belief. You either have it or you don’t. You’re smart or you’re not. And it’s really focused on identifying who those star performers are with the belief that these are going to be the team members and the performers that we are going to elevate and put all the resources around. These are people who are inherently more capable due to maybe some kind of superior intelligence or talent or ability.

And they really focused in these cultures of genius on those standout individuals to carry the rest of the team. And the whole organization and teams are set up around it to do that. It’s, find the genius and give them the ball. And that’s a very fixed-minded way. It’s like there are only a few people who have these kinds of skills, only a few people who have this kind of ability.

The culture of growth has, at its core, the growth mindset belief that talent, ability, and intelligence is a potential, that, sure, we all differ based on it, but the commitment of the team and the organization, if it has a culture of growth, is that we are going to take everyone, hopefully everyone with very high intelligence, talent, and ability, and we’re going to challenge and grow them and give them strategies and resources to take that talent, intelligence, and ability and grow it even further to the benefit of the individual and to the benefit of the organization.

And so, this culture of growth, you can tell it from a culture of genius because supports are given to people to develop and to contribute. The reality, though, just as we’ve gotten fixed and growth mindset wrong by saying, “Do you have a fixed mindset? Or do you have a growth mindset?” this false dichotomy, we’re not going there when it goes to mindset culture. Mindset culture exists on a continuum, and the truth is that many teams and organizations are usually a mixture of the two.

And so, you can have a bit of a culture of growth or a bit of a culture of genius, especially if you have a very large organization. We find almost always pockets of cultures of genius and pockets of cultures of growth. And then it becomes, “How do we actually move the whole organization to be more growth minded more of the time?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, the continuum is present both for individuals and for organizations, teams.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. The individual mindset continuum and then the mindset culture continuum. And we move between at the individual level. We move between our fixed and growth mindset. That’s like the last third of my book. It really talks about the mindset triggers that we know from 30 years of research on the fixed and growth mindset. What are those situational triggers that move us between our fixed and growth mindset sort of on a daily basis in the workplace, in our relationships, in our families? What are those triggers?

So, we identify four of those that have really strong empirical evidence to back them up. And then we help people identify which are their triggers, and then how to move more towards growth when I identify that I’m in a triggering context that’s going to move me towards my fixed mindset sort of automatically.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so helpful. And I find that is dead on with my own experience. Like, “Yes, indeed, I believe not just because I’m supposed to, but because the science and data tells me it’s better and superior, that growth mindset is true. Like, yes, human beings can, in fact, learn, grow, develop, improve in things.”

Mary Murphy

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, neuroplasticity, etc.

Mary Murphy

And I’m in my fixed mindset all the time, too. I mean, talk to me in the evening when we are loading the dishwasher. And I’m like, “Man, there is a right and the wrong way to do this. This is the right way to do it.” And you talk to my husband, he does it a completely different way. I got a very fixed mindset about the way to do that.

We can’t be thinking about it that we can’t talk about when we find ourselves in our fixed mindset, what are the triggers that move us to our fixed mindset. Because then it becomes more of a religion. The growth mindset becomes more of a religion. Like, you have to have it. You have to bow down to it. You can’t admit to ever having a fixed mindset thought or behavior. And then we never get better. It just becomes something that we kind of give words to rather than actual behavior on the ground.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mary, when you say on the ground, I think loading the dishwasher is about on the ground as it gets. And I think, I don’t want to spend too much time here, but I think we must spend a minute or two. So, is it, in fact, not the case that there is an optimal way to load the dishwasher?

Mary Murphy

I actually think there is a scientific way, and I think YouTube will probably give you about 400 videos about the scientific A versus B testing of the better way to load the dishwasher.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess what I think about there is, like, I’ve got my own opinions on dishwasher loading, but I think in, some ways, it all depends on what do we mean by better in the terms of the speed in which you can load it.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. That’s right. How do we define better? It’s a good question for mindset culture, actually, more generally. How do we define better? How do we define high performers or top performers? Are we talking about efficiency? Are we talking about outcomes only? Are we talking about process? Being able to make those definitions transparent and clear is the first step to actually figuring out then what we are trying to drive towards.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I did want to hear about these triggers, but first, let’s hear a little about the genius notion. So, is it not true that there are stars that we do need to disproportionately lavish with coaching and resources and attention to maximize shareholder value, etc.?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, so I think that this is one of those things that we haven’t really thought all the way through. I do think a big question is, “Wouldn’t an organization just want to hire geniuses? Aren’t they all high performers? Or don’t we want a whole organization with just these geniuses there?”

And what we see is that high performers actually prefer, because we’ve done the research with thousands of people at hundreds of companies, that high performers actually prefer the culture of growth because, to your point, most organizations, if they’re hiring for genius, they are not investing in the growth and the development of those geniuses. They are hiring geniuses and say, “Now you take us to where we need to go. Now you take us,” and they don’t give people resources or strategies and supports to actually help them continue to grow their skills and abilities. They expect them to get there and to do the work.

The problem with having a whole organization where you do nothing but hire these geniuses is that it creates a hugely interpersonally competitive environment within the organization, because, again, if you have that fixed mindset view, there’s only some who are smart, “Look to your left, look to your right. Only one of you is going to be here at the end of the quarter or at the end of the year when we do our stack ranking evaluations.” It creates this environment where everyone is only as good as their last performance.

People start to hoard information. They start to leave people off calendar invites in order to show that they’re the smartest ones in the room. They’re the ones with the best ideas. They know a new star is being born every day, and so they really want to hold on to not only their reputation, but also their status within the organization. And so, you have people concerned about that instead of concerned about doing the work that’s going to move them and the organization forward. And you also see big ethical problems in these organizations due to this internal competition.

And so, ultimately, high performers know that the culture of growth is the place where they can take risks, they can be supported in that risk taking, they’re going to be continually resourced and invested in across time, and that the process is going to matter just as much as the outcomes. The outcomes are very much going to matter in a culture of growth. But there’s also the whole thing about process and development and the work of, “Will the company allow me to take some risks to actually do something innovative and creative?” That’s where the culture of growth really out-beats the culture of genius and the bottom line, because we’ve studied that too.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And I think I’ve seen in my own experience, having hired folks who were amazing, it’s not true that you just hire someone who’s brilliant and then everything they do is brilliant always and forever.

Mary Murphy

That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis

Like, I actually scratched my head a few times. It’s like, “Well, what happened here? We had someone who was just amazing and then they stopped being amazing. Like, what’s the deal?” And sometimes you might never know the answer as to what happened, but it really is, I think, almost like, folks are realizing, “Oh, this isn’t quite right. This isn’t quite my thing. I’m actually getting progressively exhausted and burnt out by being so amazing day after day, and I’m just tired of it now.”

Mary Murphy

That’s right. That’s right. I mean, that’s what our research shows, too, that as it turns out, even geniuses don’t fare well in the culture of genius. In these environments, high performers are usually put on a pedestal and that creates almost like a straightjacket where they’re not allowed to take risks, they’re not allowed to make mistakes, and it puts them in a very fragile place where they’re afraid to fail, and so they become very risk averse, and they kind of do the thing that we kind of thought we’ve seen in the past, “Well, that worked in the past, so I’ll just keep redoing that cause that’s the safe thing. We know that will be a success.”

So, you see people not putting forward their best ideas, not innovating, not being creative in their work. And we see this too in school settings where we label kids as gifted, and then it becomes that they’re often terrified of underperforming. So, they play it safe, they hide their mistakes. They don’t take on any kind of intellectual challenges because they have been labeled gifted and they can’t lose that reputation or that status. So, that’s what we do when we put people in those roles and when we surround them with that culture of genius.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s true. I’ve known some folks who, they were on a valedictorian track, and they weren’t going to mess it up by taking the hard AP classes.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. Exactly right, yeah. That’s a good example.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you make reference to a prove and perform mode. Sounds like we’re talking about that right here. And so, you say that when we escape from that, we actually improve our cognitive abilities. Can you tell us about some of this underlying research and just how much of a lift do we see there?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, this really goes to some of the cognitive and neuroscience work that’s been done when we look at mindset and mindset culture. And so, what this shows is that when we are really only focused on performance goals, rather than performance goals and learning goals together, which is the alternative in a culture of growth.

When we’re only focused on performance, you’re only as good as your last performance, you have to prove your worth with every example that you are engaged in, every piece of work you’re engaged in, a new client presentation, a report that you’re writing, “Show me how smart you are. Show me what you did for me lately or how smart you are,” and that any mistake can be taken as a sign that you don’t have it.

When we are focused on those performance goals, a lot of our cognitive resources and executive function actually is focused on the self, “It’s focused on me and how I’m coming across and my reputation and how other people are seeing me.” And so, by dividing, literally dividing our attention in this way, our executive functions in this way, self-focus and then the work that you’re actually trying to do, it takes longer to do that work. We do it, ironically, with more mistakes, and it actually undermines, therefore, the quality of the work that comes out.

Whereas, if we can focus on the performance, and we want to do the best possible work we can, but we want to also learn the most while we’re doing this, it takes the self-focus off and it puts the focus on the work itself and how to improve the work, “How can I write the best client pitch that’s really going to help the client see that we’re going to be the best for them? What can we learn with the client together? What are they going to want to learn from us by working with us? How do I build that into the pitch?”

You take that learning lens onto the work, in addition to the performance, takes the attention off of you, puts the full executive function onto the project itself, and that ultimately produces the best outcomes at the individual level, and then when you aggregate that at the team and the organizational level.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And you’ve got a good turn-of-a-phrase, succeed by failing at 15% of your efforts. How so? And why 15%?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, so this is basically from a set of studies, kind of a meta-analysis of many studies, that looked across many different modes of being. So, it looked at human performance. It looked at animal performance in animal studies. It looked at AI algorithms and the performance of those algorithms. And in each case, the question was, “What is the optimal amount of mistakes that actually support learning?”

If you think about it, if you have flawless performance, what are you learning? You’re not learning anything. You’re not learning what worked. You’re not really learning about what might work or what could work or how to get innovative about it, and so mistakes are integral. And we actually have parts of our brain that are tuned to mistake-making that really help us then concretize, “Okay, that didn’t work. Here’s the lesson. Here’s a new way to solve or strategize for this problem, so that we can actually update in our minds, and then solve the problem going forward.”

Those systems are not activated without the mistakes. So, the question becomes, “What’s the optimal amount of mistakes?” And these studies over time, in many of these different modes shows that 15% is the optimum amount of mistakes to enhance learning and performance.

And so, if you’re not making about 15% of mistakes, if 15% of what you’re doing isn’t failing, you’re not pushing yourself. You’re not actually learning and performing at what could be your best. You’re playing it a bit safe. And so, that’s where that 15% comes from. And it’s a really nice study of studies that sort of shows what’s optimal.

Pete Mockaitis

You know, what I find intriguing here, as we talk about teams and cultures and such, is Gottman and others have talked about the five-to-one ratio associated with praise to critique, and, mathematically, 15% critique…

Mary Murphy

Pretty close, right?

Pete Mockaitis

…and 5X praise, yeah, that is rather close.

Mary Murphy

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I’m not surprised, too, that, like, in many of these contexts, making mistakes, yes, it’s a negative experience in the same way that being critiqued by a partner is a negative experience. And so, you need to have a lot of that positive reserve. But if you have no complaints or critiques of your partner, are you actually learning and growing together?

Are you different people? You probably are, if you’re human, you are going to be different people on some dimension. And if there isn’t enough space for that in the context of the larger success of the couple or of the organization or team, you’re probably not optimally growing together either.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, as I think about a team, could you give us a story of someone, or an organization rather, who was able to turn it around, they noticed, “Hey, we’ve got a culture of genius here. It’s not serving us,” they took some steps and they transformed and saw cool things happen? Could you share something about this?

Mary Murphy

Yeah, I have a lot of these examples. I think that the one that I worked with closely was Shell. The oil and gas company, Shell. And they were really challenged by a goal that they had set back in 2007, called Goal Zero. They wanted zero leaks in their pipeline, and they wanted zero fatalities with any of the production or consumption of their oil and gas throughout their whole process.

And they were not able to meet Goal Zero for years and years and years. And they started working with me and several inside the organization together to start to think about how a growth mindset culture, how a learner mindset might actually be able to help identify, “What’s the missing piece that has not allowed us to reach that Goal Zero?” and started to do this with talking to the frontline workers.

They looked at their evaluation and promotion processes. Are they learning the most that they possibly can about their employees and their work, and how to improve it? They changed those things. They started talking to frontline workers who may not even be Shell employees. They might be contractors, but they’re out on the deepwater platforms and they’re in the fields of Afghanistan doing this work. And, “How can we help support them?”

And so, the conversations basically started to permeate the whole organization. They started to change some of their policies and practices on the ground. And, ultimately, they had a couple of individuals on the frontlines that said, “Hey, I have an idea. Like, we go through this process with regards to this work that we’re doing, but we think that there’s a hole here. We could, actually, if we’re doing this learner mindset thing, we can actually try this other way of this process. And we think that will allow us to not have any risk for leaks or fatalities that might happen.”

And so, they started to shift that. They found mechanisms to lift that information up to decision-makers. That was a new strategy they did as part of a culture of growth culture change. They changed some of these practices and then they reached Goal Zero. The only company within this industry to do so after sort of working on this culture change for a couple of years.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. And so, it’s funny how… I mean, I’m sure you worked hard, and I don’t mean to diminish this fabulous accomplishment. At the same time, it sort of seems like, “Yeah, we probably should have been doing this forever.” But I guess that’s the way of like most improvements. It’s like, “Oh, I probably always should have been exercising,” or, like, all the things like, “Oh, yeah, people know stuff, so we got to make sure we have mechanisms by which we can get that surfaced and implemented.” And yet, often we just don’t get the wisdom inside people’s heads. Jeff Wetzler, we just had on, discussed this matter. We don’t get that wisdom in people’s heads up and out and going.

Mary Murphy

That’s right. And I think that the reason, one of the reasons for that, is because sometimes some of these changes, they can seem sort of piecemeal, like, “Oh, yeah, that’s a good practice. We should put that practice into place,” But without a framework, a unifying framework that says, “Here’s growth mindset culture. What does a growth mindset culture look like? What does it do? What is its focus? It’s on learning and development.”

“Now we take every one of our processes and our practices and we put them through the lens of learning. Are we learning what we need to learn? If not, let’s change it through that, and to figure out the best practices to advance that across the organization.” Otherwise, it’s just popcorn. Like, different practices that we should always have been doing, but without understanding why or what the larger goal is, what we’re trying to create more constructively for the whole organization.

And that’s, I think the benefit of that growth mindset culture idea, and then the particular norms and practices that we know and have studied that actually create that growth mindset culture and make it real on the ground.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, when you said culture, it’s almost like the process is an organism that learns as well, not just an individual human.

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. That’s right. You might fire these individuals, or they might retire, or leave the organization, and the new people that come in, the process and the practices are so embedded in the work that they then can enact that and come back into that learning organism that exists, and be plugged into that and be able to take that on almost immediately because that is the benefit of culture, not just working at the individual level, it’s the benefit of the cultural level.

Pete Mockaitis

And can you share a couple of these norms and practices that are just transformational in terms of they might seem small and yet they make all the difference?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, we find that fixed and growth mindset cultures differ on the basis of five different norms kind of consistently across all of the studies and the research that my team has done and that others in the scholarship area and academia have done. And those are collaboration versus competition, the extent to which those are everyday practices, and how that collaboration versus competition is structured.

Those practices also exist when it comes to evaluation and promotion of individuals. So, you might think about, “Are people only getting benefit in their performance evaluations based on the outcome instead of the process, or how they galvanized an entire team, or how they collaborated to make this work, either with external or internal individuals?” So, collaboration versus competition, all the practices related to that.

Innovation and creativity, that’s the second norm that is really shaped by cultures of genius or cultures of growth. In cultures of genius, we see people playing it safe. They are afraid of bringing different ideas to the table because if they don’t work, they’re going to be taken as a sign that, “Me, personally, I don’t have it. I don’t belong here.” It makes people’s imposter syndrome kind of go through the roof because, “If I make a mistake, it’ll be seen and it’ll be known that maybe I’m an imposter in this environment.”

Whereas, in the culture of growth, people are really so focused on learning that they’re willing to try new things. And in fact, they’re motivated to do that. But they set up very safe experiments that actually help them take innovation and creativity piece by piece, and gathering the data along the way to really see whether that innovation or that creativity problem-solving is actually moving them in the right direction. It’s what I call effective effort.

This is a big difference between cultures of genius and cultures of growth. Cultures of genius rely on the guts of their geniuses, what do they care about today. Elon Musk is a great example, where he says, “Today, I feel like Twitter/X should be like this. And that’s what the whole organization is going to do. Tomorrow, it might be like that.” And you see these huge swings in these cultures of genius based on what the genius feels or wants in that given moment.

In a culture of growth, it is so much more rigorous. It’s based on data and experimentation. And we’re going to see whether or not the changes that we are actually making at the organizational and team level is having the impact that we expect it to have. And so, a culture of growth ultimately ends up being much more successful because they are learning so much baked in.

And the last three quickly is just risk taking and resilience, integrity and ethical behavior, and then diversity, equity and inclusion. We see much more diversity naturally in cultures of growth than in cultures of genius, because the culture of growth is not tied to the genius prototype that exists in our society. Pete, if you’re going and you Google genius, and you put the Google image, you click Google images, who do you think you’re going to see in the Google image?

Pete Mockaitis

Albert Einstein.

Mary Murphy

Albert Einstein, a million, bazillion. Who else?

Pete Mockaitis

Nikola Tesla. Ben Franklin.

Mary Murphy

Yeah, good.

Pete Mockaitis

Edison.

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. Right. Or present day, you might think Steve Jobs, or you might think Elon Musk even. But you think about, “Who are these people? What do they have in common?” They all tend to be mostly men. They all tend to be white. Or they all tend to be of a certain economic or social background. And so, the culture of genius uses that prototype, even implicitly, not even in an explicit, conscious way. Implicitly, we want to hire the geniuses. We want to bring those in.

So, when we’re thinking about who matches that or internally who we should promote who’s a genius within the culture of genius, it will benefit these individuals that fit that cultural prototype and leave aside women, people of color, people with disabilities, really anyone who doesn’t match that cultural prototype that we also know in our bones what that prototype is. The culture of growth, on the other hand, they’re focused on who can learn, grow, and develop the most.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. Well, I definitely want to make sure we can touch on the mindset triggers. Can you unpack a few of these and kind of raise our attention to, “Aha, this is the specific kind of a situation that nudges me over into fixed land” and what to do about it?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, there’s four mindset triggers. The first one is evaluative situations where we anticipate, before we’re even getting the work done, we anticipate and we know that we are going to be evaluated on the basis of what we’re working on. So, that might be, again, a client pitch, a presentation, a report that I’m writing. For a lot of people, being evaluated is their fixed mindset trigger. And they then create work and set up their outcomes very differently.

For example, if I’m giving a presentation, I might decide I’m only going to hit the high points and the successes, not the challenges and things that we actually struggled around because I don’t want to admit any weakness. And I might not leave any time for Q&A at the end of my presentation because I don’t want anyone to question whether or not my ideas or the recommendations that I’m putting forward are appropriate or are optimal. So, evaluative situations, we know that that’s a big trigger for people.

The second is high effort situations. That is where we believe in the negative correlation between ability and effort, “If I have to try hard, it means that maybe I don’t have it. Maybe I’m not a natural.” And in the culture of genius, this is really, really threatening because you should have it. You should absolutely know exactly what you’re going to do and be successful every single time.

And so, what we see in the culture of genius, with the high effort situation trigger, is that people only want to do the easy parts. They don’t want to take on stretch assignments. They don’t want to take on mastering a whole new domain. Even if they get promoted and get more money from it, we see that a lot of times people are held back by this fixed mindset trigger of high effort situations. It puts them right into their fixed mindset rather than their growth mindset.

The third one is critical feedback. Now, instead of anticipating that I’m going to be evaluated by others, now that evaluation has come and the feedback is not good. This is a lot of people’s fixed mindset trigger, where people feel like the negative feedback that they’re receiving or the critical feedback says something about them as a person rather than the work. They take it personally. We call this also the backpack kid. When they get a negative performance grade on a test, they crumple up the test, they put it at the very bottom of their backpack, crumpled up at the bottom, never to be seen again.

We see the same thing happening in workplaces where people get their evaluation, they look at the top to see where on the scale they lie, and then they put it away, rather than actually read through and remember the ways in which they’re being offered support, or what they could do to improve. That’s how critical feedback can operate as a fixed mindset trigger.

And the last one is the success of others. And here we can really think about the ways in which we praise people individually and on teams. What do you usually say when someone performs well? What would you say to them?

Pete Mockaitis

Good job.

Mary Murphy

“Good job!” Right, exactly. Now, good job makes us feel great, and it’s kind of the most common way we praise, but it doesn’t tell us anything about what we did well. Like, what would we actually improve or what would we actually want to replicate because we did it so well in this context? And so, when we think both about praising individuals and praising teams, how can we take this from, “Someone else got praised on my team. Now that means that there’s less for me”?

Putting people in that zero-sum mindset, that scarcity mindset around praise or success, which is really showing that this is one of our fixed mindset triggers, and actually help people see, even in the good stuff that people are creating, how they can learn, grow, and develop from that, and make it not an individual thing, but also so the whole team is learning what was really great about this presentation, how can the team replicate that or take it to the next level the next time that they’re working on it.

Pete Mockaitis

And if we catch ourselves, let’s say something triggers us and then we have a thought like, “I guess I’m just an idiot,” and so then it’s like, “Oh, that’s fixed mindset. Uh-oh.” So, you mentioned, like, religion, it was like, “No, no, no, I have sinned by thinking this into our thought,” what is the ideal response? And how do we, ideally, I don’t know if recover is the right word, but kind of get back into an optimal groove?

Mary Murphy

Absolutely. So, I do think people think of it sort of counter intuitively, but truly the best way to learn and to lean into our growth mindset more of the time is to acknowledge and learn to work with the fixed mindset, to not sort of be shocked or dismayed when it shows up, to just be like, “Oh, yeah, old friend, I remember you. Here you are again.”

Remembering that this is where my fixed mindset is likely to show up. If I know I’m going to give a presentation and I know I’m expecting some critical feedback from the people in the room, preparing myself for that and trying to tell myself, “Okay, when this happens, I’m going to make a plan to go into learning mode rather than going into prove and perform mode where I get defensive, where I have to show how smart I am.”

Asking questions of the questioners, trying to learn where they’re coming from, trying to learn and think about the ways and the experiences that we’ve had that might be able to answer their question in a way that everyone can learn from. So, I think identifying those triggers for ourselves, and then making a plan to know that these are predictable context, predictable situations, when I know I’m going to go into it, making a plan to prepare for that and not, you know, you’re going to be in your fixed mindset occasionally. That’s normal, right? Normalizing that, not beating yourself up about it, and just saying, “Next time, I’m going to focus on moving towards growth.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, Mary, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mary Murphy

Well, I would say if anybody’s interested in identifying their own mindset triggers, on my website, we have a Mindset Triggers Assessment that people can take. And you can take that for yourself. Or if you are a leader or you have some direct reports, you can also take it as a group and understand each other’s mindset triggers so you can work together better.

The other thing I would say is that we have a culture cues audit. So, if you are looking at, “What are the triggers and the situations in our own teams or family or clubs that you might be a part of? What is the mindset culture of these?” you can sort of look at the cues and the environment that sort of helps show you where you are on the mindset culture continuum and give you strategies to help you move towards growth, even no matter what your role is, even if you don’t have direct reports or others that you’re responsible for.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

I am really inspired by the African proverb, I think it goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” That idea, I think, is really interesting. And I probably would amend it a little. That if you want to go fast, go alone. You’re not going to go optimally.

I think that we tend to think, in American society, that we’re all independent agents and that we can sort of operate completely alone if we choose to do so. And we know that that’s just not a fact. We know that when we operate alone, we’re not going most efficiently. We’re not taking all the best ideas. We can’t possibly as an individual. And so, I’m really inspired by that idea that to go far, we go together.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mary Murphy

We had a study with over 600 entrepreneurs, and we looked at the mindset of founders in early-stage companies. These are like series A, series B, very early-stage organizations and companies. And we saw that the founders’ mindset influenced so much in these early-stage companies as to the clients they would bring in, the hires they would make, and also the culture that they started to, even if they weren’t attending to culture, it really impacted the culture that they started to create with the organization.

And we saw that these companies started by founders with more of a fixed mindset, they were more risk averse, they were less creative, they didn’t want to hire anyone that was smarter than them, which actually really stymied the innovation and the market share that these companies actually created. And we also found it influenced their fundraising. And so, the ones with more growth-minded founders who created more cultures of growth in their companies, they actually were able to meet and exceed their fundraising goals much more than those with a fixed minded culture of genius.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Mary Murphy

Most recently, I read Amy’s book, Amy Edmondson, Right Kind of Wrong. I really loved the examples she provided and the stories she told. So, I would recommend that to people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

I started to work with a coach around storytelling, and I feel like examples and resources and tools to help make better stories and to help create storytelling has really helped me be better at my job.

It’s also showed me new research questions and new ideas for studies when I listen to other people’s stories through the lens of really understanding what makes them work and what are the mechanisms underlying people’s success or people’s failures.

Pete Mockaitis

And can we hear who this amazing storytelling coach is?

Mary Murphy

Her name is Kymberlee Weil, and she has an organization called the Storytelling School, and you can also listen to her podcast, but she is incredible.

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

Mary Murphy

Mindset is not just in our minds. For years and years, we have thought about it that way and we have seen it actually be used to label people and kids in classrooms, “So, that kid just has a fixed mindset. There’s nothing I can do about it,” says some teachers. And we see that in the workplace too or in families.

And so, seeing that mindset is not just in the mind, it’s co-created in relationships and teams and organizations. And then how do we help each other create these mindset cultures? I think that really resonates with people.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

I’d point them to my website, MaryCMurphy.com. That’s where those quizzes are located. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter and all the other places. I also have a Substack, if people are interested in that, and that is recorded as an audio too if people are into the audio formats rather than the reading format. So, yeah, they can find me there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mary Murphy

Oh, yes. So, this would be a homage to my mentor, Carol Dweck, who came up with the idea of the fixed and growth mindset, who wrote the book Mindset. She challenges her first-year seminar students, her first-year college seminar students to this, and I would challenge your audience in the same way, in Carol’s name, that think about over the weekend or in the next few days, whenever you’re listening to this, what is one outrageously, outrageously growth minded thing you can do in the next few days?

Imagine what that could be, commit to doing it, and then tell me about it. Find me on social or anywhere. I would love to hear what your outrageously growth-minded thing is that you’re going to take on today.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, Mary, could we hear just a couple examples of…?

Mary Murphy

Well, Pete, what do you think? What is one example that would come to your mind?

Pete Mockaitis

Outrageously growth-minded, I don’t know.

Mary Murphy

Yeah, outrageously.

Pete Mockaitis

I’m meeting my podcast mastermind group shortly, and we’re going to do stand-up paddle boarding, and I’ve never done that before.

Mary Murphy

Hey, that’s good.

Pete Mockaitis

I feel like I’m going to fall over many, many times. So, that’s the first thing that came to mind.

Mary Murphy

I love that. That is a fantastic example. I started to pursue a couple of things. One, I mean, you can’t sort of take this on in just a day. But I started to pursue cello recently because I got really into it, I don’t know where it came from. A lot of family members are musicians. But I got really into this idea so I just signed up for a cello lesson. And then I got really into it. Now I’ve been sort of doing it for several months. But I think follow one of those passions that you might have or some inkling that you have, that’s a way to, and then commit to doing one step towards it. That’s outrageously growth minded.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, thank you, Mary. This has been much fun, and I wish you many fun growth environments.

Mary Murphy

You as well, Pete. Thank you so much for having me. This has been fantastic. I hope your listeners enjoyed.

May 30
0

966: Guy Kawasaki on How to Increase Your Impact and Become Remarkable

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Guy Kawasaki discusses the key to making your life and career remarkable.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The three keys to becoming remarkable 
  2. How to effectively sell your dreams 
  3. Why there’s no such thing as “perfect” timing 

About Guy

Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist of Canva and host of the Remarkable People podcast. He was the chief evangelist of Apple, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, Mercedes-Benz brand ambassador, and special assistant to the Motorola Division of Google. Kawasaki has a BA from Stanford University, an MBA from UCLA, and an honorary doctorate from Babson College. He lives in Watsonville, California. 

Resources Mentioned

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Guy Kawasaki Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Guy, welcome. I’m excited to chat. Now you’re an experienced interviewer yourself. You’ve interviewed some remarkable people. Tell me, any particularly super memorable moments that you’d like to share with regard to that adventure?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, certainly, interviewing Jane Goodall, actually twice. Those are very memorable moments. I mean, if you had to pick someone that you wanted to interview, Jane Goodall would be right up there, right? And so, that’s the two Jane Goodall recordings. And then one of the funniest things that happened is that, believe it or not, of all people in the world, Margaret Atwood is the first person to drop an F-bomb on my podcast. Now, I thought for sure, I was like waiting for the Gary Vee episode. I figure he’s going to drop a few for sure, you know, just saying hello, but Margaret beat him to the punch. What can I say?

Pete Mockaitis

That’s fun. Well, I’m curious, what is it about Jane Goodall’s message, life, work, vibe that really resonate with you?

Guy Kawasaki

I mean, how can you not love Jane Goodall? She’s 90 years old. She travels 300 days a year, and her kind of travel is very difficult because she’s on deck from the time she wakes up to the time she goes to sleep. I know when I travel, I’m making a keynote speech. I really have to be on for about one hour. The rest of the time I can be like not so on, but Jane Goodall is on the whole time. And just the love and passion and empathy and concern she has for the welfare of people and the world is just so obvious. I mean, she’s truly a remarkable person.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, I’m excited to hear about the wisdom you’ve got for us in your book, Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. And you are a remarkable person yourself, Guy, with a remarkable title. And if you could actually indulge me for a couple of minutes, I’ve wondered about this for years, and now is my chance. All right.

Guy Kawasaki

Well, let’s end this problem for you.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. All right. So, you are the Chief Evangelist of Canva and formerly the Chief Evangelist of Apple.

Guy Kawasaki

Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Tell me, in some detail, I’ve got follow-ups, what does the role of Chief Evangelist truly mean?

Guy Kawasaki

The role of the Chief Evangelist, well, first of all, going back to Greece, the word evangelism comes from Greek roots, and it means bringing the good news. So, I bring the good news of Canva today, how it has democratized design and enables people to be better communicators.

Way back when I was the Chief Evangelist and software evangelist for Apple, so I was bringing the good news of Macintosh. So, what a chief evangelist does is he or she is kind of the person that’s the most visible as this is the person who truly believes it’s going to get you to believe in our dream as much as we do. And he’s bringing good news and it’s kind of a cheerleader marketing sales position. It’s the purest form of sales. And it’s the purest form of sales because an evangelist has not just his or her own interests at heart, but also the other person’s interests at heart.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it sounds beautiful. And it’s, like, I think I want to be one. And I think maybe some of our listeners would like that as well. So, just very fundamentally, what is the nature of your relationship between, say, you and Canva or you and Apple? Are you, like, an investor advisor, a full-time employee, a contractor, a marketing affiliate, a customer and super fan? Like, what is that?

Guy Kawasaki

So, when I was software evangelists for the Macintosh division, you know, round one, I was an employee. When I was chief evangelist round two, I was also an employee, but also an Apple fellow. And that is not a line position. It’s more kind of an honorary kind of title fellow, but I was a working fellow. I had a real task to do, not just sit around thinking about the future. Most Apple fellows are engineering and tech visionaries. And I was just a marketing schlepper. So, that was unusual there.

Now for Canva, when I met Canva 10 years ago, they offered me this position, and I made a very wise decision. I said, “I don’t want a salary. I want everything in stock.” So, I took everything in stock and I was really the first person in the United States, so they really didn’t have like, you know, I guess there’s a bunch of legal things you have to do to legally employ a person.

So, I was not employed. I’ve been a contractor technically for all these years. And now they have hundreds of employees in America, but we just never did anything. And Canva is doing so well. I couldn’t hurt it if I tried. They don’t need to make me sign any piece of paper at this point.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And so, then when you interface with Apple or Canva, are you “reporting” to or working with, say, the VP of marketing or the CEO or the board or whoever wants to say, “Hey, Guy, spread some good news over here”?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, when I was the Apple Chief Evangelist, I reported to a vice president of R&D, I think his title was. This was Don Norman. And then later on, I moved over to the marketing department. So, they shoved me into the functional area. Now, when I started with Canva, there were only, I don’t know, 10 people, so it was kind of dealing directly with the co-founders.

Now in the 10th year, I’m just kind of hanging out there and I’m just doing very high-level stuff and I speak for them and I continue to carry the flag, but it’s not like I’m punching a clock, and it’s not like I’m issuing monthly progress reports or anything like that.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Now, Guy, if I or a listener aspire to become a chief evangelist, what does that path look like?

Guy Kawasaki

Okay, so I think the path for an evangelist is that you truly, truly love the product. And that’s the start. And for you to love the product, the product has to be really great. So, the key to evangelism is you evangelize or you create or you affiliate with something great because it is really hard to evangelize shit. Trust me, I have tried a few times in my life. So, that’s the key.

Now, many companies have not yet understood or embraced the concept of hiring an evangelist. It seems like focus mostly in tech because they kind of copied what Apple did. But the function of bringing the good news and getting people to believe in your dream as much as possible, that’s what it does. I wouldn’t worry about the title so much.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. So, this is clear. I’ve wondered about this for more than a decade, “What does it mean when Guy Kawasaki says he’s a chief evangelist?” That is settled.

Guy Kawasaki

Well, you should have contacted me earlier. You didn’t have to think about this for 10 years.

Pete Mockaitis

I can rest easy. Well, I mean, I just sort of heard, it’s, “Oh, yeah, Guy Kawasaki…” Okay, sure. Well, now, so there’s that. Let’s talk about your book, Think Remarkable: 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference. What’s the main thesis, core idea here?

Guy Kawasaki

I think the main core or the thesis here is that if you make a difference, if you make the world a better place, people will have no choice but to think you are remarkable. So, basically, the book, I would not characterize this book as a self-help book that, it’s like, “Okay, you’ve decided to be remarkable. Day one, when you wake up, this is what you do.” You’re like, I don’t know, you change your LinkedIn profile. You write a white paper. You start talking at TEDx or something like that. That’s not it at all.

The assumption is that if you make a difference, people will have no choice but to think you are remarkable. And I want people to be empowered to make a difference. That’s the key to me.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you kick us off with a cool story of someone who followed a path that looks a lot like what you’ve laid out in the book and what unfolded for them?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, I would not say that there is no single path, right? I mean, Jane Goodall from the time she was a kid till today, she loves animals and she loves nature, so she’s stuck with that the whole life. Julia Child is another example. Until her mid-30s, she was a spook, and then she got married and she moved to France, fell in love with French cooking, and she became the French chef. So, you can make big changes in your life too.

But what I noticed after interviewing 250 of these people is that they all go through this phase of growth where, Julia Child acquires new skills in French cooking, Jane Goodall started in secretarial school, went to Africa, and she studied the chimps, and then she went back and got a PhD after she did all that. And, yeah, that’s a completely different path but that also showed growth. And the flip side of growth is grit. Because if you’re growing, if you’re learning new things, you’re not going to be instantly successful. You have to have perseverance and passion.

And then the third phase, I think, and the phase that not everybody makes it to, is that you have to become gracious, which is you realize that you’re lucky, you’re fortunate, people have helped you. It’s not just your own growth and grit, but good fortune, good people have helped you, so you owe it back to the universe to help others succeed too. And Jane Goodall is a great example of that.

I’ll give you a negative example. So, until three or four years ago, I would have told you that Elon Musk is the closest person there is to Steve Jobs in terms of world-changing ideas in technology. But I think that he has totally flunked the third chapter, which is grace and graciousness, right? So, I mean, you would not say that Elon Musk is gracious. Well, not the new Elon Musk, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, I hear you, growth, grit, grace, three components. And it sounds like super achievers may not always exhibit all three of the stages, but they probably have growth and grit, and whether they choose to use their progress and stature for good or evil can go either way. Is that fair to say as a summary?

Guy Kawasaki

Yes, that is fair. And, listen, I’m a very optimistic guy despite my criticisms of various systems and things. But I think with a life of growth and grit, where you’re making a difference and you’re making the world a better place for people, you’re probably going to end up being graceful and gracious. Maybe Elon is an outlier there because, I mean, you cannot debate that Elon Musk, more or less, single-handedly made the automotive industry go electric, and you cannot debate that the automotive industry going electric is not a good thing for the world. It is a good thing for the world, right? So, he has made a difference. He’s made the world a better place. I just wish he would embrace some grace and graciousness.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood. Well, then can you walk us through a little bit? So, within the growth, grit, and grace, each has three subcomponents. Could you give us a quick overview of these nine chapters?

Guy Kawasaki

The quick overview of the nine chapters is growth, grit, and grace. So, growth is, I’m a big fan of Carol Dweck, the Stanford University psychology professor. And she basically makes this dichotomy that if you have a growth mindset, you believe you can acquire new skills, you can do new things. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe you cannot. And you, also, if you are successful and you have a fixed mindset, you believe you don’t have to grow, which is arguably even worse.

The grit mindset is Angela Duckworth’s. She’s the mother of grit. And it’s about persevering when things don’t go right and learning from failure. And the grace mindset, I think it’s mostly this understanding that when you are successful, you have an obligation to society. And there’s 188 tactics in this book. This book is extremely, extremely tactical and practical.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool. Well, let’s dig into some of them then. So, under stage one, growth, talk about the growth mindset. We’ve had a few guests discuss that concept. Tell us, are there any misconceptions about the growth mindset? Or are there times where you yourself find you’re drifting into some fixed mindset type thinking? And what do you do when you find yourself there?

Guy Kawasaki

Yeah. So, one of the things that I learned after the book was done, there’s a protege of Carol Dweck, her name is Mary Murphy, and she made the brilliant observation that the growth mindset is primarily in your head, right? So, in your head, you believe you can grow or you believe you cannot. But she says that, as important is the environment that you’re in, because if you have a growth mindset, but you’re in a fixed mindset organization, you’re going to be very unhappy. And if you have a fixed mindset, and you are in a growth mindset organization, where this organization wants you to learn new things and you cannot rest on your laurels, you are also going to be very unhappy. So, that’s something that, if I could do it all over again, I would include that. And I pride myself on having a growth mindset, and it’s because of Carol Dweck’s book. And, like, at 44, I took up ice hockey, having never skated before. At 60, I took up surfing, having never surfed before. And let’s just say that when you take up hockey or surfing that late in life, you pretty much have a growth mindset. You cannot not have a growth mindset and do those things.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, then chapter three, under growth, you say plant many seeds. Can you unpack this idea for us and some of your favorite tactics?

Guy Kawasaki

Yes, yes, yes. So, planting many seeds means that in order to grow, you have to collect a lot of data. You have to do a lot of sampling. You have to take a lot of shots. And I bring in this example of I cut down these eucalyptus trees in my backyard, and I wanted to replant the hill. And so, I wanted to put it in native oaks. And I learned that with native oaks, you got to put in a lot of acorns, and you have no idea which acorn is going to be a seedling, then a sapling, then a tree. And it actually takes 20 years to get from acorn to tree.

So, I mean, that’s a metaphor for life. You gather a lot of acorns, you put them in water. The ones that float are dead. You throw those out. Then you put them in this preparation stage where you cover them with a cloth and moisture, and you put them in your refrigerator and you simulate winter for the acorn. Then come spring, you stick it in the ground and you put a lot of them out because not everyone is going to take root, and then you wait 20 years. You need to collect a lot of samples, and you need to plant a lot of acorns to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, what I’m noticing about the metaphor, which is rather beautiful and practical, is that along the way, with each of the steps or phases, you’re getting some information and you’re saying, “Oh, okay, don’t pursue these, the floaters versus the sinkers. All right.” And then you get the refrigerator situation like, “Oh, okay, don’t pursue these.” And so, you’re already sort of whittling it down to “This is the most promising thing that looks like it might really take off.”

Guy Kawasaki

Yeah. And then, so you plant a lot of acorns after those first couple processes and then some of them take root, so you’ve got to protect those from the deer. And then you got to be patient. It’s a very good metaphor for life.

Pete Mockaitis

I hear you. All right. Well, I guess with all the tactics, any particular tactics you recommend in the planting seeds department?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, I think the most important tactic is it’s a numbers game. You’ve got to plant a lot of seeds. And going back to my Macintosh history, we evangelize hundreds of companies to create Macintosh software, and we thought, initially, and we thought we had it all figured out, right? You need spreadsheet, you need database, and you need word processor. But lucky for us, there was this acorn called Aldus PageMaker.

And Aldus PageMaker became a mighty oak called desktop publishing. But I got to tell you, we did not plan desktop publishing. It’s not like we said, “We’re so insightful. This computer is great for desktop publishing.” Nobody knew what desktop publishing was. People were still setting hot type, melting lead. And that is a great example of, “Thank you, God, that we’re planting many seeds.” And one of them was Aldus PageMaker.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then in stage two, grit, your chapter, “Sell your dream,” I mean, you’ve been evangelizing for a long time. Any favorite tactics in the realm of selling dreams?

Guy Kawasaki

Yeah, my favorite tactic in the realm of selling dreams is a demo. I believe that a demo is worth a thousand slides. Well, actually it’s not completely geared towards tech. Now, in tech, obviously, you can have alpha software, you can have a rough website, you can have a hardware prototype. So, it’s easy to see how you can create this demo.

But to take an extreme example, if you were trying to create a new restaurant and you want it to evangelize your restaurant, maybe you start with a food truck serving that kind of food, or you start out with a pop-up restaurant, or something like that. There are people who serve meals at their houses. So, there’s always a way to figure out like, “How do you prove the concept? How do you test the concept?” Not just cogitate it, not just talk about it, but actually let people touch and feel and eat your concept. I love the demo.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then any clever ways you recommend we go about doing the demonstrations? So, we got a food truck, we got a pop-up and software. It’s like, “Hey, look at it, and see how it does the thing you like.” So, any other clever ways you recommend we do the demo to sell the dream?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, in software, where probably this may be the most obvious to people, in software, I think the key to demo is not to show what it can do, but to show how you can do it. And let me use Canva as an example. So, yes, I could have all these finished graphics in Canva, and just go from page to page and show beautiful PowerPoint, beautiful Instagram, beautiful Etsy, beautiful infographic, beautiful resume, beautiful, you know, etc. but I don’t think that’s that effective a demo.

I think the effective demo is, “Okay, so let’s start with your photo, and let’s make this into a book cover. So, here’s the collection of Canva book cover templates. Now let’s scroll down here. Oh, we like this template. Let’s click on this template. Now let’s upload our cover photo and let’s change the text from the generic text on the template to your book’s title.” And in five minutes you would have a very nice book cover design in Canva. So, you showed how not what, and I think that’s the best demo.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense because, in that context, that really delivers the, “Oh, wow,” kind of a moment, like, “That was five minutes, and this looks just about ready to go. That’s amazing. Holy crap, I got to buy this.”

Guy Kawasaki

Let me tell you something, in five minutes, in Photoshop, you may just barely be finished installing it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, when it comes to grace, what do you mean by turn and burn?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, turn and burn is actually at the conclusion of the book. It’s not grace per se, but turn and burn is a surfing metaphor. So, I can explain a lot of life in surfing. So, most of surfing is spent waiting in the water, hoping you’re in the right place for the wave to come to you and to break at the right time, etc. But, as a lesson in life, if you are always looking for the perfect wave, the perfect product, the perfect service, the perfect book, the perfect photo, the perfect movie, the perfect project, the perfect, you know, whatever, you’re never going to accomplish anything.

At some point, you just have to turn and burn and start paddling. And that’s a very important lesson. There are many entrepreneurs, they spend just years and years thinking about, “Yeah, this is what I’d like to do, and I’m doing research.” At some point, as Steve Jobs once said, real entrepreneurship, I mean, and there’s no truer words than that.

Now, after turn and burn, my last recommendation in the book is that, rather than focusing on, “Did I make the right decision or not?” Instead, you focus on making your decision right, because making the perfect decision is very difficult, if not impossible. You just cannot know everything and predict the future. So, at some point you take your best shot, and you paddle and then you make that wave work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. All right. Guy, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Guy Kawasaki

No, that’s good. I just want people to know that, man, I think I’ve created the best book ever for how to make a difference and how to be remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

Okay, my favorite quote is a Chinese proverb. And the Chinese proverb is, “You have to stand by the side of a river a very long time before the Peking duck will fly in your mouth.” In other words, Peking ducks don’t fly in your mouth. You got to go out and kill the duck and cook it.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

Ah, my favorite study or a bit of research is probably the video by Dan Simon. And he did this research where he showed, it’s called the invisible gorilla. So, in invisible gorilla, they have these college students wearing black and white T-shirts, and you’re instructed to count how many times the kids in the black T-shirts are tossing the beach ball.

And in the middle of that, this guy comes out dressed as a gorilla goes, “Hoo, hoo, hoo,” and only half of the people noticed the gorilla because they’re so focused on counting the beach balls. I think that’s a very important thing about making things noticeable and what could be on, how can something be so obvious and people not see it. Half the people didn’t see the gorilla, which is, to me, just amazing. And I hope I always see the gorilla.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Guy Kawasaki

My favorite book is a book called If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. Now, obviously it’s for writers. But if you substitute any creative endeavor for the word “write,” it’ll work for you. If you want to paint, if you want to play music, if you want to make movies, if you want to be an entrepreneur, this book is about empowerment.

And the gist of the book is if you want to write, don’t wait for permission. That permission could come externally like, “Oh, you passed the creative writing course,” or, “You have a Master’s in English,” or, it could be internal, “I took the creative course. I have a Master’s in English. Now I can be a writer.” Brenda Ueland is saying, “If you want to write, write. If you want to program, program. If you want to be an entrepreneur, start a company. You don’t need permission. You don’t need certification. You don’t need to do anything. Just do it.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite tool you use that helps you be awesome at your job?

Guy Kawasaki

By far, the center of my universe is a Macintosh. I could not function without a Macintosh. And then I have a second favorite tool, which is, I don’t know if you know this, but I am deaf. And I am deaf so I can hear because of a cochlear implant. And I became deaf about three years ago. And I’ll tell you that cochlear implant has made a huge difference in the quality of my life because it enables me to go from being deaf to just having really lousy hearing. So, that’s a big deal. And, oh, you wanted a digital tool, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, well, I guess you said Macintosh, but if you got another one, I’ll take it.

Guy Kawasaki

Well, okay. I mean, I guess you could say Macintosh is a digital tool, but also you may find this astounding, but I am a hardcore Microsoft Word user. I use Microsoft Word to write my books. I use style sheets for every paragraph of my manuscript. And I constantly flip between the outline view and the print view. And I’m a hardcore user of Microsoft Word.

Pete Mockaitis

Microsoft Word on Mac and not a PC?

Guy Kawasaki

Yes. No, I never touch a PC. There are two things I will not use, a PC and a Tesla.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite habit?

Guy Kawasaki

I always clean the filter in our dryer from lint after drying clothes. Every time I always clean the lint filter.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Wise words. Wise words. And is there a particular nugget you share that people tend to quote back to you often and you’re known for?

Guy Kawasaki

Well, I tell the Peking ducks quote a lot, so I get fed back that. I also tell people that you should never ask people to do something that you yourself would not do. Now, this assumes that you’re not some kind of psychopath, but assuming that, that’s a very good way to go through life. Just don’t ask people to do something you yourself would not do.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

Ah, it’s hard to avoid me. I mean, if you use Google, you just type Guy Kawasaki and you’ll get more responses than you possibly want, but there is GuyKawasaki.com. That’s my website. That’s primarily brochure where, if you really wanted it to interact with me, the best way is email. So, I’m GuyKawasaki@gmail. That’s hard to remember, right? My name at Gmail. And, yeah, that’s it. I’m like an open book.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Guy Kawasaki

I may lose a lot of readers when I tell you this, but this is the truth. I think that one of the most important things you can realize to be awesome at your job is to understand that you should try to make your boss look good. I think many people think, “Oh, my job, I want to get ahead. I’m going to make my boss look bad. I want to show that I’m better than my boss, and they’re going to fire my boss and give me the promotion.” I have never seen that happen.

I think the much more mature, productive, and remarkable perspective is, “My job is to make my boss look good. And if my boss looks good, he or she is going to get promoted, and I’m going to be drafting along. And then, finally, that my boss is going to be so good that I’m going to have such a halo effect on me that it’s going to enable me to branch out and take a new job, get funding, whatever.” But it’s all based on make your boss look good. Don’t try to make your boss look bad. There’s very little upside in that.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Guy, this has been fun. I wish you many more remarkable conversations and adventures.

Guy Kawasaki

Thank you very much. Thank you. All the best to you.