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Jun 06
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305: Screwing Up Masterfully with Kristen Hadeed

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Kristen Hadeed says: "Give yourself permission to screw up and to be human and in doing that, you will inspire the people around you to be more human."

Student Maid’s Kristen Hadeed shares her numerous leadership mistakes, how to learn fast, and inspire employees so much they clean toilets with a smile.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When and how to deliver critical feedback
  2. The detrimental effects of praise
  3. The power of vulnerability to grow an inspired workforce

About Kristen

Kristen is the Founder and CEO of Student Maid, a student-powered cleaning company in Florida. She helps organizations make a lasting, meaningful impact on people by creating environments in which they thrive. Her first book, “Permission To Screw Up,” tells the stories of her biggest mistakes in leadership. She hopes to inspire other leaders to share their “perfectly imperfect” stories of success to empower people with the knowledge that even if they screw up, they can still make it. Kristen and Student Maid have been featured in news outlets including PBS, FOX Inc., NBC, TIME and Forbes. Her first TED Talk has received nearly three million hits on YouTube.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Kristen Hadeed Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kristen, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think we’re going to have so much fun here. First, I want to hear the tale, I understand that one time you actually cleaned Tim Tebow’s house while in college. Did you bump into him? You didn’t know who he was? What’s the story here?

Kristen Hadeed
I’m the worst Gator football fan ever. I went to the University of Florida, which is a big school, cares about football. Yes, I cleaned Tim Tebow’s apartment several times and I did not even know it was him.

Pete Mockaitis
He was a student there?

Kristen Hadeed
He was a student. Yes. That was when he was – we won the National Championship. I should have known who he was, but nope. No clue.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s living large, college student having someone clean his house.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. I’d say so.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. They treat the athletes well. There’s probably like a stipend for that or something.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good time. I’m so excited to get into this conversation. We’re going to talk a lot about mistakes and learning and screwing up. In a way it’s kind of meta because boy, so you and I we know each other through our agency for speaking on college campuses. Campus Speech shout out, yeah.

Kristen Hadeed
Hey.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been a lot of fun chatting with you there. Then way back in 2013 you also joined me on the Student Leadership podcast.

Kristen Hadeed
Oh yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I know. I kind of forgot too. It was some years ago. Talk about mistakes, I made a lot of mistakes with that first podcast. It never really took off, but I learned so much from them. I think we’re going to have a better conversation this time around and it will reach about 100 times as many people.

Kristen Hadeed
There you go. Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fo sho. Let’s orient us a little bit. The Student Maid, what’s your company all about?

Kristen Hadeed
Sure. I definitely was not one of those kids that came out of the womb saying I want to be a CEO one day. I want to start a company. I was super lost in college, changed my major nine times.

Finally ended up with finance because I’d heard that you can make a lot of money working on Wall Street. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I thought I could figure that out because to me at the time success was about making a lot of money.

I used to go to the mall all the time when I was in college and window shop because I could not afford to buy anything. I just so happened to go to the mall this one day. I fell in love with a pair of jeans that I could not afford. It sounds so silly, but my company started because of this pair of jeans. They were 99 dollars.

I thought what is something I could do to just make 99 bucks and buy this pair of jeans and just call it a day. My first idea was to put an ad on Craigslist to clean someone’s house. A woman hired me. It was a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my. How so?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I had no idea how to clean. She had a mansion. I told her it would take me two hours. I didn’t have any supplies. I only had like this sponge and a bottle of Windex to clean this 4,000 square foot house. It took me seven hours and I wasn’t even done at the seven hour mark. It was just – she was like, “You need to leave,” because it was dark outside. She had already put her kids to bed. It was a disaster.

But she paid me. Then I bought the jeans. Then she actually called me back and said I really need help. She joked and said she could teach me how to clean. That’s how the whole thing started.

I cleaned her house every week. She told her friends about me. I forgot to take the ad down off of Craigslist. Then in college as I – every year I gained more clients, but I never thought that this would be my career. The turning point really happened right before my senior year I got this big contract to clean hundreds of empty apartments.

Pete Mockaitis
It was just you at this point?

Kristen Hadeed
It was just me. Maybe I had a couple people helping me, but they weren’t – it wasn’t a serious business. This was just a side gig.

I get this contract. It’s 800 and something apartments. They’re filthy. I hire 60 people to help me with the work. These are all college students who I hired. I have no idea how to lead a team of people. I don’t have any real business experience. I have no idea what I’m doing. Terrible leader. A couple days into the contract, 45 of the 60 people just walk in and quit, like on the spot at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
It was like in unison, like a group meeting or how did it-

Kristen Hadeed
It should have been a movie. Yes. It was like – I was sitting in this air conditioned club house in the middle of the complex with my feet propped up eating a Cesar salad. Right before they walked in I remember thinking to myself, this is so easy. Maybe I could be an entrepreneur. I like this. Because I was doing nothing. I was just sitting in this room doing nothing.

They walk in. I know something’s wrong because they’re whispering. I can hear someone saying, “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I know in my gut something really serious is about to happen. Then one just stood forward and she said, “We quit.”

I remember – I was so shocked. I couldn’t even process what had just happened. It’s so funny to me that I had no clue. I remember thinking, “Why are they leaving,” but now looking back, of course they wanted to leave.

The work was absolutely horrible. You’re cleaning empty, filthy college apartments and then you have this leader who doesn’t seem to care about you at all, who’s sitting in the air conditioning with her feet propped up eating lunch and scrolling Facebook. Of course you want to quit.

Pete Mockaitis,
Understood. Was there like a speech or did they lay out their grievances or they just said, “We quit,” and then it’s done.

Kristen Hadeed
No, it’s just “We quit.” And they turned around and they walked out. I was shocked, then it turned to anger. I was thinking, “How could they do this? I’m paying them.” There was so much work to do and I only had 15 people left.

I ran and I found those people. I told them what happened. They weren’t really surprised. I said, “Well, can you help me figure this out? We have to get them back.” I think they wanted to help me because it sounded more fun than cleaning, not because they really wanted to help me.

Pete Mockaitis
This is a juicy drama. I want to be a part of this.

Kristen Hadeed
I know. Then someone had this idea to call an emergency meeting at my house that same night and that the way that we would get everyone there is by promising them an early paycheck because the way that it was is you’d have to wait the whole three weeks to get your paycheck, but if they came to this meeting that night, they would get it that night.

It was a great idea. Everyone showed up. I just – I was just honest. I said, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what I did wrong.” I was honest about how scared I was that we had all this work, that I didn’t know how we would get it done. I think I just – I became a human to them. I think they realized that I was a good person, I just didn’t know how to be a leader.

One kind of said, “Oh, I’ll come back,” and then it was a domino effect. Another is coming back and then the next thing you know, they’re all coming back.

I always say that that changed the trajectory of my life because it made me really obsessed with learning how to be a better leader and most importantly learning how to build a company where people really, really wanted to be and they didn’t to walk out.

That was – that for me was I think looking back, that was the moment that I – I didn’t do it consciously, but I think that’s when I gave up my desire to move to New York and work on Wall Street because that summer really changed everything. We became a team and then I graduated. I turned down a job in finance to stick with Student Maid. Here we are. It’s been nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool and congratulations to you. You share these tales and these lessons learned in your book, Permission to Screw Up. Why that title?

Kristen Hadeed
It’s pretty funny. I always wanted to write a book, but I never knew what I wanted to write about. The way I got my book contract was kind of a backwards way. I was giving a talk. My publisher was in the audience. I just so happened to be speaking about Millennials at that event.

My publisher said, “I want you to write a book,” and I started writing about Millennials because I thought that’s what he wanted me to write about. That’s what I had just spoken about. When I finished the book, I didn’t like it. I didn’t actually finish it. Halfway through I said this is not – everything I’m writing about applies to all people, not just Millennials. I threw that version away.

Then I started to write about Student Maid and just the journey of leadership and it was empty. I went to dinner with a friend, who’s written several really great books. I asked him, I said, “How do you know when you’re writing the right book?” He said, in my experience the right book is the one that’s really, really hard to write.”

I thought about that. The book I was writing was not hard. I changed my thinking to what would make it hard. That’s when I realized that I was writing about all the lessons I had learned, but I wasn’t talking about what it took to learn them.

Yeah, I know the importance of empowering people, but I only know that because I micromanage people and people quit. I know the importance of building a relationship that’s real and meaningful with your people, but only because I had superficial relationships that did not lead to trust and loyalty.

I wrote about the how I learned it part, which was not fun. Some of the stories I wrote about paint me in a light that I don’t really want to be painted in, but it’s the truth. It’s how I learned.

The title, Permission to Screw Up, it’s about giving yourself permission. You don’t need it from anybody else. You don’t have to be perfect. Give yourself permission to screw up and to be human and in doing that, you will inspire the people around you to be more human.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. I like that a lot. Thank you. Well, you’ve got a lot of wisdom packed in there.

Could you maybe share just a couple of the most dramatic shifts that you made in terms of, “Hm, before I was thinking this way and then I had this experience which showed me that, no, that’s totally wrong. I should think about it the other way,” so in the practices that you abandoned or adopted as a result of some of those insights?

Kristen Hadeed
I would say the first major shift really had to do with feedback. Because 45 people quit on me, I was really afraid to give critical feedback to people because I thought it would make them quit.

I was the kind of leader who would recognize people every day for things that really didn’t deserve recognition, like thank you for being on time today. But that’s their job. You’re supposed to be on time. On people’s birthdays I would say thank you for being born. I recognized everything about everyone because I thought that was what – I thought that meant they would be happy and they would stay.

I realized two things. One that when we overpraise and we over recognize we actually are doing people a disservice because it doesn’t help them understand what their true strengths and contributions are. It’s also not meaningful.

But number two, when we avoid feedback that really needs to be given, the critical feedback, the kind of feedback that really helps people grow, we’re hurting them because we have this opportunity, we see a way they could be better and we don’t speak up, we’re hurting their growth and their development.

There’s a student I had who – she did a couple of things. I mean things that were really bad, like trying on a client’s high heels and –

Pete Mockaitis
What? Doing what to the high heels?

Kristen Hadeed
Trying on a client’s high heels.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, just putting them. Okay.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. Or like playing Mary Had a Little Lamb on a client’s antique piano that clearly is off limits. Just stuff that would get under my skin. Every time I would hear about something I would say, “Okay, I’m going to confront her,” and I never did.

Then I finally got the courage to do it and I did it in an email. It was a total cop out and then she quit. Then I felt guilty because I felt like man, I really missed out on this opportunity to make her better. Now, chances are the values she had, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but I should have told her way earlier that this kind of behavior was not acceptable and I missed out on that opportunity to help her learn and to help her grow.

There’s a tool that I loved teaching. It’s in the book. It’s not my own. I learned it from a company called Barry-Wehmiller, one of my favorite companies in the world. It’s called the FBI. It’s a way to give feedback, both critical and recognition, that inspires behavior change or inspires someone to keep doing something great.

It’s a sentence. Each letter stands for something, so feeling, behavior, impact. How you felt about someone’s specific behavior and what the impact of that behavior was.

If someone’s late, for example, you can say, “I felt disappointed that you were 30 minutes late to our meeting this morning. The impact, even though I know it was not your intention, now the impact is I don’t know if I can rely on you. I don’t want to feel that way, so can you help me?”

The idea is that person probably didn’t wake up saying, “I can’t wait to be late so that you’re disappointed and you feel like you can’t rely on me,” but once we tell them, once we tell them how we feel, the impact it’s had, now they want to change that behavior.

On the flip side, recognition, you can say, “I felt proud when you spoke up at the meeting this morning and when you shared your opinion. The impact that had is everyone else felt comfortable sharing their own and we had a really productive meeting.” Now you’re telling that person I want to see that again. I want to see you share your opinion again when you have one in a meeting.

I love the FBI. Now, in my company, every single person on our team that’s one of the first things they learn even before they learn how to dust and vacuum. We’re big on the FBI.

The second thing I would say is about when is it time to give up. That was really hard for me. I’m someone who believes in everyone’s potential. I think it’s really hard when you’re programmed that way when is it time to walk away from someone.

On the flip side, if you’re working in an organization and you’re giving it your all and you see the potential in this organization, but it’s just not right for you right now, when do you walk away? Do you walk away?

We have this metaphor that we use at Student Maid. It’s called the line. It symbolizes what it takes for the relationship to really work.

What we say is the leadership team, the executive team, we’re going to stand at this line every day and what that means is we are going to invest in you, care about you, give you feedback to help you grow, support you, stand by you when you fail. We’re going to give you the tools to do your job and that’s what it’s like standing at the line for us.

But it only works if you’re at the line, which means that you’re doing something with the feedback we give you. You’re giving us feedback when there’s room for us to grow. You’re getting back up when you fail. You care.

What I’ve learned in this whole thing is you can’t make someone care. You can’t make someone change. You can’t make someone anything. They have to want it.

If you are standing at the line, whether you are leading a team of people, whether you’re not, but if you’re at the line and you’re by yourself, I think that’s how you know that it’s time to walk away because you can’t force that other party to stand at the line with you. They have to want to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Then it sounds like you’ve had some experiences then when others are not standing at the line and they needed to be let go.

Kristen Hadeed
Yes. There was a student we had many years ago. Her name was Kayla. Kayla, she was the best cleaner we had ever seen. You could eat off the floor after she cleaned it.

When I met her I learned early on that she had a really rocky home life. She was the first person in her family to go to school. She was fully supporting herself. She came from physical and emotional abuse and made it very clear that Student Maid was like her family. I made a vow to myself that I was going to protect her and keep her as a part of our family no matter what.

The problem was Kayla had a real issue with being on time. She was late very often. It wasn’t just five minutes late, ten minutes late, sometimes it would be 45 minutes late. I really struggled with, here’s this person, I know she’s struggling in her personal life and that we mean a lot to her. She’s also a really fantastic cleaner, but yet she can’t be on time. What do I do?

It started to cause a lot of tension on the team because other leaders in the company would say, “This isn’t fair. We’re requiring everyone else to have – to be on time, so we have to hold her to the same standard.”

What I ended up doing with her is I made exception after exception after exception. It got so bad that she started to not show up to work. Then I just had her cleaning my own house because I didn’t want her actions to impact anyone else.

Long story short, I found out that she had a substance abuse problem. She really needed to go and get help for that. I had to eventually walk away from her. She went to a rehab center and she got better.

Then after that she called me out of the blue one day and she thanked me for giving up on her. I thought, “Uh, wait, what?” It was the first time anyone ever thanked me for giving up on them. She said, “Had you not walked away from me, I would have never hit rock bottom and I would have never wanted to take ownership over my life.”

I realized that you can’t keep giving people chance after chance after chance. You have to – they have to want to change. They have to be open to that. They have to be ready for that.

That experience really helped me. It made me realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone and even the best thing you can do for an organization is to say, “I’m walking away,” because that’s when the other party decides, “Hm, I need to change something here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. I imagine there are other occasions, maybe less dramatic, in which folks aren’t living up to the line as well.

Kristen Hadeed
Of course. Yeah. I think the key is it should never be a surprise to someone when they’re being asked to leave. This should not be coming out of the blue here. Okay, we’ve talked about this. We’ve made a self-improvement plan. We’ve identified what happens if the plan doesn’t work. Now we’re here.

What we find in our company now is that people don’t – we usually don’t have to ask anyone to leave. They come forward and say, “Look, I know we had this agreement for this plan. I didn’t do my part and so now I know that I have to walk away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yup. That’s powerful. I guess I’m so intrigued by some organizations in which there are some that have a really strong performance culture and expectations and clarity and folks who just clearly need to go and go, then others that just seem terrified of lawsuits and there are hideouts and stowaways and just severely underperforming folks who remain and there is no termination just out of a terror of lawsuits.

What’s your take on that? Have you had to deal with lawsuit issues or it’s just been pretty smooth? How do you think about the risk liability side of it all?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I’ll just say this, you name what can happen in a business, I have been there. I’ve gotten the T-shirt. I’ve done it all, been through it all.

But I think when you’re operating out of fear, that’s a problem. The route that I take is let’s never get to that point where there is fear.

I think it starts at the beginning. Are you hiring people who really embody the values? Then do your people feel empowered to speak up when they notice that there’s someone on the team who isn’t living the values? How can you make sure that those people aren’t really a part of the company for too long?

Then, like I said, the feedback should be regular. It should be ongoing. It should never be a surprise that this person is letting the team down.

Yeah, I think you have to live – I think you have to if there’s someone who is not sitting at the line or they’re hurting the organization, they’re hurting the team, they aren’t ethical, they’re not living the values, they have to go.

Your fear of a lawsuit or whatever it may be cannot trump that because the message you’re sending to everyone else in the company is actually the values that we say are so important, aren’t that important because we’re letting this person stay on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
So you have been sued?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh yeah. Yeah. But the story I think of when you said that, there was someone I had on the team who I knew was stealing. People had come forward and told me. I was afraid of her. I was afraid that if I confronted her, she would sue me, which is so backwards because it’s like she was stealing from the company. Oh my goodness. What am I afraid?

But I let her stay on the team. I was afraid to confront her. The way that she was stealing, she was adding time to her payroll, so she was exaggerating her hours. What ended up happening is she would go to newer people who didn’t really – who were just brand new and she would kind of bully them into lying about their hours so that their hours would match hers.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, because they’re partners, right?

Kristen Hadeed
Yes, they’re partners. The toxicity spread to so many people. So many people exaggerated their hours. I ended up having to let them all go. Had I just dealt with the problem the first time I heard of it, it would have never grown into that.

But that was a huge mistake I made. It cost – then all of the people who came forward and said this is happening and then they watched me do nothing about it, I ended up losing those people because they didn’t want to work with a company where the values and everything we said we stood for we actually didn’t.

Kristen Hadeed
I think you just have to treat people like – you have to care about people and you have to treat them with respect. You have to treat them the way you’d want to be treated. If you do that, yes, sometimes things get ugly and people are hurt, but I try to look past that and think about what’s the real root of this.

Every time where there has been something where someone’s come back to the company, it’s because they were hurt. They didn’t feel cared for. They didn’t feel valued. That’s what made them take this action. I think we just learned a lot from those situations.

Sometimes it’s not related to me. Sometimes it’s related to someone who maybe was their leader and they didn’t make them feel valued and cared for. It’s really hard when you’re in this position of leadership. I think it’s really hard to learn the dance between holding people accountable and really making them feel cared for and valued. Until you figure out what that balance is, you’re going to mess up.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Cool. I just wanted to say or hear from you if you have that strong encouragement for those who are in that fearful place of someone needs to be let go but I’m terrified of a lawsuit. To summarize you’re saying, “Don’t live out of fear. It shouldn’t be a surprise.” You’re saying, “It’s absolutely worth it to just – to live out the values and experience some consequences because you really come out ahead.”

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, yeah. A mentor once gave me some advice that helps me even today. Whenever I’m afraid of something, I think about what is the worst that can happen. I just wrap my mind around what’s the worst case scenario. Then I think about well, what would I do if that happened.

Now, all of the sudden I’m not worried because I’ve thought about the worst case. I know what I’ll do. How many times does the worst case actually happen? Hardly ever.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Cool. Give us some more pro tips when it comes to cultivating meaningful relationships. You said you used to host parties but that wasn’t quite doing the trick. What is doing the trick?

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, I used to think relationships were about just being together. When I started the company I was the same age as my team. I had a graduation party and I invited them over. We would go to the same pool parties and this and that.

But at the end of the day our relationships were superficial. We were talking about what we were doing over the weekend or what our plans were for summer vacation. It wasn’t really about anything with any kind of depth.

Over time I learned that if you really want meaningful relationships, you have to know people deeply. You have to know where they come from. You have to know the experiences that really shape them and the moments in their life that really define who they are. The only way you know is by asking and sharing yourself and being vulnerable yourself.

We do regular exercises at Student Maid. It’s called development day. Every quarter we bring our whole company together.

We always start with three vulnerability questions. The leadership team will answer the questions in front of the whole room. Then everyone splits off into different teams and they answer the questions amongst their team.

Examples are “What is the most challenging relationship in your life and why?”  or “What’s a moment that really defined who you are that you haven’t shared with many people?” or “What’s one thing that’s preventing you from becoming a better you that you’re not doing that you should be doing?” Things that really are hard to talk about but when you do, you actually form a connection. You actually build trust.

A lot of people look at that and they say, “Wait a minute. This is a little too weird for work and you’re crossing a line.” We never force anyone to share anything they don’t want to share. I’ll say that. But I think it’s so crazy because we spend most of our time at work and with the people we work with and yet we are afraid of crossing this line and forming a real relationship.

Well, I don’t want to work with people who I don’t really enjoy working with, who I don’t have high sense of trust with. What is that? I think if we really want to create a place where there’s loyalty and trust, we have to create the space for those conversations to happen.

We do that. It’s a huge, huge component of Student Maid. I think actually I think it’s the reason that people want to work for a cleaning company because it’s certainly not the work that’s keeping them there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. That is powerful. The vulnerability questions, which immediately makes me thing of Brene Brown. Then to start with the leadership and front and center is powerful because it’s kind of like we’re not just forcing you to do this, worker bees. Here we are showing the way and putting that example out there.

I guess the reason that folks are leaders is because they knew what they were getting into upfront is that this is a part of the game as opposed to – it might be a little bit trickier to spring that on people. “Hey, for tomorrow’s meeting, here’s kind of what I think-”

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. I think you have to explain to – especially when you’re doing that, it’s – what is the purpose of this. Why are we doing this? What’s the end goal?

We always say that relationship is the foundation of accomplishment. Before we can ever talk about accomplishing any goal, we have to have a really strong foundation that’s built on trust and real, meaningful relationships. Until we have that, we can’t talk about our business goals because we don’t have a foundation to stand on to reach those.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I would imagine it’s just like if you can share those kind of vulnerabilities – now I’m thinking about the movie Dodgeball. “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”

By that I mean, if you can say this thing that’s hard to say, that doesn’t have direct business impact or feedback about performance but it’s important to you, if you can say that, then in a way that just really kind of builds up your capabilities to have other difficult conversations in terms of, “You know what? This performance is really disappointing in these ways,” or “Here’s some perspective I have for you on how I found this challenging or upsetting.”

It’s like an icebreaker that actually breaks ice I guess is how I’m thinking about it.

Kristen Hadeed
Right. Yup. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Now as a result of sort of all of this stuff, you’ve got some impressive retention rates for your workers as compared to I guess the cleaning industry at large. Could you share just a little bit of sort of where you’re sitting versus the industry norms and any other kind of elements of the secret sauce you think are behind that?

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, the cleaning industry has such a high turnover rate. 75% is the average.

Pete Mockaitis
That means in one year 75% of a workforce will not be there the next year.

Kristen Hadeed
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Kristen Hadeed
Because of that the customer turnover is also equally high, 55% is the average.

That’s hard but then you add in that in our business model we hire primarily students. Not all students. If you’re a fit for our culture, you’re getting a job, but most of our team members are students. They come with not a lot of job experience.

Then the average profit margin of a cleaning company is only 15%, so you can’t really afford to pay people much above minimum wage. You’ve got hard, exhausting work, can’t afford to really train, develop. You don’t have a lot for that. Then you have people coming into my business with hardly any experience.

It’s a huge challenge, but we really evolved early on from being a cleaning company to a company that is centered around growth and leadership. We always say that we – our goal is to help our people build a skillset that really will help them be successful after they leave our doors. Everything we’re doing is about getting them ready and equipping them with the skills they need to be successful for after they leave us.

Because of that, I think people really feel invested in. I know they feel invested in and they don’t want to leave. While they’re cleaning, they’re taking courses on things like the FBI and how to find your strengths and articulate them in an interview and how to build meaningful relationships, what is vulnerability, what is empathy, how do you listen, what things should you text about, what things should you talk face-to-face about.

We do all of this stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with dusting or mopping or vacuuming but really does help you in your life.

Then what happens is people graduate and it’s time to move on from the company and they don’t want to go because they’re like, “Will I be able to find another company where I’m invested in?” Sadly I think there are a lot of companies that don’t do that. I wish more would. I dream of the day when every company invests in people like we do the bottom line.

I think the average person stays with us until they leave school. For some that may be four years, for some it’s two years, depending on when they join the team. It isn’t uncommon – sometimes we have to tell people, “You’ve got to go. It’s time to go and branch off and go out there and make the mark you want to have on the world.”

But I think it shows that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what the work is that you’re doing, you can find a way to really inject purpose and meaning into that work. As long as you’re making people feel like they are the priority because they are, they usually don’t want to go anywhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. So cool. I want to get your quick take on Millennials, not to belabor the point. But I mean you’ve got perhaps one of the most privileged vantage points of any human alive in terms of working with young folk, doing menial work. What’s your take on what’s real versus silly, overgeneralizations when it comes to Millennials?

Kristen Hadeed
I’ll tell you two stories quickly. One is a student who came into the office and said, “Do you know where I can get a stamp?” We said, “What? A stamp?” She said, “When I need one, my mom mails me one and I don’t have time to wait for that.” We’re like, “Your mom mails you a stamp when you need a stamp. Oh my goodness, we can get you a stamp way faster than that.”

It would be really easy for me to tell you that story and then at the end say, “Ah, Millennial,” but I’m not going to say that.

Then I’ll tell you this other story and it’s that my mom works with us. She’s a Baby Boomer. I gave everyone an assignment not too long ago where they had to write their own job description. I said it needs to be around 500 words. When my mom turned hers in she kept saying, “It’s either 503, 504, 498. I don’t know. I counted so many times. I keep getting a different number.”

I realized that she did not know about word count on Microsoft Word and she was hand counting every single word on her job description. It would be really easy for me to say, “Ah, Baby Boomers,” after that, but I’m not going to.

I think the point is, we’re all just trying to do our best. We’re all just trying to figure it out. It’s really easy to make fun of Baby Boomers, just like it’s really easy to make fun of Millennials, really easy to make fun of Gen X.

We’re all humans, so let’s just put this … away and let’s just instead focus on how can we just create a place that brings out the best in everyone, that helps everyone realize their potential, and remember that at the end of the day we all want to feel valued and significant and trusted. That’s the thing we have in common. Let’s focus on that.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds a lot easier than doing an elaborate segmented-

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, it’s way easier.

Pete Mockaitis
-intervention person by person based on their generation. That’s great. It sounds like you don’t really buy into so much the so-called assertions that Millennials are this way as opposed to Boomers which are that way.

Kristen Hadeed
I do think that there are things that help shape a generation. We employ Gen Z as well as Millennials. That’s primarily our makeup.

I think technology has really affected both. I think that it’s affected our independent thinking because when we have a question our first thought is that we Google it instead of thinking of it on our own. When we need directions, we type in the address and step-by-step it tells us exactly what to do. We don’t have to think about where we are.

Then on the relationship end, we’re used to texting and social media, so sitting and having a real conversation that’s really based on vulnerability maybe isn’t comfortable because we’re not used to that.

But then I think about, well that’s definitely affected us, let’s look at everyone else. When I walk into conference rooms with other people, I see people on their phones all the time. It’s not just Millennials. I see people emailing about important things that really should be face-to-face all the time, not just Millennials.

I think technology has affected everyone and the way we interact and the way we think. I think it’s affected Millennial in Gen Z’ers more because that’s really the way that we grew up, but I think that’s something that’s widespread.

Also, almost 70% of the world is disengaged at work. That’s not a Millennial statistic. That’s a human statistic. To me what it’s saying is this isn’t a Millennial problem. This is a human engagement problem. We have to figure out how are we going to help everyone become more engaged.

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

Kristen Hadeed
I think – no. You’re good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh shucks.

Kristen Hadeed
I love this interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Flattery will get you everywhere Kristen. I appreciate it. Well, let’s do it. Tell us about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Kristen Hadeed
I don’t know who said it. Well, I have two. I don’t know who said either one. The first is, “Nothing goes to plan and that is the plan.” That just helps me realize that when something happens that’s a deviation, instead of getting frustrated, realize that it’s all part of the process. One day when you look back it will all make sense.

The other really helps me in terms of empathy. It’s that, “Hurt people hurt people. Loved people love people.” It helps me when someone’s emotions kind of exceed the moment or they’re angry about something and I cannot understand why they’re taking this out on me, I just remember that hurt people hurt people. They’re probably hurting inside about something else, so I need to come at them with empathy instead of anger.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh, I love John Gottman’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Kristen Hadeed
I’m obsessed with it. He, if you don’t know John Gottman, look him up. He studies – he’s a psychologist who works a lot in marriage and family space, but I find a lot of the work he’s done can be applied to the workplace. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh, I have so many. Probably the book that influenced me most early on, Delivering Happiness, which is written by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.

It really helped me understand what culture is and that is that it’s not things like having the cool office and a ping pong table and beer on tap, that it’s really about how people feel. Then it got me thinking, how do I want people to feel and how do I help them feel that way.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job? I’m sorry, scratch it. Your favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job.

Kristen Hadeed
I don’t know if this is a tool. I guess it’s more of a habit, but every night before I go to bed I think about what are the three things I want to accomplish tomorrow. I’m really clear on that because during the day there are so many things that happen that take you away from important stuff.

I think the night before identifying what are the three things that if I accomplish these, I’ll go to bed feeling like today was a win. It just helps me stay focused when things can get so crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks as you speak it?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I think it’s the title of the book. I think it’s that you don’t need anyone to give you permission to screw up; give it to yourself.

Just give yourself permission to be human and talk about it because I think we’re making leadership unattainable because we’re acting as if you’ve got to have all the answers and know how to do everything in order to be a leader. That’s not true. Everyone can be a leader. Everyone can have an impact on the person to the right of them or the left of them.

Sometimes we’re going to mess up in figuring that out and it’s all right and that’s normal. Let’s just admit that.

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

Kristen Hadeed
Well, all my social media is my name Kristen Hadeed and then you can go to my website KristenHadded.com or StudentMaid.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kristen Hadeed
Let’s see, since we talked about FBIs, how about give someone at work an FBI in person.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Kristen thank you so much for sharing this. This was so much fun.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I wish you and Student Maid tons of luck going forward for another nine amazing years.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you. Thank you.

May 04
0

295: The Value of Awkwardness with Melissa Dahl

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Melissa Dahl says: "The ridiculous in me honors the ridiculous in you."

Melissa Dahl discusses embracing awkward moments and turning them into valuable learning experiences.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When self-consciousness can be helpful
  2. A quick exercise to instantly make you feel less self-conscious
  3. How to effectively navigate an awkward conversation

About Melissa

Melissa Dahl is a senior editor at New York Magazine’s The Cut, where she leads the health and psychology coverage. In 2014, she helped launch Science of Us, NYMag’s popular social science website. Her writing interests include personality, emotions, and mental health. Outside of New York Magazine, Melissa’s byline has appeared in Elle, Parents, and the New York Times.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Melissa Dahl Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Melissa, thanks so much for joining us here at the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’re going to have a whole lot of fun in this conversation. I think we both had our fair share of awkward moments. Could you tell us a little bit about a time you once ran into a light pole?

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, you heard about that too. Yeah, okay.

This happened a few years ago. I am very much not a morning person, but sometimes I kind of like to pretend to be one. I was meeting my friend, Marie, for like a 6 AM jog on the East River. We had just started and I do not know how it happened, but I like ran straight into a pole, like a light pole. To this day I have no idea how it happened.

I write about this in the book and how you’re instinct when these sorts of things happen is to just play it off and say, “Oh, I’m fine. I’m fine. It was fine,” even if you’re like really, really hurt.

The funny – we can kind of get into this later I guess, but the funny thing about that was I didn’t tell my friend Marie I was putting that in the book. When she got to it because I gave her an early copy, she was like, “Oh, I mean I kind of remember that, but I don’t remember it in this much detail,” so yeah, it didn’t have as much of an impact on her as it did on me.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I guess emotionally in the memory and physically.

Melissa Dahl
Physically. Oh my gosh.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh mercy. Yes, that is an illustration of an important principle that we’re going to get to. But maybe you can orient us first and foremost, so your book, Cringe Worthy, what’s it all about?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, so the book is about – so I am a senior editor at The Cut, where I cover – which is a New York magazine website. I cover health and psychology there. I’ve written about psychology for a long time. I’m really interested in emotions, kind of relationships, how we understand ourselves, how we understand each other.

This book is sort of an outgrowth of that I wanted to understand the feeling of awkwardness, which is something that, I don’t know about you, but I feel a lot.

What I’ve always really liked about my job is it’s like almost like highbrow self-help. I’m reading these academic studies and there’s some kind of just nugget in there of “Oh, I could apply this to my life and it’s going to make me better at this or it’s going to make relationships go more smoothly,” or something like that.  I just kind of couldn’t find anything that applied to awkwardness.

That’s what the book kind of is, just me trying to understand this feeling and what the purpose of it might be. I actually have to tell you, it started as a book about how to avoid awkwardness, how to kind of overcome it and protect from ever feeling this way. By the end, I kind of came to really like this weird little emotion.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. First of all, for those who are curious or intrigued, what’s there to like about it Melissa?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, a few things l think. One of the things is – the subtitle of the book is A Theory of Awkwardness. My sort of major theory is I think that awkward moments happen when the version of yourself you’re trying to present to the world is shown to be incompatible with reality in some way.

I would like to present to the world that I am not the kind of person who runs into lamp poles and then I do. Or a good recent example of this is at the Winter Olympics a couple of months ago, there was this picture that went around of a – I think she was a Russian athlete – wearing a shirt that said something like, ‘I don’t do doping,’ or something like that. Then it turned out she failed a drug test.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, bugger.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. I remember someone at my job put that into the chat and just wrote ‘awkward’ on it.

I think it kind of shows you that there’s a gap sometimes between the version of yourself you’re trying to present to the world and the version of yourself the world is actually kind of seeing.

If that’s true, then I think one good thing about these kinds of moments is that it kind of maybe shows us some places where we need improvement if we’re open to it. It’s going to show us some places where we can grow. That’s sort of my main theory of awkwardness.

But the other aspect of it is that I came to really love is these moments feel isolating, it feels like you’re the only one who just feels like an embarrassing idiot, but of course we all feel this way. If we are a little more open about it, it’s a way to kind of connect with people.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh that is good. Well, I want to follow up on a couple of those points there. First you say that the awkwardness happens when there’s a mismatch between sort of your self-perception or the version of yourself that you have in mind versus what is picked up by others.

Would you say that this is a mismatch in sort of the net disappointing direction, like, “I think of myself as someone who doesn’t dope and yet, here I am being found out as someone as dopes,” but can it happen in the opposite as well, like, “I think of myself as just sort of like a normal guy, but then people are telling me that I’m a genius.” Does that also feel awkward?

Melissa Dahl
I actually sort of think – I think we certainly think of it more in the negative direction. If you think you were having a pretty good hair day and then you see a picture of yourself and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, actually my hair was super greasy or something like that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and no one told me. That’s happened before. It’s like, “We were talking for more than an hour, you didn’t think that this worth a mention?”

Melissa Dahl
Exactly. I think it’s typically in that direction. I don’t know.

I sometimes think it might be – I think we feel weird whenever – I think we feel unsettled a little bit whenever we realize the self you’re trying to present to the world is not the way other people are seeing you.

There’s a story I read about in a book. It’s anthropologist story from the late ‘60s. He went to this tribe in Papua New Guinea. He had reason to believe that these folks had never seen their reflections, that they’d never seen a photographic image of themselves. They’ve never seen themselves in a mirror.

He kind of came and his arrival changed all that. He brought mirrors, he brought Polaroid cameras, he brought tape recorders. As he writes it – he wrote this report about it later – they all just kind of cowered and kind of just like clenched their stomachs, and kind of gritted their teeth. I think you could say they cringed. They cringed at the way they looked, at the way they sounded.

I’m not sure we can say they all thought like, “Oh, I’m uglier than I thought,” but just like oh, there’s just something existentially weird about thinking there is the you that exists in your own head and there’s the you running around out there who other people actually see and that those are often the same, but sometimes they’re not. Yeah, I think that’s kind of a part of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true I guess. It would be unusual if all of those villagers were disappointed.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Because I guess some of them would probably be surprised like, “Oh, I’ve got some good muscles.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s paying off all that work I’ve been doing.

Melissa Dahl
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I just think there’s something strange about the fact – confronting the fact that – I don’t know, you don’t just exist in your head that other people see you maybe a little differently than you see yourself. It’s just a little strange to reckon with even if it is in a positive direction.

Pete Mockaitis
It is strange to reckon with. One thing I find strange to have a hard time reckoning with is when you’re in the midst of a situation and someone actually explicitly says the word, “Awkward.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s up with that? Any research insights on that one?

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, I know. That was such a thing when I was in college. Oh my gosh.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m glad it’s died down a little bit. I don’t hear it as much anymore.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I know. I feel like it’s kind of migrated to people like my mother now says it a lot, although she might just say it because I wrote this book.

I think that term kind of has become kind of a cliché and almost kind of annoying. But I think that it’s – what it was supposed to be, what it was intended for actually helped a lot. I think there’s something about calling attention to the awkwardness of a situation, but if you do it right, it can kind of diffuse it.

Your listeners want to be awesome at work, there’s a lot of awkward situations at work. You maybe have to give someone feedback and you don’t know how to say it or maybe you have to tell someone they didn’t get this promotion they put in for.

I think sometimes it can help kind of cushion the blow a little bit or make it a little bit less uncomfortable if you just kind of acknowledge this is going to be a little hard to hear, this is going to be a little uncomfortable, maybe even this is going to be a little awkward. I think that’s where it came from a good place, but the awkward thing worked into something very annoying, so don’t do that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. I like that because I think if you just sort of declare in advance, “Hey, this is what’s going on,” that really can be helpful as opposed to just saying, “Awkward.” It’s like, “Ah, shut up.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, don’t do that. That’s annoying, but the impulse makes sense. I think the impulse is a good one, so kind of digging that out of the annoying

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. Thank you. I also want to hear a little bit about the awkwardness vortex turn of a phrase. What does this mean?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, so this is something I discovered in the research. There is all this psychological research linking nervousness and self-consciousness. Basically if you are nervous, you become more self-conscious. If you are self-conscious, you become nervous. The two kind of exacerbate each other and it goes round and round and round. I called this the awkwardness vortex.

It’s the kind of thing where if you’re going in for a job interview and you sit down and suddenly you can’t remember like, “Wait, what am I supposed to do with my legs? Should I cross my legs? Should I cross them to the side? Should I go to the other side? Should I just not cross them? What should I do?”

You’re nervous, so you’re kind of like zeroing in on your body, like “What am I doing? What is my arm doing?” Then focusing in on yourself makes you more nervous and it just goes around and around and around. Yeah, that is the awkwardness vortex.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah. That’s intriguing. Can you give us a couple more examples of how that can play out and sort of if you find yourself emerging or beginning to enter that, how do you escape?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, well another example because it’s kind of a pop culture example, but – it’s like a silly example – but it’s in one of the Austin Powers’ movies. I think it’s like the third one, which is not a good movie. But there’s a part where there’s like a spy or a character or something who has a really big mole on his face.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes.

Melissa Dahl
And Austin is trying to say anything but calling attention to the mole. Then it just kind of comes out, like, “Oh mole, mole.” It’s a funny scene.

But I think that sort of could be applicable here. If you’re trying so hard not to offend somebody, but then all you can think about is what you’re saying, what you’re doing, and how that might offending them, and then that’s making you nervous you’re going to offend them. It’s just that link between nervousness and self-consciousness is a really established thing in the literature.

The good thing is because it’s so established, the folks who study this say that there is a pretty clear way out, which is if self-consciousness is part of the thing that triggers this, the way out of the awkwardness vortex is to focus on anything but yourself. Just focus on trying to get to know the person in front of you.

To go back to the job interview example, maybe do some work beforehand and think like, “Okay, these are the three things about myself I’m going to get across in this interview.” Just focusing on anything but yourself, calling attention to the weather, calling attention to, I don’t know, some third party thing, that should help.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. That notion of fixating on what not to say causing problems just reminds me of a scene in The Simpsons where Principal Skinner is addressing the student body. He doesn’t know what to say regarding girls and math. He’s just trying so hard not to say the wrong thing and he just breaks down and says, “Tell me what you want me to say.”

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, yeah. I think that – this is kind of a lot what I was writing about. The book is kind of aimed at people who are acting in good faith, who don’t – that chapter about the awkwardness vortex is people who don’t want to offend someone, not in a politically correct way, but just don’t want to be offensive. They’re people who want to be kind and make other people feel respected and welcome.

Sometimes I think focusing so hard on that, it just causes us to clam up and get more nervous and get more self-conscious. Part of this is kind of just taking a few steps back and not doing in so hard on yourself. It really helps.

Pete Mockaitis
You say we have good reason to feel less self-conscious. Can you unpack that a little bit, if you’ve got a handy exercise?

Melissa Dahl
Well, a really interesting thing about self-consciousness that the psychologists who study this say that it doesn’t exist to torture you. The point of self-consciousness is to help you learn.

A baseball player or something who is working on his swing he has to be – or someone who’s learning to play a sport like tennis or something like that. That’s maybe a better analogy. You are being pretty self-consciousness. You’re zeroing in on your actions, on your body, and that’s a good thing. That’s what you have to do to learn.

That’s actually helped me too to talk about kind of why we feel self-conscious. It’s there to torture me. It’s there for a purpose.

But that said, ways to not let it completely run your life, one of them is the focusing on other people. Then the other thing is just realizing that nobody else is as self-conscious of yourself as you are.

No one else is as focused on you as you are, which I know we all know in our heads, but you forget that when you’ve done something really silly. You think everyone’s looking, everyone’s – like the example with the lamp post. My friend didn’t even really remember that. She kind of did, but not really.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Now you suggest an exercise right in terms of really kind of checking that out with a best friend with regard to your awkward or embarrassing memories.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So can you unpack that a bit?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing. It’s the opposite version of my friend Marie not remembering me crashing into a lamp post.

We’ve been friends for a long time and I kind of can’t – I’m trying to call to mind something embarrassing she’s done. She’s someone I see all the time. I know I’ve seen her do something or say something embarrassing, but I really can’t remember anything. Now I’m trying to think of my college best friend, like I’m sure I’ve seen her do a million dumb things. We’ve been friends for a really long time.

To me that’s a good exercise. Your brain will come up with some things if they’re funny stories or if you’ve repeated them a lot, but I think for the most part it’s pretty hard to remember something that – I don’t know, something dumb your coworker said last week that she might be still really punishing herself over, like, “Oh, I can’t believe I made that stupid joke in the meeting. I’m such an idiot.” I can’t remember any of that.

Yeah, trying to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and trying to call to mind an embarrassing thing someone else has done is a pretty good exercise.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Thank you. Now I’m curious, if we are going to enter into some territory that sounds like it could be awkward, you mentioned one pro tip is just sort of kind of setting the stage of the context and admitting what’s there, calling a spade a spade. Do you have any other perspectives on what is the optimal way to go forward into a conversation you perceive as likely to be awkward?

Melissa Dahl
Okay, so I have a chapter in my book about awkwardness at work. One kind of like underrated awkward thing at work is friendships. We work with people but we’re also friends with them. We’re kind of playing these two roles with them.

I don’t about you, but I’ve certainly been in plenty of situations where I’m friends with my co-worker but also she is not pulling her weight. I don’t know what to do. I feel like I need to – I don’t know how to have that conversation.

Or something like – this is a real thing that happened to a friend of mine. Her coworker just disappears to go to the gym for a couple hours in the afternoon and she has to cover for the coworker and it’s really starting to make her mad. I think work friendships is a place where it can be pretty awkward.

Talking about how to deal with it. I think one thing that helps – I think sometimes awkwardness can come from a feeling of uncertainty. I don’t know what to say next. I don’t know what to do next. That’s such a common thing when you’re feeling awkward.

To use this example of a problem with a friend at work, the best thing you can do to cut through that discomfort I think is just to be as direct as possible, just as straightforward as possible, which can feel uncomfortable, but it’s actually I think the kindest thing to do. You can say it in a kind way, but it’s better to just say it to your friend that “You’re doing this. It makes me feel this way and you’ve got to knock it off.”

I think that straightforwardness and directness can help cut through some of the awkwardness actually. I think we think that the answer is to kind of dance around a subject and like, “Oh, I can’t say that. I can’t say that directly. I can’t bring up this problem,” but I think it would be better if we all got up the guts to be a little bit more straightforward.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. I think you’re dead on and it makes it more awkward when you’re dancing around it.

I remember one time I was coordinating this youth leadership seminar. It so happened that there was another group in the same facilities that I was familiar with. There was this dude who was like a hero to me that I had heard of from afar. I read his book. It was like, “Oh my gosh, that is Curtis Martin,” which means nothing to most people, but for me it was like well that guy is a big deal.

He’s in the room. Actually, me and my staff we all need to get in this room and sort of set things up because we’re going to have a bunch of students coming through here soon. I was like, “Oh my gosh, how do I boot almighty Curtis Martin out of this room.”

I remember I went in there. I felt super awkward. I was like, “Oh hi, so we – hi, I’m Pete and I’m a big fan. We have also a need-“ He was like, “Oh, you need the room?” I was like, “Yes, please.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
It was merciful that he directly said what was there. I think that’s a good move. I guess there’s a fear associated with going there like they’ll be offended or they’ll lash back, or sort of terribly negative things will unfold if we say what we really think.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, but I think there’s a way to do it with kindness and I think that sometimes the simplest way is the best way to do it. Yeah, I think you kind of have to either – you either have to have the awkward conversation, you have to kind of be straightforward with the person or you just have to live with the thing that’s bothering if it’s a work situation especially, but probably in any situation.

Pete Mockaitis
That will do it. I’d love to hear what’s your verbiage that you settled upon for the gym situation or the friend/coworker not pulling the weight situation. Can we hear it? Flashback, you’re back there in the scene, what were the words you said?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. Well the gym situation is a friend of mine.

The other person not pulling their weight, this was years ago before I went through my exercise in studying awkwardness. I didn’t say anything. I never said anything. Actually the resentment grew, and grew, and grew and I don’t consider this person a friend anymore, which I guess that sometimes happens with coworkers.

Looking back I have a really negative feeling about it. I think that I could have stopped that and we could have had a much better working relationship. That’s kind of an example of I just was afraid to have the conversation. I would tell everybody else, like, “I can’t believe I’m doing all the work,” but I never said it to this person. I’m sorry that I didn’t.

I write in the book about I kind of had a spotty track record of rising to the moment of awkwardness. There was a time I was a brand new manager and some folks had kind of complained to me about one of my direct reports. He’s kind of rude. He’s making more work for others. We’re having our weekly one-on-one and I literally had written down in my notes ‘address attitude’ and I didn’t do it. I didn’t know how to bring it up, so I didn’t do it.

I have fallen. I have not stood up in moments of awkwardness. It’s hard. It can be really hard. However, I think since kind of studying the heck out of this feeling I have kind of become less afraid of it.

This is pretty awkward at work I guess. We went through a reorg here last summer as I was kind of finishing up the book. All the sudden I didn’t know who my boss was, which is like a really embarrassing thing to have to admit because I kind of let it go on for a couple of weeks. It was like, “Um, like who is-?” like that Dr. Seuss book like, “Are you my mommy?”

But I just asked directly. I just went into my old boss’s office and I was like, “Hey, this is kind of weird, but are you still my boss? Is this other person my boss?” He was like, “Oh, yeah you should know that. Okay, here let me,” going through ….

I am just so a fan of being direct. The things you do that you think are saving you from awkwardness kind of just dig you in further sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s kind of what’s connected for me in terms of we fear these negative outcomes if you go there directly, but there are other negative outcomes if you don’t with regard to one, you may have the resentment that resulted in the disruption of the relationship or two for the rude coworker with the bad attitude, if you never address that for him, I don’t know where he ended up, but-

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I’m not doing him a favor in the long run.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, he could get fired.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And he’s broke because you didn’t go there. Not to heap the guilt on you Melissa.

Melissa Dahl
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
But yeah, negative outcomes can happen for not going on there that far exceed the negative outcomes that you fear for going there.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. I also sometimes think we think we’re avoiding an awkward conversation because we’re trying to protect the other person’s feelings, but I think it’s more often we’re protecting ourselves. We don’t want to come off as a critical negative person.

If it’s a boss situation, you want to be the cool boss or whatever or you want to be the cool coworker, like, “I’m chill. It’s fine. Do whatever you want,” but I think it kinder in the long run to have those conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say cool boss I don’t know why I’m thinking about, what was it A.C. Slater or Will Riker, always backwards chair. “What’s up?”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That’s how I have my meetings, take a chair, turn it around backwards, “Hey, …”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you’re so cool.

Melissa Dahl
You want a cigarette?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh that is cool.

But that’s a great perspective when it comes to you’re protecting yourself as opposed to their feelings. In a way if you think about what we’d call a hero or a person who is really loving or generous, it’s a person who takes a personal risk for the benefit of another.

It’s like, you’re scared of what’s to come but you know that they’ll be enriched by you sharing it potentially if they receive it. They might just reject it. But there’s a chance of them really being enriched and there’s a risk of you suffering some kind of a consequence. It might be just an awkward feeling. It might be a damaged relationship or …. So in a way you going there makes you a hero.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. I should say, it’s not like it’s guaranteed that these conversations will always go well. The person might not react well, but I think that you can only control what you can control.

But the other thing I kind of wanted to say is sometimes you’re on the receiving end of the awkwardness, someone is pointing out something about you won’t want to hear, someone is saying to you like, “Hey, I’ve been doing all your work for you the last three weeks or something.” You’re like, “Wait, that’s because I was – that’s because of this, that’s because of that.”

I think when we’re in that situation our natural reaction is to be pretty defensive. I think if, as I kind of think awkwardness comes from, in part at least, from that gap between how you see yourself and how others see you, this is an example of that that someone is showing you, like “I see you in this pretty unflattering light.”

It’s our natural reaction to kind of push that out, but I think it’s really useful sometimes to kind of sit there in the awkwardness and hear what the other person has to say about you. It’s not always necessarily true, but sometimes it is. Sometimes other people’s perspectives about you are worth hearing because other people can see parts of us that we can’t really see. That’s the other side of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah. Do you have any pro tips if you’re feeling defensive, you’re hearing something, you don’t like it, you’re getting those defensive vibes bubbling up inside, what’s the best practice?

Melissa Dahl
All I can think is – something that helps is maybe kind of to take a third person perspective almost of the situation or just kind of distance yourself from the situation a little bit it helps, just think, “Okay, this is what this person thinks of me. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person. It doesn’t even mean it’s necessarily true, but this is one opinion of me. This is one viewpoint on me. Let me see if I can look at this, step outside of myself and look at this from their perspective and kind of try to evaluate it subjectively.”

Trying to kind of tap into a cooler mindset rather than the kind of heated response I think helps. Then just to me kind of having a mindset of, “This could help me grow. This could help me become a better person. If what this person is telling me is true and if it is something I can improve on then thank God they told me.”

Like the direct report I had who was pretty rude to people around the office, he was a nice guy. I’m sure he wasn’t doing it on purpose.

If I had had that conversation with him, I would hope he could have just let that in and let that perspective of himself in and let it clash with how he sees himself, I don’t know, and maybe use that perspective and use that feedback to maybe become a little closer towards that person he thinks he is or you think you are to turn it back to you. Anyway, I hope that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is good. Certainly to focus in on like, “I don’t like this. I think this is bullcrap,” etcetera to, “There might be something worthwhile within this to facilitate my growth and so I will receive it.”

That third-person perspective sounds handy. Then maybe even just spending some time with it after the fact in terms of, “I thought that was outrageous. They don’t have the right context for it, but this huh. I’ve never heard that before.”

Melissa Dahl
Yeah. It’s sort of back to the analogy of having a picture taken of you where you look really unfamiliar to yourself. It’s true that maybe it did catch you at a bad angle or it’s just a weird look on your face or something, but it shows you a side of yourself you couldn’t see.

You don’t have to take it and be like, “Oh that’s me. I always have that weird look on my face,” or, “My hair’s always doing something weird.” But sometimes I think it’s good to see those unflattering aspects of yourself that you can’t really see on your own.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. Tell me, Melissa, anything else you really want to make sure to cover before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things.

Melissa Dahl
Let’s see. I guess maybe just kind of going back to the part about how these moments can help us connect with each other. I did Jordan Harbinger’s podcast. He also had a story about running into a lamp post, which was like, “Wait, what?” I was so surprised to hear that.

What I have come to really love about these moments is if we look at it in the right light, it’s like these little moments where a very real, vulnerable part of you can connect with a very real vulnerable part of somebody else.

As I’ve done interviews and stuff, people have kind of broken in with their own stories like, “Oh my gosh, that reminds me of this time. That reminds me of that time.” There is something very cool about this little feeling and these little moments that just – they have the power to kind of connect us in a way that I didn’t really appreciate before I started working on this.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Melissa Dahl
I don’t know if this qualifies as a favorite quote, but something I keep returning too lately is ‘constant vigilance’ from Harry Potter, which is the Mad-Eye Moody says this. It’s about keeping on guard against the Death Eaters or something like that.

But I’ve just been thinking about that in terms of I’m trying to get back into shape. The only way to do it is – I think the way I’m interpreting that quote is the only way to do something really is the hard way if you want to do it well.

I’m trying to get back into shape and I’ve just kind of been halfheartedly doing some workouts. I’ve had this quote in mind. It’s kind of helped – this is so stupid, but it’s kind of helped me stick to – yeah, I have to stick to this workout plan. I said I was going to run three miles today; I’m going to run three miles today.

Just the idea of – I think it says to me that little efforts made every single day add up to something. It’s the constant work that adds up to big results, which is not what it means in the book, but that’s what it means in my head right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well great. Thank you. But how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Melissa Dahl
Oh my gosh, I have so many of these.

One of them, this is a good one to really what we’ve been talking about. In my work I have covered, I don’t know, hundreds of studies or something like that. Most of them just kind of leave my brain the second the story is done, but this one has stayed with me.

There’s this cool study by a Harvard Business School professor. You might have heard about this. People talk about this one.

Basically, you can do this very cool magic trick if you’re feeling nervous. Basically if you tell yourself you’re actually feeling excited, that is supposed to help you perform better because the theory kind of goes that to your body nervousness feels the same as excitement.

Your blood is pumping. Your heart is racing. That’s just your body knowing that you’ve got something big you’ve got to do. Your body’s like, “Here we go. Here. Here’s all this extra energy. We’re ready. We’re ready.”

If you interpret it as nervousness, it can make you kind of screw up on the thing you’re about to do, but if you interpret it as excitement, it’s supposed to help. I have thought about that so many times since I read that study five years ago. I find it so helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Think you. How about a favorite book?

Melissa Dahl
There’s so many books. Let’s see. Okay, I don’t know if this is a favorite book – I don’t even know if I have a one singular favorite book right now, but maybe it’s this. I don’t know. Something I return to again and again is Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s a classic. It’s the kind of thing I’ve just pressed on all my writer friends over the years. That’s how I found it. An older writer friend at a newspaper I worked at was like, “Here you go. Read this.”

It’s writing advice, but it’s also just kind of wisdom and advice for life. Just reading that book – I’ve reread it so many times. It has such … advice for writing. She has the idea of the shitty first draft, which is just like letting yourself write the bad version of the thing and you have to do that before you get to the good version of it. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful book, especially if you’re a writer.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. How about a favorite tool?

Melissa Dahl
I guess maybe we could say Slack. We use that at my work. A lot of people are using it now. There’s ups and downs, but I think it’s helped make work feel a little more fun. It’s helped make my team feel more like a community or something. We’re just chatting all day and it’s helped us get to know each other better. Yeah, I guess I’ll say Slack, although sometimes it’s annoying too, but for the most part it’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. How about a favorite habit.

Melissa Dahl
I think that there really is something to the making your bed everyday thing. I’d actually love to do some kind of psychological analysis of that of maybe it’s sort of easy to do, but it’s something that you do in the morning and it really does just kind of set your day. It just kind of organizes things right away.

That one and writing my to-do list for tomorrow at the end of the previous day. I love doing that. That’s probably better than the make your bed thing because I don’t even do that every day. I want to switch my answer to that.

Writing your to-do list for the next day at the end of the previous day is so helpful because then you wake up and you just are like, “Oh yeah, these are my priorities today.” You can just jump right into that. That’s really helped.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you do that at the end of the workday or at the end of the ‘I’m about to fall asleep’ day?

Melissa Dahl
I do it at the end of the work day, but I recently read about some study. It was a pretty small study, but interesting though. It claimed that it helped people fall asleep faster if you write your to-do list right before you go to sleep.

I don’t know. I feel like there probably is some truth to that. Sometimes I feel like I’m going to sleep and my mind is just going over like, “Oh, I have to do this. I have to do this. I have to do that. Don’t forget that.” Right now I do it at the end of the workday, but maybe I should try moving that back a few hours.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued because in some ways – I can see if you’re ruminating, that’s great to stop that and relax. But I think for me, if I brought my attention to that which tomorrow holds, I would start getting excited and fired up and the opposite of sleepy. I’d be like, “Oh yeah, these are the things I get to do tomorrow.” I don’t know.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I can see that too. I can see that too.

I’ve tried it a couple times and I don’t know. Maybe it’s only applicable if you like me are constantly going through your to-do list in your head when you’re falling asleep. The times I’ve tried it there is something nice to just being like, “Oh, you know what? I’ve already got that. I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve already got it. Calm down.” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote you back to yourself frequently?

Melissa Dahl
There’s a couple lines in the book people seem to like. There’s one – it’s just a throwaway line my editor actually wanted to cut, but it’s, “Being human is exhausting and embarrassing.” People have quoted that back to me.

Then there’s a line people seem to like that I also really like. It’s also from the book, which is, “The ridiculous in me honors the ridiculous in you,” which is kind of how I feel about these embarrassing moments.

Now when I see someone – I don’t know. Yesterday I saw someone fall over on the subway. She mistimed her getting up and I just felt this kind of sense of connection to this stranger, like, “Oh, you’re a dummy too just trying to make your way through the world.” People seem to like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. It’s funny, “The ridiculous in me,” acknowledges or greets, what is it?

Melissa Dahl
I think it said honors.

Pete Mockaitis
Honors. Yes. “Honors the ridiculousness in you.” I guess that – isn’t that what Namaste means? The light in me honors the light in you.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Sometimes I just end up saying Namaste for no reason. I think it’s because people have wet hands and they can’t shake my hand. I end up bowing and saying Namaste. I don’t know if that’s offensive to any hard core yoga lovers. Apologies.

Melissa Dahl
I’m sure it’s a nice sense of it.

Pete Mockaitis
It feels good and I mean it. Hey, I’m honoring them. We have a laugh because it is a little ridiculous. “No, I just have wet hands. There’s no need to revert to these practices.” Cool.

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

Melissa Dahl
Probably Twitter is the place I am at way too often. They can also buy my book. It’s called Cringe Worthy: A Theory of Awkwardness available on Amazon.com or wherever you buy books, had to put that in there. But, yeah, Twitter, I’m on it way too much, so if you say hello, I will definitely see you and say hello back.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh cool. Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeing to be awesome at their jobs?

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, I think that fear of awkwardness at work is something that holds people back from, “Oh, I can’t have that conversation with my coworker. It’s going to be too weird.” “I can’t ask my boss this thing that I should have figured out three weeks ago. It’s going to be too weird.”

Maybe your challenge is to think about the problem you’re having or a few problems you’re having at work and if the thing holding you back from solving it is just you’re afraid of it being a little awkward, push through that. You can do it. You can get through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Melissa, this has been a whole lot of fun.

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, it’s been great.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you for taking time and-

Melissa Dahl
Yeah, thank you so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well good luck with the book and all you’re up to.

Melissa Dahl
Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Apr 27
0

292: Enhancing Work and Life through Mindfulness with Oren Jay Sofer

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Oren Jay Sofer says: "Mindfulness develops the capacity to be focused, to choose where we put our attention, and keep it there."

Meditation teacher Oren Jay Sofer discusses the vastly positive impact of adopting a meditation practice.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The top three evidence-based benefits of mindfulness practice
  2. How a one-minute pause can make a huge difference
  3. How to train your brain for greater attention

About Oren

Oren Jay Sofer is Senior Program Developer at Mindful Schools and Founder of Next Step Dharma, offering online courses on meditation in daily life. He is a member of the Spirit Rock Teacher’s Council, a Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication, and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner for healing trauma.  His work has been featured on apps such as 10% Happier and Simple Habit. Oren holds a degree in Comparative Religion from Columbia University, and is author of Say What you Mean: A Mindful Approach to Nonviolent Communication.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Oren Jay Sofer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Oren, welcome to the show!

Oren Jay Sofer
Thanks so much, Pete.  Happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I think we’re going to have a ton of fun here.  First I’d like to get oriented to your history and backstory as a child actor.

Oren Jay Sofer
Alight, yeah.  It’s interesting – I was thinking about this before getting on the call.  And my motivation for being a child actor is actually the same reason why I do what I do now.  So, when I was about eight or nine years old I got really inspired by a movie I saw and I realized that millions of people have seen this movie.  And here I am having this cool thought and thinking about something that’s pretty amazing.  Imagine if I could reach large numbers of people and get them to think about their life in a different way.
And so I decided I wanted to become an actor.  And so until the age of 20 I was going into New York, going to auditions, I did some TV commercials, a few shows, some student films, some off-Broadway theater.  And then I found meditation, and it radically changed my life.  And here I am 20 years later and realizing that in some very interesting roundabout way I’m doing the same thing, in a different way – trying to reach people and help them to think about their lives in a different way.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool.  And I want to hear, what was the movie that got this seed planted?

Oren Jay Sofer
[laugh] It’s slightly embarrassing because it’s not a very profound movie.  But I think it was Back to the Future part 2 or part 3 or something.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s pretty profound.  That gets you thinking.

Oren Jay Sofer
It was.  It was in the ‘80s and I got thinking about time and one’s life.  And yeah, it really made me ponder things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, I dig it.  And I’ve had those moments as well, from movies that might be silly or comedies or not as powerful apparently in the eyes of the critics, in terms of assessing it as a movie great.  But that’s cool.

Oren Jay Sofer
And I was eight or nine years old.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so kudos there.  And so, with your child acting, are there any commercials we might have seen or recognized?

Oren Jay Sofer
I giggled in a Life Savers commercial. [laugh] And I did an Applebee’s commercial, that restaurant is still around.  The thing that you might see actually that’s still out there if you’re having trouble sleeping late one night and flipping through cable television, is an episode of Law & Order that’s still running, where I actually was the murderer.

Pete Mockaitis
A kid murderer?

Oren Jay Sofer
Yes, a kid murderer.  A Crime of Passion was the title, or something like that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so funny, because you’re all about the non-violence.

Oren Jay Sofer
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And here we have that role.  Well, cool.  So, I’ve heard your voice many times through the Simple Habit meditation app, and I just connected with it in a great way.  You’re just so encouraging, so thank you for that.

Oren Jay Sofer
Thanks, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you say meditation changed your life.  Could you maybe walk us through a little bit of what’s the story or the narrative of how this unfolds?

Oren Jay Sofer
Sure.  So I was in college and acting in New York City, and worn pretty thin.  Just kind of rolling hard and heavy.  I won’t go into details, but you can imagine.  And parents got divorced.  So just a lot of stress, a lot of pressure.  I had a big falling out with my friends.  And just in kind of that way that can happen at that particular age – I was about 18 or 19 – it felt like my life was coming apart at the seams, and I wanted to start over.
And I ended up hearing about a study abroad program in India actually, where I could go to a monastery, and no drugs, no sex, no alcohol, up at 5:00 a.m. in the morning, meditating twice a day.  And I said, “Sign me up.”  I kind of wanted to clear the decks and just start fresh.  And some of the teachers that I met over there had a really profound impact on me and kind of opened my eyes to what was possible in a human life, and taught me how to understand my own mind.  And it started a whole process of me reevaluating my life, reorienting to deeper values inside, and starting to deal with some of the struggles and emotions that I had been kind of pushing away inside for many years.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating.  And so when you say you meditated twice a day, what kind of length of time are we talking about here?

Oren Jay Sofer
We would meditate for 30 or 45 minutes, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, intriguing.  And so was there teaching on top of that?

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, it was a whole program.  So we were studying Buddhism and learning about meditation.  I was in the process of doing a degree in Comparative Religion, so that kind of became part of my studies.  But I had I guess you could say the good fortune, but the unique opportunity to kind of dive in head first.  And I’m guessing most of your listeners aren’t going to give up their career and go to India for six months the way I did.  But what’s wonderful is the kind of opportunities that are available today, like Simple Habit or 10% Happier or other apps – those weren’t around 20 years ago.  So people today can actually access these practices right from their own home, and there’s a lot of really wonderful teaching and guidance available.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so cool.  Well, could you maybe share in your own experience, in terms of back here States side, thinking about the… Well, you tell me first of all – do you find that you go into and out of a regular habitual meditative practice, or is it like stone cold, 100% solid?

Oren Jay Sofer
So, it’s pretty much a regular part of my life at this point.  That doesn’t mean that I sit for 45 minutes every day without fail.  Things get busy sometimes, I’ve got an early morning appointment.  I try to sit quietly for at least a minute or two, no matter what’s happening, just to kind of touch into that space.  But what is the case is that the level of clarity and awareness that’s present in my mind is much greater because of the many years of mindfulness practice.  And so even when I’m not meditating formally, there is a connection with mindfulness that’s happening.  And that’s the result of practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’d love for you to expand upon that clarity and awareness, sort of the result or the product, if you will, the outcome from having done it, either in a day, like right afterwards, or over years.  Could you just make that a real clear contrast or distinction, in terms of non-meditating – “My brain is kind of like this”, versus meditating – “I experience this other opposite thing instead.”

Oren Jay Sofer
Sure, yeah.  So, we can characterize the benefits of meditation in two or three key ways.  And this comes straight out of a lot of the research that’s been done.  So, one is emotional regulation.  So for example if one’s not meditating, we might find that things get us going a lot more easily, we get reactive, we pop off at someone, we’re short, we’re testy.  Things get to us easily.
Meditation, mindfulness meditation helps to decrease emotional reactivity, so that we are more aware of the emotions that we experience and have more space inside to tolerate any discomfort and choose how we respond, rather than reacting impulsively based on how we feel in the moment.
And as all of us know, that’s a really useful skill in life in all situations, whether we’re talking about our primary relationship, our family, or our work.  Being able to be in a stressful or demanding situation, where something comes up that triggers us or makes us angry or makes us upset or fearful, or a lot of anxiety or anticipation – to have the capacity to still think clearly and not be pushed around by those emotions – that’s huge.  So that’s one major benefit.

Pete Mockaitis
That is huge.  Just that phrase there, nice – “The space to tolerate discomfort”.  We’ve got a bunch of people who like learning, listening to the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast, and we’ve heard it said many, many times associated with, growth occurs in discomfort.  When you’re learning something new you’re kind of clueless and feel dumb.  Stephen Covey talking about the comfort zone versus the growth zone, which is intrinsically uncomfortable.  So that just sounds so huge right there, is if we can tolerate greater discomfort, then our whole ability to learn, grow, develop just… We might, I don’t know, I’m going to throw a number out, see how it feels – you might double or triple your capacity to grow if you double or triple your capacity to tolerate discomfort.

Oren Jay Sofer
Absolutely, yeah.  And the phrase that I like to use comes from a colleague of mine.  We talk about “the zone of strategic discomfort”.  So, if we’re too comfortable we don’t learn, we don’t grow, because we’re just going along and everything’s fine.  However, if we’re too uncomfortable we also don’t learn, because it’s overwhelming.  So there’s this zone in the middle, of strategic discomfort, where it’s uncomfortable enough that we’re forced to actually look at things and question them and pay more attention.
And so, that’s what the training of mindfulness does, is it creates a space in which we can study our own mind, our own habits, our own reactions, and really start to come into contact with those places that we get uncomfortable and learn, “How do I respond here?  What’s my go-to strategy?  How do I develop more patience, more resilience, more stability inside, so that I have more choice?”  And this is one of the central principles behind mindfulness practice, Pete, which is the more aware we are, the more choice we have.
So, mindfulness practice increases awareness.  It increases awareness of our emotions, it increases awareness of our thoughts, it increases self-awareness, our attention is sharper in terms of being able to observe around us and pick up more information from others and our environment.  And when we have that awareness and information, that allows us to make better choices.  And all of those things translate directly into our ability to be awesome at our job, as your podcast likes to say, because we have more access to our own intelligence and resources inside.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good, that’s good.  Alright, so you said three.

Oren Jay Sofer
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to make sure I’m segmenting or following your train.  Did we cover one or did we cover two?  Or did we cover three?

Oren Jay Sofer
We covered one.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright, you have more.

Oren Jay Sofer
We covered emotional regulation.  So the second one is something called “attentional stability”, which is a fancy way of saying focus, or ability to pay attention, or concentration.  So, one of the skills that’s developed through mindfulness practice is the ability to stay aware of a chosen activity or object.  So, you talked about your mind before and after meditation.
So I remember when I was in college, before I started meditating, reading the same paragraph over and over again, sometimes five or six times, because my mind would keep wondering.  And it would take a lot longer to get a certain task done because I wasn’t able to stay on task, to stay on track.
So mindfulness develops that capacity to be focused, to choose where we put our attention, and keep it there.  And again, that translates into all areas of our life, whether it’s personal or professional, whether we’re wanting to read or study or write, or even listen in a meeting and be able to keep track of the information that’s coming, without losing focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s certainly helpful in lots of things.  I dig it.  And what’s the third?

Oren Jay Sofer
So, the third is self-awareness.  The third is being able to understand and be aware of our own experience, our own mind.  So one of the other common ways of talking about mindfulness practice is that this quality of mindfulness, which we haven’t defined, so maybe let me take a moment to just do that now.  Mindfulness is the ability to be aware of what’s happening in the moment in a clear, balanced and non-reactive way.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Oren Jay Sofer
So it’s not just knowing what’s happening, but it’s knowing what’s happening in this particular way where there is clarity and there is a kind of balance inside.  We’re not getting pulled around or reactive just because of something that’s happening in our environment, internally or externally.  So, one of the main things mindfulness does is it helps us to tell the difference between what’s actually happening and the stories that we’re telling ourselves about what’s happening.
And so this is where the self-awareness comes in.  We start to see how our thoughts, our moods, our emotions, our interpretations begin to influence and color our experience.  This is really important.  It’s like our mind is a set of glasses through which everything is being filtered.  So there is nothing that we experience in life, there’s nothing that we hear, see, taste, smell or touch that doesn’t involve our mind.  And so, if our mind is adding interpretations and opinions and biases to those experiences and we’re not aware of it, that’s going to affect how well we live, how well we do our job, the quality of our relationships, the quality of happiness and well-being we experience in our life.
So, for example, how many of us have had the experience of working someplace and somebody walks in and they don’t say “Good morning”?  Or you catch a weird look on their face and all of a sudden we’re like, “Oh my God, they don’t like me.  They’re out to get me.  I know, it’s that project we did last week – they’re not happy with it.”  And we start spinning.  We make this whole story and we don’t even realize what just happened – that all that happened was actually we walked in and we didn’t hear them say “Hello”, or we didn’t make eye contact, and that everything else is extra. It’s all thoughts and fears and interpretation.
And so that’s happening a lot of our lives, that we’re living in the reality of our stories and our beliefs and our interpretations.  And the more we develop mindfulness, the more we see those for what they are, and then we can actually evaluate, “Okay, which ones are helpful?  Which ones are maybe likely to be true?  And which ones are just getting in my way or tripping me up?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.  That’s potent.  So I think you really painted a nice picture there, associated with what good looks like, when you’re sort of “with it”, and then what the not-so-great default can look like.  So I’d love it… You mentioned studies a couple of times.  Could you share, are there maybe one or two or three studies that have an impressive, quantified result that you’d like to drop?

Oren Jay Sofer
I’m happy to answer the question.  I want to say one more thing on your last question before we go there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Oren Jay Sofer
You said something like, the difference between what’s…

Pete Mockaitis
Like when you’re on the meditation train versus off of the meditation train.

Oren Jay Sofer
Exactly, exactly.  And the one thing that I want to add to that that’s really important is that being on the meditation train doesn’t mean that we don’t still have negative thoughts or interpretations or anxiety come up.  It means that we’re able to be aware of those and have some choice about how much space they take up inside, so that they’re not running the show.  And that’s a really key distinction, because if we have an expectation that, “All this stuff is going to go away and I’ll never have to feel anxious or insecure again” – that might not be realistic.  But what is very attainable is being able to put those things in context and not be so oppressed by them.  And how much of the time are we our own worst enemy, in terms of being able to really fulfill our potential?  So, I just wanted to make that really clear before we move on to the research question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you.

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah.  So, I’ll share a little bit of what I know about studies with the caveat that I’m not a scientist and I’m not a researcher.  So, just to give you an analogy – I’m a meditation teacher, and so I teach people how to practice mindfulness and I teach people how to practice communication, how to bring those two together in their relationships.  How to use mindfulness not just for one’s own mind but also in your relationships and life.  And it’s a little bit like the difference between being a musician, who plays music, and being a sound engineer, who records the music and knows how to get the right frequencies and levels set.  So, I don’t deal with the sound engineering; I just play the music.
So, having said that, one of the interesting things that’s happening these days is, they’re doing what are called “meta-analyses”.  So the individual research studies that are done have a specific sample size, and those carry some weight.  But a meta-analysis aggregates the data over 20, 30, 40, 50 or more individual research studies and then looks at trends.  And so within scientific research, a meta-analysis can often carry more weight because it’s drawing on a much larger sample size.
And the meta-analyses are showing really strong consistent evidence for benefits in decreasing cognitive and emotional reactivity, for decreases in mind-wandering and rumination, so like getting lost in thoughts and sort of spinning inside with worry and anxiety; and self-compassion and kindness.  So those are some of the qualities that are coming out.
But a couple of my favorite, favorite studies – so, one has to do with the effect of mindfulness training on kindness and altruism.  So they gave people three weeks of mindfulness training – not a long time.  And then they said they were going to participate in a research study.  So they get to the waiting room.  One person comes in from the study, a participant, and they’re waiting to go in to do the research study.  But what they don’t know is that the waiting room is actually where the research study is happening.
So they come in and there are three chairs.  Two of them are occupied with people who work for the research team, but they don’t know this.  They sit down in the third chair, now they’re waiting to go in.  A few moments later somebody comes in on crutches, with a boot on one of their feet – also an actor in the study.  And they visibly kind of sigh, noticing that there’s no place to sit down.
So they do this with everyone who participated in the study, and with a control group who received three weeks of cognitive training with no mindfulness.  And what they found was that people who received mindfulness training gave up their seat at a rate two times as often as others.  And that was verified by another study.  So it points to, very clearly, when we’re more aware of our own thoughts and feelings and body, it increases empathy.  We become more aware of other people and how it is for them, and say, “Here, sit down, please.  Take my seat.”

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’m so curious to know what the baseline rate is of non-meditators.  It had to be less than 51%, if it was doubled by the meditators.  So that’s no so encouraging for humanity.

Oren Jay Sofer
Right, right.

Pete Mockaitis
But there is a pathway, so there is the bright spot there.  That’s a fun one, thanks.  And you said there’s another.

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah.  The other is less of a story there.  But six weeks of mindfulness training has been shown to decrease implicit bias against minorities.  So that’s pretty powerful to think about the effect on one’s mind there.  They also do a lot of studies on something called “loving-kindness practice”, which is another form of mental training that’s related to mindfulness, but different.  It’s cultivating an intentional state of goodwill and kindness.  And just 10 minutes of this kind of meditation has been shown to have a relaxing effect on one’s ability to shift gears into a more relaxed, para-sympathetic state.
Another study’s showing that a number of weeks of loving-kindness meditation, participants reported significant increases in well-being, like contentment and joy and gratitude in their lives.  Oh, and then here’s another one, you’ll like this.  I was just reading last night.  A lot of the research that’s happening, or a certain amount of it that’s really fascinating is where scientists, neuroscientists are taking meditation masters.  So people who are considered like Olympics-levels of meditation – more than 10,000 hours, and doing FMRIs – functional imaging scans of their brain and measuring different things.
And so one Tibetan teacher, they’ve done some different scans of his brain over the course of the last 8 to 10 years, and what they’re finding is that his brain is aging more slowly than like 99% of people in his age group.  He’s in the like 100th percentile of the rate of aging in brain cells.  And so, that’s really fascinating to me to see that the potential for training our minds with meditation and mindfulness can even have an effect on the long-term vitality of our mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s compelling.  It makes me what to kick it up right now, to reap those benefits 50 years from now.

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, you mentioned loving-kindness and its impact on relationships.  Can you share a little bit of how that can pop up in the workplace?

Oren Jay Sofer
Sure.  Well, I think that our culture and our society tends to be very competitive, and I think in many workplaces my sense is that that carries over, and that there is a sense of competition and we are against one another.  Not exclusively, but that can infiltrate, it can get into the workplace.  And what I’ve seen in my own life and from the things that I’ve read and the stories that I know, two things are true.  One, we can accomplish more when we work together as human beings.  We can do great things when we are supporting one another and celebrating one another, rather than competing or fighting with one another.
So, if you’re looking at any kind of a company or a team within a company that has a certain goal or charge, when there’s goodwill present, when there’s a quality of respect, mutual respect and trust and empathy, you can draw on the strengths and the ingenuity and creativity of each person in that team a lot more.  So that’s one aspect. The other aspect is… Dale Carnegie’s famous book How to Win Friends and Influence People.  It’s like you catch more flies with honey than with. What’s the saying?

Pete Mockaitis
Vinegar, was it?

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, that’s it.  Vinegar.  So, in our own relationships when we’re kind, other people tend to be kind back to us.  When we approach a situation with goodwill and an open mind, that energy tends to come back around to us.  And even when it doesn’t, it feels better in ourselves, and so we’re enhancing the quality of our own life and we’re increasing our own well-being directly.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good.  Well, it sounds like to get in the depth of that, we might just have to do this again, maybe when your book comes out, December-ish.  Because I really want to dig into a little bit of, if someone’s never meditated before, what do you do?

Oren Jay Sofer
Right.  Sure, sure.  Yeah, so there are a few simple pointers or suggestions.  I think the first is just understanding the main principle behind the practice of meditation.  And the main principle is that our minds are designed to learn.  And whatever we do with them, they will learn.  So, if we spend our time thinking about things that are stressful, if we spend our time feeling aggravated and rushed, we’re doubting ourselves, we are actively shaping and training our mind to feel stressed and aggravated and rushed.  Those are just a few examples.
If you look back to the origins of mindfulness meditation in the Buddhist tradition, there’s a quote from the early text that captures this really well.  And it says, “Whatever the mind frequently thinks about and ponders, that will become its habit, that will become its inclination.”  And so, the modern day version of this is neuroplasticity – neurons that fire to get a wire together.  So our brains can change in their shape and function based on how we use them.
So, this kind of fundamental plasticity or malleability of our brain means that we can use the mental training techniques of mindfulness practice to shape and train our brain in a different way.  So, the exercises of mindfulness meditation are about training our mind to be aware of what’s happening in the moment in a clear and balanced way.  So, that’s the underlying principle.
The practice itself involves sitting or standing in a comfortable position at first.  You can also do it while walking.  It’s helpful to start when you’re still, turning your attention inwards.  Sometimes that might mean closing your eyes, other times that might just mean withdrawing your attention from what’s going on around you – the sights and the sounds and so forth, and just turning your attention inwards, and seeing if you can feel your breathing.  So when we breathe in, can we be aware of that?  When we breathe out, can we be aware of that?
That’s the most basic mindfulness meditation exercise, is feeling the breath.  And it’s important to let your breath be natural.  We’re not trying to control our breath in any way, or breathe in a special way.  But what we’re doing is we’re using the breath as a foil, as a tool to sharpen our awareness, to learn how to stay connected to what’s happening in the present moment.  And as you know, and as anyone who tries this will very quickly see, we’re not really good at that.  Our mind tends to wander off really quickly.  And that’s okay, that’s part of it.  That’s why it’s a practice.
So, every time we notice that our mind has wondered, that moment of noticing is really powerful.  That’s actually the key moment of mindfulness practice, because that’s the moment where awareness is actually growing.  We just woke up, we just realized that we were off task.  So, in that moment it’s a cause to actually appreciate, “Oh, great.  This is working.  I’m becoming more aware.”  And then we just gently come back to feeling the breath.  That’s the most basic practice.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m glad you said that.  I was going to prompt you to do it if you didn’t, because that point that you made in the Simple Habit app when I heard you, it was so powerful for me because it’s I guess a little bit of what I was doing before, in my noviceness, was I’m like, “Oh, darn it!  Argh, I thought of something.  I’m screwing up.”  And you just completely turn that on its head, reframing it to, “The sheer fact that you did notice that means you’re growing in awareness, not that you’ve screwed up.”

Oren Jay Sofer
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It was so funny, the first time you said that I was like, “No, that’s not what that means.  Ohhh.”

Oren Jay Sofer
It’s a win.

Pete Mockaitis
So it was a big eye-opening sense for me, so thank you for that.

Oren Jay Sofer
You’re welcome.  Yeah, it’s a win.  Every time we remember, our awareness is growing.  The other important thing I’ll mention for your listeners out there, in terms of if you’re experimenting with mindfulness practice, or even if you have a mindfulness practice already.  The other thing that’s important to remember is that because our minds are so fluid and can be shaped, the way that we do these techniques is really important.
So, in other words, if we take on this practice and we get excited or we’re going to try it, and we’re doing it with a lot of self-judgment and tightness, and we’re pushing and we’re trying really hard, not only are we going to exhaust ourselves really quickly and probably give it up, but we’re reinforcing those habits in our mind.  So, how we practice mindfulness is as important as that we practice mindfulness, the technique itself.  It’s like any other tool that you use – how you hold the tool is really important, and if you’re not holding the tool properly, you’re not going to be able to use it well, you might even do some damage with it.
So, as the saying goes, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent.”  So, it’s important to see, how am I approaching this?  Am I approaching this with a sense of curiosity, lightheartedness, patience, rather than, “Okay, now I’m going to really do this and I’m going to be great at it and push myself.”  And that’s where the transformation happens, is that we learn how to be patient, relaxed, kind, steady, balanced, by noticing, “Oh my God, I’m totally driving myself nuts here, just trying to feel my breath.  Why is this so hard?  Oh, I can relax.  I don’t have to try so hard.”  And so begins the learning that unfolds through the practice.

Pete Mockaitis
I really like when you say in the app in terms of the stances of, nowhere to go, nothing to do, being friendly and curious.  And as we’re talking about neuroplasticity and the mental inclination, it’s like, those are things I want to experience in my brain frequently, and maybe experience less frequently than I’d like to.  So, I think that’s really cool how that ties together and is just very pleasant.  So, do you have any pro tips on how to step into that stance effectively?

Oren Jay Sofer
Sure.  Yeah, I’ll offer one of those and then link it to our work in the workplace, the relevance in the workplace.  So, I make a huge emphasis in my teaching and in my own personal meditation practice to start from a good place.  And I actually have a free guided meditation on my website called “Finding Ease” that shares this, it shares some instructions on this.  It’s a free download if people sign up for my email, is they get this meditation.  And it’s basically when you sit down to meditate, see if you can set an intention inside to just say, “Okay, this time is for me.  I don’t have to do anything now.  All of the projects, all of the plans, all the issues – I can just set those aside.  And can I find a place of just being able to feel relaxed or at ease right now, in this moment?”
Not forever, just for right now.  Just to take whether it’s 5 minutes or 10 minutes, however long you’re going to practice for, just to take this time off from other things.  That doesn’t mean that stuff’s not going to come up, but it just means that we’re starting from a place of letting go and just arriving in a place of, “Ahhh, I can just chill out here.”  And so, it can take time to find that.  It’s like finding that note.  How do I hit that note inside?  But we all know that place; we’d go nuts if we didn’t.
It’s that feeling when you’re with a good friend that you haven’t seen for a while and you’re just sitting out on the porch or taking a walk.  Or it’s the feeling on Saturday afternoon on the weekend, when you’re with your family or you’re out by yourself just enjoying a sunset.  And everything just kind of slows down for a little bit and gets quiet.  It’s remembering that feeling and that sense that that’s always available to us in the moment, if we can just step back from things.  And so, starting from that place.
And that takes practice.  It takes practice, but it’s totally doable.  Now, how does this relate to having a job and going into the office every day?  So, I think that what I’ve seen in myself and other people at work is that the number of demands on our time and energy are greater than the number of hours in a day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Oren Jay Sofer
And that gets stressful over time, because there’s always a list that’s growing faster than we can accomplish the items.  So this is where mindfulness comes in really valuable, because what mindfulness does is it allows us to be more present… I was going to say “fully present”, but that’s what we’re aiming for.  But at least to be more present with what we’re doing in the moment.  So rather than worrying about the 10 things that we’re not doing right now – that we actually can’t do right now, because we’re not doing them, we’re doing something else – instead of worrying about those or rushing to try to get to them, we can be fully present, or as present as possible with the task at hand.
And that has a few really positive effects.  Number one – it allows us to do that task more efficiently and more skillfully.  We have access to more of our intelligence and creativity because we’re 100% there, or as close to 100% as we can.  Number two – it helps us keep from burning out.  One of the reasons we burn out is that we’re always trying to be two or three steps ahead of ourselves, and that’s just not possible.  So when we’re able to just do one thing at a time completely, we’re conserving our energy because we’re not pushing ourselves to be someplace where we’re not.
And so to sum this up, what’s the essence of this?  In the Zen tradition they say, “When you’re sweeping the garden, just sweep the garden.”  So there’s that sense of like anything… And this is where mindfulness is more a way of life than something we do for 5 or 10 or 20 minutes in the morning.  It’s about being wholehearted in whatever we do.
Our whole life is having an effect on our mind.  Everything that we do – how we are when we’re driving and sitting in traffic.  If we’re gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles – well, we’re actually strengthening impatience and anxiety in our nervous system.  We’re enhancing those qualities.  So, if we can take any activity, whether it’s walking to the car, chopping vegetables, answering an email, washing our dishes, and use that to strengthen qualities of clarity, focus, calm, presence, resilience, by how we perform that activity.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, could you expand upon answering an email… The white knuckle driving steering wheel example is a nice visual.  So can we get the contrast between a not-so-happy to the nervous system way of replying to an email, versus a delightful way to reply to an email?

Oren Jay Sofer
Absolutely, I see it in myself all the time.  I get a lot of emails, and sometimes I see myself firing off responses, and because of my practice I notice the tension in my body.  So I’ll notice my shoulders are hunched up, as I’m typing my fingers are pounding on the keys, and maybe my breath is tight or shallow.  And there’s this energy, a little like impulse or push inside to be going more quickly getting on to the next one, on to the next one, on to the next one.
And what I find is if I just take literally half a moment, just enough space to breathe in and breathe out once, my shoulders relax, I can feel my body sitting on the chair, instead of being like up out of my body through my eyes in the computer screen.  And then I can respond to the email with ease, and that’s less exhausting.

Pete Mockaitis
“Ease” is a great word.

Oren Jay Sofer
It is, yeah.  And so, I know that you’ve shared with me that you guys are really big on, “How do I use this?  How do I take this into my life?”  I am a huge proponent of a very simple practice called “pausing”.  And as I just said a pause can be as brief as one breath.  It could be longer, it could be a minute or two.  But the more we can make a habit of taking just really brief pauses throughout our day – as I said, it can really just be one breath, like you sit down at your desk and before you turn on your computer just to take one breath, or before your lunch break, or before a big meeting.  Those kinds of pauses can help us be more efficient with our energy during the day, it can enhance our quality of life, it can allow us to enjoy our work more, instead of always being on the treadmill, trying to get ahead.  Yeah, and like you said, just feel more at ease inside.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it, thank you.  And nice to have inspiration there.

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me, Oren – anything else you really want to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Oren Jay Sofer
No, I’m good.  Let’s move on.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.  Could you share with us a favorite quote, something that inspires you?

Oren Jay Sofer
Sure.  One of my favorite quotes is from Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who wrote The Little Prince.  This is from another one of his books, called Wind, Sand and Stars.  And he wrote, “It is idle having planted an acorn in the morning to expect to sit beneath the shade of an oak in the afternoon.”  And so for me it just really points to the virtue of patience in our lives, and how anything worthwhile doing takes time and takes patience.  And that goes for mindfulness practice, and it goes for any kind of creative project or other pursuit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good, thank you.  And how about a favorite book?

Oren Jay Sofer Gary Snyder has a book called The Practice of the Wild.  It’s a collection of essays that are really wonderful reflections on what it is to be human and how our culture and society can interfere with realizing our potential, not only as individuals but also as a community and as a species.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Oren Jay Sofer
I’ll share two.  So one – I use an app called Things that helps me track my to-do lists.  I find that very helpful.  And well, the subject of our podcast is the other tool, so mindfulness.  In terms of pausing, there are many apps that you can get for computers – desktop, laptop computer – that give you a reminder periodically to pause.  The one that I use is called Time Out for Macs, but there’s a whole host of those.  And it’s hard to remember to pause.  Work day’s often so busy, so I rely on that sometimes to just help me to take a break periodically.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.  And is there a particular nugget you share that seems to really connect and resonate with your students?

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, I come back to patience.  The key to success is patient, kind persistence.  Just keep showing up, being patient and having that spirit of kindness towards oneself and others.

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

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, my website is the best place – OrenJaySofer.com.  You can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook – same thing, Oren Jay Sofer.

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

Oren Jay Sofer
Sure.  Sure thing.  Think about what’s most important to you, why you’re doing what you’re doing.  And then every morning when you wake up, set a clear intention about how you want to show up at your job.  What qualities do you want to bring to the work that you do and the people that you work with every day?
Set that intention every morning.  If you can remember it halfway during the day, at lunch come back to it.  And then at the end of the day when you come back home, before you go to bed just reflect back on the day and think, “Okay, when did I actually remember this?  When was I able to come from this place inside?”  And if you do that every day, even for a few weeks, you’ll start to notice changes in your work and in your quality of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect.  Oren, thank you so much for sharing this.  It sounds like there’s a wealth of stuff to talk about, in terms of the relationships and interconnectedness from this stuff.  So, I hope we can chat again about some of this.

Oren Jay Sofer
Yeah, that would be great.  We can talk about how mindfulness applies to communication, which is what my book’s on that’s coming out in December, called See What You Mean.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.  Well, this has been a real treat.  Thanks for all you do.  I’ll continue listening to your voice in the app, and keep on rocking!

Oren Jay Sofer
Thanks so much, Pete.  You too!

Apr 09
0

284: Boosting Your Work with Mindfulness Practices with Dr. Leah Weiss

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Leah Weiss says: "You can influence a lot more than you think if you take responsibility for how you are thinking."

Stanford instructor Dr. Leah Weiss discusses how mindfulness training can translate to tangible results in the workplace.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to practice the intentional use of your attention
  2. Pro tips for taking productive breaks
  3. Handy tools for setting your personal purpose

About Leah

Leah Weiss, PhD, is a researcher, professor, consultant, and author. She teaches courses on compassionate leadership at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and is principal teacher and founding faculty for Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Program, conceived by the Dalai Lama. She also directs Compassion Education and Scholarship at HopeLab, an Omidyar Group research and development nonprofit focused on resilience. She lives in Palo Alto, California with her husband and three children.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Leah Weiss Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
 Leah, thanks so much for joining us here on “How to be awesome at your job” podcast.

Leah Weiss
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
 Well, I’m excited to talk to you. And it seems like of all Americans, you have a special connection with the Dalai Lama. Can you tell us a little bit about the story of how that relationship evolved?

Leah Weiss
Well, I think for me, he’s been an inspiration since I first encountered his speaking and writing when I was a teenager and I’ve had the fortune to work closely with interpreter, Thupten Jinpa for the for the last seven years or so of my career. It’s been a great opportunity to get to work in ways that are supportive of the Dalai Lama’s vision for secular effects in a world where we all bring the values and compassion to do our lives and our work.

Pete Mockaitis
 Do you have any sort of fun facts or any thoughts or exchanges that leave to mind when you reflect on time with him?

Leah Weiss
I have the opportunity to fly across the country with him when I was nine months pregnant with my second child and that was amazing. I was also concerned that I was going to go into labor, which luckily, I did not. But when he saw that I was pregnant he started telling stories about how his mother had told him that he used to kick a lot when she was pregnant with him, which I really enjoyed hearing. And you know, just any opportunity and even brief moments or being part of a large group, he’s still so inspiring and I think on point. Imagine people in the audience, you’ve read or seen something of his, he just fosters that connection wherever he goes. I remember the secret service on the plane with us were talking about how their lives were changed by being on this assignment.

Pete Mockaitis
 That’s awesome. So, well, can you tell us then a little bit about the story behind your course at Stanford when it comes to compassionate leadership? How did this get born and what does the student learn when they’re enrolled in this course?

Leah Weiss
So, I’ve been teaching this class for about six years now and it’s always white listed. It’s evolved over the years. I think the quickest snapshot is what I teach is really captured in the book. The book was an attempt to share their experience to the broader group of people that I have worked with at Stanford and in organizations. But really what it boils down to is learning the skills that fit within our emotional intelligence quotient that are mindfulness and self-awareness and purpose and ability to forge strong connections even with people we dislike and are irritated by our workplace. And it’s really … and so it brings together research from all across positive psychology and combined with the long contemporary practice traditions and including my own training. I spent most of my twenties doing 100-day and six-month meditation or treats. So I’m really distilling that down into what I learned in those retreats as well as the research.

Pete Mockaitis
  Well, I’m so fascinated. What do you do over the course of 100 days of meditating on a retreat?

Leah Weiss
Well, the Tibetan curriculum as you’re doing a lot of different things and it follows a trajectory. So from the first year, you do a set of practices, visualization, some of their practice would be physical and some would be more along the lines of what you might think of when you hear the idea of meditating. Then the next 100-day retreat does a lot more with the Tibetan yogas which are different than what most of us probably think of when we hear yoga. It’s a different system not unrelated in goal but approached differently. When you’re at Tibetan up in the mountains and you’re doing yoga, one of your primary concerns generating heat and so there’s a whole way of approaching our bodies and actually researchers have fascinated by and have documented changes in our metabolism and our ability to increase the body temperature.  From there there’s different in depth visualization worlds basically that you learn to create in this mantle to learn how we reconstruct our reality in day-to-day lives. That’s kind of the sampling and a lot of looking into how perception happens. So it’s more active than you’d think and more varied than you would think there’s a lot of different types of practices.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay. Well, that’s cool. So, let’s talk about some of these skilled development elements. First, could you share with us? So you’ve got the course and then your book, how you work sort of lays out for a broader audience how to develop these skills. Could you maybe first make a bit of the case of the “why” behind these skills in terms of just in case we were to have a hardcore skeptic, “Greed is good. Cash is king results” to our paramount listener? And we’re usually nicer than that character, but if do have such a listener, could you paint the picture for how do these things tie into performance, results and that sort of thing?

Leah Weiss
Absolutely. Well, I love getting into it in a practical mentality. Because I think if we can’t understand where the rubber meets the road then what is the point of doing this work? So I’d say the starting place I would have is if you’re interested in productivity, you’ll know that the first place that we are challenged in our productivity is in our ability to pay attention particularly in this day and age whether there’s information overload and technology designed to grab our attention. And in this chronic time, people don’t understand, one in three people could tell you what their job is, meaning two in three people can’t actually tell you what their work is and why.

Pete Mockaitis
 That’s fascinating.

Leah Weiss
So, of course they can steady on point and be productive, right? I mean, that’s terrifying and that means if you employ six people that four of those don’t exactly know what they’re doing or why and you could scale it up for there.

Pete Mockaitis
 Could you zoom in on that just a little bit? That’s boiling my mind. I can understand how sometimes people are like, “Oh, my gosh! It’s complicated. I don’t want to get into what a python framework is and how I’m coding.” Blah blah blah software code talk, but you’re saying to two of those folks just cannot master the sentences for this is what I do.

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean let alone like getting in the weeds with, here’s with type language from coding and why it was selected, but like here’s why we’ve created this program and our end goal to serve our company or our customers rather is, they can’t answer that question.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh, the “why” is where it’s tricky. It’s like, well, I filed these reports. I can tell you that but the “why” where.

Leah Weiss
So, what their role is there for.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay. What their role is there for.

Leah Weiss
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay, understood.

Leah Weiss
So even if you know what you’re there for, you’re going to be challenged in paying attention. So, and which is why people are describing our time now and the business world is the attention economy because everything comes back down to our ability to prioritize and make good choices for our ourselves, for our team and for our organization. And you know, mindfulness is not like some hippie dippy thing that we’re just doing in California. It’s a 1.1 billion dollar industry and 22% of companies in 2016 had mindfulness programs and that number was projected to double in 2017 and they’re still analyzing the data from that period of time. But the reason people are investing in it isn’t because the hippie movement is back on the rise. It’s because it directly translates into dollars and hours spent in productive ways. Company like … measure it that, 62 minutes per employee of additional productive time per week, $3000 per employee a year of increased productive time when an employee has been through mindfulness training.

Pete Mockaitis
 Intriguing! So then you define, what is mindfulness and how do we train it?

Leah Weiss
So my preferred definition of mindfulness is the intentional use of attention. So we can do that anywhere, there’s nothing in that definition that says close your eyes and meditate or do it during your break or lunch time. It’s we should be doing it right now while you and I are talking and whoever is in the audience listening. It’s so simple but if you start to pay attention you notice that you’re way more distracted than you ever realized and quickly that becomes the impetus for people to say, “Wow, this is a big problem. I’m super distracted and everyone around is as well. What can we do about that?” And then the good news is you can do a lot actually.

Pete Mockaitis
 So I’m intrigued. So the intentional use of attention, and we had at Dan Harris on the show some time ago talking about 10% Happier and Meditation and such. So he used an interesting analogy for meditation that he said, “It is like a bicep curls for your brain.” And so I’d love to get your take when we talk about the intentionally use of attention. Because I’m thinking I cannot quite intentionally use my attention nonstop for nine hours. So how do you think about that sort of the dynamic between intentionally using attention verses hey, chilling out and taking a break? And does taking a break mean let your mind want or whatever the heck you want? I’d love if you could frame that up a little bit in terms of this notion of intentional use of attention. Is that like a muscle or does it have effort that gets tired? How do you frame that up?

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean, I think if you want to play with that metaphor or since it’s valuable of looking at meditation like a way to train your mind, which is the wrap is returning your attention to what you’ve chosen them to your anchor. So you can increase your strengths meaning you can do it for longer and you can do it better. But just like following on this training metaphor that doesn’t mean you go to the gym and you start doing bicep curls around the clock if you want stronger biceps. You need to train properly, which includes a different kinds of exercise and learning how the complimentary muscle groups work. And that’s how I think of responding to your question around what about rest, and I couldn’t do it for nine hours. No, nobody could focus in a formed a kind of way for nine hours. What I recommend to people is to use permadrols or setting an alarm for different style for 25 minutes bursts of multitasking than having a break. This is recognizing how attention works so that we can leverage it. And I do think that there’s a lot to be done with improving how we take our breaks and doing them in ways that are relaxful as opposed to just a distraction or kind of false break.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay, Yes. Well, so I’d love to hear then, if we’re talking about doing reps or training, what are some of your favorite prescriptions in terms of enhancing our ability to have intentional use of our attention?

Leah Weiss
So I think you need to have clarity on what your goal is in any period of time. So if you’re approaching your day, you need to be aware of what the priority is and also defacto what the priority is not. You need to know what your likely distractions are going to be. This is all consistent with the best thinking on behavioral change.  You need to know where you’re going and you need to know what’s likely to make you not get there so that you can preempt. So you want to structure your time if your goal from the day is to get focused or work done, you’d approach it differently than if you’re at a networking conference and you want your goal for the day is to connect with as many people as possible. You need to have your targeted outcome. So if you are moving through a number of different activities, you would want to structure your day work with how your habit or focus work. So if you’re like, I know I’ve got four hours for this work to get done and I’ve got some calls I’ve got to make. Then I’ve got just a bunch of tasks that don’t take a lot of brain power but they will take time. Then create the plan based on how our attention functions so that we do the bursts, the focus energy interspersed by the breaks of the less high maintenance kind of tasks and we’re aware that we’re not calling ourselves multi-taskers along the way, that we are uni-tasking and taking breaks or we are switching intentionally in between tasks. Because as we know from the research, there’s no such thing as multi-tasking. There’s only task switching which has costs. You can’t actually be on a call and emailing both at the same time. You’re moving your attention back and forth between them doing neither of them particularly well.

Pete Mockaitis
 Understood. So that’s kind of clever when it comes to the alternation between intense focus, task and then tasks that does not require intense focus. And so I’m wondering, if all of your tasks require this focus, what’s sort of the best practice in terms of taking an optimal break?

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean, I definitely live in that world where it’s writing, it’s grading and it’s a lot of highly focused work. So the way that I structure my time is knowing that I need to not fall into habits of thinking that social media is consumption as a break. That’s not a break. Getting up, moving, taking a walk could be a break, getting a drink could a break and taking the 20 minutes. Today, I have my grades due tonight. So there’s just like a lot of reading and backlog. So it’s making the decision that instead of having 15 minutes of unproductive time, I’m going that take a real break for 20 minutes and do a quick workout. And what I see in people who are performers is lots of time with great care. They know when they’re having their calls, they know when they’re having their emails and it’s like they’re architects of their time in a very proactive sense and you don’t hear the same overwhelmed from them that you do from some many other who are kind of approaching their calendar like happening to them rather than they’re making choices about how to structure it.

Pete Mockaitis
 That’s a great distinction. So social media is not a break, I think that is a rallying cry. Can you expand upon that for the skeptic?

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I mean, I think for the skeptic, I don’t think you need to believe anything, skeptics. I think what you should do, this is my humble opinion is pay attention when you try different things like if you’re not sure if you believe that then try it. Take your breaks tomorrow and have them be breaks on social media. Then the next day say my brakes are not going to be on social media, they’re going to be getting up and taking five-minute walks a bunch of times through the day and see how you feel.  You don’t need to believe anything including me or the research. What you need to do is pay enough attention to what happens when you experiment and take that data and trust that data and that’s very much what I encourage my students to do. I’m not a big believer person. I’m just a person who has tried practices and seen that they work. And also some of them don’t work for me, but then I figure that out, put them aside and go with something else that does. So I encourage all of you to do the same.

Pete Mockaitis
 All right, thank you. Well, let’s talk a little bit about self-awareness. I have seen some research, which I think I do believe as we were talking about what we believe and don’t with regard to most of us are not as self-aware as we think we are. So could you pack a little bit of what you mean by self-awareness and how can we get more of it?

Leah Weiss
Self-awareness is such an interesting term. So one of the ways we talk about self-awareness often is when we hypothesize about what we would do in a given situation. We say, well, you know if I were in that fill in the blank from a newspaper article we’re reading or movie we’re seeing or just a friend situation we’re hearing from our imagination about what we would do. So our take on who we are and how we would behave is notoriously wrong. It is like completely the choices we think we would make are not the choices we actually make when we’re in a situation. So that’s one big way in which we don’t know ourselves and there’s a lot of ways to unpack that, sentiments the perspective of condiments work that he won the Nobel Prize for understanding that there’s fast and slow thinking and that there’s responses that are rational and that there are responses that are emergent or intuitive or embodied.  There’s a lot of different ways you can describe that. So this is one of the places where economic theory breaks down if you want to say that we are all rational actor. We are people who make post hoc descriptions of our choices in rational ways but those were not the actually drivers. So I think that’s another way where mindfulness practice relates. Because we can actually get much more clear on the emotional kinds of drivers that are influencing in our behavior and the behavior of people around us that we are most likely to overlook otherwise.

Pete Mockaitis
 Okay, so are there any particular practices that you recommend in terms of getting a boost in terms of getting mindfulness?

Leah Weiss
One that I think is really simple and really powerful is to start getting clear when we are analyzing and interpreting a situation. How much is data that’s observable and much of it is conceptual overlay or interpretation that is highly subjective? And those tools that I write about in the book where I talk about how you can go about doing this from like take a piece of paper and say an event that you’re thinking about or meeting you had that went sideways and you’re trying to figure out what happened. So on one side of the paper literally writing out like things that happened and on the other side of the paper, the interpretations you made about all the things that happened. And it sounds so of simple but we bundle those together and when we do then we’re very quick to say, well, she coughed and that was an indicator that she didn’t like my thinking. It’s like, well, maybe what we know here is that she coughed. We don’t actually what that meant, but we do these projections and conceptual overlays so quickly and then we react to what we’ve constructed. And often its misinformation and incomplete information and it leads us down the path of interpreting another person behavior and reacting in that behavior and all these ways that are just wonky. So what I recommend is just getting back to the basics like what do we actually know? What is the interpretation? If its interpretation, is there another possible interpretation? Can we get ever more precise and then bundling this mess that we can make when we’re projecting motives when we don’t actually know what they are?

Pete Mockaitis
 I like that. Thank you. Will you likewise share some of your favorite tools for hitting the purpose side and the connections with the other side?

Leah Weiss
So one of the ways that I’ve really fallen in love with thinking about and training in it comes from a student I had at Stanford Business School an officer in the army and he comes from a military family. His father with a General of the Engineering Corp. The metaphor that he brought that I’m in love with comes from his father, which is something that they grew up with and what it is, is pretty simple. It’s a puzzle and a puzzle box top. But the story behind it, I love and why it is so helpful I think is really powerful. So the story behind it is from the time they were little they would do puzzles as a family. As they got older the puzzles would get harder and as they got even older and there were about to leave the home their dad would take away the box top. So they had to try to figure out how to solve the puzzle without having that clarity about what they were building.

So this becomes the metaphor for leadership. That is our job and there is no box top out there. We view it as leaders and aspiring leaders need to be awesome at clarifying what we’re doing and why and continue making sure that everybody is clear on that. And then this is where I think it gets even more useful is if use that metaphor then that means we ourselves, we work with our instrumentals towards that vision because you can’t solve the puzzle with just one piece. That won’t work. You have to actually value the role of the other pieces. So I think when leaders take a metaphor like this, it is inherently causing them to take a more strength based approach to understanding the people around them, lifting them up and building stronger relationships and building their own career in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
 Yes, so in practice if there is no box top you’re continually reflecting and reiterating the vision of what we’re up to here.

Leah Weiss
Exactly. Every time you make some sort of change, people need help updating it and making sure that they’re up updating in a way that it’s systematic with the rest of their team in the organization. So this becomes an ongoing aspect of leadership that we need to take really seriously, not waiting until like the retreat next year when we talk about the purpose. But this comes closer to what we were talking about with crazy highly engagement epidemic and the lack of engagement that we have. It comes back as purpose. There’s no box top and so without that box top 2/3 of your employees don’t know what they’re building.

Pete Mockaitis
 Right. And I’m wondering, if you find yourself in a box-topless world and you’re maybe not the leader and you would like to get a clearer vision and purpose connection to what up to what we’re up to. What are your tips for the person those shoes in terms of asking the questions or maybe even formulating your own purpose?

Leah Weiss
I love how you just framed that. Actually those two clauses in your question are exactly what I work with my students on that your ability to ask questions actually differentiates you as being valuable. I can’t tell you how many times CEOs visit my class. We just had Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn come in a few weeks ago. One of the things that students were talking to him about is, what can I do if I’m not like you and I’m not running this company? What I heard him say in response to that was you prove yourself valuable by showing the inconsistencies and by asking the questions. That’s you any good leader wants to surround themselves with. So it’s actually a great way instead of trying to be “the know it all” be the person who’s asking me the real question in surfacing what is not known but needs to be known. So that’s piece of it and then you exactly alluded to how I would refer to cultivating purpose.

No matter what the box top is for the organization, you also have to have your own individual purpose and you need to have clarity about how it’s fitting together with your organization so that you can be in the situation ideally where it’s a calling or at least a career for you. And it is a meaningful trajectory because what the organization sees you as valuable for providing is also valuable to you. So you need this as continual work that needs to happen. And I think the good news is, it’s doable work and it’s actually really inspiring work. You know, this is one of the reason. I think when I’m going and doing off-sites with organizations and working with teams. More and more them are recognizing the need to spend time together really understanding what makes each other tick so that we can work well together particularly when things get stressful, which they will.

Pete Mockaitis
 And I like that, I think it is a pretty powerful reframe there from Jeff Weiner in terms of, we need to ask those questions. It’s helpful and a great leader will want that. I think that maybe there’s just a lot of not so great leaders or there’s a justified fear that if someone’s thinking, I am kind of curious how this connects, how this helps a customer, how this ties into our strategic plan or vision or whatever. But I’m concerned that asking that question could put on the defensive like, “Oh, he’s trying to torpedo what I just talked about” or make me look dumb like, “Oh, I’m apparently not sharp enough to connect the dots on my own” or it would just be annoying because this meeting has already been going too long and we want to wrap it up.

So that’s intriguing because I think any number of these elements of doubt or resistance can creep in. It’s so encouraging to hear that at least one person’s take that no, no asking such a question is highly valuable and does not make you a pain but makes you look awesome.

Leah Weiss
Well, and you to have to be smart about it as your point is exactly getting to like you don’t want to do it at the all hands meeting when everybody is like, just been told the department is shutting down. You have to be sensitive to context and when and how but creating those opportunities, seeking them out and getting more comfortable and just experimenting with it, I think goes along way so we can take the risk to ask a question certainly where we’re on the fence about it and see what the responses.

And I think you’re exactly right, it doesn’t mean that the group is there to serve our needs. We need to make sure the way that we are asking the question is of service to bringing the group along. And I think we can all tell when other people are doing that, that’s the difference between a good question and someone being really annoying.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh yeah. Isn’t it true that this thing I know makes me awesome?

Leah Weiss
Totally. Yeah, like that’s what not to do because that’s not actually trying to get at your organization or your role or purpose or your team’s function. That’s just going to irritate people, don’t do that. But find a way to ask a question that will be of service and there’s an honest question. We have really good sniff tests for when people are being authentic. So if we really want to understand and being aware of our environment, I think that it’s a good risk to take and see what happens. You’re not going to get fired for asking a question. You might get better at when and how, those are learnable skills and way better than be learning them than to just throw the whole exercise out the window.

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

Leah Weiss
I love your questions, even asking you’re good at this. You’re clearly a pro.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh shucks, thank you.

Leah Weiss
Yeah, I think the one thing I haven’t really talked about over that might be helpful for the skeptics is understanding and let’s talk about a topic like compassion again for a second. It might sound, “Oh, that’s so soft and we’re here to compete and we’ve got beat everybody else out.” Worrying about this just seems like a waste time. Look at it from the perspective of organizations are groups of people or people have challenges. We suffer, we have families who get sick, we have illness ourselves and we have things that happen in life.

So it’s inevitable in our organizations that the challenges of life are going to come in. When people see not just that their own challenges are met with compassion but the challenges of the people around them are responded to, they increase their royalty to the organization, they become more engaged. And this could is following on the research, this isn’t just my opinion. They miss less days of work, they stay with organizations longer, and they are more invested while they’re at work.

So I think there’s an important way of understanding that it’s an organization’s need to respond to the human element and that we can also do that in small ways even if we’re not at the top of the work chart or if we’re just a person working in an organization. We can still create within an our team and department an environment where we understand what’s going on at least to some basic degree in the lives of the people around us and demonstrate that we care. That will improve our relationships and will make it easier when we need to get stuff done. People will be more likely to help us if they know that we demonstrated care for them.

I think there important way of framing this that I would want to share with the listeners to think about and reflect in your organization what you’ve seen happen in terms of responsive to suffering and challenge. Often times an organization fails on that, what does that end up doing to morale and retention and all those things?

Pete Mockaitis
 Sure. I think that’s powerful because just the innate human experience and need for reciprocity that just sort of baked into to us as well as suffering really can be kind of kind of mild. I remember one time I was working late and someone asked me if I wanted a milkshake from Pot Bellies. It really did alleviate suffering and I thought that guy was the coolest for having done that. So, that’s awesome.

Leah Weiss
Great! Just like we would in relationships outside of work. I love that example, it’s so human. Like you’re working late, you’re hungry or just having someone care about you as a person that it would make you feel delighted to have this shake like that is a very human moment in the thick of it and it couldn’t have been like a company policy. It had to happen because this person saw you and cared about you as the person and wanted to make you smile. It was sincere, it was customized and it was appropriate. They didn’t like buy you a car.

Pete Mockaitis
 I’ll take that too.

Leah Weiss
It could’ve been cool.

Pete Mockaitis
 You’re having trouble getting around Pete. Here’s a car. Excellent! This is fun. So now, can you share with us a favorite quote that you find inspiring?

Leah Weiss
The quote that I love and come back to again and again is from Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning in he wrote about out his experience in the concentration camps in the holocaust. He says, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” If he can say that about the concentration camps, the thing I love about that is then I can deal with that annoying co-worker. I can remind myself why I’m there, why we’re are both there even they’re chewing with their mouth open or the interrupt me when I don’t like it. If I can get really clear on that common why, that goes a really long way. So that’s one of my favorite inspiring but also highly practical quotes.

Pete Mockaitis
 Excellent! Thank you. And how about a favorite study or a bit of research?

Leah Weiss
I love Allie Crum’s milkshake study. She now at the Stanford Psychology Department. And one of my favorite studies of hers is looking at what the impact is of our beliefs on our physiology. So she started out asking questions about placebo. And so this study, what she does divides people into two groups, one group gets told this milkshake is healthy, nutritious, low calorie yada, yada. The other group gets told this is indulgent high calorie treat. Depending on the message that they got, their hunger hormones responded in kind.  So if they were told it was the light low calorie shake, they would get more hungry again more quickly and their hormones would actually respond accordingly. If they were told it was the very fattening dense shake, then their bodies would respond in kind. The thing I love about this study is that it shows us how much our beliefs matter. We know the placebo effect has impact but how are we really leveraging that in our day to day lives and the way we’re approaching our work and our relationships so that we can be healthier and happier.

Pete Mockaitis
 Oh, lovely. Thank you. And how about a favorite were book?

Leah Weiss
I’m going to go with The Lorax. I just reread with my youngest child who’s three. And I have to say Dr. Seuss now more than ever, we really need to understand the impact of our organizations on other humans on the environment. Got step it up before it’s too late or we’re going to end up in a… I think we’re already seeing where we could end up. So that book, it’s impactful. I actually wrote a piece on it recently saying why I think this is a vital leadership text for our time.

Pete Mockaitis
 All right, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Leah Weiss
I think what I want to go with is knitting needles because I think that it’s really important to have practices. And for me knitting is one of them, of getting back in our bodies and doing something for those of us who are knowledge workers and live in our head seeing something physical that we can build with simple materials and dedication and a plan for me is endlessly inspiring. So I’m going to say my knitting needles.

Pete Mockaitis
 Thank you. And how about a favorite habit, the personal practices of yours?

Leah Weiss
I loved one that I started when in my oldest child was about two, so this is five years ago. She loves making decorations like lots of little kids and I was struggling with transitioning from work to home. I would come home and be preoccupied with what I needed to finish or college just had, you name it. I would come home and I’d be preoccupied with the call I just had or something I needed to get done. And so we would put up decorations on the front door for the holidays and they would constantly be shifting because the holidays would shift and they would grab my attention because they were changing. So it was became my prompt, my cue to notice. I’m coming home I want to be present to my kids and to my family and transition and with care from one of rules to another and dock my technology and take my shoes off and enjoy that precious time with my family. So the decorations on the front door for when I’m coming home.

Pete Mockaitis
 Thank you. And can you share, Is there a particular nugget that you have been teaching that really seems to connect and resonate with students and they quote back to you time after time?

Leah Weiss
We really do a lot with David Foster Wallace’s This is Water and that fundamental idea that he shares in it that if we don’t choose then we’ll fall into our negative default. But if we choose to pay attention to how we’re mentally constructing the world around us particularly the people around us and experimenting with seeing them as fully human as valuable giving them benefit of the doubt, imagining the suffering that they might be going through that I don’t know about that’s driving this behavior that I’m not a fan of in this moment. And the students talk about that and I’m just grading final papers right now and it comes up again and again as reaffirming this commitment to choose to be more aware and compassionate in their lives. And also with the humility of like that’s going to be a lifelong trajectory, but it’s one worth being on.

Pete Mockaitis
 Excellent! And is there a best place that folks who want to learn more get in touch with you? Where would you point them?

Leah Weiss
My website is the best place you can sign up for my newsletter and I share out the most current research and all of that kind of material and lots of tools for mindful meetings and exercises you can do in the thick of it at work and in your life, in your busy life.

Pete Mockaitis
 All right, and do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Leah Weiss
You can influence a lot more than you think if you take responsibility for how you are thinking or talking about approaching your time and your relationships at work. So own that and use that and benefit from that.

Pete Mockaitis
 Beautiful! Well, Leah, thank you so much for taking this time sharing the goods. Please keep on doing what you do in cultivating the compassion and all you’re up to.

Leah Weiss
Thank you so much for having me. It’s been such of pleasure.

Mar 23
0

277: Keys to Exceptional Goal Achievement with (100% Bucket List Completer!) Danny Dover

By | Podcasts | 4 Comments

 

Danny Dover says: "If you want to be a person who lives an extraordinary life, then... take action that is extraordinary."

Fascinating achiever Danny Dover shares how we can unlock similar achievements in our own careers and lives.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How and why to set binary goals with zero wiggle room
  2. How to eliminate distractions, ruthlessly yet tactfully
  3. Approaches to rediscover your motivation

About Danny

In 2010, Danny Dover assigned a deadline of May 25, 2017, to his life. He was tired of hearing about other people’s exciting lives and decided to jump-start his own by taking steps to actually live as if the end was in sight. He tattooed his deadline on his butt and made the sole purpose of his life to complete his Life List (a list of more than 150 life goals). While pursuing his list, he inadvertently became a minimalist in order to gain the necessary focus to create a more meaningful life. This seemingly small change in mindset (which he later detailed in the book The Minimalist Mindset) dramatically changed his life for the better.

As of 2017, Dover has completed his entire Life List (which included living alone in the wilderness for a month, traveling to nearly 100 countries, mountain climbing in Antarctica, becoming a best-selling author, etc.)

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Danny Dover Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Danny, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Danny Dover
I am so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Well, I think we’ll have a great chat here so I’m excited as well. First of all, I’d love to hear about the tattoo on your butt. What is the scoop here?

Danny Dover
This comes up more often than I had imagined before I got this, or when I got this. Okay, so if you rewind about 10 years of my life, I was in a really, really, really rough spot. I was dealing with depression among other things, and I realized, very frankly, that I had really no choice but to find a better life for myself or perhaps a better way to word it now, say building a better life for myself.

I knew I was a procrastinator. I knew that with depression I had very, very little motivation, so I decided that I need to make this thing very real, something very permanent, and something very important to me, meaningful. And so I got a tattoo with what I imagined, at the time, would be the deadline for my life, so this was May 25, 2017, and, again, I got this done about 10 years ago.

And very, very slowly I got started on rebuilding my life a little bit, on making some strides and, as I’m sure we’ll talk about, on working on a list of 150 goals that I have for myself before that deadline.

Pete Mockaitis
So deadline for your life, you mean, to do all the items on your list prior to that date?

Danny Dover
That’s correct. Now, you got to remember, I was in a real dire side of my life and so I was taking this very morbid direction and a very serious direction. But in hindsight, I can look back and say…

Pete Mockaitis
Hind? Ho, ho, ho, zing.

Danny Dover
Hiny-sight. That was exactly what I needed then, so it did the job. I came up with this idea that it seemed like a good idea to follow this general advice of, “Live as if the end is in sight.” But, of course, none of us know when that time is going to be. And so I said, “Well, what if I just picked a time…” or a date in this case, “…and have that be my trajectory,” and kind of draw a line in the sand or a tattoo on my butt, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s cool. And so, then, you had a healthy list of 150 life goals. Can you give us an example of a couple of them that were the most challenging and transformational?

Danny Dover
Sure. And I should give a little context on where this list came from. When I was in this little part of my life, I asked people around me what were some of the favorite stories from their lives, and some of these were accomplishments, some of these were people they’ve met, some of these were relationships they had. And I took their stories that they told me and made those the items on this life list.

So some of the odder ones, the more challenging ones, well, first, just this wasn’t specifically a bucket list then, but it was inherent to the list. I had to come up with ways of paying for this. And perhaps even more difficult, or at least equally difficult, I had to figure out, “How am I going to create a lifestyle where I can do these things as far as time goes?”

Because if you’re going to make money, that means you’re selling your time to somebody else, usually. And so I need to find a nice balance there where I could do these things. So let me give you some examples here.

So, visit every continent. These were more specific, but go to roughly about 100 different countries, get multiple patents, complete many, many meaningful tasks a year, and each of these had smart goals associated with them, so each of them were very specific, but in this list they’re not. Run a marathon, do astronaut training, go to the Olympics, Super Bowl World Series, create a profitable business, live in the wilderness alone for a month, so on and so forth, 150.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so good. Now I want to touch base on what you mentioned there with smart goals. So, that’s kind of how actually I got my start in speaking as I was presenting at this conference called HOBY, Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership, which I still do. It’s a lot of fun, very sort motivated, fun, high school sophomores assembling and having a transformational sort of a weekend experience.

And so I do talk about smart goals because I was a goal-setting enthusiast. Some people are a little down on smart goals, saying, “That’s actually not the optimal way to establish goals given our psychological understanding given dah, dah, dah.” But, hey, you’re a living proof, you had 150 of these and you knocked them all out, and all of them had a smart goal associated with it. Can you unpack, first, the acronym, and second why you think this is a good way to go?

Danny Dover
Well, perhaps, surprisingly I agree with some of the research that you just referenced.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Danny Dover
I don’t think that smart goals are necessarily the best way to do it for everybody, but I think the general concept, which I’ll talk about in just a second, seems like a better path than what I was doing before – smart goals.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Danny Dover
So, before it was smart goals, my goals were very broad and it wasn’t clear if I completed them or not, and there’s lots of wiggle room. With a smart goal, I don’t even know if I know the acronym off the top of my head, but I think it’s specific, measurable, actionable, I don’t know what the R is.

Pete Mockaitis
Realistic?

Danny Dover
Realistic, thank you. And timely or time-based. And I don’t care so much about getting the specifics and nailing it down, but what I care about is making a goal that fulfills these general accomplishments. It is binary decision, “Have I completed this or have I not completed this?” And there was absolutely no wiggle room. It is either a yes or it’s no. There’s no, “Well, maybe,” or, “Yes, but…” that doesn’t exist.

So what I’m really going for is a binary thing, and the tool that I used for that is smart goals but I’m not really religiuos about obsessing about making sure I hit each of those letters. As long as it’s binary I’m happy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so I’d love it if you could maybe give us an example of how you binarialized – we’re inventing a word, Danny.

Danny Dover
Sure. I think you did. I guess you get credit for that.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a joint creation. You made binary. Some accomplishments or goals are tricky when it comes to sort of like an emotional thing or about some happiness or like a relationship thing in terms of if you want to have a good or better relationship with a spouse or a great friend. So could you give us an example of maybe something that started fuzzy and how you made it smart or binary?

Danny Dover
Yeah. So let’s take chess, which actually ended up in the hindsight, hiny-sight, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Danny Dover
Ended up being one of my least favorite items I did on there. But, originally, when I wrote it down it was not a very good goal as far as being smart. It was, “Learn to play chess well,” I think is what I wrote.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Danny Dover
And in order to do that, and in order to make this binary, you need to add more attributes to it. So what I first did was researched, okay, “How is chess set up? How is it measured? What does the Bell curve look like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Those ranking are insane, bro.

Danny Dover
They are insane. Oh, yeah, some people… there’s a problem actually with this. I’ll go into it as kind of an aside. So in order to look at distribution of a chess players, you look at places like chess.com, or this was what I chose. But people who spend all their time playing chess for fun tend to be very good at chess, and so the Bell curve has shifted than what it would be for the average human being. So it’s actually made the challenge quite hard.

So there’s multiple chess ranking systems, there is, I believe, is Elo is how you pronounce it, and Glicko-2, too. So I chose Glicko-2, it looked like, for my research, that that was going to make more sense for my goals. I found what the center of Bell of curve was, I wanted to be slightly above average which would be well because I was taking into account this bias that the people who were on chess.com playing this were the ones who play chess all the time are like quite good, and so I wanted to beat the average.

And I believe the number was 1550 on the Glicko-2 is what I had to beat. I’d have to look at my notes but I believe that was it. So I played chess until I was able to beat 1550 on the Glicko-2, if I’m getting my numbers correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow.

Danny Dover
It was terrible.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, I was going to say that. I think that would take a long time based on my progress in the game of chess.

Danny Dover
Yeah, so chess is really interesting. I love it as an analogy, and I love it as a concept for explaining strategy. But what I found, for my personal taste, is that the way to get good at chess, which is just rote memorization, is trying to understand lots and lots of different permutations and memorizing that is just not a fun endeavor for me, not to say that it can’t be great for other people. Clearly, a lot of people get a lot of joy from it, but not for me.

What I thought I was going into was a game where you would get broad strategy, but what I found, to master it, at least my understanding from the teachers and mentors I worked with, it was more about memorization and then general rules based off of trends that you start to see. And that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, maybe that’s why I didn’t get that far. It’s like I learned the lesson.

Danny Dover
And maybe that’s why I didn’t get farther. I mean, any subject that we take in this kind of very quantitative way is going to be, there’s going to be lots of side cases.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And so I’m intrigued there, so then that’s the idea, is you’re shooting for, it needs to be binary such that there is no wiggle room. I know that I have to achieve it by this date or I have not.

Danny Dover
Correct. So it was 1550 on Glicko-2 by a specific date. I had the overall deadline on May 25, 2017, but when I went through each goal on this list, each of this list items, I signed a sub-date so a deadline that I gave myself earlier, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. That’s so cool. Now, I think that others would suggest, I guess, the smart goals doubters would say, you know, “Hey, you need to be kind to yourself and not sort of put yourself in a position where the results or the performance is somewhat beyond your control. And you got to focus in on what you can do, your actions and the process.” What’s your response to that kind of vibe?

Danny Dover
It’s complicated. So half of me says, “That’s right. You should be kind to yourself,” and that not enough people are kind to their self in a meaningful way and for long periods of time. And I think you can cause a lot of damage by not being kind to yourself.

The other part of me says that, “If you want to be a person who lives an extraordinary life, then you’re going to have to take action that is extraordinary,” just by definition. And so I was a person who had given myself this big goal, this entire life list, and I said that I’m going to make this the meaning of my life, that’s why I was so serious with the tattoo, and so that is going to require extraordinary steps.

So, now, is that the right thing for every single person to do? No, but I think this general idea of trying to create some meaning or importantly, or worded better, choosing a meaning for your life, I think that is a really good idea and I think that does apply to everyone. Now the difference will be in the meaning that you choose and the execution you choose to pursue.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious to get a sense for, you said you made that the purpose of your life and it’s like sort of decided this is very important. And then you stuck with it. Like are there any sort of master keys that others who have fallen off the wagon for their goals can do there?

Danny Dover
Maybe. I hope that by discussing this topic, some other people will be able to skip some steps that I took, that ended up not being useful. So I spent a lot of time at the beginning of this journey, or really let’s say when I got about a third of the way through, because at the beginning I was doing nothing. I had no motivation. I barely get out of bed.

But as I slowly progressed, very slowly, I started doing more research on happiness, and how do you measure that, and what do you look at. And there were studies I read about measuring the different brain chemicals, which we can go to as an aside. I think they’re all kind of crazy. There’s different ones like measuring facial expressions and wrinkle depth to see how much you smiled, that kind of stuff.

And there’s all these kind of studies I read and there’s lots of other ways people went about it from like how do you act or you’re perceived by people or how you perceive other people, to kind of more psychological perspective. At the end of the day, I realized it just doesn’t matter. We don’t know. We really don’t know what we’re talking about when we’re talking about measuring happiness or quantifying happiness because it means different things to different people in different contexts.

So what I realized is that if I’m going to battle these very, very, very big problems in life, these big questions of, “Why am I here? What is the meaning of life?” I’m not going to find a binary answer. I’m not going to find something that’s like specific and measurable. I’m not going to find a smart answer to this.

Instead, what I’m going to find is that we don’t know. It just so happens that we’re here on this floating rock. You might as well just choose a purpose, just make your own decision, and what you’re going to find meaning, or what I found meaning from, as a result of that decision, is just pursuing it. Waking up every day and having a mission, even if it’s not the mission that was granted you by some extra like spiritual being.

Even if you have that choice, you made that choice, then you can find your own meaning in that, and that’s what happened to me. I think you can do that in lots of different ways. It doesn’t have to be a life list. But, for me, the key was just choosing something and fully committing myself to that decision. That’s what really made a big difference in my life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing and I guess I’m wondering. You didn’t waiver and decide, “You know what, actually there is another mission that’s going to be the thing,” and sort of back and forth, teeter-totter, wobble. It’s like, “Nope, this is the thing,” and it stuck. Any sense for what made it stick?

Danny Dover
Well, first, the push for me to make this big decision was just I didn’t really have any other choice. I mean, nothing was working in my life so I needed to make a bold change or I was going to be stuck or even worse. So I had a large reason to push me to do this.

And then the second part of it was, well, I had created this tattoo that I had told some people about and then I eventually kind of writing about this kind of a year later, maybe a little longer, and so I had public peer pressure in a positive way. So positive peer pressure and people reading this and asking me, “How is it going?”

And so put this out here and I had these feedback loops in place that kind kept pushing me forward. So were there days that I waivered? Sure. There absolutely were, but I had chosen this mission and it was very clear what needed to be done and it was a matter of trying to figure out how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Thank you. Well, so then, I’m curious now, in order to do that it takes some discipline associated with prioritization and saying no to alternative things. What are some of your best practices there?

Danny Dover
Well, okay, this is a big topic. I’m glad we’re going into it. So let’s talk about, in order to answer this, let’s try to talk about high achievers. So we’ll choose one aspect of high achievers, and I want to be clear, there’s lots of different ways you can achieve things, but one aspect of that would be people who have a lot of money, so let’s say billionaires, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Danny Dover
And billionaires are unique not because – well, they are unique because they have a lot of money, but that’s not the part I care about. What they’re unique in is they have a lot of power. So I think there’s a lot of evidence that these people, in many cases, really are able to change the world. It seems like they are modern-day superheroes who are the people who have this much power. So billionaires being one example of that.

Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld has a funny quote on this, he said, “When men are growing up and reading about Batman, Spiderman, Superman, they see these not as fantasies. They see them as options.” And I always really identified with that. I always thought that was funny.

So if you look back like last year, there was something like Forbes, I think, I’m quoting this from. There’s 2,043 billionaires on the planet in 2017, and that number rises roughly every year by 200, it depends on how the stock market does. So we have 2,000 plus billionaires who are with us right now, and none of them are Batman. This pisses me off. What the heck is going on here?

Pete Mockaitis
That we know about.

Danny Dover
That’s true. Maybe Batman would be smarter and just not actually show us. So we do have heroes who are billionaires. We have Bill Gates who professionally, I dislike him. But from what his impact on the world with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is actually amazing. He’s probably the prime example of someone who’s saving the world.

We have someone like Elon Musk who’s trying to save the world by leaving it, or at least getting humans off of it. So we do have these people who are like superheroes in our modern world so it’s exciting and it’s interesting.

So what I did, trying to understand this stuff, was start to study them. So lots of autobiographies and biographies, and really, I like those kinds of book in particular because they’re based in the real world and they’re people who have the same limits as all of us, meaning time, but they’re still able to achieve things.

And what I noticed was that, yes, there are definitely specific factors that applied to each of them specifically within the context of how they grew up and all that. But, generally speaking, what all these people who I have read books about, had in common is they had luck which I define as opportunity times preparation. You don’t really get to control opportunity per se but you certainly can control preparation, so it’s the multiplying the two where you really get luck.

And then habits, which is, this is part of my long answer in answering your original question here. Habits, I think, are what superheroes and billionaires and other people who are successful in other ways are different than the rest of us. So I started looking very seriously into that, and there’s a whole bunch of books on the topic, and they’re fine.

But what I’ve started to realize and what I really ingrained in myself is that it’s habits, not ideas, that are the programming language of human beings. And so I took this and I very seriously studied this concept. So I studied artificial intelligence, trying to mine this a little bit, trying to understand what breakthroughs are being made there, and can I apply this to myself.

And I found one that I thought applied quite well. It’s this idea of recursive self-improvement. So this is stolen from the field of AI, but I try to apply it with habits. Recursion, if you’re not aware, if you don’t have a development background, is a method that calls itself. And so you can be very, very powerful in a very, very small instruction base, or very, very small amount of code.

So in a human’s life it seems like this would be a habit that calls itself. So a habit that improves on itself. The most straightforward example of this would be something like speedreading. If you can speedread, and you really could keep your retention high, then you would be better at self-improvement because you’d be able to input more information into yourself, and then you’d get better at everything essentially if you’re reading the right stuff.

So in this way it would be recursive in that it would be a habit that was making you better at self-improvement, so improving that self-improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, so sort of like a loop of sorts.

Danny Dover
It’s a very specific kind of loop.

Pete Mockaitis
So you’re saying, if this is fair, you tell me, that it gets real powerful when – like the speedreading example – is that you are improving your ability to improve yourself and, thusly, there’s kind of a, I’m thinking like compound interest here.

Danny Dover
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
But there’s like a growing effect when you’re growing the thing that does growing.

Danny Dover
Exactly right. So like a billionaire is going to know the advantage of compound interest, right? That’s probably how they became a billionaire, at least in many, many cases. And so I wanted to apply this concept of compounding interest to people, to humans, so take away from finance entirely. And I realized that there’s certain habits, these ones I’m calling recursive self-improvement habits, that get more powerful as you develop them and they make other parts of your life better.

So speedreading is one kind of example although there are some problems here. The other ones that I’ve seen that I think are more beneficial are diet and exercise and, say, personal finance, friends, your network, your family, and things like focus. If you can get better at those core, I think other people, there’s like a Venn diagram here with what I’m calling recursive self-improvement habits, and other people call it like keystone habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Okay.

Danny Dover
So there are these ones that if you can get really good at these then it makes everything else much, much better. And so I doubled down on this concept. So you would ask me, “Well, how do I measure these things. How do I prioritize things? And how do I persevere with these things?” Well, this is exactly how I prioritize things.

I take what I believe to be these recursive self-improvement habits and I draw what’s called the goal-map. This is cool. I’ve actually never talked about this publicly before so this is something I’ve actually been doing for years.

So what I do is I outline what are the most important skills that I want to be working on in my life and then every quarter map the projects that I am doing to those, and I realized that if my projects are not aligning with these specific habits then I’m not going in the direction that I want. So let’s do a concrete example of this.

For me, these are diet, exercise, personal finance, family and friends. There also could be something like, if you go through traditional like definitions I’ve read of job satisfaction, it would be something like autonomy or competence, relatedness, maybe creativity impact. I think these broad categories and then I map all my projects to them.

And if you have job, well, so anybody who has a job is going to have to do some projects that don’t align with these, but you can know you’re doing the right direction, you can know you’re pointing the right way if most of the projects you’re or most of the hours that you’re spending are building up these kind of recursive self-improvement habits. These ones are going to get better over time and superpower you, like they give you these superpowers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s cool. That’s exciting. I’d love to dig deep into one of them. Let’s talk about focus because I think that’s highly applicable for professionals who have a lot of things coming at them from a lot of places. So how would you recommend starting to grow your capacity to focus such that it’s recursive and building on itself in becoming all the more awesome?

Danny Dover
Well, the most recent book I wrote, it’s called The Minimalist Mindset. It’s entirely about just focus. Focus is a very, very big topic. And funny enough, I think it’s one that doesn’t get enough attention even though we’re in a world where it’s very hard to focus and like there’s more need for focus than ever.

The way to become focused is to figure out what it is that you want to be focused on first, so prioritizing as we just covered. I use this tool called the Go Web but you can use any kind of prioritization system that you want and that works for you, and then being ruthless about eliminating distractions or anything that is not serving you.

So if you want to have extraordinary results, again, you have to really be persistent about being ruthless of eliminating any avenues you might have for failure. So this could be as simple as a clean desk. I mean, that’s the kind of advice I hear on like every podcast including yours. Your last guest, I think, spoke a lot about this and did a nice job on it.

But it’s also making sure you don’t have too many things on your plate, too many responsibilities. It’s about saying no and then consistently doing it which is hard. This reminds of a Steve Martin quote, “Perseverance is great substitute for talent.” I think that is a great way of looking at it. If you can just persistently say no to things that are not important and have an eye and understanding of what is important in your life then you’re setting yourself up on a very, very good path for potential success by however you want to measure that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to hear a few more things              that are great to eliminate, you know, one is clutter from a desk, another is many, many commitments. Are there sort of particular commitments or distractors that are particularly pernicious?

Danny Dover
Yeah, so this book I wrote called The Minimalist Mindset is a book about minimalism. And minimalism is usually applied to things, so this would be like having less clothes so that you don’t have to spend your creative energy picking out clothes in the morning, right? And that’s how minimalism is usually looked at, which is I think a good idea.

But I think the real beauty of minimalism is it applies to everything. So this could apply to your friendships, this could apply to your email, this can apply to your car, it can apply to anything you want. So I want to go give you an example that’s not the common one. So I’m going to avoid email just because that comes up in lots of podcasts episodes. Inbox Zero is a great way to do it. I’m looking at a tool called SaneBox. There’s a Cliff Notes version of how I got my email under control.

But let’s try to do something like priorities because that ends being the hardest one from a professional perspective. Let’s kind of dive into that a little bit. So what’s happening with a job, from my understanding, is that what you’re trying to do is trade time for money. And in doing so, if you’re working for somebody else, which almost all of us are, be it a client, be it a boss, then you are helping them achieve their dream rather than you necessarily achieving your dream. And you have to do this to start this when you don’t have a lot of leverage professionally because you need money and you need to pay your bills.

But I think it becomes very tempting to continue to prioritize all the things that your boss or your clients are prioritizing so that you can get more and more money so you can upgrade your lifestyle, so you can kind of go down this path. And, again, that works for everybody. But, for me, as a minimalist, I eventually got to a point where I had enough career capital, enough leverage where I could say, “You know what, I’m doing okay and I’d rather focus on these other things that I’ve already established as important in my life.” So, in my case, my life list.

So I was able to take these things that I had a focus on and then realizing kind of take a step back and be like, “Well, whose dream do I really want to accomplish here? Is it help my millionaire boss get more money? Or is it that I want to have more flexibility and freedom in my life, and in my family and friends’ lives?” And so I kind of took a turn there and started to persist in those directions, making things work that way. And that kind of is a rabbit hole as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to hear, as you’re being ruthless, as you’re saying no to things, any pro tips on how to do that in the kindest or best way possible?

Danny Dover
Yeah, this is a very hard thing, and I want to make sure that that part is clear, that saying no, I think people gloss over how difficult that is, but a lot of times it’s saying no to like your significant other or saying no to someone who has a lot of professional leverage over you, that’s very difficult.

The only ways I found to do this is to create scripts so that’s as easy for you and reflexive for you as possible. If you’re very clear on what the direction you do want to go in, it gives you this motivation to do these uncomfortable things of saying no to people you may really legitimately care about.

So for professional, I’ll do an email script, so I’ve written up a very polite way of saying no that says basically the idea is that, “Currently I have too much responsibilities on my plate. I want to make sure I give everyone my all with those. I’m happy to meet with you or I’m happy to work on your project…” whatever the context is, “…but it has to be after I finish my current obligations. I don’t like being this busy, and so I’m taking active steps to make sure that’s not the case going forward”

So I have a written out email that already says this. I’ve massaged all the wording so that this is crystal clear and that’s what I’ll send. And it’s just for me, it’s two keystrokes. I run a Mac and you can just build this. It’s built into the operating system to do shortcuts with texts. So I think I just typed in, “Nob,” so nob I think is the word and it does that on my email, and then I hit send. And then I go on the next thing.

If it’s a significant other, it’s a lot harder. It’s working with your family and your friends so they can understand what it is you’re up against and what it is you’re trying to achieve so they can understand why you’re prioritizing things you are rather than just saying no. It’s giving them a fuller understanding of the why you’re saying no and let them know that the no is a temporary no so you can pursue this other thing so that you can make everybody’s life – so this would be your friends, family – make everybody’s life a little bit better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very nice. So, let’s see, I had all these things I want to hear from you, and I think we’ve covered a good bit. When it comes to habits, you’ve focused in on here’s something that’s worth developing as a habit and we’ve said no to a lot of other things in order to make that happen and to dig deep because it is recursive and has great cool accumulative effects.

What are your perspectives on getting that habit to really stick in terms of, “I am embarking upon this. I want this to be a habit in my life”? What do I do to ensure that I can make that happen and not fall off the wagon?

Danny Dover
Well, the first thing I do is I put it out there into the world that I’m working towards this habit. So be it weight loss or be it exercise or be it Inbox Zero or whatever it is. Put it out in the world so that you have this positive peer pressure working for you. You could also word this as working against you. But it works in your favor because people are going to check in on this.

From then, I make sure that I have plans for your bad days because there’s nothing I found that I can do to eliminate bad days or days when you don’t have motivation. And so I pre-plan some simple alternatives to make sure I do my full prep.

So if this is exercising, this would be saying, okay, if you’re having a bad day, or today you’re traveling or it’s going to be really hard for you to do a run, for example, then what I’m going to do is I’m going to have this exercise, put into notes on my phone so I know exactly what it is. I’m already have looked at what all the positions are so that I know this, so there’s nothing to stop me there, and then I’m just going to do it in the clothes that I’m wearing. So this wouldn’t be a run, this would be something like a series of like jumping jacks and pushups and sit-ups that kind of thing, where you don’t need equipment.

So I pre-plan for bad days and I make it crystal clear on what I’m going to do on days where I don’t have the option of doing what I’m supposed to be doing. So that example was with exercise. You could also do this with, say, email or you could do this with kind of any other area in my life as I pre-plan for them.

And the last one here is rekindling what it is that inspired me to start this to begin with. So this is almost always YouTube videos for me. So what I’ve realized is that I can get into to, say, Day 20 of doing a new habit, be it exercise or be it, right now, I’m learning to base guitar. And what I found is that like Day 1 and 2 are easy basic, like kind of easy because you have a lot of motivation. Day 3 is always really hard because your motivation is a little bit low, and you don’t really have that willpower as strongly as you did the first two days.

And so what I found is that I go on Day 3 or Day 4, I’ll go re-watch that initial spark that made me be inspire to do this job to begin with. So, again, I said this is usually YouTube videos, sometime this will be a conversation with a friend or whatnot. But then I’ll do that again like 10 days later so that works out to Day 13 or Day 14.

And then any other times I stumble past that point where I’m not going to make it to a true ingrained habit, usually depending on the research or who you’re reading, is like Day 22 or Day 30. I make sure that I get those re-boost of the original inspiration source, multiple times at point when it’s particular important.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing that you can often pinpoint the original inspiration source. I’m curious, are there particular YouTube channels that you’re watching. Where are you going to pack such a punch?

[00:33:03]

Danny Dover
We’ll come back to that a little bit. So it’s important to note that sometimes watching this same video over and over again is not going to quite do it. Although there are some videos which I’m happy to share with you on the show notes, that really every time I watch them really get me going again. But it’s more like I’ll find a particular, with the base guitar I’ll find a particular artist. I really like Flea, and re-watch some new stuff that he’s done or stuff that I haven’t seen is really a better way of saying that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So understood. So the source of inspiration there. Now if you want to create habits of focus, for example, and you are seeking a source of inspiration, I’m wondering if a video would, what video would do it, it’s like, “Check out that guy,” not looking at his face, but it seems to be I’m fired up. What would it be?

Danny Dover
Well, in that case it could be that video is not the best way to do it. I’m certainly open to that. But if I was trying to do focus, I might look at something that someone has accomplished as a result of their focus and focusing on that. So that could be a great business person or a great sports star and their highlight reel, something along those lines, or spending some time with someone who I really admire who does a great job with their family and to see how it is they’re focusing on their children and just watch that again. I mean, maybe that’d be an offline example that is better applied here.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. That’s cool. And then I’m almost seeing, in my mind’s eye, I’m picturing just sort of like a pulled quote and a graphic of the person’s face, and them sort of articulating that sort of decision or philosophy whether it’s entrepreneur or someone that you’re looking up to, like they have attributed their success to a thing.

Danny Dover
I’m reading the book Black Swan right now and it seems to be at this point in the book that the major thesis is saying that some things that happen to us are very random, and very often humans do not take randomness enough and do account when they’re looking at back at their college life.

So one of the key examples, I don’t remember if it’s from this book or from something else that I read, Steve Jobs looking back at his life, and he does the famous commencement speech which is a great YouTube video. I bet you more than half of your listeners have watched that. But what he’s failing to do is understand a lot of the other things that happened in his life that he didn’t have any control over, any responsibility over but also helps him enable these.

So, yes, he’s certainly used some habits to make these things occur, but it also just so happen that he was born during a time when computers weren’t even possible to develop, and there’s also ripe given the marketplace for it. Those are the things that he didn’t have any control over. So these ae kind of the exceptions that break the rule, and I think humans overly attribute their own amazingness to their past accomplishments.

So I’m trying now, I’m reading this book. I’m trying to apply that to my life as much as possible. You can do things that open up opportunity for you but you’re not going to be able to control those opportunities and how they play out. You’re only going to be able to prepare yourself for the potential for an opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. You know, it’s not sort of “if this then that” kind of direct line of “because Steve Jobs did not check his email” I don’t know “early in the morning, then if I don’t do that I, too, will achieve his results.” But, nonetheless, it seems like that theme associated with identifying the patterns that you want to model or the spark of inspiration that is compelling for you will push you, even if, hey, even if we’re deceiving ourselves a smidgeon along the way to get there.

Danny Dover
Yeah, I mean, I’d be this role of randomness is a very positive thing in my life so if you want to say that like the habits that you’re doing and the opportunities you’re trying to present for yourself or you just throwing spaghetti on the wall, then by all means throw more spaghetti but just acknowledge that even if…there is going to be a degree of randomness to this.

And I find this is a nice thing because if I fail at something and it seems like I was doing everything right, it makes me realize, “Hey, you know what, the world is actually much more complex than I understand. There are other things that play here. It doesn’t mean that I’m a failure because I fail at this particular thing. It just means it didn’t happen this time.” So I see this, the role of randomness, as a very positive thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay. Cool. Well, Danny, tell me, anything else you want to cover before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Danny Dover
I do. I want to talk about mistakes that I’ve seen lots of my friends make professionally, and then I think they can be very valuable if people were able to get better at it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Danny Dover
So the most common professional mistake that I’m seeing with friends and family members and other people like clients that I have is that they’re not showing the right kind of value to the right people. A lot of people that I work with or have worked with in the past try to demonstrate their value by putting in lots and lots of hours.

And while in some, like especially the taxing emotions for most of my time has been that can show value – it doesn’t necessarily show the value to the right people, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re getting the right things done.

So what I’ve tried to do instead is really hyper focus and work these people to make sure that they’re demonstrating the right kind of value, so understand what their goals are from their boss which, actually I found is they can just ask their boss and that enlightens people a lot. They work on something, and I’ve done this many times, I’d work on a project for six months, nine months, and while my boss thought that it was interesting or good, I didn’t realize that it was not the thing that was most important to them or that it would solve their bigger hanging problem.

And just by having that simple coffee conversation with them, asking them what their biggest problems they run into, now I can understand what the right value is. And then showing this to the right person. So it’s easy to show value to your boss because they’re checking on you and they’re making sure you’re providing value for the business.

But what turns up to be more important is to show value many times to your boss’ boss because they’re going to be ones who are going to be – information about you is going to be new because they don’t see you every day, and they’re probably the ones who can make decisions that are going to impact you in a way that you’re able to leapfrog in your career as opposed to just move up incrementally.

So what I’ve been doing with that is sending out, and I have an email script for this, but a polite way of trying to have a very casual coffee with your boss’ boss, if that applies, or just with the head of the company, the CEO or whatnot, and just trying to understand their problems and then demonstrating that you have some value without stepping toe on the toes of anyone who you’re directly working for and just saying, “Hey, I’m here to help. I’m interested in what is you see as good employees. I’m interested to see where you think the company is going. I’m interested to see what your priorities are with everything just so that I can be on the same page with you and help eliminate kind of silos that kind of stuff.”

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

Danny Dover
Yeah, I’m a big fan of quotes so I have lots of them, but the one that has been resonating with me lately is one that my bartending instructor gave me years ago at a bartending school, he said, “Everything that we are is revealed by how we play.” That really struck me because I think a lot of people spend a lot of time, myself included, overthinking things. I do this probably worse than anybody. But when your shields are down, it’s when you’re actively playing that I think your true essence really shows itself. And I’ve been trying to remind myself of that more and more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Danny Dover
Favorite book. Hands down it’s The Alchemist. It’s the only book I re-read every year. The Alchemist is really a beautiful wonderful story.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Danny Dover
Gap tape. So gap tape is very much like duct tape but it doesn’t leave residue and it doesn’t melt in high temperatures. Of course, if you put it on the sun it would but generally speaking it doesn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
So this is for like your studio setup?

Danny Dover
Yeah, I mean, but I travel with this so there’s been lots of times when – you can use tape for anything, right? But this’ll be that I’m fixing some clothes. This will be patching a tent. This will be earplugs. I probably shouldn’t have done that but I have. I mean, gaff tape is just solves all kinds of problems that know has such an expansive way of solving problems. So, yeah, gaff tape, you can buy it on Amazon or anywhere.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. And how about a favorite habit? Of all these we’ve discussed, is there on you think is evermore key for you?

Danny Dover
Boy, I mean, I don’t have a specific habit but I would say a general good direction going is to read more autobiographies. So if you want to make that into a smart goal it would be read, say, 15 autobiographies by December 31, 2018.

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

Danny Dover
Yes. Okay, so this has to do with the human eyeball. This is something that comes back to me, and I haven’t heard people say it to me verbatim, but I’ve heard them express this same idea so I like it. So if you look at the human eyeball from an evolutionary standpoint, how we got it to where it is now, there’s at least one interesting thing about it, but I’m sure there’s many.

The typical men’s eyeball compared to the typical women, I want to make it clear that, of course, there’s going to be some variations here so I’m making a very big jump here by just saying that men versus women. But it’s more complicated than that but I’m going to.

So men’s, if you look at their eyeballs, it’s developed in a way where the visual perspective is relatively laser focus when compared to a typical female eyeball for humans, whereas women’s are very, very broadly focused. And so it’s unclear exactly what’s the reason for this but the best guess that I’ve heard from an evolutionary standpoint is that men developed narrow visual focus for hunting.

It’s very important to know exactly where the animal is and have that laser focus, whereas women’s evolutionary spent a lot of time taking care of children, and children are running around all over the place, and there’s lots of things going on at the same time so having a broader focus would be something helpful there.

And I like this from a humor perspective because it explains perfectly well why man checks out a woman, it’s very obvious. But when a woman checks out a man it’s not quite as obvious. But where I actually find value in this is that this is a really beautiful vivid picture of understanding alternative perspectives.

It’s very easy to get caught in your head where you believe that everybody lives in the same world as you. But with this example, it’s not that only do people think differently from you, which is kind of obvious, but it’s also a bit, in this example, half the population is going to see the world differently than you, and they’re going to experience the world differently from you because visual, your eye, is such an important sense for how you experience the world.

So I really like this idea of understanding how just that small subtle change can really make a vastly different world from different people’s point of views.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Thank you. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Danny Dover
Go to LifeListed.com in the About page there, so lifelisted.com/about. It’s got all the contact information, much more information about my story.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Danny Dover
Sure. If you’re interested in learning more about focus and an alternative way of trying to develop that in your life, check out my latest book The Minimalist Mindset. You can find it any bookstore or on Amazon.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cool. Well, Danny, thanks so much for chatting here, and I wish you luck with the subsequent goals that you are establishing for yourself, and it seems like you’ve got a heck of a track record so it’d be cool to see what unfolds here.

Danny Dover
Well, thank you, and thanks to all the listeners for spending time with us today. We both really very much appreciate it.