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Aug 22
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989: Training Your Brain for Maximum Efficiency with Dr. Mithu Storoni

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Dr. Mithu Storoni goes behind the science of how focus works to use your brain to its maximum capacity.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to identify and get into the best mental gear for your work
  2. What to do when work gets either boring or overwhelming 
  3. The trick to resetting your brain 

About Mithu

Dr. Mithu Storoni is a University of Cambridge-trained physician, neuroscience researcher and ophthalmic surgeon. She advises multinational corporations on mental performance and stress management. She is the author of the forthcoming book Hyperefficient: Optimize Your Brain to Transform the Way You Work, out on September 17, 2024.

Resources Mentioned

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Mithu Storoni Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mithu, welcome.

Mithu Storoni
Hi. Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited to chat about becoming hyper-efficient. And I’m imagining, well, it’s in London where you are, so it’s been a few hours in the day. Have you hyper-efficiently already taking care of tons of tasks today, Mithu?

Mithu Storoni
I’ve tried to be as hyper-efficient as I can. Every day is a different one. If you have a different kind of day, depending on the kind of day you have, it’s all about tailoring your tasks and fitting them around your own rhythm. So, every day I do different things, and so every day I have a certain different timetable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I’m so intrigued to hear about that, and I understand that’s one of your core theses here, is we want to align our work with our natural rhythms of our brain as opposed to trying to contort ourselves to what is externally imposed upon us. Is that a fair synopsis?

Mithu Storoni
That’s absolutely fair. And if you want a little bit of background, so I wrote the book when I realized how the way we work today is very much a hangover from the era of assembly lines. So, when we had the Industrial Revolution quite a long time ago, we had assembly lines, we were producing quantities of things, of refrigerators, of cars, of hair dryers. And during that time, the number of items you produced decided how productive you were, and the longer you stayed on the assembly line, the more productive you were, because the more items you assembled.

When we then had the shift into knowledge work, post-Second World War, around the 1950s, where the majority of the work became office work, became sort of what we used to call white-collar, we actually changed the work but we didn’t change the way we did the work. So, our work hours, the way we measured work, continued in pretty much the same way. We still looked at how many hours we were sitting on the seat, we get paid on overtime, productivity is all about targets.

We then had another shift, which is the kind of shift we still have now, where we started producing intangible goods rather than tangible refrigerators. And so, when intangible goods, such as a software solution, such as other solutions, ideas, it created the bottom line, so they become principle. The principle thing you try to make a difference to your company, to your organization, you need to think about the quality, not the quantity.

So, it no longer matters how many software solutions you manufacture, or how many software solutions you think of, or how many ideas you think of, you could have a thousand mediocre ideas, they will be just as unproductive as having one mediocre idea. We now need to shift to thinking extremely well, so producing one exceptional quality solution, exceptionally creative idea, rather than a hundred bad ones.

In order to do that, the brain can no longer sit and work continuously as if it were producing, or assembling its idea parts on an assembly line. How long you sit on your chair and the way you sit influences how well your mind performs. But we have created a template around that, which is a hangover from the past.

Now we have technology doing all the monotonous, the routine, the sort of quantity-heavy jobs aspects of knowledge work, so now we need to be even better at creating ideas, at forming solutions. And in order to do that, we need to change the way we work in a radically different way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. That all seems to check out in terms of the way the world used to work and the way things are working currently. I’m curious, when it comes to us working at our finest to come up with these exceptional ideas and solutions, is there anything really striking or surprising you’ve discovered about what holds us back and what unleashes us to this greatness?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, I approached this subject from my background, which is in neuro-ophthalmology and neuroscience, and I’m very aware of the very, very exciting research field at the moment, looking at the brain’s dynamics. What we know is that the brain is a complex system, it changes state, and there is a network in the brain called the locus coeruleus norepinephrine network, which influences how alert you are, it influences how you pay attention. That’s one angle of the story.

We have uncovered quite a lot of data about this network and how the faster it fires, the more alert, the more sort of wired you become; the slower it fires, the calmer you become. If you take that, I’m diluting it a little bit, but if you take that you add in the cholinergic network, you add in the dopaminergic network, you know, you create the whole map. You realize that when you are performing mental work, knowledge work of any kind, your brain has to be, or your mind has to be, in a certain configuration in order to perform one particular type of task particularly well.

So, for instance, let’s take two examples of knowledge work. Let’s take creative idea generation and let’s take a different kind where you are focusing on something. So, if you imagine an organization, it has lots of teams but it has two sub-teams, one focusing on innovation, the other focusing on implementation. The team focusing on innovation is going to focus on coming up with ideas, original ideas. What do we know about how the brain works or what is optimal for the brain when this happens?

Well, we know that if you make the brain focus on one single target in front of you, such as a computer screen, your brain state is not going to be optimal to come up with those “aha” ideas because of the temporary structure of the brain at the time. Focusing is not conducive to gentle mind-wandering.

It’s not conducive to letting your attention wander and pick up fragments of data, fragments of thoughts wandering in your head, which you then assemble, or to just waiting for aha moments, for moments of insight to spring up inside your head. That’s one angle to it. So, detaching your attention is important. Not focusing is important.

The second angle to it is there is data that the time of day you work influences how well you work when you’re doing creative work. So creative insights, creative idea generation seems to be better first thing in the day and last thing in the day, not in the middle of the morning, and not in the middle or late in the afternoon. So, in order to really, really optimize idea generation, creative idea generation, perhaps working in a slightly different way for this particular sub-team is going to be more suited for their performance.

Similarly, if you take the second sub-team, which is working on logistics implementation, there they need to zone in, converge on ideas. Now if you are converging on ideas, focusing does help. So, their focused attention is going to be absolutely pivotal. We know focused attention, similar in the opposite way to creativity, focused attention, there seem to be some peak hours for that during the day. The middle morning, middle to late morning is one of them. Immediately after lunch is not one of them and later on in the day is a second slot.

When you’re doing focused attention, when you’re paying focused attention or doing work that involves focused attention, you have to, it helps to sit undisturbed, sit in a very, very attentive state of mind and get that work done. So, if you also think about how your mind is, when you’re creative, your mind is sort of very gently, slowly mind-wandering. When you’re focusing, you want to be sharp, you want to really zone in to what’s in front of you.

These two states of mind are very, very different. So, if you put all of that together, it shows you how you need to be in a certain state of mind that you can tell by looking at how well you focus, how well your mind can, or how easy your attention can wander, a particular time of day is also helpful. And the third thing we haven’t talked about is, as soon as you work continuously, and you measure this as time on task when you measure this aspect in psychological experiments, when your brain works continuously on some kind of intense work, it becomes tired.

When it becomes tired, its information-processing pathways inside your head become inefficient. And when they become inefficient, you can actually measurably or you can visibly see the effect that has on mental output. So rather than coming up with lots of original ideas, you’re much more likely to come up with ideas but they’re not going to be original. So how long you work for is a huge factor here, which is why you also have to put in this 90-minute, 90- or 100-minute ultradian rhythm where you work in slots, and even within those segments of work you pace how you work. That’s a very long answer to your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s really beautiful and it matches my own experience in terms of the groove, the flow, the rhythms, the vibe of work. And you talked about the creative and innovative side of things versus the implementation side of things, and sometimes I think of this as creating versus destroying. And I don’t know if it’s just my raw kind of attitude, but it’s like, “I’m going to destroy my inbox,” and by that, I mean I’m going to process it with vigorous speed. We’re going to do a three-second sweep per message, a 20-second sweep per message, and we’re going to watch that baby shrink from 200 to 20 in short order, and that’s good, and that’s kind of fun for me.

But sure enough, that does require that I’m not distracted by other things, and my mind isn’t wandering to interesting, fun things to pursue that’s counterproductive to what I’m after, is shrinking this inbox in a hurry and dispatching messages so people would get what they need from me, etc. Which is totally different than the vibe is like, “Oh, this would be kind of cool if we tried this thing. And here’s a fun idea. And, oh, that sort of connects to this thing I’m hearing on a podcast over there.” And so, those are very different vibes. So, tell me, just to make this contrast all the more crisp and clear for us, do you have a name that you apply to each of these modes of brain operation?

Mithu Storoni
I have. So, in my book, I have created a metaphor, which is very helpful, and I describe the mind as being in three states in the specific context of knowledge work. And these are, I call them three gears: one, two and three. And in a very easy way of imagining them is slow, medium and fast. The mind-wandering state, so the seek and destroy that you just described, which is going through your inbox – I love that analogy, I think it’s a great way of describing it, creating and destroying – that state would be right in the middle of gear two, which is the middle zone.

Gear one – is the kind of state of mind you have when you are really daydreamy. So, maybe the first thing in the morning after you’ve woken up after a deep night’s sleep, you haven’t quite reached that sort of sharpness, you haven’t reached for your coffee yet, you are kind of in a slight daydreamy zone, there’s a sunrise in front of you, you’re sort of halfway, halfway, and your mind feels quite slow. Your attention is floating a lot. You don’t have the ability to make it focus. It’s very, very floaty. You think of thoughts, they come, they go.

Gear two is when you can focus. This is the middle zone. As soon as you reach gear two, you’re able to focus. Within gear two, you have a kind of a slow pace and you have a fast pace. The slow pace gear two is when you can both focus and you can let your attention wander alternately however you want. That is optimal for creativity where you can just detach from what you’re doing, let your attention wander a little bit, but soon as you come up with an idea, with an insight, you can quickly zone your attention spotlight on there, focus on it and bring it to fruition. That is gear two, a slow gear two.

And then you have middle gear two, which is what you described as really intense, powerful focus. And then you have, you leave gear two and you go into gear three. And gear three has, correlates with what is sometimes termed sort of a hyperarousal state. So, in gear three, your thoughts are faster, your actions are faster, but you can’t perform analytical difficult thinking and you cannot focus as well.

So, these are the three gears: gear one is where you just wander; gear three where your mind is very fast and you can’t focus; gear two is right in the middle. And in gear two you can navigate by playing with your attention, detaching it, letting it wander around to go into kind of a light, creative gear two or a really deep focused gear two.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say hyperarousal gear three, just to make sure I’m understanding this, I’m thinking about, is this like I’m enraged at a situation? Or what are some of the scenarios or illustrations of hyperarousal?

Mithu Storoni
We are diluting these into single terms, but these are all scales. These all have a range. So, if you look inside the brain, people in a state of hyperarousal, this particular network in the brain is firing very fast, and the faster it fires, the more your physiological arousal increases. But just outside this zone where you can focus, the moment, so let’s just say you’re sitting there, you’re focusing on your email, you’re doing really well, and then a colleague keeps making herself or himself a cup of coffee, and every time they do this, they come and give you one because they’re really kind, and so you inadvertently just keep sipping those espressos while you work, just because they happen to be there.

After one espresso, it’s great, your focus is even better. But after another five, which you don’t realize you’ve had, suddenly, the noise that you heard behind you, the noise of the drilling outside, or the traffic outside, or someone speaking on their phone, suddenly seems really sharp. You couldn’t hear it a minute ago, but after five espressos you suddenly can, and so your threshold for being distracted is suddenly lowered, so you can become easily distracted.

Then, by this time, you haven’t realized you’ve had those five espressos, some more espressos appear and you keep drinking those. And as you drink them, eventually, you reach a point where your focus is completely gone, and you’re simply just reacting to the situation. You’re doing very low-level cognitive stuff, and every sort of small distraction around you is grabbing your attention away.

And as you increase that, you can eventually get into the stage that we do term that falls under the canopy of the banner of rage. But that sort of gear-three state is where you become easily distractible, subtle things become amplified. You become more anxious, more vigilant, so it’s a hyper-vigilant state. And the more, the faster this network fires, the more you go into this state, the more amplified it becomes. So, it’s a scale. This whole thing is a scale. Gear one itself is a scale, gear two is a scale, gear three is a scale, and within those, you’re modulating yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. It’s like we just got one very long continuum. It’s like the entirety of human experience, and we’re segmenting it into three-thirds to make it a little bit more workable to discuss and interact with. So, I guess I’m wondering now, this might be dangerous talking to neuroscience about this, but you mentioned, so we got some choline, some dopamine.

What is the, shall we call them biomarkers, or biochemical things, or heart rate, or brainwave frequency? What’s the stuff going down at our brain-body level within each of these three things in terms of it’s like a little bit in one, a medium amount in two, and a whole lot in three of these fundamental ingredients?

Mithu Storoni
So, very basically, let’s look at norepinephrine. So, norepinephrine, many of you will have heard of it, it’s associated with exercise. We talk about how we’ve got to get that adrenaline pumping or get that norepinephrine. 

And very, very loosely, these three gear states describe or correlate with three ways, patterns of firing of this, of a network in the brain, that is the brain’s headquarter of norepinephrine. So, in a very simple way of saying that, as norepinephrine levels vary in your brain, there’s a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex that sits right behind your forehead. The prefrontal cortex is your brain’s seat for focus, attention, any kind of higher-level cognitive work. Analysis, thinking, remembering, working memory, you name it, the prefrontal cortex is the seat of higher thinking, okay? This entire region of the brain, prefrontal cortex, it’s absolutely pivotal for knowledge work and it becomes very, very active at middle levels of norepinephrine.

So, when you’re in gear two, it’s the Goldilocks zone of norepinephrine that brings your prefrontal cortex completely online. When you have too much norepinephrine, when you enter gear three, your prefrontal cortex goes partly offline, and this is why being in gear two is ideal and essential for focused work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is cool, and so I’m curious. So, putting it in these terms, I can see that if you’re in gear one, yeah, that’ll bring you to gear two or gear three, the jumping up and down, the smacking your chest, you’re screaming, “Yes, yes, yes.” That’ll do it. Go for it.

Mithu Storoni
I was just going to say, so I think the three gears are a metaphor of three different mental states. But I would not think of it like a racing car. So, when you’re in gear one, it’s simply a description of a different state. So, when you’re in gear one, and you’re in this kind of slow, mind-wandering state, you can’t focus because you are just not sort of awake enough to focus then. Gear two is when there is more norepinephrine, your prefrontal cortex is engaged, you can focus, you can do high-level cognitive work. And gear three is when there is more norepinephrine, you can think faster, but you can’t do high-level cognitive work because your prefrontal cortex is partly offline. Now, when you’re doing any kind of knowledge work, you’re actually shuttling between these three states, in the sense that, for instance, if you are solving a problem, you have to be mainly in a state of focus, all right?

But as soon as you hit a wall, or your mental slate gets crammed with data, you have to briefly move out of that state into gear one to wipe your slate clean and to refresh the angle that you’re taking. So, if you’ve hit a wall, your brain needs to step back and look at the problem from afar, or from a different angle, that’s when you need to briefly foray into gear one to do that, and then you might see something you were missing, you might feel a little bit more refreshed, then you go back into gear two.

So, although your baseline is gear two, you’re going to keep coming back into gear one every now and again to change your mental state in order to overcome a wall or to just refresh your mind. So, it’s not like you are getting into these fast, high-powered, kind of racing track scenarios. It’s very much a way of your brain is mainly in gear two, but gear one is essential. And that’s why gear one is the mental state you have when you take a break.

So, as an example, if you’re focusing on your inbox, in your email inbox and you’re working through it, every time you close your eyes, your brain immediately goes into gear one for a bit. And then when you open your eyes, you’re back into gear two. What I’m describing here is the baseline you’re in for the majority of time.

The whole thing isn’t a flat line, and that’s how the brain is but the overall general state of the brain when you’re in a mode of focus versus when you’re in a mode of gentle daydreaming are very different, and these are the states I describe with gear one, two, and three.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, then I imagine one of the things you want to do in order to accomplish a whole lot of stuff is to just schedule the kinds of activities when things are naturally going to be great for that. If I need to have some brilliant epiphany, aha, eureka moments, well, then let’s schedule some thinking, daydreaming, wandering time in the early morning or late at night, etc. So, there’s kind of working with our schedules and our rhythms and, you know, 90- to 100-minute cycles of stuff. That’s cool. And then, I’m curious, if the situation calls for us to be in a bit of a different gear than we find ourselves in, what do you recommend we do?

Mithu Storoni
So, if I give you a typical day, so just say you are a writer, you are looking for an idea. So, if that’s your job, if that’s your task for the day, what you would do is you’d wake up probably in the morning quite early, and once you’re up in the morning, you would tackle the creative aspect of things there and then. You wouldn’t wait for later in the morning. You’d use the kind of very gentle, relaxed, not quite committed state of mind you have, which would be perfect for that kind of work, that kind of idea generation.

And then once you have your idea, later on in the morning, you’d find you feel a little more alert, you can focus a little bit more and your mind is wandering a lot less. You’re kind of much less in that kind of gentle daydreamy more. There, you sit down, you focus and write or type. And then you continue that pattern as I describe. It changes slightly for the rest of the day.

So, if you’re entering one of those sessions, one of those work sessions, and you’re in the wrong gear, so let’s say you are doing focused work, you’re starting at 9:00 o’clock in the morning, and you are still in that kind of distracted, mind-wandering state of mind. If that’s the case, there are a couple of ways you can use your body’s physiology to make your mind think differently. So, for instance, we know that if you make your body active and alert, your mind becomes active and alert too. Intuitively, you know that to be true.

Physiologically, we know that if you do, for instance, a few sprints before you sit down, when you are feeling a little bit kind of slow and lethargic, that immediately wakes you up. It doesn’t have to be sprints. Any kind of exercise will wake you up. We know that intuitively. And when we say wake you up, it also changes your mental state. You go from feeling lethargic to feeling more alert, much more able to focus.

Conversely, we know that you can also use your body to relax your mind. So, if you are feeling very, very wired, if you’re working in an office where things are very, very, sort of deadlines are very frequent, activity is very fast, everything is very hectic, and you really need to calm down and you need to focus and you need to think about something, in that sort of situation you can use your body, you can use three elements actually, you can use your environment to calm you down.

So, we know that if you bring elements of your environment to be slow, low and soft and dark, your mind also climbs down. So, if you have, for instance, a background music or background sounds which have low frequency beats, sounds which are low pitch, not high pitch, like very slow drum beats or like ocean sounds. There’s a reason why we’re attracted to ocean sounds. So, slow beats, slow rhythms, low frequency, low pitch around you.

So, as an obvious example, if you listen to radio shows or breakfast shows first thing in the morning, people will be speaking very fast at a higher pitch. If you listen to radio shows very late at night, people will be speaking slower with slightly lower pitch, and that is to really match the viewer’s state of mind, but in the morning it’s to really draw the viewer into a more alerting state of mind to wake them up essentially. So, your environment can change in this way.

Colors and intensity of light also have a role to play. There is data that shows that warm, so redder, reddish tones, soft, warm hues are better for creative idea generation, whereas blue light or blue dominant white light, the kind of light you get in the middle of the day or in the middle of the morning even in most latitudes, that’s conducive to being focused and alert. So, if you’re doing a night shift and you really, really need to focus, then using light can help you be in the right state of mind.

So light, sound, your physiology, so muscle. When you contract muscle, you feel more alert, but when you release it, you feel more relaxed. Similarly, when you stretch muscle and release it, you feel more relaxed, and we know that people seek this kind of activity, whether PMR, whether yoga, any sort of stretching-relaxation activity also relaxes the mind.

We also have a third thing, which are breathing exercises, and there is now a lot of data to show that if you breathe at a frequency of around five breaths a minute with long exhalations, and Mara Mather, in California, has done amazing work on this with her team, you can also lower this, the gear, of your mind. So, bring your mind back to an optimal state.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, this is beautiful. So, then I’m thinking then, if we’re in a state where it’s just like, “Ugh, I don’t feel like doing anything,” that’s sort of like the sleepy state, and so more arousal would be helpful if what needs to happen is some smart focused work. And if, likewise, it’s like, “I’m freaking out about this thing,” you know, well, then we want to maybe do with some more of the stretching, the slow breathing, the low lights, etc.

Mithu Storoni
Adjust your environment. Modulate your environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now you got me wondering, it’s so funny, I’m thinking about mindfulness meditation stuff, and there are times when it feels so amazingly wonderful, like, “Yes, this is just delightful.” And there are times in which my brain is just furious, which is like, “This is so boring! I can’t stand it!” And so, it seems like, is this kind of the fundamental dynamic at work? Or do you think there are some other dimensions to be considered in this context as well?

Mithu Storoni
So, I’m so happy you brought up the word “boring” because this is really, really important. Now when you’re working on something, when you’re doing knowledge work, you’re working on something, you can, in gear two, you’re in peak focus, you’re engaged, all right? But if what you’re doing is boring, then a little while through, a little while along, 10, 15 minutes, whatever, you suddenly feel your mind wandering and your focus slipping off, slipping away. Not because you’re tired, the work isn’t tiring at all, or let’s imagine the work isn’t tiring at all. You’re just noticing your focus just slip away.

In that sort of scenario, you’re sliding into gear one because you are bored, and there you need more stimulation or a bigger load to get you back into gear two. So, one way is, as you say, you need more stimulation, so maybe change the environment, go to a place that wakes you up. But you can also do it through the work, through the work you’re doing. So, for instance, multitasking gets bad press, but if what you’re doing is boring and you’re sliding into gear one, multitasking can actually keep you in gear two.

Because any form, anything that engages your mind, engages your brain, causes you to put in cognitive effort, will raise you back, will raise your gear. And it’s for the same reason that if you’re working very well, but you have an enormous workload, or you’re getting information you don’t want and you’re being forced to process it while you’re doing the work that you’re doing, you’re having to put in, you’re having to really step on the pedal.

You’re putting in more cognitive effort, and that requires norepinephrine, and there you’re shifting up to gear three to be able to cope. So, actually, you can modulate your gear with the work you are doing. So, if your work is very boring, actually multitasking and doing something in parallel can put you back into the right frame of mind.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And so, I guess I’m wondering if we don’t have the option of changing the thing that we’re doing, maybe we’re in a meeting and we think it’s boring, I suppose, internally, in our own brains we would maybe make up a game. Or what do you recommend there in terms of if it’s like here we are, we’re in a meeting, we’re supposed to be polite, and not whip out our laptops or phones or something? Any pro-tips there?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you’re in a meeting and you just have to attend the meeting, but not contribute or not take anything away from the meeting, then it’s a great opportunity to get into a creative state of mind, be in gear one, let your mind wander, and just use that as a break. So let your mind wander, let your attention wander, try not to dwell on anything, and just use that as a refresher, as a refresher palette for your mind.

If you have to stay awake during a meeting, and simply stay awake and not necessarily contribute, then doing something while you are in that meeting, so solving a problem with pen and paper discreetly while you’re there is another way of dealing with it. So, you add your workload, you increase your cognitive load to stay in the right state of mind.

So, the bottom line of all of this is really that we all function the best. We don’t just work the best when we do knowledge work. We actually function and we feel the best when we’re in this kind of middle speed, is a good way of imagining it, in this kind of middle speed, Goldilocks speed. And in order for the brain to put itself into that middle speed, you need, the brain needs, first of all, some kind of external stimulation, or the external urge to raise its own gear for some other reason.

So, for instance, if it’s receiving a lot of load the brain is going to work harder to cope with it. If cognitive load is very low, it’s going to get very bored and slip out of gear two. So, if that happens, then you can bring in extra cognitive load or bring in extra stimulation to keep the brain in this middle zone. Your mind, your brain is really an information-processing machine, and its optimal pace of processing that information is gear two. So, you need to give it enough information to keep it there. And if you swing over, if you overshoot, you end up in gear three.

So, if you’re going down from gear three to gear two, another way to look at it is you’re going down from gear three to gear two, then reduce the number of tasks you’re doing, reduce the difficulty of the task you’re doing, remove time pressure, remove uncertainty, and then adjust your environment to make it lower, slower, slower-paced, and then, of course, you can add in these physiological buttons through your muscle relaxation, through your autonomic nervous system.

So, ultimately, your brain, your mind is most efficient when it’s moving ahead at this middle speed of processing information. And the key, the art of being able to navigate yourself and stay in that zone while you’re doing knowledge work is a secret to hyper-efficiency because when you’re in that zone, the kind of work you’ll be doing will be the best you can do.

You can still do a lot of work while you’re bored. You can also do a lot of work while you’re in gear three. You can type hundreds of emails. You can even type them faster. But you won’t be able to solve a difficult differential equation in gear three, or plan a killer chess move in gear three. You’ll be able to play chess, but you’ll probably lose in the first 15 moves.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty-second bullet games.

Mithu Storoni
Exactly. Exactly. In gear one, you’re not engaged enough to think, to analyze either. But in gear two, in this middle zone, when your brain is just awake enough, alert enough, but not too wired, that’s when it processes information the fastest, and hence, it does it in the best possible way.

Pete Mockaitis
You said the word “refresh” earlier, and I’m curious, if we’re doing these 90- to 100-minute bouts, a break is just necessary. Do you have any suggestions on what is a supremely, or hyper-efficient, or excellent means of breaking to restore our brains’ capacity and capabilities quickly?

Mithu Storoni
Yes. So, when you’re thinking of a break, just to give you a little bit of background, we now know through some very elegant forms of brain imaging that when you’re doing intense mental work, something that requires you to pay attention, something like solving math equations, as your brain cells work, they produce byproducts because they have little factories in them, they need energy to work, they break, they use ATP. They produce byproducts.

And as you’re working, these byproducts accumulate and then they get cleaned away. Now there is some evidence, and I mention where this data comes from, in the book, that one reason for fatigue may well be that the rate at which you’re producing these toxic byproducts is faster than your ability to clear them away. And so, when you take a break and you stop the intensity of work, you’re immediately giving your mind, your brain an opportunity to recover. So that’s a bottom line.

Now how should that break be? So, in this context, think of the difference between the brain and muscle. So, if you’re lifting weights in a gym, the moment you stop lifting weights, your muscle relaxes. So, when you stop working your muscle, your muscle rests. But when your mind is working on its office chair, as soon as you move from the office chair and you even go and sit on a beach, your mind has not moved one inch. It carries on working. There is no stop switch on your mind.

And so, the kind of break you take has to be tailored to the state of mind you are in when you were working. So, if your work was just very, very tiring, it wasn’t in any way emotionally draining, emotionally triggering, just very, very tiring, and as soon as you stop, imagine you’re having to read a hundred boring emails that don’t really mean anything, but they’re just, your eyes are glazing over, that sort of state. If that’s the case, then as soon as you take a break, as soon as you stop what you’re doing, your mind will be able to relax.

So, in that sort of scenario, you can break and just do nothing. Just relax, you don’t have to do anything actively. But if your work was, or is, in a situation where you have a lot of emotional tension, you have a deadline you’re working for, you have a problem you really can’t solve you’re still struggling with, the moment your break approaches, you’re very likely to be what I call tired and wired, which means you are tired, you’re physically tired, you’re mentally tired, but your mind is still trying to process that information, so it has stepped on the accelerator, taking you right up to gear three to work through and your gear just won’t slide back.

And, intuitively, your listeners and you will realize what this is because it’s the kind of feeling you have at the end of a day when you’ve just really pushed yourself to keep working beyond when you were tired by having coffee, by carrying on. And so, by the time you get home, you can’t really switch off. You feel tired, but your mind is still buzzing. That’s what I describe as tired and wired.

If that’s the case, and you’re taking a break in the middle of the day, and you’re feeling like that, then for the first few moments of your break, it’s much more helpful to do something really absorbing that distracts you completely from the work you are working on. So, play a game on your phone. Something like Tetris has been shown to be very effective in this sort of context, other games like Tetris. Play a game on your phone or watch a video, watch something immersive, until you momentarily forget the work you were just doing. As soon as you do, stop and then you relax.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, first, we get into the forget zone and then we stop and relax. Is there any way to relax better or should we just chill?

Mithu Storoni
So, if you are in that forget zone, you can relax. I mentioned two kinds of breaks in the book. So, I mentioned a break at the end of 90 minutes when you just need to refuel. I also mentioned a type of break, which I call a kind of a reset break, and this is the kind of break you would take within your work segment. So, if you’re doing a 90-minute block of work and your work is really intense, you would probably need to pause for a little while every 20 minutes or so, if your work is really, really intense.

Or if your work is really, really boring, you will be forced to just kind of take a step back every 20 minutes or so and just be like, “Okay, I need to kind of wire my mind back up to cope with this.” When you’re taking a break in that context, what you’re trying to do during the break is put your mind back into gear one.

So, as an example, imagine you are just watching paint dry, okay, you’re doing some kind of work, which is really, really boring. Your mind, you’re in the right zone when you started that work. But about 10 minutes, 15 minutes into the work, your attention just floats away. You cannot bring it back and everything just gets very slow, lethargic. At that point, take a quick five-minute break and do something to bring you back into that zone. So that can be something physical. Physical is usually the easiest.

So, at that point, doing a quick bout of exercise will put you back in the best kind of mental zone where you can go back to doing that work focusing. So, an applicable real-world scenario of this is anything that requires you to keep monitoring something. So, monitoring a camera, monitoring other machines working, monitoring a system. Every 20 minutes or so, your attention is going to float, melt away, and there you take a very quick break to actually not relax you but to actually excite you back into the right mental zone.

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

Mithu Storoni
Certainly. So, another aspect of work today, as well as these three gears, is the idea of how everything we’ve always used to motivate us in the past are changing because the whole map of knowledge work is drastically changing at the moment. We are having to retrain, we’re having to reskill, we’re having to learn on the job, so there’s a huge amount of change taking place, and so this is a really great time to bring in the idea that has long been known as intrinsic motivation, and kind of repackage it and rework it for our era.

Because right now, we are working and living at a time where your job might not be guaranteed, the goal that you’re working towards might change tomorrow, a new LLM might come about tomorrow, a new version of the existing one might come about tomorrow, and everything you’ve been learning suddenly becomes obsolete the next day.

So, in this sort of landscape, you have to work with a different kind of motivation. So, we have to learn and we have to tailor and curate our jobs. Managers should be curating workflows, workloads, to generate as much as much of this intrinsic motivation as possible. And one way that seems to be a pretty powerful way of deriving it in any context, and intrinsic motivation is notoriously difficult to create, is by this phenomenon called learning progress.

It’s called learning progress mechanism. And one of the researchers behind Pierre-Yves Oudeyer from Paris, who is working with artificial agents, and his team has found how, whenever you’re working, you’re doing any kind of work, it’s really, really important to have physically kind of something that you can really physically, tangibly feel, obvious progress.

So, you have to be making rapid progress in something towards a goal and improving through skill or knowledge yourself in some way as fast as you can, as regularly and as solidly as you can, while you work. If you can engineer an element of this into one what you’re doing, you will have sufficient intrinsic motivation in your work, and that is going to be key in the workplace moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, that rings true. That gets me fired up, no doubt. Well said. Now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mithu Storoni
What I would say is my book was really heavily influenced by the work of Marshall McLuhan, who looked at technology and the effect it is having on our brains. One of the quotes that I really love, is that we have had a way of working all this time, where we’ve really been working like a marching soldier. We’ve been moving forward in regular steps in order. We need to change, and we need to now add flair to the way we work because that will help us get into these unique brain states and produce our best.

And he describes that as a transition from a marching soldier to working, spinning like a dancing ballerina. And that is really a metaphor for how our work needs to change in this new AI-assisted age of the knowledge age.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Mithu Storoni
So, The Medium is the Message is a great book that really gives you a wonderful overview of technology.

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

Mithu Storoni
So, I have a website, my name, www.MithuStoroni.com. I’m on LinkedIn, Mithu Storoni. I’m also on Twitter/X as @MithuStoroni.

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

Mithu Storoni
Tomorrow, whatever your routine is, just think about this conversation and tailor your day completely differently, adjust it to your routine, and then give us a feedback the day after as to how it went.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Mithu, this is fun. I wish you much hyper-efficiency.

Mithu Storoni
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Aug 01
0

983: Making the Most of Your Limited Time Before Death with Jodi Wellman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Jodi Wellman shares how reflecting on our scarce remaining time of life helps us live free from regret.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you need to befriend the Grim Reaper
  2. How to feel “astonishingly alive”
  3. How to break out of a rut

About Jodi

Jodi Wellman is a former corporate executive turned executive coach. She has a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is an instructor in the Master’s program and a trainer in the world-renowned Penn Resilience Program. She is a Professional Certified Coach with the ICF and a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach from CTI. 

She has coached and spoken with clients like American Express, Fidelity, pwc, Royal Bank of Canada, BMW, and more, and runs her own business, Four Thousand Mondays. She’s also known for her inspirational TEDx Talk on how death can bring you back to life. She lives between Palm Springs and Chicago with her husband and cat, Andy.

Resources Mentioned

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Jodi Wellman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jodi, welcome.

Jodi Wellman
Thank you for having me here. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited, too. I understand you say you’ll have about 1,822-ish Mondays left of your plans here.

Jodi Wellman
Well, I got to tell you, that number’s down by two weeks since you read that. So, I’m down to 1,820, but this clock is ticking down, and, yeah, big plans. I mean, that’s the point, right? It’s like, when we get a little bit granular with that math, that fabulous mortality math, it does make me and many others go, “Wait a sec, how am I going to spend that diminishing time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, what are some of these big plans?

Jodi Wellman
Well, they’re usually bucketed. It’s funny you ask that because, in terms of research and then the way that I look at my life, they’re in categories. So, there are different domains of life. There’s the fun and recreation side of things, which can further categorize into travel. So going to the south of France in the fall, that’ll be exciting. And so, there’s a whole category around recreation. What are we doing with our leisure time?

And so, looking at starting new hobbies, I’m going to be getting more into trying to learn a new language. And so, really, I’m looking to either refine French or Italian. So that’s just one category, and so that’s a good start, I think, lest I bore you with the gory details.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I appreciate that, that’s fun. That’s fun. Well, lay it on us, you’ve been researching our mortality. Your book, You Only Die Once, a compelling title. Any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and our lives, our mortality, that professionals need to know?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely think so. So, we all know in the work we do, for example, that, oh, there’s nothing better than the power of a deadline. It’s like we will tend to procrastinate until we know that the strategy session is coming up on the 17th or we’ve got a big project due at the end of the quarter, etc. And it’s so true with our lives.

So having this distinct and, okay, fine, maybe a little bit morbid sense that we are finite is precisely the thing, by having that deadline that does kick us into gear to get on with, I say, the business of living. So, it could be the things we do at work, all of the initiatives we might just keep postponing, but also the things we do outside of work, all the joys and things we might do, again, for recreation, socially, etc., that make us more well-rounded when we come back into work.

So, the research is called Temporal Scarcity, and it’s this idea that whenever we have an asset, okay, like life, that we become heightened, frightenedly aware that it is temporary or rare. Our perception of its value goes through the roof. So that is why I get us to count our Mondays, and that is the heft in terms of empirical evidence behind how we do need to have, unfortunately, that rankling feeling of, “Ugh, scarcity” in order to take action and have that deadline, or else we’ll just float along the lazy river of life and have good intentions, maybe, but not really take as much action on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, a deadline is quite literally here, there will be a day in which we die, a deadline.

Jodi Wellman
You caught it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, morbid, yeah, I mean, that’s how some people could react to it, but you seem to have a very different emotional energy vibe association to this. Tell us about it.

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, I’ve never been super scared of it. I recognize, and in doing research, of course, and working with groups and individuals that some people would much rather not talk about death than anything. Many people would rather public speak. We’re very afraid of dying in the discussion.

So, my openness to it and my mission in life, really, is to de-fang it, make it something that’s like, “Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to think about the fact that we’re not going to be around much longer,” relatively speaking. And so, how do we use that and take a more amusing approach to accepting, “Yeah, it sucks to be us,” and yet let’s use it pretty darn quickly to move over to the life side?

So, I talk about the Grim Reaper. I love it. I love the whole topic of mortality because I know it’s a tool. It catapults us not to keep talking about death but to talk about life. So, I make the switch pretty darn quickly. It helps that I doodle, you know, the Grim Reaper and tombstones. It helps to lighten it a little bit, and I tend to give out the most ridiculous, hilarious prizes in my workshops, again, to create levity.

But it’s like a fact of life that we do a fabulous job of denying and deferring and avoiding, and I just say, “Guys, let’s just accept it. Let’s talk about it for a minute. Let’s do the math, let’s do the thinking, and then use a table. I’m curious, like, how does that motivate you to maybe spend your time differently because there’s so much power there?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe could you give us an example of how a person walked through the math, they took a look at it, and then that transformed the way they approached their work, and their life, what they’re up to?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I give so many examples in the book, and I do that because we do like to hear and learn vicariously through other people, right? So, there’s one leader I worked with who used to do, in the nature of his business, he acquired companies. And when he stopped and counted, not just his Mondays left in life, but his. Mondays left in his career, he didn’t really have formal retirement plans, but he had a sense about, “By this age, I want to be able to say no and say no a lot, unless it’s a really cool project.”

So, he did the math and he looked and said, “Okay, I do however many acquisitions, mergers per year.” And he did that and worked backwards and said, “Wait a sec. Like, I’ve been thinking, deluding myself,” because that’s what we do. I mean, this is what psychology is. We just try to fool ourselves into happiness. You know, we got to cope somehow.

And so, he was thinking, he knew he wasn’t going to live forever or work forever, but when he did the math and he realized, he really had five good deals ahead of him, like really good juicy ones that he loved to live for, it put everything else in perspective. And it helped him focus in on the kind of work he wanted to do, the kind of deals he wanted to negotiate, the kind of team he wanted along the way, because he was just dilly-dallying and having people around him that weren’t necessarily the lifers, as he now called them.

And so, it helped him prioritize, “What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of work do I not want to do?” because we all know sometimes that’s where the meat on the bone is. So, it can really help sharpen what our priorities are just by way of one example.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then for our math, can you walk us through it? How might we compute that? Do I need to whip out an actuarial table? Or, what’s the sequence by which I arrive at my Mondays left?

Jodi Wellman
Right. It’s a lot easier than you think. Now, the good news is I have a page on my website called Resources that does the math for you, if you don’t want to waste your precious time in life doing math, but it’s pretty easy. So, if you identify as male, start with 78 years, that’s the average life expectancy, and then you minus your age, and then you multiply by 52 just to keep it easy.

Now, if you are a little more fortunate to have been born a female and you identify as such, then your average age is 83, and then you minus your current age and you multiply it by 52 weeks a year. And then if you don’t identify with either, just average it at 80 and minus your age, and again multiply it by 52. And I think you could probably add in a few Mondays just because you listen to How to Be Awesome at Your Job. I mean, I do think that that should buy you…

Pete Mockaitis
Life extender.

Jodi Wellman
It is. It is, at least a couple weeks, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Life giving. Okay. And so, then when you see that number, it’s like, “Well, shucks, here we are, we’re maybe 1,000-ish, 2,000-ish,” and then it’s even more real when we get precise like 1,822, like you had there. And so, you see that. And then what’s most people’s reaction to beholding this figure?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it is usually a bit eye-opening, like, literally, eyes-widening, like, “Oh,” because we are used to the language of years. We’ve already rationalized, “Yeah, I’m going to live to about 80. My grandma lived to 90. Oh, shoot, but my Uncle Reg died at 71,” and you average it out somewhere. But when we talk about the weeks, and I’m super nerdy because that’s why I call my company 4,000 Mondays.

When you even think of it in terms of Mondays, which have a very different feeling than a Friday, you know, Fridays are slam dunks, like, life is easy. But when you think about it with a Monday, and you quantify and say, “Am I really doing the stuff that lights me up if I’m going to be waking up for just that many more Mondays?” that’s where it creates the eye-opening and wakeup call that I’m looking for people.

So, it does tend to create enough discomfort. I’m not afraid of a discomfort. I want people to feel just enough of the poke in the ribs to feel like, “Oh, I got to get on with this.” And this is the thing, Pete, and you know this from all the work you do and the research you do, and with me with my positive psychology background, I would love the idea that we could all just be motivated enough by the pursuit of something awesome. You know, the, “Oh, I want to live this kind of life and I’m going to go for it.”

And some people are intrinsically motivated enough to do that, but the rest of us, we need a prod, we need a nudge, we need something that is, unfortunately, just a tad negative, which is why I talk about scarcity rather than abundance in this context. And so, that is the eye-opener for people that we think, “Oh, I didn’t want to see it that way, but now that I see it and I hopefully can’t unsee it. What does it motivate me to do?”

And that’s where the conversation gets good. It’s like, “So now what? This precious life. This dwindling, diminishing existence you have. What do you want to…?” Throw that in. I mean, you’ve got to heighten the drama, “But what do you want to stuff it with?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jodi, it’s funny. This might be the most intense episode of “How to Be Awesome at Your Job” ever. It’s like, quite literally, life and death is all we’re talking about. But what you say really does connect. A friend of mine shared with me he had some family members with some health challenges. One was a child of his, which was very scary. And another was his mother, and he said, “Boy, just experiencing that really kind of made me think about what I want to be doing with my career, instead of like postponing my dreams.”

And so, he just like went for it, he’s like, “I’ve always had this cool business idea, and so I’ve got some people together. We made a pitch deck and we approached an investor. And then he’s in for a couple hundred thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars for a few points of equity.” So, he’s got like a multi-million-dollar evaluation. It was like, “I just talked to you like a month ago. What is going on here? It’s amazing.”

And so, I’m proud and impressed and, just like that, I mean, he had the idea bouncing around his head for a long time, and then a few scary situations with family members’ health, the guy was, “You know what, let’s just see what happens. Let’s just go for it.” And then, wow, he’s off to the races.

Jodi Wellman
Oh, this story is profound, and I love it. This is the research that I do that just lights me up beyond belief that I hope to also shine that light on others. This is the wakeup call with this gentleman. And it takes a really unfortunate situation to see that light. Especially, because I talk a lot about the wakeup calls we receive personally. Like, if you get a health diagnosis that ain’t so hot, that usually tends to snap us to attention, and we want to live differently, and research is so clear.

I always love this phrase that psychologists, existential psychologists use, that when people have had a brush with death, they experience what’s called a roar of awakening. It feels so visceral, right? And so, whether it’s our own precipice moment with the great beyond, or whether it is because a family member or a dear friend, or we’ve had some very salient moment to realize, “Oh, gosh, like, we are mortal,” that can be the thing that catapults us.

And, ultimately, what it comes down to, and I think you even embedded the words in your anecdote, it’s like, “What are we waiting for?” We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re going to have time later, and I am getting to get all hot and bothered here, but we need to talk about it because I think we believe we’re going to have time to do the new initiative, or open up the New York office, or do the cool thing, or open up the spinoff business, or go to Prague, “We’re just going to get to do it later.”

It’s either in this category of when work dies down, we’ll, like, let’s all get laughed together at that notion, because we’re working hard at making work more productive and busier often, which is not about dying things down, another metaphor about dying things down. And so, we’re either waiting for that, lull, “Well, it ain’t going to happen,” or we’re waiting for retirement, which to me is like, “Don’t you dare.”

Yeah, plan a cool retirement, do that, too. But if you are deferring your existence for a later that just may not arrive, oh, honey buddy, I just want to take you, in somewhere between a hug and a throttle, it’s just like, “What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for your kid to get sick. Don’t wait for you to get thankfully in remission from a cancer that you just were trying not to think about. Don’t wait to get to retirement when, all of a sudden, your gout is so bad that you can’t even climb the Spanish steps that you’ve been longing to climb since you were in your early thirties that you just put off.” See, I’m getting all worked up, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I hear you. Well, it’s heavy and it’s intense. And, in some ways, you’ve got something novel on your hands, like the math and the number of Mondays and whatnot. In another way, this is a very ancient wisdom concept, you know, memento mori. I think that’s Latin. I was a Latin student. That just means remember your death. Is that correct?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, remember you’re going to die. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Remember your death. And so, I know Ryan Holiday has done a fine job of, I think, he’s got a cool coin as well that says that on it. I think there’s a skull or something. Cool stuff from Ryan Holiday. So, tell us, what’s sort of like the ancient wisdom on meditating upon this? And what’s your new fresh stuff that you’re bringing to the table?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it’s all rooted in the ideology that some call it stoicism as a philosophical endeavor. Philosophers, depending on their camps, for centuries have been extolling the virtues of remembering that you’re going to die, and in some cases, it was so that they could control the population for ways of being virtuous or for religious means. But being in tune with the end is not a new idea.

Just like with most of us, we all rationally know we have an expiry day. We don’t know when it is, but we all understand it. But it’s the reminder that we need to keep in mind and keep fresh. So, in more modern times, I referred a moment ago to some existential psychologists, and there’s a whole new branch of psychology called existential psychology, and it really is the study of our experience of not just the positive psychology side, which is a lot of my background around like what it takes to live the good life, but it’s also the nuances of how we will defer and avoid and deny, and what the cost is of that.

So, the more modern take on it is let’s just try to be open and honest with ourselves about it, and have conversations with our families, and our friends, and just like, for me, it’s like that’s the best happy hour ever. It’s just talking about a bucket list and holding each other accountable about, “What are you going to do?” “Did you book the trip?” “Did you book the online course?” “Did you set up the LLC like you said you wanted to do?” Because again, what are we waiting for?

So, it’s all rooted in the ancient times. And in the modern times, I think there’s not really a lot more we can do other than create a habit around talking about it and thinking about it and remembering it. So, this doesn’t just become a, “Huh, interesting conversation I listened to on your podcast that floats away.” We have to embed it into our routines, if you will, and that’s the stuff that helps make it stickier.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us another example? So, we’ve heard about a couple folks in the deal-making or entrepreneurial zone. Any other dramatic wakeups that you’ve witnessed?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, there was a woman I worked with three years ago, she was in her early 40s, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she ran her own company and it was an eye-opener for her. She beat it, and that was fantastic, and that had inspired her to come alive and start a foundation as part of her organization.

So, a lot of what this does is it instills this idea about like legacy thinking, which is really important I think for leaders, but not even just for leaders but people thinking about, “How am I showing up at work? And how am I showing up at life? Like, how do I want to be remembered?” So, for this woman, Christia, she felt really compelled as a result of having her life threatened in front of her, to say, “I want to start raising money for women with breast cancer who didn’t have access to some of the means that I had.”

Because she knew coming from the south side of Chicago, that she had a history where she knew other people were suffering in ways that her financial means were allowed her better access to some care and convenience. So, now the truth is, if I was just to fast-forward to take this to a different direction, but on purpose, is that she was re-diagnosed and, unfortunately, a couple of years ago she did pass away, and she was 42 when she died.

And I still work with the company, the fabulous team there that inherited the business from her. Her sister and her niece are running that company. They’re called Thank God It’s Natural, and they are phenomenal. But for Christia, it opened her eyes up to “What kind of business do I want to run? Where do I want to prioritize our operations? And where do I want to not focus?”

So, another woman, here in Palm Springs, where I’m currently based, also had a breast cancer experience for herself. She started a nonprofit that helps survivors. And the way she worded it is that, “I was given a second chance at life.” And she said that in her experience of sitting and doing something like 24 rounds of chemotherapy, I wrote about this as an example in the book and drew a doodle about it, I called it Shay’s Circle because she said, “I took a fresh journal page and I drew a big circle.”

“And I said to myself, ‘I’m making it through this cancer situation, but I’m going to be very thoughtful about the life I’m going to live moving forward, this second chance I’ve been given. What do I want and who do I want in my life?’” And she was very deliberate and wrote names of people, some of the priorities with her work, activities she wanted to focus on, things with her kids in the circle, and she was very thoughtful about, “And I will no longer…” and she had a couple names, and she had a couple of tendencies, like pleasing tendencies, saying yes to being on committees and all the things that we just do because we’re not conscious that our life is finite.

So those are extremes, people having had scares that did, unfortunately, take them, but also scares that did, I think, we learned from that. Like, my goal is for us to have wakeup calls without having to go through any of that drama of having a near-death experience because there’s so much gold from people who have been there or have been close. So, we can refine our priorities. I think that’s one of the biggest opportunities, in addition to being grateful for life. But we’re refining our priorities and the big businesses we work in and things we do, sometimes that’s key.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m fascinated as I just imagine the listeners hearing this, like, some people have already turned off this podcast and have asked out their dream guy, their dream partner or send an email to be like, “Let’s talk about this business that we’ve been picking around.” They’ve already taken the action. They’re so fired up. They’re inspired, like, you’re transforming them. Boom. Already done.

I think there’s others, and I’m finding myself in this boat a little bit right now. It’s like, well, you know, Jodi, I mean, I guess I’ve been quite blessed. I mean, in many ways, I’ve had a lot of dreams, and then I have realized them. It’s like, I’ve got a family, and they’re amazing. I’ve got a dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that, better than that dream job. It’s like, I’m talking to fascinating people whose books I would just read, and this is turning into income, and then other entrepreneurial things are turning into income, and I’m working with cool people I like.

In a way, it’s like I don’t feel like I’ve postponed anything major, and yet I have a feeling there’s more for me here because I don’t, frankly, spend much time thinking, “Oh, I’m going to die soon.” I don’t do that. And as you’re saying it, it feels heavy and intense, like, “Yeah, whoa, for real, a limited number of Mondays. Okay.” But I’m not yet electrified to charge in any given direction. I was like, “Huh, these are pretty good. I guess I should just keep doing that.” What about this segment?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I love what you’re saying. So, I have quadrants like any good empirically based situation has quadrants, and so you are in…

Pete Mockaitis
As a former consultant, absolutely, they do.

Jodi Wellman
I know, exactly. You got the Bain in you, right? So, you’ve got widening your life with vitality is one dimension, and that’s literally the idea about, “How can I add more fun and interest and experience and cool stuff and pleasure and happiness?” Okay, so for many people who have really busy profound jobs, this is the dimension and, in fact, this actually is where most people in my research will identify as.

They’ll say, “I’ve got enough meaning in my life but I need more of this widening vitality. I need more fun. I feel like I’m not going out as much as I used to do the fun things in the restaurants, or going to a concert, or trying that new printmaking class, or the things that might feel kind of cool and make me feel more alive in a different way, rather than maybe the more one-dimensional existence I’ve been living, which is like rocking my business.” So that’s just one axis is widening your life with vitality.

The other one is deepening your life with meaning, and that is that sense of having a purpose, being connected to people, maybe something bigger than you, like in the spiritual realm. It’s defined as kind of doing good, as opposed to just feeling good. And so, when you mash these together, you’ve got four quadrants.

Pete, you are in what I call the astonishingly alive category, which I know, it’s a big word. I know, but here’s the deal, because why this is, is that you are, you seem to be, you’re living a good life where you’re plus, anywhere positive, even if it’s 0.10 on meaning, and plus on vitality, and so you’re in a good place. There are a lot of people out there, a majority, because, by the way, my research is clear, like 11% of people identify in the astonishingly alive category currently.

And so, most people are in that zone of like, “My job’s meaningful,” or, “Rearing my kids is meaningful, but I’m so freaking bored.” Or, it could be the reverse, which is, “I am having fun. Like, I’m out there. I am traveling. I’m on the yacht, but I go home and I feel like I’m an empty hollow shell. Like, what am I doing this for?” So, there are variations on those themes, but I don’t want to say now that there’s no fun for you, that you can’t do more with this.

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re done.”

Jodi Wellman
No, exactly. Cash in your chips. No, because here’s why. This is why you do this podcast. You’re in a good situation, you’re living life, and yet you are yearning to learn more. You want more. So, nobody I know who’s in the astonishingly alive category is just content to put your feet up and be like, “We are done here.” You want more, and so that is where I do think some of these exercises can be useful.

So, for you, counting your Mondays may not be resonant in a way that you’re like, “No, but I’ve done cool things.” That’s what we’re looking to get to, is that feeling like, “I killed it.” Like, if you got to the end, you’d be able to say…

Pete Mockaitis
So much depth, Jodi. Like, “You’re just going to die.”

Jodi Wellman
That’s where you’re at, like, “Okay, fine. I nailed it. Like, I lived this life. I extracted it. I did it.” You might be able to say that now, and yet, there are also things where if you did play the game with me about the deathbed regrets, or if you knew you had 18 months to live, what would be things that you would, all of a sudden, think, “Oh, I want to do that”?

Those are all just cues and clues to either yearnings or inklings that you might want to get moving on now, and I call them pre-grets. I know it’s super cheesy, but, like, if you identify a regret, you might be like, “Oh, man, I always wish that I had volunteered at that library,” or “I always wish that I had gotten back to playing the violin,” or fill in the blanks. There’s no shortage of examples.

That’s an example of like, “Hey, the good news is, last I checked, you still have a pulse, and if you really want to pick up the violin again, like, dude, it’s yours to pick up!” And then you just get to be the one to decide, like, “Eh, it was a passing fancy, no big deal. My life is great without doing that,” or, “Yeah, you know, I would feel proud of myself if I actually did pick that up,” or go and read to kids from 4: 00 till 5:00, Tuesday evenings, whatever it is. Those are opportunities, I think, to just add even more astonishment to your astonishingly alive life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I like that notion a lot in terms of with the two axes. I’m thinking of a buddy he’s doing a lot of cool things. Like, yeah, he’s into drumming in a band. He’s brewing beer, and going to beer-tasting events, and like golfing and improving his golf. And then his mom said, this is like a very mother thing to say, she’s like, “Oh, you know, all those hobbies aren’t really a vocation.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s heavy, vocation.”

But, yeah, that sort of speaks to meaning, and there’s some truth to that, like all the fun and games with these activities can leave you feeling hollow and/or you might say, “No, I’ve got the dream family, but, oh, my gosh, when do I get to get out of this home and just be wacky”?

Yeah, so two dimensions, you can widen, have more fun widening your vitality, but you might feel hollow, or you can be super fulfilled, but, “Ooh, where’s the fun?” And that does remind me, yeah, I guess the things that are sort of left undone, I mean, some of them I’m just sort of pursuing, like, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to be lighter and stronger at 41 than I was at 21? Well, I’m on my path. I think we’re getting there and it’s sort of exciting to feel the progress from like a fitness perspective.

But then there’s also things that just sort of got left by the wayside, like, you know I always thought it would be cool to learn how to sing, and I’ve never really done that very well. Or, I’ve always been mystified by when I go bowling, which is rare, like one throw of the ball is a strike, the next is a gutter ball, and I don’t think I did anything different. Like, what’s behind that?

Like, I thought it would be fun to spend a day with a bowling coach for no reason, just to solve this plaguing mystery, but, like, though I may only go bowling three times a year for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t matter if I win or lose to me in the least.

Jodi Wellman
Right. This is the cool thing. You are giving examples that I think we, in our rational brains think, “But this isn’t really a thing, is it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it doesn’t really matter.

Jodi Wellman
And we can call it corny. And that’s one of the things I notice actually in the workshops and work I do, is that people will feel the need to kind of explain away or say, “I don’t even know why I want to do this, but I do,” and it’s like we just have judgments about things. And I’m here to say there’s nothing that is too small or silly.

Because when you look at the span of your life, and remember, I’m the one that gets fanatical about calculating time, usually calculating it backwards, but every single moment of our lives is a little tiny fragment, whether it’s a five-minute or 10-minute, or a bowling excursion, or going out for Thai food, or spending time in a meaningful conversation with a colleague, they’re all just 30 minutes attached to each other.

And so, in our lives, we underestimate that if I was to take, “Hey, what if I did book a bowling guru session?” First of all, that sounds to me like it would be hilarious, and I’m always a big fan of having a good story to tell later. But that could be a thing. It’s a fun thing. Now, this is an example you could probably whip up, and this is what I do in workshops with people.

It’s like, “Get your list going. The things you might come up with first may not make your cut, or you may find it interesting today, and then tomorrow, when you’re seeing the light of day, or you’ve ranked ordered other things, you think all that, “Meh, you know what? I don’t really need to go to the Florida Keys, whatever.”

But at some point, when you have a working list, it gives you the actual solid chance to make choices about your life. Because right now, in the absence of having something that’s concrete, like your list of things that bring you joy, your list of things that would be cool to do, that again I like to organize them on those axes, about fun stuff, deep stuff, vitality, meaning. But now at least you have a menu to choose from about how to design your life.

And life will pass us by. We know this full well. We get to the weekend and, well, first of all, we’re always glad it’s the weekend. But we get through our weeks and they feel like blurs. It’s a very strong signal that we aren’t doing anything that’s unique or different with our time. And in order to even just create the perception of time slowing down so that your 1,822, or however many Mondays you have left, are well spent, it’s about being super conscious and saying, “You know what? I’m going to book that bowling lesson.”

Or, “You know what? I am going to go and plan that road trip that I’ve been talking about for ages.” Or, “I am going to finally schedule that team retreat that I’ve been dreaming about but I just like, am I an all talk no action kind of person? No, I’m going to just book it because it’s on my list, and I’ve said like this is something that I would feel really cool if I did. Would I regret it gravely on my deathbed? Maybe, maybe not.”

But the point is we need to start capturing some of these desires because, otherwise, they will float away and we’ll get focused on the things that are sometimes important, but mostly urgent, Covey style, and the next thing you know, it’s three years later and we’re not any younger. So, this is just really about getting deliberate with what it might take to make a life worth living.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah And, Jodi, I think as folks go through this exercise, they could have moments of inspiration, like, “Yeah, these are all the cool things I’d love to do.” And then disillusionment in terms of, “Oh, but you know, I got to pay the bills, and we got the mortgage, and the kids need these things. And I can’t just abandon my duties and responsibilities.” So, we get excited and then there’s a dose of reality and practicality that’s like, “Wah, wah.” So, how do you deal with those?

Jodi Wellman
How do we deal with that? I am fanatical about making sure that at least, like, do a list of 30 things, 25 at least have to be things that are very doable in a day or a week. So, it needs to be within your resource plan. Like, it can’t be, “Oh, you know what makes me really happy is when I am sailing around the Mediterranean.” Yeah, you and everybody, but that’s not going to be likely. Like, I’m looking for things that are actually very bite-sized on your list. Like, for many people, it’s that they go for a walk on a Saturday morning in the forest preserve.

Like, last I checked that was free. Okay, maybe you have to pay for parking. I don’t know what we’re talking, like five bucks. And sometimes I know busy parents are like, “Dude, when was the last time you had a Saturday morning free?” But I would still challenge you, and say, “Do you have 35 minutes to go and sneak that into your day?”

Identifying things that give you, again, small little bouts of joy. Like, for some people, it’s as simple as, I’m looking right now, of course, at a book. And this comes up a lot when I work with professionals. We read a lot of business books, as we should. They’re amazing. Lots of cool ones. Lots of great self-development books.

And yet, it is a real source of almost guilt but joy about people saying, “I would just love to read a fiction book for a change,” or, “I would love to read a biography, just something kind of mind-expanding.” And that is an example where, what if you read a chapter in the morning over coffee and your piece of peanut butter toast, and you just shook up your routine a little bit?Because we haven’t even talked about novelty, but like having variety in our life is one of the lowest-hanging fruit options out there to shake up our lives, and add just a little bit more, again, of that vitality because we just get into routines. And we’ve been trained by lots of really smart thought leaders that habits and routines are the way. And I’m going to challenge that because I think that it is because we get into the rut, and one of my favorite quotes is by Ellen Glasgow, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Like, we will routinize our lives to the point where they’ve lost sort of the flavor. It just becomes, “I know what I do on Tuesday mornings. I go into the office. I nod at Marcy. I get my coffee. I do the report. I have a status update meeting at 2:00 p.m. and then I go home.” Like, the shaking things up even in ways that we will, again, underestimate the value of, like, going outside.

I just heard from somebody that was at a workshop. They decided to go and spend part of their lunch break walking to a little food stall because they were in a bit of a funk, like, “Let me go walk to a food stall, shake it up a little bit.” They got a taco. Again, we’re not talking about big bucks to live a life that feels really cool, and, like, “Oh, interesting. This is like a new area. I’ve never been here. There was a little bit of sunshine. And I got out, and I came back, and I have a new lease on life to attack my afternoon.”

And those are small things where, again, we’re not talking about doing the bucket list about you have to move to Paris, and you have to divorce your deadbeat spouse, and you have to make these massive plans, like change your career and go back to school. If you feel the urge to do those things, don’t not do them. But for most of us, it’s not about the grand sweeping gestures. For most of us, it’s about deliberate little tiny things that we can pepper our days with that will add up to a life that feels more lived than one that just, again, was like a glossed-over, zombie-version of the life that I think we all deep down really want to be living more alive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, this is powerful stuff. Tell me, any other do’s and don’ts or things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jodi Wellman
Well, definitely, the biggest do of all is do befriend the Grim Reaper. He will take your last breath away in the end, and so I understand the need to keep a distance, but he is absolutely the portal to living like we mean it. So do keep him close by, being aware, count the Mondays. And I’m going to reiterate what I just said. Like, don’t underestimate that small things matter and pick one small thing to take action on. We know this through every business adage we’ve ever found, every to-do, every self-help to-do. It’s like, don’t try and take on the world.

If you can blow your life up and start something. I know a client who said, “I’m leaving my job.” She’s in New Jersey. She’s like, “I quit. I moved down south and I’m opening up an Etsy shop.” That was a lot of life change in an instant, but for her, she needed to make a big signal to herself. But was it like that for most of us?

No. It’s like, what is one thing you can do by the end of this week that is going to make you feel just a little more alive? Is it making a new playlist? You know, is it pulling out the spice drawer and being like, “Oh, my gosh, when was the last time I used garam masala?” Or is it calling your old friend from college and being like, “Dude, we keep talking about getting together. When are we going to…? Okay, October the 9th? Booked.” Like, do a thing that makes you feel like you voted to live. One small thing.

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

Jodi Wellman
Oh, my gosh. Hunter S. Thompson, “Life should not be a journey to the grave in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow, what a ride!’”

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

Jodi Wellman
I’m always a fan of the research that reinforces death reflection helps us be more grateful. So not death awareness, which is just seeing a funeral procession go by. That does freak us out. But, actually, stopping and thinking, “Huh, I have this many Mondays left,” being thoughtful. And then what that does is it does make you more grateful for not just the experience of being alive but for the good things in your life. So, death reflection pays off in multitudes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jodi Wellman
I would say anything by Irv Yalom. Y-A-L-O-M. He’s a psychologist that does really cool work. So, Staring at the Sun is a really good example. And it’s this idea about being willing to contemplate mortality.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite tool?

Jodi Wellman
I’m going to come back to count your Mondays and keep some sort of talisman nearby, they will be your reminder about your fabulous temporariness.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jodi Wellman
No habit. Remember, habits dull the edges of our existence.

Pete Mockaitis
I love the multiple perspectives here. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Jodi Wellman
This idea that sometimes the fear of death is rivaled only by the fear of living.

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

Jodi Wellman
Thanks for asking. I’m over at FourThousandMondays.com.

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

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, think about your legacy. How do you want to be described when you’re long gone? Not just because you died. Maybe you got promoted. Maybe you got moved to the fancy office in the Southwest. Go do that. How do you want people to think of you when you’re gone? Oh, and, yes, at your funeral. And that is the reverse way to engineer a life that you love and that you are proud to be living.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, thank you. This has been very, very fun. Jodi, this has been aliveness-boosting. I wish you 1,800 plus joyful Mondays.

Jodi Wellman
I super appreciate it. Thanks for this time well spent.

Jul 22
0

980: Building the Habits of Mentally Strong Leaders with Scott Mautz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 Scott Mautz shares powerful strategies to stay confident and in control when negativity strikes.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to wisely managed doubt–and confidence 
  2. The early warning signs of self-acceptance being degraded 
  3. The three-step solution to reset negative chatter 

About Scott

Scott Mautz is a high-octane speaker expert at igniting peak performance and deep employee engagement, motivation, and inspiration. He’s a Procter & Gamble veteran who successfully ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion dollar businesses, an award-winning/best-selling author, faculty at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education, a popular instructor on LinkedIn Learning where his courses have been taken over 1.5 million times, and a frequent national publication and podcast guest.

Resources Mentioned

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Scott Mautz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, welcome back.

Scott Mautz
It is so nice to be back. It’s so nice to try to be awesome on an awesome podcast that has awesome in the title. I’m grateful for it all.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you’re awesome at it, which is why you’re back for a third time. You got it going on.

Scott Mautz
Right on. Yeah, you take what you can get.

Pete Mockaitis
Your latest piece here is called The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors. That sounds handy. Although, Scott, some might ask, “Isn’t this for kids? Don’t kids learn this stuff? Aren’t we done with that when we’re like nine?”

Scott Mautz
Maybe they don’t. It all depends on your kid. Well, if you start with a definition of it, Pete, and then let’s get into your question here, the title obviously is The Mentally Strong Leader, which presumes that it’s about mental strength. Mental strength is the ability to regulate your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors productively, no matter what. For us adults, it’s how we manage internally so we can lead better externally.

And to your question now, I think as adults, we intuitively understand that if you want to succeed and be a good parent, and a good leader, and good in life, you have to be able to regulate your emotions, and your thoughts, and your behaviors. But here’s where the rub comes in for kids, guess what? It’s really, really hard to do that as a parent, and even as children.

You layer on how hard it is to grow up in this world, it becomes even harder. So, yeah, mental strength is something we all know we need to succeed. But, man, Pete, it is really, really hard to do. It’s why I wrote the book “The Mentally Strong Leader” to provide that help.

Scott Mautz
I was kind of teasing a little bit about the kids because we had Mawi Asgedom on, who wrote a cool series of books called the “Inner Heroes Universe,” which has like action-hero comic book folks doing stuff and teaching lessons about this for kids, but we had them on because it absolutely is applicable for grown-ups, as we’re called.

And it’s funny, I’ve noticed in my own inner life, sometimes it’s quite easy to manage emotions and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the frustration rolls off the back and sometimes the frustration eats at me, and it’s not even, I think, necessarily, about the strength of the frustration itself.

Scott Mautz
That’s a really important point you’re bringing up, which is it doesn’t even have to do with the strength of the frustration itself. It’s just really, really hard to manage our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors.

And I have found that the key to doing this is you really have to build the proper habits to help you become mentally stronger, so you could train your brain for achievement, which I’ll get into later, but train your brain in general to have the kind of outcome that you want. And habit-building science teaches us that if you want to build a habit, a habit is essentially, Pete, repetitions, right? It’s systems and frameworks that you put in place.

And in The Mentally Strong Leader, I’ve built in over 50 plus systems and frameworks to help you with that difficulty you’re talking about. It helps you build, take that first small step to building a new habit to becoming mentally stronger. It helps you figure out what to do in moments of weakness when you can feel your frustration leaking out, even if it’s not a huge frustration.

Because of that, it’s why, you know, the subtitle of “The Mentally Strong Leader” is “Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Your Thoughts, and Behaviors” because of the very nature of what you’re talking about, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could maybe kick us off with an inspiring story of someone who was able to really see some powerful upgrades that made an impact for them by pursuing some of this stuff.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, it’s interesting, Pete. I bet if I had, you know, I don’t even know, if I had 500 people to ask to share a mental strength story, they would all share stories, they would all boil around six core mental muscles, and I’m going to pick a story within the context of that for you. But the six core mental muscles that make up mental strength are fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision-making, the ability to make a decision, to be decisive and make a high-quality decision, goal focus, the ability to stay focused on your goals, and even what I call messaging, the ability to stay positive-minded with your messaging even in the face of supreme negativity.

It’s those six mental muscles that make up mental strength. So, I have collected so many stories from so many people, but I’ll share one quick story that focuses on the fortitude muscle, because most often, Pete, when people think of mental strength, one of the things they might think of first is, “Oh, that’s got to be fortitude. That’s got to be resilience.”

And one woman that I interviewed for The Mentally Strong Leader was a business leader at a packaged goods company, and she would not give in to the demands of a particularly big retail customer. They wanted better service, they wanted lower prices, they wanted differentiated packaging. If she gave up all that to the big customer, it would mean a short-term sales gain and that would be great, but a substantial decrease in profitability over the long term.

And so, through a series of kind of really intense meetings, the retailer called her bluff, and said, “Okay, you’re not going to meet my demands and, fine, you’re out of distribution, and I won’t share the company, I won’t share the retailer for many reasons.” But they said, “You’re done.” And Sharon stuck to her guns, and she said, “All right.”

She got tremendous pressure to get that customer back to grow business aggressively, to get them back and to say, “Hey, make amends. Say you made a mistake.” And she just wouldn’t do it. It meant a 15% catastrophic drop in sales. And I remember she told me this story, Pete. You could see the tears forming in her eyes that it wasn’t an easy choice, and the pressure she was receiving from her chain of command to reverse the decision was brutal, but she refused to play the victim.

She held tight, and she really started to exercise her fortitude muscle. She reframed the loss as a huge sales opportunity to grow with other smaller customers that were more strategic for them, “Hey, forget this big customer,” Sharon told everybody, “Forget them. We are going to get that back and more by operating with people that are more strategically aligned with us.” And so, she kept reframing the opportunity over and over again. She would have tough conversation after tough conversation. She would really attack things with a problem-solving spirit, and despite everybody pounding on her, “Get this big customer back.” She used her fortitude muscle.

And some of the tools that I teach in the book The Mentally Strong Leader to do that, to really, at the end of the day, grow her business even faster than she did without that big retail customer, and she never went back to them. Now I just happen to talk to her a few months ago, and the business is stronger than it’s ever been and more profitable, and had a lot to do with her and her fortitude muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful, and I like that story on so many dimensions because it’s not life or death. You said a 15% drop in sales. And it’s funny, depending on your point of view, you might gasp, “Oh, dear.” Well, the other hand is like, “All right. Well, no one’s bankrupt.” It sounds like there aren’t brutal layoffs harming everybody. But, as a business owner, if I were to get a 15% drop in sales, I would be quite troubled by it, and she persisted.

So, it’s not catastrophic, and yet it does feel very uncomfortable, particularly when you’ve got folks piling on you from all sides, and you can sort of see it in the numbers right there. And it takes some real faith, in terms of it’s like, “Yes, right now, we are making far less revenue. That’s just very clear. However, I believe there’s something that we can do that will be even better.” And so, it’s like, “Well, hope you’re right.” That’s an unpleasant spot to be in.

Okay. Well, so then tell us, you said there’s six big mental muscles here. Can you maybe give us a quick definition of each of the six?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, sure. Okay. So, of course, we have the fortitude muscle. And I think, Pete, fortitude is probably the one that most people could most easily define for themselves. It’s our ability to push through challenges onward to achievement. In the face of adversity, you don’t let it get you down. You keep pressing forward. Fortitude, that’s the most obvious, biggest mental muscle that people first mention.

The second is confidence, which is probably exactly what you think it is, with one exception. Confidence is, the definition of it, is not the absence of doubt. It’s your ability to monitor your relationship with doubt, because we all have a relationship with doubt.

The boldness muscle is probably exactly what you think it is. Boldness paves a direct pathway to growth and it forces us to push our thinking, to get out of grooves, to press past discomfort. And boldness is a huge part of mental strength, as is messaging. Now as a leader, as I often like to say, people are always taking cues from you, Pete. You live in a fish bowl. People always wrap it on the glass to see what you’re going to do next, especially in times of adversity and negativity.

The messaging muscle is all about, as a leader, staying positive, even in the face of negativity. Staying engaged, even when your brain is elsewhere, so that you send the right positive message to the troops, and that they take energy from that message rather than the alternative. There are two more mental muscles.

Decision-making, and I think the best way to explain this is to say that emotion and bias and undisciplined thinking are all enemies of good decision-making. And self-regulation skills, like mental strength, are really required to be decisive and to make high-quality decisions. So decision-making is a huge part of mental strength.

Another mental muscle is goal focus, meaning the ability to really set aside wayward thoughts, emotions, and anything distracting you from the goal at hand, and getting back to focusing on what’s going to make the biggest difference in moving things forward towards your goal. So, there you have it: fortitude, confidence, boldness, messaging, goal focus, and decision-making; the six mental muscles of mental strength that also equate to the highest level of achievement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about our relationship with doubt, shall we?

Scott Mautz
We shall. I have a tool in the book called the doubt continuum, Pete. And I’m getting tremendous feedback on this tool already, and then I’m going to talk another tool afterwards on confidence, but it’s helpful. I want your listeners and your viewers to think about this thing that I call the doubt continuum. It’s a tool in the confidence chapter of The Mentally Strong Leader.

Think about the continuum with two ends, and on either end are danger zones. On one end of the doubt continuum is overconfidence. You’re blowing through red light signals. You operate in a vacuum. You don’t think you need help from anybody. You just keep doing your own thing. You’re operating in an echo chamber. That’s not good. That’s the opposite of self-doubt. You’re way too confident.

The other side of the scale is also a danger zone, which is where you’re paralyzed by fear. Doubt has overcome you to the point where inaction sets in, and fear takes over, and you have a hard time making a move of any kind. In the middle on this continuum are two areas where you want to be. Either perfectly confident, where you have the right balance between gut and data to inform your decision-making, between experience and just taking a risk and going for it.

Or, also in the middle is where you learn to embrace healthy doubt. This is where you learn to park those doubts that you have in the backdrop. You don’t let them overcome, and maybe this is the most important thing here about this, Pete, is that embracing healthy doubt means knowing that you don’t have the answers to everything. That you’re going to learn along the way, you’re going to find out more as you go, and you believe in your ability to do that, to figure things out as you go.

So, the doubt continuum is really about self-awareness, getting you to understand, “Am I either letting fear take over or am I too confident? How do I sit in the middle, and either be perfectly confident or embrace and work with doubt in a way that’s productive and healthy?” Does that continuum make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is very good, really good. And I think about that overconfidence reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I really resonate with, which is from former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, Robert Rubin, who said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” And I think that those people are in that overconfidence zone and it’s dangerous because, this is one of my, I don’t know if you call it pet peeve, or one of my things lately, I’m sort of astounded by the confidence at which people say certain things.

It’s like, “Do you have a crystal ball that predicts the future? Have you ever been wrong or experienced the emotion of surprise before? Because I am amazed that you are so sure that it’s going to work out just the way you predict.”

Scott Mautz
Pete, isn’t it why we have a hard time even agreeing on the facts in today’s society, right? It’s because of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Because we’re very confident about our own facts.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Or our theories, we think they’re facts, but they’re really hypotheses, perhaps we should say. And so, I think that’s really great, a really great tool right there to know that a lot of us are operating in a danger zone.

So, the doubt continuum is really handy in terms of, if you are super confident all the time, you are, in fact, in a danger zone. And if you’re avoiding something, that is a variety of fear paralysis that has you. So, help us out, Scott, if we find ourselves in one of the extremes of the continuum, what should we do about it?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, there’s another tool that kind of goes along with this. It’s a kind of partner to help you on the confidence front. So, if you’re on either side of the scale, you’re obviously trying to get to a place where you can embrace healthy doubt. You can’t do that until you have greater self-acceptance, Pete. So, there’s a really powerful tool that’s a partner to this in The Mentally Strong Leader to help you build your confidence, that I call the self-acceptance scale.

Now, I want you to think about a different scale, Pete. On one side of this scale, visually, picture this, you have this term called self-acceptance. It’s nirvana, right? This is the highest form of self-regulation where you’re not allowing unpleasant thoughts and emotions and behaviors to be unproductive in your life. You’re regulating yourself in a place where you accept all that is true about you. You’re in a place of self-acceptance. That’s where you want to be on the spectrum, on the self-acceptance scale.

Now, on the far right of this scale, and we’re going to talk the in-between in a second. On the far right is the opposite of that, which is what I call imposter syndrome. This is where you’re not accepting your skills and your accomplishments. You downplay them. You question how you got to where you are. It’s the lowest level of self-regulation because you’re allowing unproductive emotions and thoughts and behaviors make you question. You’re allowing them to question who you are.

Now, in between, there are degradations of self-acceptance that happen along the way. And the point of this scale, Pete, is to help people increase their self-awareness of, “What happens when I’m in a space of self-acceptance? How do I start to erode myself over time all the way to the point where I can be as bad as imposter syndrome?” And it starts with self-awareness, knowing the points on the scale.

The first point to the right on the scale of self-acceptance, that first degradation in confidence, is approval seeking. When you start to chase the approval of others, when you start to chase approval instead of authenticity, being the authentic you. That’s the first sign that you’re not really accepting yourself. You need others to tell you that what you’re doing is okay.

The next degradation is when you start to compare to others. Sometimes hear that, the only comparison that matters is to who you were yesterday, and whether or not you’re getting better each and every day. And, yes, of course, Pete, some comparison is good. I’m sure you compare yourself to other podcast hosts and say, “Oh, he or she is doing this, and I could do that to be even better.” And that’s good.

The comparison I’m talking about that’s painful is irrelevant comparisons. Like on social media, when we compare ourselves to some model version of some other person, when we compare our blooper reel to everyone else’s highlight reel, and it starts to really gnaw at our confidence, when we assume that that person in social media got to where they are because of circumstances that were perfect for them, or because of how skilled they are, and I’m not there because of all the bad things about me.

Then the next degradation is negative inner chatter that kicks in. We start to beat ourselves up, forgetting that sometimes the enemy is the internal me. One last degradation, and then I want to get your reaction to all this. One farther point over on the scale is when we actually stop and say and believe, Pete, “I’m not enough.”

And I want your listeners to hear this, and if you’re viewing this for any clip, I want you to look in the camera when I say this. You are enough and you don’t have to take on everything by yourself. And so, the self-acceptance scale helps you to understand and raises your awareness of all the ways our self-acceptance degrades over time. The more aware you are of these, the more equipped you are to resist each and every one of them. And you’re better suited to be self-accepting, you’re better suited to overcome doubt, you’ll be more confident. That’s a lot. Does it make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, Scott, I love this in that we’re talking about self-acceptance, and we talked about a scale. When you said degradations, I think, “Oh, I think he meant gradations.” But, you know, it is a degradation. It is the degree to which it has been degraded. And it is also a gradation in terms of, “Where along the scale are you on that journey?”

So, first of all, and it’s funny, and, for me, personally, it’s kind of volatile, you know? Like, there are some days where, boom, total self-acceptance, awesome. And then other days where, yeah, I do. I do want approval or winning or beating in competing and comparisons. And so, it’s intriguing how, and I don’t know what’s behind it. It’s just like not enough sleep or what is behind the volatility. So, I’ll ask you that first. What are some of the drivers that make it such that, on some of these things, we have good days versus bad days? Like, what are the variables, the X factors behind the scenes?

Scott Mautz
A lot of what my research has shown me on this front, Pete, is, first of all, a lot of it has to do with the human story. First of all, the fact that every day won’t be consistent. Always playing in the background, is this some level of self-doubt. And people are always surprised when I say confidence is not the absence of doubt. It isn’t. I could tell you. I’ve interviewed, I can’t even count the amount of people I’ve interviewed for The Mentally Strong Leader.

And I could tell you, even the most confident executives that I talked to will not tell you that they never experienced doubt. It’s there. It’s how you manage it. So, this human experience means doubt is always parked in the backdrop. So, it’s natural for it to surface in multiple ways over time, and we forget that. We think the human experience needs to be the absence of doubt, that Pete Mockaitis never has a bad day, that he’s always fully self-confident.

But if that was true in your mind, Pete, I would say you’re probably lying to yourself because the human experience is not that. It is to experience the peaks and the valleys. Now you layer on top of that the environment that we’re exposed to every day, the social pressures that we’re facing, the fact that we have a hard time even agreeing on what the facts are anymore, the fact that there’s more distractions in our universe than there have ever been, the fact that there’s more social tension around the planet, and a lot of more and more things to worry about.

It all adds to this quiet addition to doubt about other things that makes it only natural, Pete, that you’re going to have those kinds of days that are ups and downs. You just need the habits and the systems and their frameworks to help you better self-regulate them, not to eliminate them. Mental strength is not about making emotions disappear. It’s not about necessarily minimizing your emotions. It’s about better managing your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that, not minimizing, but managing. And so, to that end of volatility, it’s funny, with that message of “You are enough,” sometimes if I hear that, I go “Yeah, right on. Thank you.” And other times, my response is “Enough for what?” So, lay it on us, Scott, what do you mean by “You are enough”?

Scott Mautz
When I say that, it’s more of a self-evaluative term. I’m not saying “You are enough to be an Olympic gold athlete, Pete,” “You are enough to be the best podcaster on the planet, Pete,” “You are enough to be the best partner to anyone in life, Pete.” I’m not saying any of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like this. Keep it coming.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Am I approval seeking right now?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you’re going to cut all the rest of that out and just play this part over and over and over again. What I’m really saying here, Pete, is “You are not a complete human being, but where you are in your journey is 100% okay.” And I don’t want to go so far as to say it’s exactly where you should be right now, because only you know that.

But what I’m saying, you know, when I say you are enough is to understand that you’re an imperfect being, and that’s okay, and that you don’t have to be everything to everyone all the time. It’s okay to focus on the you-universe, Y-O-U-universe, and not the universe all the time. That’s okay. Where you are in your development is right where you should be as a human being, perhaps. At least we can allow that, you know, of ourselves, and not to think about you are enough compared to any other external standard.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So, then help us out, if we are having one of those days where self-acceptance, we are not too high on the scale, what do we do about it?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, a good tool, I think, is the way that manifests itself a lot, Pete, is really the middle of the scale where we beat ourselves up with negative inner chatter. And whether it’s you’re seeking approval, you’re comparing yourself, you’re saying you’re not enough, or you’re just outright beating yourself up over and over again, which, by the way, I teach this stuff, Pete, and I still do the opposite of that sometimes.

There’s another tool in the book, that I call taking a self-compassion break, and it’s really, really important and it’s also really, really simple to do. Here’s how you work. When you catch yourself in that moment where you’re beating yourself up, first, you got to get better at catching yourself. And I don’t know how good you are at this, Pete. I’m still working on it. There are days where I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been beating myself up for like the last five minutes, and I don’t even realize I’m doing it.”

So, you have to get better at that, and I don’t know what letter grade you would give yourself on that. I’d give myself only a B. I’m working on it. I’m getting better at it. In the moment though that you realize that, there’s kind of three steps you take. First of all, stop beating yourself up for beating yourself up. If you catch yourself doing it, accept it, acknowledge it, quickly move to step two, which is, in that moment, to talk to yourself like a friend in need.

And I’m sure this isn’t the first time your listeners have heard this advice, but it’s really powerful to consider. I’ll give you an example before we go to the third step, Pete. Let’s say you and I are chatting, right? We’re old friends, you know, this is my third time on the show, and I start telling you about a podcast I was on that I didn’t feel like I was good on, right? And I’m clearly looking for compassion with you. We’re old friends, right?

So, I start telling you, “Pete, man, I got off this podcast. There were some points I really wanted to make. I didn’t feel like I articulated them well. I forgot to say this other thing. I feel like I came across like an idiot when I was trying to bring value,” on and on and on. After five minutes, you know I’m looking for compassion.

After five minutes, Pete, would you do this? Would you interrupt me and say, “You know, Scott, I’ve heard enough and I’ve come to a conclusion, that you’re a complete loser”? Would you talk to me like that when I’m clearly in need? I don’t think you would. So, it begs the question, “Why would you talk to yourself that way ever?” It’s not productive.

Pete Mockaitis
What you’re surfacing here for me now is sometimes I can be too quick to jump to solutions in terms of like, “Well, you know, Scott, what happened one time is I actually had a guest who thought they did a bad job and they said, ‘Hey, Pete, I don’t think I did a good job. Can we do a do-over?’ And I said, ‘Hey, thanks for asking. Sure, we can.'” So, anyway, there I am, I’m sort of, you’re looking for compassion, and instead I’m offering you problem-solving. But I think the funny thing is I can do that to my own self as well.

Scott Mautz
Absolutely. And oftentimes, that problem-solving thing is something that I do, Pete, and I have others that will tell me, “Hey, dude, I’m not looking for you to solve this. I’m just looking for you to listen.” And sometimes we’ll interrupt with that because it’s easier for us because we feel uncomfortable in what they’re sharing with us, and we want to make it easier for us, when all they really want is just to feel heard, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Mautz
And so, in that moment, it takes you to the third step in this, which is to remember the 90/10 rule, and it’s based on an article I wrote that went crazy viral a few years back. And the 90/10 rule is simply this, Pete, this is the third step in the self-compassion break. It’s to remember the ratio for how you should value yourself on any given day, which is to say it should be based 90% on self-worth, 10% on assigned worth.

How you value yourself should be based 90% on self-worth, self-appreciation, self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, 10% on assigned worth, what others think of you, that occasional slice of external validation that we all need. The problem arises, Pete, when, in our minds, in our formula, that 10% external validation rises to 90%, 100% of who we are, and people say, “Well, Scott, shouldn’t you be teaching the 100-0 rule, though, that 100% of how you value yourself is based on what you think?”

And I think that’s a nice theory, Pete. I don’t think that’s the way it works in life. We all need that 10% occasional slice of external validation. But the problem is when that 10% goes to 100% of how you value yourself. The problem arises when you start chasing approval instead of authenticity. The problem arises when you begin focusing on winning love rather than giving love.

And when you remember that 90/10 rule, it really helps to round out and think like, “You know what? I’m going to stop that negative inner chatter because it’s not servicing me in the way that I need to. I need to get back to a place of 90% self-worth, self-appreciation, self-acceptance, and self-love.” And I have been told many times, Pete, that it’s a very powerful tool, a very powerful process for helping folks that need to get past that negative inner chatter.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting is, as I think about my own negative inner chatter, it’s almost never super intense, super dark stuff, although I’ve come to learn that it’s actually quite common in the human condition. It’s just like, “You’re such a worthless, stupid loser.” It’s very sad that there’s a lot of inner chatter like that that happens. And if that’s any listener, I recommend you take a look at that and work on it, because it can be really transformational.

I’m thinking about Peter Attia’s book, Outlive, a very powerful section about emotional health, in which he shared some of his practices there that I found touching. But my negative self-talk is more like, “Ugh, I’m just not up for all of the stuff I got to handle today. It’s too much for me today.” And I don’t quite know what’s the optimal self-response to that.

Because sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete! We can do this! Come on! Let’s do some Rocky music! Let’s do some, I don’t know, Tony Robbins power moves! Come on! Let’s get after it!” Sometimes that works, the psych up, and then sometimes like, “Oh, well, maybe let’s just take a nap.” And sometimes that works, and sometimes neither of those work, but I want to hear the Scott Mautz approach.

Scott Mautz
What if I told you, if you change one word, one word in your thinking process, it could make a world of difference?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. Lay it on me.

Scott Mautz
And I’ve proven this to work, and it’s very specifically for exactly what you’re talking about, Pete. One of the most common forms of negative inner chatter is like, “Oh, my God, my duties, they’re getting me down. There’s so much to do. I am not in the mood to do all this stuff today. I understand my job is this, and I get it.” Ready for this, Pete? Try this trick. I promise you it really works. I do it. I do this all the time.

I think, “Okay, Scott, I don’t have to do this. I get to do this.” And the one-word reframe is incredible, and I’ll give you an example. Part of my life is to travel around the world as a speaker, an author, a trainer, a work-shopper. And I was in the airport not so long ago, on a layover, and travel is the one part about what I do that I just cannot stand, and I was feeling really down, Pete. I was in Denver Airport, and the flight was delayed. It was going to be a five-hour flight. I was already in a grumpy mood, people were being people the way they can be in airports when flights are delayed, and I didn’t feel like getting on the plane. I just wasn’t in the mood for this.

And I remember thinking, “Wait a minute, Scott. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go get on a plane. You get to do this.” By me getting on a plane, that would mean very shortly, within two hours of landing, I would be able to be on a stage in front of, in this case, you know, thousands of people, sharing insight, sharing something that I had learned, and it happened to be a talk about mental strength from the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

And it can really help, Pete, if you just stop to say, “It’s about understanding the privilege and what you still get to do.” And it puts the thinking, “I get to do this” versus “I have to do this,” flips it very quickly to the things that you can appreciate about what you’re doing, and bring you back to the purpose of why you’re doing it to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, that’s good stuff. Well, there’s a whole lot of goodies in your book, and I like how you’re just surfacing the tools everyone tells you they love the most. So, Scott, can you give us one more dealer’s choice, whatever you’re feeling?

Scott Mautz
There’s one other tool that I want to share that, I don’t know, may or may not surprise you. It’s not about any one of the six mental muscles per se, but it’s an overall tool, which is the Mental Strength Self-Assessment that is a part of the book The Mentally Strong Leader, and it is a 50-question questionnaire that you take. It takes you about 15 minutes of quiet self-reflection and introspection. And when you’re done with that test, and I have worked with data scientists to build the test to make sure it correlates as tightly as it can with mental strength.

When you’re done with the test, it gives you an overall mental strength score, and then you’ll find out which tier do you score in for mental strength. There are four different tiers, all the way from novice, you’re just learning about the idea of mental strength and building, all the way up to you’re a beacon of mental strength, other people draw from you because of your mental strength, and then there’s the in-betweens.

Besides the mental strength score, it also gives you a score for each mental muscle, so you’ll know, “Oh, wow, my fortitude isn’t quite what I thought. My boldness isn’t where I want it to be. My decision-making needs to be stronger.” And then you can build accordingly your own customized mental strengths training program, which is important because when you go to the gym, Pete, you don’t go to the gym to work every muscle all the time. It would be a 19-hour workout every day. Wednesday is leg day. Thursday is, I don’t know, arm day. Friday is back day, whatever it is.

With understanding what muscles you need to work on, you can choose over time where to pull the levers and where you want to level up in your mental strength. And the mental strength self-assessment can help you to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, to take that, how do we proceed?

Scott Mautz
A couple of things, of course. Obviously, you can get the book The Mentally Strong Leader which you can find at ScottMautz.com, but I also put together for your listeners a gift. If they go to ScottMautz.com/mentallystronggift, you can download the Mental Strength Self-Assessment for free. It’s actually a 60-page PDF that not only includes the assessment with all 50 questions, it also has prompts in there to help you get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader. So, if they go to ScottMautz.com/mentallystronggift, you can get your hands on the Mental Strength Self-Questionnaire to help get you primed up to get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Free stuff. We love it.

Scott Mautz
Free stuff is a good thing.

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

Scott Mautz
Yeah, I really believe in this thought of chase authenticity, not approval. I find that to be very, very important to me. And I also like the quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

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

Scott Mautz
Well, very quickly, I did a study for The Mentally Strong Leader. It took me quite a while to complete, but I asked over 3,000 executives a single question, “Thinking of the highest-achieving organizations you’ve ever been a part of, that achieved the most, that overcame the most obstacles, how would you describe that leader?”

When I asked that question, time after time, between 90% to 91% of people described the same leader, a mentally strong leader that has fortitude, confidence, boldness.

And while they might not use the term mentally strong, Pete, when I say, “Oh, wow, so you’re describing these same six mental muscles that they’re flexing. Would this word describe them?” When I put mentally strong in front of them, you could see the eyes lighting up. Even when I hide the term and I say, “Okay, pick a word out of this list that describes the person you just described to me,” they find the words mentally strong, and they circle it, and it tells me that that research really helped me to see, like, I’m really onto something that mental strength may be the leadership superpower of our time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Scott Mautz
Oh, my favorite book is, I’m not going to give you a business book. I just finished reading Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I’m a big fan of the fantasy genre. So, I just read that and I love it. And it’s a close match with the all-time classic The Hobbit, which makes me officially a nerd, I think, Pete.

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

Scott Mautz
My favorite tool is called Unsplash. It’s a great website that you can find free images to use, whether it’s on your website, whether it’s in your presentations or whatever. They just ask that you assign credit to the photographer. So, it’s a very win-win thing. Everybody wins by using the tool Unsplash.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Scott Mautz
My favorite habit is using the self-acceptance scale and really working hard on reminding myself to stop seeking approval of other people, and working on the habit over and over of revisiting that scale to remind myself “I fall into the trap of comparing to others and I need to stop doing that and stop seeking approval.”

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

Scott Mautz
ScottMautz.com. You can learn about my keynotes, my books, my workshops, and all the things I do there at that site, ScottMautz.com.

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

Scott Mautz
Yeah, just to remember that don’t be intimidated by the concept of becoming mentally stronger. The opposite of mentally strong is not mentally weak. We all have a baseline that we work from. And if you can take the mental strength self-assessment, understand where you stand, figure out where you want to level up, and use the tools, use the habits in The Mentally Strong Leader, you too can be mentally strong starting immediately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, thank you. I wish you many strong days.

Scott Mautz
Stay strong, as I like to say, Pete.

Jul 15
0

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

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Marie-Hélène

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Marie-Hélène Pelletier Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Marie-Hélène, welcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
A state.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
I love it. Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we’ll charge through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Retention?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say exercise.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

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

Pete Mockaitis
What you got?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Marie-Hélène Pelletier
Walk outside.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jun 27
0

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

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

You’ll Learn

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

About Stella

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

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

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Stella Grizont Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Stella, welcome.

Stella Grizont
Thank you so much for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right, yeah, the Gallup stuff.

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

Pete Mockaitis
In one year?

Stella Grizont
In one year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, bummer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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